ABSTRACT
David Black’s paper takes psychoanalysts on a huge trajectory, an intellectual and emotional journey that leads back to past controversies in order to find a place for spirituality in a post-Darwinian age. In the major thrust of his argument David Black declares that “spirituality is begotten by language upon sympathy”, and that it is the “no-longer-very-satisfactory name for a group of emergent properties that accrue upon the development of a language-based culture”. Following Sigmund Freud’s theory of symptom conversion, psychoanalysts assume that if there is something in the mind that cannot be expressed, borne, or known, it may well emerge as a physical symptom, and then may disappear as that “something” is transformed from a physical to a mental level. Perhaps, as Rosemary Gordon suggested in her talk in this series, and David Black endorsed in part in his, the pendulum is already swinging back and science itself now seriously questions Galileo’s split between subjectivity and objectivity.
