What are your religious or spiritual beliefs? Do your beliefs and traditions impact your work either implicitly or explicitly? And what about your clients’ beliefs? How do they show up in the room? Do you invite an exploration of how their spiritual or religious traditions might play out in their lives? And lastly, why are we trained to explore the subjects of sex and money but not religion?
The relationship between psychoanalysis and religion has long been characterized by mutual criticism, misunderstanding, and/or total disregard. The decades of tension have not affected the presence of religion or spirituality in our culture or in the lives of our patients (or ourselves); when clients bring in material of a religious or spiritual nature, many clinicians find themselves at a loss. How might we expand our analytic framework to understand and engage patient’s spiritual material in a way that is neither reductionistic nor uncritically accepting?
This seminar will examine issues such as faith, god-images, fundamentalism, trauma, moral injury, and “healthy” vs “unhealthy” spirituality from a relational psychoanalytic perspective informed by the theories of Winnicott, Benjamin, Ghent, Kohut, Shaw, and others. We will discuss theoretical and clinical approaches to working with the diversities of our patients’ religious or spiritual experience no matter what our own spiritual orientation (or lack thereof), and take up contemporary realities of Christian right-wing activism, Christian nationalism and working across religious divides. There will be time to explore participants’ clinical material in a conversational setting with the presenter and other participants.
Lisa Cataldo, MDiv, PhD, is a psychoanalyst and Associate Professor of mental health counseling and spiritual integration at Fordham University. She is a faculty member and supervisor at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies and the Stephen A. Mitchell Relational Studies Center in New York. She is the author of many articles and book chapters addressing the intersection of relational psychoanalysis and religion, most recently around issues of trauma and moral injury. She maintains a private practice in New York.
