Porter - Can Be Spiritual Psychonalisis

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Can There Be a Spiritual

Psychoanalysis?
Kenneth Porter MD
Published online: 07 Oct 2013.
To cite this article: Kenneth Porter MD (2013) Can There Be a Spiritual

Psychoanalysis?, Psychoanalytic Perspectives, 10:2, 235-269, DOI:
10.1080/00330124.2013.826952
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Psychoanalytic Perspectives, 10: 235269

Copyright 2013 National Institute for the Psychotherapies
ISSN: 1551-806X (print) / 2163-6958 (online)
DOI: 10.1080/00330124.2013.826952
CAN THERE BE A SPIRITUAL PSYCHOANALYSIS?
KENNETH PORTER, MD
Why might a 21st-century psychoanalyst be interested in spirituality? Spirituality

is increasingly permeating both our culture and the consciousness of our patients,
and can offer a new vision for psychoanalytic theory and practice. This paper
presents the new paradigm of spiritual psychoanalysis. We will first take up our
resistances to spirituality, next consider the meaning of spirituality, and then
review the history of spirituality in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. We will
then explore the possibilities for a spiritual model of the self, a spiritual model of
analytic process, and a spiritual model of analytic technique. In this the goal is
not to replace the traditional valuable aspects of psychoanalysis, but rather to see
if we can learn to do even better what we already know how to do well.
Keywords: spirituality, psychoanalysis, self, psychoanalytic technique.
The absence of psychoneurosis may be health, but it is not life.
D.W. Winnicott (1971/2002)
Why might a 21st-century psychoanalyst be interested in spirituality? Freuds original vision offered the radical promise of human
freedom, based on a fearless search for the truth of the human
psyche. In the last century, this vision has been enriched by new
insights and perspectives. As spiritualitywe will see shortly what
that might meanincreasingly influences our patients and our
society, it offers the possibility of another new perspective: a new
spiritual model of the self, a new understanding of psychoanalytic
healing, and powerful suggestions for psychoanalytic technique.
Much has been written on spiritually oriented psychotherapy,
but a comprehensive theory of it has not yet emerged. This essay
represents a first step toward such a theory. I believe that integrating the insights of the great spiritual traditions into our clinical
Address correspondence to Kenneth Porter, MD, 25 East 87th Street, #11G, New York,
NY 10128. E-mail: rokeisland@aol.com
235
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Kenneth Porter, MD
work can offer us the possibility of learning how to do even better

what we already know how to do well.
A word about my personal perspective. I am a 69-year-old psychiatrist originally trained in classical psychoanalytic approaches
to treatment who for the last 25 years has explored the world
of spirituality in a personal and professional way, studying the
Kundalini Science of India with Swami Chandrasekharanand
Saraswati; the Buddhism of Southeast Asia with Jack Kornfield;
and the Diamond Approach of A. H. Almaas. It is especially the
work of Almaas that has profoundly affected me. This work, well
known in spiritual circles but as yet barely known to analysts,
integrates Eastern spirituality with Western psychoanalysis, and
forms the main theoretical scaffolding for much of what I will be
exploring (Almaas, 1986, 1988, 2004).
We will begin by considering what is generally meant by the
word spirituality, then we will consider the history of spiritual
approaches to psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. Next we will take
up the theory of the soul, self, and identity in this new approach,
go on to explore the nature of analytic healing, and conclude with
some reflections on spiritual psychoanalytic technique. Like any
good clinician, I will start with our resistances.
Barriers to Understanding Spirituality
For a Western psychoanalyst attempting to understand spirituality,
three barriers immediately arise. These are the limitations of the
Western philosophical worldview, the confusion between spirituality and religion, and the New Age connotations of the word
spirituality.
The Western Worldview
We have inherited our Western worldview from centuries of intellectual development. This worldview is both empirical and materialistic. It is epistemologically empirical, as was the 17th-century
work of Francis Bacon and John Locke, in assuming that the
basic pathway to knowledge is physical experience. In other words,
knowledge is considered fundamentally not to come via cognition
of the mind and not via intuition, but rather via the direct apprehension of concrete experience. Our current Western worldview
Can There Be a Spiritual Psychoanalysis?
237
is also ontologically materialist, as was the Scientific Revolution of

the 17th century, in assuming that the basic nature of reality is
physical, as opposed to nonmaterial.
On the other hand, the great spiritual traditions have a
different foundation. Judaism (in its esoteric or secret version,
Kabbalah), mystical Christianity, Buddhism, the Yoga Vedanta tradition, Sufism (the esoteric branch of Islam), and the aboriginal
shamanistic traditions hold to the perspectives that in Western
philosophy have been known as rationalism and realism. They
are epistemologically rationalist in believing that the pathway to
knowledge is not direct physical experience but via human faculties other than physical perception. They are ontologically realist
in believing that the ultimate nature of reality is not material. It is
interesting to note that prior to the 17th century, the Western
worldview was also rationalist and realist. In fact, the philosophers
considered to be the early towering figures of the Western intellectual traditionSocrates and Platowere so in ways similar to the
great spiritual traditions. Platonism went on to dominate Western
thought for over a thousand years. It was only in the Middle Ages,
starting with Aquinas, that Western thought began to shift, first
to Aristotelian thought, and then to the philosophy and science
of the 17th century. This led Western thought into its current
empiricist and materialist framework.
So when we, as empirically and materialistically minded
Western psychoanalysts, begin to entertain the possibility of a spiritual perspective, it is important to remember two facts. First, even
within our own Western tradition there are alternatives to our current empirical and materialist philosophical assumptions. Second,
our often unconscious and unquestioned empirical and materialist worldview may inhibit us from fully grasping the spiritual
perspective.
Spirituality and Religion
A second barrier to understanding spirituality for Western psychoanalysts is the confusion between spirituality and religion. Occasionally in the history of our species an individual
arises who possesses an uncommon degree of wisdom, love, and
personal maturity. Such individualsMoses, the Buddha, Jesus,
Mohammedinspire others with their vision, generally termed
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Kenneth Porter, MD
spirituality by scholars and intellectual historians. Students cluster around these teachers, who are not interested in creating a
new religion, but generally are focused on revitalizing the religion
within which they themselves have matured. Their students, however, seeing their lives profoundly transformed by their teachers
spirituality, wish to perpetuate this core spiritual vision after their
teachers death. So an organized body of teachings and practices develops around the original teachers spiritual vision. This
becomes an institutionalized religion, which over time inevitably
becomes rigidified and bureaucratized.
Most of us in the West have had encounters with religion, particularly the Judeo-Christian version, rather than with the more
fresh and spontaneous experience of spirituality. For us spirituality may become conflated with religion, and religion may mean
artificiality and lack of aliveness. This unconscious bias or linkage
may block us from appreciating the transformative power of a spiritual approach that is radically different from what we think of as
religion. We will explore shortly what the term spirituality might
mean.
Although this distinction between religion and spirituality is
not always clear, and at times can be an oversimplification, it can
help us in questioning our preconceptions as we approach the
study of spirituality.
The New Age Movement
Finally on our list of barriers to understanding spirituality is the
confusion between genuine spirituality and what have come to be
known as New Age beliefs. Many of us came to maturity in the
1960s and 1970s, and spirituality may mean to us an ill-defined
but vaguely flaky conglomeration of naked hippies, encounter
group marathons, and crystal- and past-life-reading Internet ministers. Because the field of spirituality, possibly even more than
other fields, has its share of poseurs and self-promoting narcissists,
it is important not to confuse the wheat with the chaff.
What Is Spirituality?
Many of us have had moments when life seemed exquisitely beautiful. These may occur at lifes peak momentsa marriage, the
239
birth of a childor they may come at moments that seem more

ordinary, such as watching a beautiful sunset, listening to music,
writing a poem, making love, or doing therapy. They may also
occur at times of crisisthe loss of a loved one, the onset of
life-threatening illness, a life-threatening accident.
At these times, we may feel that life is more intense and real
than usual, that life is more meaningful. We might have a sense
of feeling at one with what is around us, or feeling that life is
perfect or beautiful. We might notice deep insights and intuitions, or have an overwhelming feeling of joy or peacefulness.
We may feel overflowing with love, or brilliantly clear in our thinking, with moments of penetrating insight and awarenesseven
wonder. Often it seems to us that we have touched on a deeper
dimension of existence than the one in which we usually live, and
we may feel a more immediate sense of aliveness. At these times
of penetrating insight, awareness, and even wonder, we may feel
something like Ah, this is what life is about.
This dimension of experience can arrive in many flavors,
as I am suggesting, but the quality that all these flavors have in
common is a sense that life is more alive and more meaningful
than usual, and that we have entered what feels like a dimension
of life that is more real and more true than our usual lives.
For the purposes of this paper, I will term this the core spiritual
experience. This core spiritual experience has been known for
thousands of years to poets, artists, philosophers, lovers, and students. Athletes know it as being in the zone (Leonard, 1974).
In the late 1960s, the psychologist Abraham Maslow introduced
this level of experience into our field, terming it peak experience (Maslow, 1968). And it is not foreign to some among the
most recent generation of psychoanalysts. Here is a description of
such an experience that occurred to me 10 years ago:
I was attending a nine-day retreat of the spiritual school in which I am a
student, the Diamond Approach. The retreat, a mixture of meditation, lectures, and interpersonal exercises, was taught by A. H. Almaas, the founder
of the school. It consisted of an exploration of how our perception of the
world, which we normally take for granted, is highly influenced by the preconceptions (preexisting concepts and categories) of what we expect to
see, built into the structure of our brains from the earliest moments of
our lives. In the retreat, Almaas slowly and carefully deconstructed our
everyday view of the world, eventually introducing us to the possibility
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Kenneth Porter, MD
of seeing the world in its original pristine nakedness and magical beauty,
unencumbered by our ideas. Although this may sound inviting, in fact it
was remarkably disturbing. All the normal ways we have of experiencing
reality were constantly being challenged. At one point I remember standing up and expressing to Almaas that I felt radically disoriented, as if I were
an infant whose brain was being poisoned by his mother.
Following the retreat, I was startled to notice that a powerful shift

had occurred in my consciousness. In my practice and teaching
of psychotherapy, and in my teaching of meditation, I seemed to
have developed a new capacity for intuition and insight. It felt as
if a sparkling fountain of light had opened up inside my head.
My insights seemed shockingly and inexplicably deep and correct.
Occasionally someone would ask me to explain what I was doing,
but I was at a loss to explain it. This went on for about six months
and then gradually subsided, leaving behind a milder version of
the experience that has stayed with me ever since.
Freuds Understanding
Freud made an attempt to understand the core spiritual experience in his famous response to a letter from the French author
Romain Rolland. Rolland had described states of oceanic feeling, and Freud saw such events as regressive reexperiences of an
early sense of symbiotic merger with a mothering figure (Freud,
1930). But because of his background and the culture in which
he lived, Freud was limited in his ability to understand the experiences of spirituality to which Rolland was referring. Epstein has
explored Freuds limitations in this interchange (Epstein, 1990).
Fundamentally, if we consider the various spiritual experiences I mentioned earlierexperiences of deep oneness, wisdom,
joy, insight, meaningfulness, peacefulness, or love that may occur
in extraordinary moments of our lives, it is hard to imagine that
our adult experience is merely regressive, or truly identical to
the experiences we have as four-month-olds. This crucial point
has also been addressed by the spiritual philosopher Ken Wilbur
in his concept of the pre/trans fallacy (Wilber, 1995). Wilber
points out that certain very early infantile experiences (prerational experiences) bear a superficial similarity to mature
adult spiritual experiences (trans-personal experiences). Both
are extremely difficult to conceptualize and articulate. But
241
the superficial similarities actually obscure the fundamental

differences. One type of experience is regressive, and limited
by infantile lack of understanding, while the other includes the
mature consciousness of a human adult. In fact one characteristic
of adult spiritual experience is precisely the presence of aspects
of infantile experience coexisting with adult consciousness.
The Spiritual Worldview

There is a better way than Freuds to understand these core
spiritual experiences, but it requires us to significantly alter our
view of what constitutes reality. Normally, as I have said, we consider that our experience occurs mainly on the materialist level.
We also make room for two other levels of experience: the affective (emotional feelings) and the cognitive (ideas). But the great
spiritual traditions have taught for thousands of years that there
is another level of experience, called spiritual, that is qualitatively
different from any of these three levels, and that can be experienced paradoxically as deeper and also higher, and also more
real or more true. Somewhat oversimplifying, perhaps, from a
psychoanalytic point of view, this fundamental level has variously
been called subtle energy, vibration, spirit, soul, the divine within,
Buddha nature, Christ consciousness, essence, presence, the true
self, the higher self, and the ground of being, among many other
things. However limited our psychoanalytic conceptions of it may
be, this core spiritual experience has been explored and mapped
for thousands of years by spiritual teachers, saints, and mystics.
Moreover, the great spiritual traditions invite us as Western
analysts to be open to the possibility that spiritual experience may
not simply be subjective, as we usually might think of it; rather,
spiritual experience may actually be objective, in the same sense
that we usually consider a table or a chair to be objectively real.
In a profound sense this objectively real spiritual experience
might actually turn out to be more important and real than the
material, affective, or cognitive realms that we are so accustomed
to considering the most real.
Interestingly, the worldview of the core spiritual experience
that the material world is not the ultimate realityis remarkably
similar to the descriptions of reality proposed by modern
physicists, and particularly by Einstein and the quantum physicists.
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Kenneth Porter, MD
For example, in his general theory of relativity in 1905, Einstein

stated that it made no more sense to say that the basic nature
of reality is matter than to say that the basic nature of reality is
energy. Energy and matter were seen to be interchangeable
that is, matter is energy, and vice versa. According to Einstein, the
level of reality that is nonmaterialwhich is energyis just as real
as what we normally consider to be the most realwhich is matter.
Similarly, the quantum mechanics developed in the 1920s
by Heisenberg, Bohr, and Schrodinger constituted another major
breakthrough in the Western view of reality, in two different ways.
First, these theorists took up the problem of the nature of light.
Was it a wave or a particlewas it, in other words, energy or
matter? Quantum mechanics went on to postulate that both theories were valid, in a way that was analogous to Einsteins view of
reality. It simply depended on ones point of view, and on what was
most heuristically useful to solve the problems of the moment.
Second, these physicists took up the problem of the nature of
the electron, a supposedly basic material building block of the
universe. They postulated that it cannot simply be assumed that an
electron is material. Instead, it came to be thought of as a probability of a certain event occurring at a given time in space. In other
words, an electron was no longer considered an actual material
particle, but rather a likelihood. What was considered the most
real level of existence was no longer the material (electron as a
particle) but the nonmaterial (electron as a probability).
Now let us consider what might be the relevance of spiritual
experience to us as analysts. First it is of note that spiritual experience is not confined to the few, but is accessible to most human
beings. Furthermore, the capacity for such experience can be
trained, through practice. Spiritual practice, it turns out, is based
on a great armamentarium of tools, including meditation, meditative body work (yoga, Chi Gung, martial arts), study of sacred
writings, prayer, chanting, control of the senses, and loving service
to others, among many others. In fact, virtually any activity, if performed with a certain orientation, can become spiritual practice.
This includes, for example, artistic activity, sports, the activities of
daily livingand, of course, writing about and practicing psychoanalysis. It is also of note that if we do intentionally embark on
spiritual practice, we find that rather than remaining confined to
a few isolated moments in our lives, spiritual experience begins
243
to permeate our day-to-day existence. We can start to experience

greater insight and openness, and develop an increased capacity
to be genuine and loving.
The experiences of spirituality that we have been discussing
are not unknown to psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. To explore
this further, we will turn to history.
The History of Spiritually Oriented Psychoanalysis and

Psychotherapy
At roughly the same time as Freuds original publications around
the turn of the centuryStudies in Hysteria in 1895 and The
Interpretation of Dreams in 1900the American psychologist and
philosopher of pragmatism William James gave the famous
lectures in Edinburgh that became the basis of The Varieties of
Religious Experience. In these lectures, James called for a new
science of religious experience (Freud, 1895, 1900; James,
1902/1987). At the same time, the first two pioneers of spiritual
psychotherapy began to publish their work: the Swiss analyst Carl
Jung, and the Italian analyst Roberto Assagioli.
Jung had begun, at age 30, as an admirer and colleague of
Freuds, and at one point was the president of the International
Psychoanalytic Association. After an intense six-year friendship,
their relationship came to an end with the publication of Jungs
first major work, Psychology of the Unconscious (Jung, 1910/1993).
Jung went on to develop over half a century of profoundly influential psychological work, whose hallmark was his conviction that
the search for spiritual significance is the main developmental
task of the second half of human life. Although Jung termed his
approach analytical psychology to clearly differentiate it from
psychoanalysis, Jung continued to employ the basic psychoanalytic
concepts of transference, resistance, the unconscious, dream
interpretation, and genetic exploration.
Assagioli, less well-known than Jung, published his book
Psychosynthesis in 1905 (Assagioli, 1905/1977). Like Jung originally
an adherent to the new movement of psychoanalysis, Assagioli
also went on to develop his own theory of psychotherapy, based
on a highly sophisticated understanding of the role of spiritual
phenomenawhat he called the higher selfin human development and healing.
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Kenneth Porter, MD
Buddhist Influences
In the 1950s, the most famous academic Buddhist teacher in the
United States was D.T. Suzuki. His historic seminar at Columbia
University, attended by, among others, Erich Fromm and Karen
Horney (as well as artists such as John Cage), had an enduring effect on American psychoanalysis (Suzuki, Fromm, & De
Martino, 1960). Following this, in the 1960s and 1970s, a number of prominent Buddhist teachers came to teach in America:
another Zen teacher named Suzuki (Shunryu), two major Tibetan
Buddhist leaders (Chogyam Trungpa and Tarthang Tulku); and
subsequently three young Americans who had been students of
Vipassana Buddhism in AsiaJack Kornfield, Joseph Goldstein,
and Sharon Salzbergfollowed. All these Buddhist teachers were
to have a major effect on those of the next generation of American
psychotherapists and analysts who had a spiritual perspective.
Existential Analysis
Also during the early part of the 20th century, a new movement
arose in European psychoanalysisExistential Analysisthat had
certain similarities to the spiritually oriented psychotherapy of
Jung and Assagioli. Existential analysis was influenced by the 19thcentury work of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, and directly emerged
from the philosophical work of Husserl, Husserls student Martin
Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre. These existential analysts took as
their main challenge the project of helping patients pass to an
authentic modality of existence (Ellenberger, 1958). Heideggers
revolutionary philosophical work had identified a mode of living that he called being-in-the-worldthe life of the authentic
human beingmany of whose aspects are similar to what I have
been calling the core spiritual experience (Heidegger, 1962).
Beginning with the work of Ludwig Binswanger (a lifelong friend
of Freud) and Eugene Minkowski, existential analysts brought
the basic ideas of the existential philosophers into the theory
and practice of psychoanalysis. This work was then brought to
the United States in the 1950s by Rollo May in his influential
book Existence, and developed by others (Binswanger, 1946/1958;
Minkowski, 1933; May, Angel, & Ellenberger, 1958; Bugenthal,
1987; Yalom, 1980, for example).
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Transpersonal Psychology
Later, in the 1970s, a group of psychologists in California
embarked on the project of integrating the great spiritual traditions into 20th-century psychology and psychotherapy. Terming
this approach transpersonal psychology, they took up William
Jamess challenge to develop a science of religious experience,
and also pursued Jungs idea that while the developmental task
of the first half of life is to master external reality, the task of the
second half of life is to develop spiritual maturity. Although never
a defined school, many prominent psychologists were associated
with this movement, including Abraham Maslow, Stanislaf and
Christina Grof, Ken Wilber, Michael Washburn, John Nelson,
Frances Vaughn, Roger Walsh, Charles Tart, and many others.
Maslow in particular developed a new branch of psychology, based
on what he called self-actualization (Maslow, 1968).
At the end of the last century, this spiritual ferment began
to affect the practice of psychoanalysis itself. Many psychoanalysts
and psychotherapists explored the relevance of religious and spiritual experience to clinical practice. These have included W. R.
Bion, Michael Eigen, Emmanuel Ghent, Jeffrey Rubin, Diane
Shainberg, Mark Finn, Paul Cooper, Tony Stern, Joseph Bobrow,
Jack Engler, Polly Young-Eisendrath, Barry Magid and Joko Beck,
Robert Langan, Jeremy Safran, Sara Weber, Henry Grayson, Victor
Schermer, John Welwood, and many others (Cooper, 2007; Engler,
2003; Finn, 2003; Grayson, 2003; Magid & Beck, 2002; Molino,
1998; Rubin, 1996; Safran, 2003; Schermer, 2002; Welwood, 2000).
It is probably Mark Epsteins work, written with psychoanalytic
sophistication and personal authenticity, that has done most to
bring spiritually oriented psychoanalysis to the attention of the
public (Epstein, 1995, 1998, 2001).
Bion
W. R. Bion also developed ideas that in some ways paralleled these
spiritual developments within psychotherapy. In his later years,
and especially in Attention and Interpretation (Bion, 1970/
1977), Bion developed the concept of what he termed O, a concept that has much in common with the core spiritual experience:
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Kenneth Porter, MD
I shall use the sign O to denote that which is the ultimate reality represented by terms such as ultimate reality, absolute truth, the godhead, the
infinite, the thing-in-itself . . . . It stands for the absolute truth in and of
any object; it is assumed that this cannot be known by any human being, it
can be known about, its presence can be recognized and felt, but it cannot
be known. It is possible to be at one with it (Bion, 1970/1977, p. 214).
Soul, Self, and Identity in Spiritual Psychoanalysis

There is, however deeply buried or frozen, a longing for something in the
environment to make possible the surrender, in the sense of yielding, of
the false self.
Emmanuel Ghent (1990/1999)
Before beginning our exploration of this central issue in psychoanalysis, and my suggestions for a new conceptual scheme, I
want to acknowledge the extreme complexity of this subject and
the lack of unanimity in our field about such terms as self or
identity, to say nothing of the idea of adding the notion of the
soul to our discourse. I also want to acknowledge that my proposal below to equate soul and self may seem reductionistic,
and would be challenged by many, in part because of the religious
connotations of the term soul. I will attempt to clarify this matter further as we proceed. For now what I am proposing is one
possible way of introducing the spiritual into psychoanalysis, and
I claim for it only that it seems to me clinically and heuristically
useful, not that it is a fully evolved or final perspective.
History
The word self seems to have come into common psychoanalytic
usage in interpersonal, neo-Freudian, and self-psychological psychoanalysis. Today, in common analytic parlance, my sense is that
it is roughly used as a synonym for what used to be called the
psychethat is, for the nonmaterial aspect of the individual. Prior
to Freud, the term used in Western intellectual history for this
aspect of the individual was usually the word soul (Greek psyche), as used in a nonreligious sense by Plato and Aristotle, and
as used in a religious sense by the Judeo-Christian and Islamic
traditions.
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Freuds View of the Soul

Freud (1927, 1930) made no secret of his belief that religion and
spirituality were neurotic phenomena. He did employ the concept
of the soul as a fundamental part of his system of psychoanalytic
thought, but only in the nonspiritual sense of the word.
Bettelheim has clarified this for us, pointing out that Freud consistently used the word soul (German seele) as a direct translation of the Greek psyche (although Strachey and other translators of Freud have usually given us the word mind for Freuds
seele). As Bettelheim writes of Freud, where he is conceptualizing the working of the psyche, distinguishing the conscious from
the unconscious and distinguishing the id, ego, and superego,
he uses the term soul to describe what he regards as the overarching concept that takes in all the others (Bettelheim, 1982).
Another example of Freuds nonspiritual use of the word soul
is his statement in Some Elementary Lessons in Psycho-analysis, (translated by Bettelheim), Psychoanalysis is a part of psychology which
is dedicated to the science of the soul (Bettelheim, op. cit.).
It is clear that Freuds use of the word soul did not have spiritual connotations. However, it seems to me he may have come
close to what I would call a spiritual, though decidedly not religious, orientation in his letter to his long-standing friend, the
Swiss minister and analyst Pfister, saying, I want to entrust it (psychoanalysis) to a profession that doesnt yet exist, a profession of
secular ministers of souls, who dont have to be physicians and
must not be priests (Bettelheim, 1982). In this paper I will follow
Freud in naming this nonmaterial, overarching aspect of the individual the soul, though at times I will use the terms soul and
self interchangeably.
The Self in Traditional Psychoanalysis
In the traditional psychoanalytic view, the self might be seen as
having four main characteristics: (a) it is conceptualized as split;
b) it is psychodynamic or conflicted; (c) it is separate from other
selves; and (d) it is the locus of experience, including suffering.
These understandings are so basic they typically form an unquestioned set of working assumptions in our daily clinical work.
Of course, different theories of analysis understand the nature of
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Kenneth Porter, MD
conflict within the self in different terms: for example, as between

the conscious and unconscious; between ego, id, and superego;
between differing object relations units; between different aspects
of the self system; or between dissociated ego states or dissociated
selves, to name just a few.
As a supplement to this, I would like to offer a spiritual
concept of the self to possibly bring a deeper dimension to our
traditional understanding of psychoanalytic process.
The Authentic (Core Spiritual) Self

In the course of our lives, most of us have the capacity to live
in two quite different ways. Oneour most frequent modeis
the mode of our usual personality, which follows the traditional
analytic model of the selfsplit, psychodynamic, separate from
other selves, and the seat of experience and unhappiness. This
could be called the mode of our social self, our ordinary self, our
habitual self, our conditioned self, our persona, or simply, as I will
refer to it, our familiar self. It has also been called the false self, a
distinction that takes on particular meaning in contrast to the spiritual experience of the self (Winnicott, 1960/1990). When we are
referring to that aspect of the familiar self that is our self-reflective
awareness of the familiar self, I will label it, following Erik Erikson,
ego identity (Erikson, 1968).
In contrast to the mode of the familiar self, when we are in
the mode of the core spiritual experience, we are whole. The
usual conflictsstructural, dynamic, dissociativeare experientially absent. This self is also intrinsically connected to other selves.
At these times we experience it as fundamentally pure, healthy,
and sane. As we shall see, this self can be increasingly experienced and eventually stabilized through the process of spiritual
psychoanalysis.
A number of analysts have pointed to this experience, most
notably Winnicott, though at that stage of his thinking, Winnicott
confined his use of the concept to a small group of his (borderline) patients. A number of other analysts have suggested similar
conceptsMastersons real self, Kohuts healthy nuclear self
but there seems to be no term in current psychoanalytic thinking
that completely captures the experience of this spiritual mode of
the self (Winnicott, 1960/1990; Masterson, 1988; Kohut, 1984).
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My preference would be for a term that has roots in the existentialist philosophical works of Sartre and Heidegger, in the
transpersonal work of Maslow, and that is currently in use by the
American spiritual teacher Andrew Cohen: the authentic self
(Cohen, 2008). What I am calling the authentic self has also been
termed the core spiritual self (Schermer, 2002; Grayson, 2003).
Here are some examples of this authentic self, as distinguished from the familiar self, from recent psychoanalytic writings: I have heard many people say that when they focus
on I-feeling and let it resonate, they sense reverberations of a
deeper fuller self, not merely as object, but as subject (Eigen,
1991/1999). The existential analyst Rollo May (May et al., 1958)
spoke of the patients experience of I-am. And Jungs concept
of the Self as the coherent, unified, and organizing center of the
selfas opposed to the egorefers to this same experience.
The Distinction Between the Familiar Self and Authentic Self in
Eastern Spiritual Traditions and in Lacan
The Eastern spiritual traditions have made the distinction between
the familiar self and the authentic self for many thousands of
years. The familiar self is considered in the East to be an artificial construction of the mind, based on self-images incorporated
in childhood. It is distinguished from the nonmaterial spiritual
aspect of the individual that I am terming the authentic self,
that in the Yoga Vedanta tradition is called atman and in the
Buddhist tradition is called Buddha nature.
In the West, the distinction between familiar and authentic
self has been illuminated in a technical paper by Epstein (1988)
and also, from another perspective, by Lacan, in his well-known
discussion of the ego and the mirror stage of childhood development. (Lacan speaks here of the ego as roughly equivalent to ego
identity, so far as I can determine):
Lacan describes the formation of ego identity as based on illusion. The
child sees in the mirror (or in the mirror of her mothers face) an illusory image of wholeness which is actually an imaginary experience, but
which the child takes to be an exact reflection of who she really is (Lacan,
1949/2002). The ego is an imaginary production, a crystallization or
sedimentation of images of an individuals own body and of self-images
reflected back to him or her by others. In contradistinction to Freud,
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Lacan maintains that this crystallization does not constitute an agency, but
rather an object (Fink, 1995).
I want to emphasize that I am not labeling Lacanian analysis spiritual. Rather, his analysis, which in modern terminology
might be called constructivist, points out the limitations of our
usual way of conceptualizing the self. This can open the door to a
deeper and potentially spiritual view of the self.
In summary, the conceptual scheme that I am proposing uses
the term soul or self to refer to the broadest aspect of what is
nonmaterial within the human being. The authentic self and the
familiar self are two different possible organizations of this soul.
For purposes of clarification, I want to add that the JudeoChristian and Islamic traditions employ the concept of soul in a
different way. These traditions do have a concept of what I am calling the authentic self, but, confusingly for us, they use the word
soul to refer to this authentic self. In my terminology, soul
refers to the broader nonmaterial aspect of the human being,
which can at times be organized into the authentic self or the
familiar self.
Relevance to Psychoanalytic Technique
Several important points can be suggested based on this discussion of the authentic (spiritual) self and the familiar self. First,
in this view of spiritual psychoanalysis, suffering or unhappiness
is not caused by conflict within the self, but by separation from
the authentic self. Second, for most individuals, the authentic
self turns out to be even more repressed or dissociated than the
Freudian unconscious. It seems ironic that there is an aspect of
unconscious process more threatening to us than even our deepest experiences of sadism, sexuality, guilt, and shameand this
deeper aspect is the spiritual unconscious, the authentic self. This
is the level of mature strength, power, wisdom, love, joy, peace,
and oneness that is a potential for us all. Referring to Bions concept of Owhich is the authentic selfs experience of spiritual
realityEigen writes, To id, ego, and superego resistance, add Oresistance. One wants and fears nothing more than what is real
(Eigen, 1998).
In a recent work, the spiritual teacher A. H. Almaas outlines
his belief that in infancy all human beings are able to experience
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a version of the authentic self (called Essence in his understanding), and that this is gradually repressed or dissociated as
a result of the normal maturational need to develop a socialized
ego structure (Almaas, 2004). This idea that the experience of the
authentic self may be lost is supported by a growing orientation
within our field to privilege the concept of dissociation over the
concept of repression. It has become apparent in clinical work
that entire self-states may be dissociated, and that dissociation in
fact may be a basic defense employed by all individuals, not just
those suffering from dissociative identity disorder.
This point of view dates from Janets groundbreaking work,
of course. Recently it has been suggested that, among analytically oriented psychotherapists, Jung may have been the first to
believe that dissociation was more primary than repression as a
defensive operation (Schwartz-Salant, 1995). This idea was elaborated in Fairbairns proposal that not just ideas, feelings, or objects
could be repressed, but also active organizations of the self, so that
every individual may be subject to ego-splitting (Fairbairn, 1952).
Sullivan also touched on similar ideas in his concept of the goodme, the bad-me, and the not-me (Sullivan, 1953), and Grotstein
has proposed the concept of dual-I-ness (Grotstein, 1999).
As studies of trauma have increasingly influenced our field,
many analysts have taken these concepts further, with Bromberg
(1998) stating that all personality disorders are dissociation-based,
and that the unconscious is best understood as containing dissociated self-states. Daviess work similarly embodies her belief that
the unconscious may best be thought of as dissociative rather than
repressive. In her work with Frawley, for example, Davies (Davies &
Frawley, 1994) has explored the clinical usefulness of conceptualizing split selves in patients who have suffered childhood sexual
abuse. (For an excellent overview of dissociation in analytic theory,
see Howell, 2005.)
A New Paradigm of Soul, Self, and Identity
To formulate a new theoretical paradigm, we could take as a starting point the work of Almaas. Almaas suggests that we view the
soul (or self) in the largest possible terms, being defined as a field
of consciousness. For psychoanalytic purposes, I will take this as a
useful working definition of the soul or self.
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According to Almaas, this field of consciousness has several

characteristics. First, the consciousness that is the soul is highly
malleable. It can take on many different forms. We already know
this from a cursory examination of the extraordinary range of
human potentialfrom saint to psychopath. Second, and very
important with regard to healing, the soul is dynamic. It can
change and grow. And third, the soul has the capacity to identify
(Almaas, 2004).
What is the relationship of the soul to the familiar self and
to the authentic self? The key is the process of identification.
We could say that the soul has the capacity to identify with the selforganization that is the familiar self. This is the usual situation,
and is true of both patient and analyst. In this case I experience myself as being my familiar self, having my usual personality,
thoughts, feelings, and preferences. But the soul can also identify
with the self-organization that is the authentic self. For most of us
this only occurs at extraordinary moments in our lives, and then
for brief periods of time.
It can expand our horizons as psychoanalysts, however, to
consider the possibility that the soul could identify with the
authentic self more and more frequently, and eventually permanently, and that this might be an achievable, practical goal for
psychoanalysis. Then my fundamental identity would be transformed, and I might increasingly live in an ongoing experience
of deeper wisdom, love, and joy. The usual identity of the familiar
self would transform into the identity of the authentic self. I would
then be in the position that Eigen describes, speaking of the goal
of a therapy modeled on Winnicotts principles: A Winnicottian
therapy aims at working through the individuals profound depersonalization in a way that makes access to true self feeling possible
(Eigen, 1991/1999).
Now if we were to take the goal of spiritual psychoanalysis to
be that of helping our patients shift their identity from the familiar
to the authentic self, what might be the process between analyst
and patient that would facilitate this transformation?
The Therapeutic Process in Spiritual Psychoanalysis
The point at issue is how to pass from knowing phenomena to being
that which is real . . . . Is it possible through psychoanalytic interpretation
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to effect a transition from knowing the phenomena of the real self to

being the real self?
W. R. Bion (1965/1977)
Probably no subject has intrigued us as psychoanalysts, or

frustrated us more, than the question, as Kohut has put it, How
does analysis cure? (Kohut, 1984). Having had the opportunity
to read and ponder, over the last 40 years, some of what has been
written on this, I have been struck by two things. First, I have yet
to feel I have ever read a completely convincing account of the
therapeutic action of psychoanalysis. Second, I continue, as do
many of us, to try to formulate such an account.
Traditional and Contemporary Models of the Psychoanalytic Process
Many suggestions have been made as to what heals in psychoanalysis. It has been suggested that healing occurs when the
unconscious is made conscious; when sufficient attention has
been paid by analyst and analysand to ego defenses to allow the
unconscious to emerge; when the unrealistic nature of internalized object relational structures has been clarified; when sufficient
empathy has been provided to the unhealed self; when mature
relating in the analytic situation is established as a standpoint from
which to reexperience, and understand in a new way, older dysfunctional relational patterns; or when dissociated self-states or
selves have been integrated into a newly mature selfto name
just a few. The capacity to shift flexibly among all these useful theoretical perspectives from patient to patient and from session to
session (and even within sessions) has been thoughtfully explored
by such analysts as Lichtenberg, Lachmann, & Fosshage (1996),
Pine (1990), Stark (1999), and Karasu (2001).
It is not my intention to discard these approaches. As Jung
the spiritual psychotherapist par excellencestated, One does
not become enlightened by imagining beings of light, but by
making the darkness visible. In other words, the traditional
and current psychoanalytic approaches to healing are crucial
and indispensable to a spiritual psychoanalytic approach. But I
believe that infusing these time-tested approaches with a spiritual
perspective can enrich and expand our analytic capabilities.
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Healing in Spiritual PsychoanalysisStep 1: Disidentifying

from the Familiar Self
I am saying that the job of the patient in spiritual analysis is
to develop the capacity to shift identity from the familiar to
the authentic self. As May puts it, The aim of therapy is that
the patient experience his existence as real (May et al., 1958).
How might this shift occur? It actually consists of two separate
processesdisidentification from the familiar self, and identification with the authentic self.
First, a patient must come into a particular relation to the
souls organization as the familiar self, so that disidentification
from this familiar self might be possible. This requires an ability
on the patients part to both separate from but also inquire into
her experience so she is not caught in it, dwelling in it, or identified with it. This is the familiar analytic split in the ego. But this
alone leads to an analysis that is dry and overintellectualized. The
patient must also be able to fully inhabit her experience. But how
can a person fully inhabit her experience and at the same time
disidentify from it?
What is required here is a particular form of consciousness
that we might call meditative awarenessthe ability to deeply
experience, but also simultaneously step back from, the contents
of our experience. This form of consciousness actually requires
the particular mental operation of being able to split our attention, as it were, into two beamsone to consciously live the
experience of the moment, the other to simultaneously investigate
it. The term meditative awareness is appropriate here, because
the basic form of Buddhist meditation, known as mindfulness
meditation, teaches precisely this technique.
Of course this is a capacity that patients often develop in the
course of psychoanalysis without paying any particular attention
to spirituality. My point is that paying attention to this process
in more precise detail can make our analytic technique more
effective.
At the same time it is certainly true that, since the actual
micro-process of simultaneously feeling and letting go of an experience is a technique that has been practiced in the East for
thousands of years through meditation, it can also be helpful for
the patient, and analyst, to learn to meditate. (Whether the analyst
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should actually take the next step of encouraging her patients

to meditate is a complex technical issue that deserves further
exploration.)
Healing in Spiritual PsychoanalysisStep 2: Identifying with the
Authentic Self
What about the second part of the process, identifying with the
authentic self? This comes about primarily through the presence
of a particular field of experience between patient and analyst that
I propose to call communion.
Communion
Since Freud, our understanding of the analytic process has
expanded and matured.
We started from Freuds clear definition of psychoanalytic
actionmaking the unconscious conscious, or where id was,
ego shall be. Trauma and dissociation studies have taught us to
integrate vertical splits in the psyche. Interpersonal psychoanalysis, intersubjectivity, and relational psychoanalysis helped us see
that we need to conceptualize the healing process as two-body
(Mitchell & Aron, 1999). And recent developments have further
expanded our view, to consider not just patient and analyst but
some third factor. This could be called the field between patient
and analyst, or what Thomas Ogden has named the analytic
third (Ogden, 2004).
Many of us have had the experience of being with a patient
in a way that feels magical. We might at a given moment find
ourselves surprised to be saying something, and then equally
surprised when the patient responds intensely. This then can trigger another statement from us, which may seem to come from
nowhere, meaning it is not necessarily calculated or premeditated.
What ensues may feel like a flowing dance, where patient and analyst seem to effortlessly exchange comments, or laughter, or tears,
or perhaps silence, in a way that comes to take on a life and a healing power all its own. These are the moments that feel like grace,
and make us remember why we are analysts.
In such experiences, can we understand what is going on?
At these times the analyst is connected to her authentic selfthis
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is then transmitted to the patient. This transmission triggers the

patients contact with her own authentic self, in a reverberating
current of realness. This midwife-like experience could also be
described as the flame of the analysts authentic self touching the
hidden spark of the patients authentic self and igniting that spark
into a flame. This is the existential analyst Binswangers description of the therapeutic process: to make or rekindle that divine
spark in the patient which only true communication from existence to existence can bring forth, and which alone possesses,
with its light and warmth, the fundamental power that makes any
therapy work (May et al., 1958).
Interestingly, this process is well known in the great spiritual
traditions, where it is traditionally given the name of transmission or initiation. In Zen and Tibetan Buddhism, and in the
Vedanta Yoga tradition of India, for example, when the spiritual
student is ready, her teacher energetically transmits the wisdom
that assists the student in taking the next step toward a fuller
spiritual maturation.
For our purposes, I would like to propose the term communion for this field of reverberating authenticity. I use this
term to clearly distinguish it from another, apparently similar
but in actuality radically different experience, the experience
of motherchild symbiotic merger. Here again we are helped
by Wilbers incisive distinction between pre-rational and transpersonal experience. Phenomenologicallythat is, experienced
from the insidewe would never actually confuse the experience
we have as analysts with what we imagine a baby experiences with
her mother. The experience we have as analysts obviously has so
much richness, complexity, and multiple levels of experience and
meaning that it could never be confused with total regressive experience, although it may share certain characteristics with it. What
characterizes the babys experience, in so far as we can determine,
is the experience of merger with her mother into a sense of total
experiential unity. But what characterizes the adult experience of
the analyst and the patient is precisely this experience of merger
coexisting with the rich and complex experience of being separate
and autonomous adults.
So communionthe shared experience of authenticityis
marked by the simultaneous experience of intimate connection
and separate autonomy, which is what provides its richness. This
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process is described by May as follows: Knowing another being,

like loving him, involves a kind of union, a dialectical participation with the other (May et al., 1958). This is Martin Bubers
famous I-Thou relationship (Buber, 1923/1958). Almaas refers
to this as the experience of a dialectical field of mutual personal authenticity (Almaas, 2004). Or as Karasu puts it, authentic
communication is neither verbal nor silentit is an irreducible
communion (Karasu, 2001).
Similar ideas have recently emerged within the mainstream
psychoanalytic community. Darlene Ehrenbergs concept of the
intimate edge comes to mind, as does Sterns understanding
of now moments and moments of meeting. Lichtenberg and
colleagues explore a similar approach in the context of intersubjective understanding (Ehrenberg, 1992; Stern et al., 1998;
Stern, 2004; Lichtenberg, Lachmann, & Fosshage, 2002). Frank
has also investigated this area by suggesting the terms the personal relationship or the new relationship to more rigorously
define, within a relational psychoanalytic framework, an aspect
of the psychoanalytic relationship that may have elements similar to what I am suggesting we call communion (Frank, 2005).
Frank has recently gone further and addressed an additional
important issuethe alteration in our experience of ourselves as
analyststhat this new perspective may entail:
The act of representing ourselves to ourselves as self-contained and as having an independent, static existence apart from all contextlike the false
confidence that we know ourselves best and patients perceptions of us
are mere transference distortionsform tempting proclivities reinforced
by the residual influence of the monadic psychoanalytic model (Frank,
2012).
Historically, within psychoanalysis there has been continual

debate about the relative importance of what have traditionally
been called the transference relationship, the working alliance,
and the real relationship. Frank has persuasively objected to the
traditional overarching phrase the real relationship to conceptualize this level of mutual analytic participation, although as he
points out, it may be that at this time in the theoretical analytic dialogue, the term real relationship may be too deeply entrenched
in the minds of all of us to be displaced even by terms that philosophically and clinically may make more sense (Frank, 2005).
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In any case, to make explicit what has been implied in this discussion, whether we term it the real relationship, the dialectical
relationship, the personal or new relationship, or communion, it
is the point of view of spiritual psychoanalysis that it is this relationship of reverberating authenticity that is ultimately preeminent in
power to heal. This distinguishes this model from traditional and
current psychoanalytic thinking in a very important way.
Technique in Spiritual Psychoanalysis

The first point is for the analyst to impose on himself a positive discipline
of eschewing memory and desire. I do not mean that forgetting is enough;
what is required is a positive act of refraining from memory and desire.
(W. R. Bion, 1970/1977)
There are two interesting and somewhat paradoxical statements to make about technique in spiritual psychoanalysis. The
first is that the basic technique is no technique, because any
technique tends to objectify the patientthe direct opposite
of the spiritual psychoanalytic approach. The second statement
is that if we do in fact want to talk about the technique of the
analyst, the analysts most important technical tool is her psychological and spiritual maturity. The most important action a
spiritual analyst can take to improve her professional functioning is to maximize her personal growth. This may recall Freuds
well-known statement, made in Analysis Terminable and Interminable
(Freud, 1937, pp. 247, 249):
It cannot be disputed that analysts in their own personalities have not
invariably come up to the standard of psychical normality to which they
wish to educate their patients . . . . Every analyst should periodicallyat
intervals of five years or sosubmit himself to analysis once more, without
feeling ashamed of taking this step.
Presence
To say that the basic technique of spiritual psychoanalysis is no
technique is to say that the primary job of the analyst is simply to
be with her patient. Another way that this point has been made
is to say that the most important aspect of the analyst is what has
been called her presence.
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To say that the primary task of the analyst is to be present

is not to make some vague New Agetype statement about trying to be genuine or authentic. What I am calling presence has
certain definite attributes. Elucidating these attributes makes presence not just a mushy concept, but gives specificity to our practice
as analysts, and guides us in the faculties we might choose to
cultivate.
First, in an overall sense, presence in the analyst is the capacity to fully inhabit her own authentic self by being completely
with her own and her patients experience, rejecting nothing,
and without in any way trying to fix her patient, turn her into
an object, judge her, reject any aspect of her experience, or use
her for any narcissistic need. This is the orientation that will most
facilitate the patients capacity for meditative awareness and will
most easily facilitate whatever communion, and consequent contact with the authentic self, is possible. The starting point for
psychoanalytic work is the analysts capacity to be at one with O
(spiritual reality) (Eigen, 1991/1999).
This approach is familiar to us as psychoanalysts. Advocated
by Freud in his famous concept of free-floating attention, it was
also explored by Heidegger in Being and Time. The psychoanalyst Chessick explicates Heideggers concept: Being can only
appear when we retire from active investigation and achieve
a state of Gelassenheitserenity, composure, release, a state of
relaxation, a disposition that lets be. This is remarkably similar to Bions advice to approach therapeutic sessions without
memory, desire, or understanding (Chessick, 2010). Within the
current psychoanalytic framework, this aspect of psychoanalytic
technique, if we may call it that, is sometimes referred to as
authenticity (Frank, 1997).
As we explore the experience of presence in the analyst, we
can further elucidate two of its critical attributesthe capacity to
not know and the capacity to not fix.
The Capacity to Not Know
The first of these attributes is a particular thinking process
that occurs within the analyst while in the experience of presence. This is not the usual linear, left-brain scientific thinking
that we refer to by the word thinking and that is part of the
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functioning of the familiar self. Rather, this is a new way of

thinkingmeditative awareness, or what Heidegger referred to
as meditative thinking:
There are then two kinds of thinking, each justified and needed in its
own way: calculative thinking and meditative thinking. Calculative thinking may someday come to be accepted and practiced as the only way of
thinking . . . . Then man would have denied and thrown away his own
special naturethat he is a meditative being . . . . [with] openness to the
mystery (Heidegger, 1966).
The ability to not know is how this capacity is often

described in artistic and spiritual enterprises. This was called
beginners mind by the Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki Roshi
(Suzuki, 2006). And it is the famous negative capability that,
writing about what makes for a great artist, John Keats described
200 years ago: When a man is capable of being in uncertainties,
mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason (Bion, 1970/1977). The composer John Cage referred to this
in saying, Before I start to work I believe I understand something;
once I start it becomes clear to me I know nothing. A similar
point has been made by Hoffman when he explores the technical
implications of his social-constructivist paradigm. The resulting special kind of uncertainty frees analysts to be themselves
(Hoffman, 1998).
The idea here is that as analysts, we want to tap into the
intuitive resources of the authentic self, which are far richer and
deeper than those of the familiar self. The way to do this is to
suspend, as far as possible, functioning from the familiar self and
functioning from our usual mode of thinking. What the psychoanalyst must know: how to ignore what he knows (Lacan, 1955/
2002).
Not Fixing
A second aspect of the analysts presence is the capacity to not
take the patient as an object, as a substance, that is to be repaired
or fixed. This was already referred to in 1943 when Sartre
warned us to not consider a human being as a substance (Sartre
(1943/1956). Not taking another person to be an object is related
to the Indian yoga concept of karma yoga, or the capacity to fully
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commit ourselves to a task without engaging in a narcissistic need

for its success. The most famous statement of this occurs in the
Indian classic The Bhagavad-Gita (The Lords Song), said to be the
second most widely read book on the planet (Mitchell, 2000).
This was also Bions analytic position: Bion came to the
view that desire for the cure of the patient was an obstacle to the
analysis (Symington, 1996). What Bion is here warning us against
is the almost universal tendency among us as analysts to objectify
or dehumanize our patients to (consciously or unconsciously)
gratify our own narcissistic needs for self-esteem, power, or money.
In spiritual psychoanalysis, the emphasis is on no technique, presence, not-knowing, and not-fixing, which all serve as
an orienting framework. It addition, it can be useful to further
describe certain specific approaches that differentiate the spiritual approach from traditional and current analytic approaches.
(For a very sophisticated modern understanding of psychoanalytic
technique, see Lichtenberg, Lachmann, & Fosshage, 1996.) These
additional spiritual approaches are: working with what I would
term the three levels of the soul; working deeply with the body;
and a specific approach to working with the superego.
Working with the Three Levels of the Soul
In traditional psychoanalytic work, to the extent that we focus on
the intrapsychic experience of our patients, we tend to start, as we
say, where the patient is. This usually involves starting from the
surface, or the patients affective state, and dealing with defensive
structures or resistances. We attempt to understand and accept the
functioning of resistances, which often leads to their relaxation.
This is the first level of our analytic work.
What then may arise is a deeper level of experience, at first
disturbing, against which the original defensive structures were
constructed. So the patient may experience grief, pain, rage, hate,
hurt, joy, pride, or sexuality. These can be precisely named, and
this naming can be accompanied by insight, by a sense in the
patient of relaxation, and by a sense between analyst and patient
of something important having been accomplished. This is the
second level.
These first two levels of the soul are part of what I am calling the familiar self. At this traditional ending place in a session,
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spiritual psychoanalysis continues. What can be discovered is that

underneath or beside this second layer of the soul lies a third layer,
and that is the layer of the (at first) unconscious or dissociated
authentic self.
This is not just a matter of the patient being helped to
experience a deeper emotional state. Emotional states are characterized by their transiency. What can begin to reveal itself, with
the right kind of guidance, is the authentic selfdeep and lasting
experiences of compassion, love, power, strength, intuition, and
will, and also experiences of universal love, unity, universal order,
and a deeper perception of reality. This is the third level of
spiritual psychoanalytic work, and it is already present in our
patients as a potential, waiting to be released through the analysts
facilitation of disidentification from the familiar self and through
the reciprocal analytic experience of communion.
Working with the Body
The capacity of a patient to access this deeper level of spiritual
experienceaspects of the authentic selfis greatly enhanced
when we as analysts pay careful attention to the direct somatic
experience of our patients. This involves the integration into
psychoanalysis of what today have come to be called active
techniques. (For a thoughtful and sophisticated exposition of
integrating such techniques into psychoanalysis, see Frank, 1999.)
The main approach here is similar to the Focusing work of Eugene
Gendlin, who stays directly with the felt sense of the patient until
something deeper reveals itself (Gendlin, 1996). It is also similar to Gestalt therapy and to many of what today are called body
therapies, such as traditional Reichian analysis, bio-energetic or
core energetic therapy, and other similar approaches (Reich,
1942/1973; Perls, Hefferline, & Goodman, 1951; Lowen, 1976;
Pierrakos, 1990). What these body therapies all have in common
is a direct focus on immediate physical experience as a gateway to
the authentic self.
Certain psychotherapy modalities unfamiliar to most
analystsEMDR (Shapiro, 2002), Somatic Experiencing (Levine,
1997), Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (Ogden et al., 2006) and
Coherence Therapy (Ecker & Hulley, 2007), among othersare
centrally concerned with the embodied self, and while they are
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not psychoanalytic per se, they can be advantageously integrated

in ways that engage the individuals biology in analysis (Frank,
1999).
Working with the Superego

Finally I want to mention the superego. Here spiritual psychoanalysis strongly differs from the traditional analytic approach. In our
usual way of thinking, of course, the superego is considered to be a
precipitate of the internalized object representations of parenting
figures and of society. It serves as a lifelong and necessary internal
ethical gyroscope that orients our adult interpersonal and social
behavior.
From the point of view of spiritual psychoanalysis, however,
this structure is superfluous in a mature human being. What we
have been calling the authentic self contains its own inherent
moral guidelines that are sufficient for the development of an
ethically mature person. There is no need for an internalized
parental imago that criticizes, or even a need for one that praises.
The superego keeps our patients trapped in a sophisticated version of a childhood familiar self, and acts as a barrier to further
growth. Therefore in spiritual psychoanalysis we employ a number of techniques to help the patient weaken the hold of and
eventually abolish the presence of the superego.
This seemingly nonanalytic clinical position has support from
an early analyst who has come to be recognized as a analytic pioneer: Only a complete dissolution of the superego can bring
about a radical cure. Successes that consist in the substitution of
one superego for another must be regarded as transference successes; they fail to attain the final aim of therapy, the dissolution
of the transference (Ferenczi, 1928/1980).
Conclusion
In presenting an outline for a possible spiritual psychoanalysis,
we have reviewed the nature of spirituality and our resistances
to it; the history of spiritually oriented psychoanalysis and psychotherapy; a spiritual theory of soul, self, and identity; the
spiritual analytic process; and new possibilities for analytic technique. My emphasis has been on incorporating the insights of the
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great spiritual traditions into contemporary psychoanalysis, not to

replace what we already know, but to enable us to do even better
what we already know how to do well.
I am suggesting five major innovations. First, I am suggesting
that we open ourselves to the existence of the spiritual, a realm of
experience known for thousands of years that is different from the
ordinary physical, mental, and emotional, and that is characterized by a sense of greater realness and meaning than our usual
experience of reality. Second, I am proposing the concept of a
core spiritual selfthe authentic selfthat is distinct from our
usual sense of familiar self, and that is more deeply unconscious
or dissociated than what we normally think of as the unconscious.
Third, I am putting forth the idea that the capacity to connect
with, and ultimately identify with, this authentic self is what constitutes psychological and spiritual maturity, and constitutes analytic
cure. Fourth, I am suggesting that analytic cure occurs primarily through the real relationship with the analyst, and specifically
through a process of communion, a reverberating authenticity
between analyst and patient, whereby the analysts experience of
her authentic self is transmitted to the patient through an energetic field. And fifth, I am proposing the idea that, in addition,
the analysts presence, as manifested through not knowing and
not fixing, along with deep attention to the patients bodily experience and with a vigorous attempt to eliminate the superego, may
enable the patient to achieve a deeper level of maturity than we
sometimes see in our everyday clinical work.
Many analysts reading these thoughts may reflect that much
of this does not seem new. I would not disagree. I believe that
skilled psychoanalysts for decades have been familiar with, and
practicing, much of what I am suggesting, using different languages or systems of belief, but not labeling it spiritual. My point
is simply that making more explicit certain theoretical and technical ideas, using the orientation that I have been calling spiritual,
may help our patients and ourselves more deeply develop these
skills that have the capacity to facilitate the analytic process.
The capacity to do spiritual psychoanalysis, which fundamentally depends on the capacity of the analyst to identify with
her authentic self, is a capacity that can be developed. Greater
intuition for the realm of spiritual experience, which is one of
the aspects of the analysts authentic self, can be trained. Other
265
capacities of the authentic selffor example, the capacities to be

present, to not know, to not fix, to work directly with physical
experience and with the superegoare also capacities that can be
developed in the analyst through her own work on disidentifying
from the familiar self and identifying with the deeper, authentic
self. This is the path of the spiritual psychoanalyst.
Although it was some 37 years ago, I can still remember my
shock at hearing from one of my psychoanalytic teachers at Albert
Einstein College of Medicine the idea that the ultimate province
of psychoanalysis was not the cure of the patient but rather respect
for the truth (Kovel, 1974). It has taken me many decades of
experience on both sides of the couch and chair to realize how
profoundly true this is. As analysts, when we privilege fixing our
patients over exploring the truth of the psyche we show the ultimate disrespect to reality; we become narcissistically attached to
outcome and to the familiar self in a way that blocks our deepest
wisdom; and we depart from Eriksons profound insight that the
foundation of human life is the development of basic trust.
In what many regard as his final theoretical statement, Freud
said, We must not forget that the relationship between analyst
and patient is based on a love of truth (Freud, 1937). This ultimate respect for the truth of the self and of realitythe hallmark
of psychoanalysisis also the hallmark of the great spiritual traditions. It is this shared commitment to the truth above all else that
at the end of the day makes possible a spiritual psychoanalysis.
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Contributor
Kenneth Porter, MD, is a spiritual psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. He is
a teacher of Buddhism and Buddhist meditation, a student of Kundalini
Science (Swami Chandrasekharanand Saraswati), and a teacher-in-training
in the Diamond Approach of A. H. Almaas, a spiritual path that integrates
Western depth psychology and Eastern mysticism. He is Past-President of
the Association for Spirituality and Psychotherapy, and is a teacher and
author in the field of psychoanalytic group psychotherapy.

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This article was downloaded by: [88.8.89.

Can There Be a Spiritual

To cite this article: Kenneth Porter MD (2013) Can There Be a Spiritual

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Psychoanalytic Perspectives, 10: 235269

CAN THERE BE A SPIRITUAL PSYCHOANALYSIS?

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Why might a 21st-century psychoanalyst be interested in spirituality? Spirituality

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work can offer us the possibility of learning how to do even better

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Can There Be a Spiritual Psychoanalysis?

is also ontologically materialist, as was the Scientific Revolution of

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Can There Be a Spiritual Psychoanalysis?

birth of a childor they may come at moments that seem more

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Following the retreat, I was startled to notice that a powerful shift

Can There Be a Spiritual Psychoanalysis?

the superficial similarities actually obscure the fundamental

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The Spiritual Worldview

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For example, in his general theory of relativity in 1905, Einstein

Can There Be a Spiritual Psychoanalysis?

to permeate our day-to-day existence. We can start to experience

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The History of Spiritually Oriented Psychoanalysis and

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Can There Be a Spiritual Psychoanalysis?

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Soul, Self, and Identity in Spiritual Psychoanalysis

Can There Be a Spiritual Psychoanalysis?

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Freuds View of the Soul

conflict within the self in different terms: for example, as between

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The Authentic (Core Spiritual) Self

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Can There Be a Spiritual Psychoanalysis?

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Can There Be a Spiritual Psychoanalysis?

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According to Almaas, this field of consciousness has several

Can There Be a Spiritual Psychoanalysis?

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to effect a transition from knowing the phenomena of the real self to

Probably no subject has intrigued us as psychoanalysts, or

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Healing in Spiritual PsychoanalysisStep 1: Disidentifying

Can There Be a Spiritual Psychoanalysis?

should actually take the next step of encouraging her patients

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is then transmitted to the patient. This transmission triggers the

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Can There Be a Spiritual Psychoanalysis?

process is described by May as follows: Knowing another being,

Historically, within psychoanalysis there has been continual

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