ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author answers three questions that integrate the main points regarding psychoanalysis conceived as a spiritual discipline. What is the Buberian/Marcelian version of the world, their spiritual conception of the human condition? In light of this conception of the human condition, how is individual psychopathology (or problems in living) understood? How does this conception of the human condition inform this type of clinical psychoanalysis as it attempts to alleviate individual psychopathology?
For both Buber and Marcel, the human being is best described as a homo viator, an itinerant being, in which he has a fundamentally spiritual caste of mind that aspires to transcendence, reaching out towards the other and his unique otherness. Such a dialogue is a function of intention and grace, and calls to mind the divine or God. As with psychoanalysis, the overarching goal is to expand and deepen the person’s capacity to love. In the therapeutic context, the key mechanism of change is to actualize transcendence in the healing dialogue between analyst and analysand and, more importantly, enacting this transcendence-pointing outlook and behavior into one’s everyday life—that is, to embrace and live an other-directed, other-regarding, and other-serving way of being. In this context, psychoanalytic treatment becomes a way of helping analysands move from ethical disablement or impairment (e.g., narcissism, egocentricity, selfishness) towards a fuller, deeper, wider, and freer expression of their transcendence-pointing striving for holiness (a word/placeholder that one should not be afraid of using in analytic circles). In such a view, the individual is, at least in some sense, consciously or unconsciously always moving towards the transcendent, towards something “more,” “higher,” and “better,” conceived in ethical/moral terms as the Good, which implicates the eternal/Absolute Thou as Buber and Marcel have suggested.
