ABSTRACT
Chapter 5, ‘Resonances: psychic space in a religious context’. The elements which emerge from the two previous chapters as important in facilitating the process of growth, are sought out in religious contexts: transformational relationships; opportunities to experience ‘intersections’ (for instance, between the known and the unknown, the human and the divine or, in Kristeva’s terms, the ‘symbolic’ and the ‘semiotic’); the use of religious symbols, narratives, sacraments and rituals to symbolise unconscious material; and the availability of ‘psychic spaces’ for thought and reflection. The use of psychoanalytic thought allows the exploration of unconscious, as well as conscious processes at work.
