CHILDE ROLAND AND THE MYSTIC'S QUEST: ANALYTIC FAITH IN A WORLD OF LOST MEANINGS

Psychoanalysis did not emerge in a vacuum. With hindsight, we can see that it was – at least in part – a response to a dual crisis in the Northern European world at the end of the nineteenth century: a crisis of religious faith, and a crisis about knowledge and the possibility of meaning. With help...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:British journal of psychotherapy 2008-11, Vol.24 (4), p.472-487
Main Author: MacKenna, Christopher
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Browning
evenly hovering
faith
knowledge
Knowledge Nineteenth century
Meaning
Netherlands
Psychoanalysis
unknowing
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Summary:Psychoanalysis did not emerge in a vacuum. With hindsight, we can see that it was – at least in part – a response to a dual crisis in the Northern European world at the end of the nineteenth century: a crisis of religious faith, and a crisis about knowledge and the possibility of meaning. With help from Henry Scott Holland and Robert Browning, this paper seeks to evoke these crises, and then to explore the way in which Freud's psychoanalysis, based on the practice of ‘evenly hovering attention’, introduced a secularized world to the practice of ‘unknowing’ which had previously been the preserve of the mystics. Similarities between the work of analysis and the mystical quest are explored, and it is suggested that both are forms of knowing, in which meaning is able to emerge through a process of mutual participation in being.
ISSN:0265-9883
1752-0118
DOI:10.1111/j.1752-0118.2008.00101.x