Encounters of Trust and Faith: Order and Discovery in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy

Abstract

This reflection explores the clinical relevance of the impulse to seek and find, to observe and learn in the service of growth, as seen through a theological lens. It describes a clinical encounter in which questions about curiosity as a propeller of searching, the fate of accumulated knowledge, the clinical location of learning, and theological inquiry were interwoven. In doing so, it considers how even within the specificity of psychotherapeutic work the foundational questions of learning, knowing, and understanding parallel the fundamental order of reality as explored in theology. Furthermore, these questions are double-layered, insofar as in clinical encounters they apply to both therapist and patient; what happens between two people who meet in a specific place, time, and manner, for the very specific purpose of therapeutic outcome, is a microcosm of the internal-external worlds of both members of the therapeutic couple, the overlap of these worlds, and, some of the time, their intrinsic and intimate harmonizing. The foundational floor of this harmonizing is the result of the discovery that the created world is ordered, and therefore, order, when found, can lead a fruitful psychotherapeutic conversation onward.