ABSTRACT
This chapter describes depict what spirituality is, how it might enrich psychoanalysis, and how psychoanalytic understandings might aid spiritual seekers in avoiding a variety of potential pitfalls. It explains some clinical implications of valuing spiritual experiences. Psychoanalysis of spirit would attend to the hidden motivations and secondary gains of the spiritual quest, as well as its exalted dimensions. Psychoanalysis could show that spirituality, like all human experience, has multiple meanings and functions, ranging from the adaptive and transformative to the defensive and pathological. Psychoanalysis could benefit from retrieving spiritual experiences split off in the modern age when the self became separate and isolated. Psychoanalysis is traditionally viewed as an atheistic science of human subjectivity, or, more recently, intersubjectivity. The atheism is often taken for granted and unconscious, a silent backdrop, part of an invisible, unacknowledged assumptive framework for viewing the world and conducting treatment.
