The Tiger's Stripe

Abstract

We are most familiar with psychoanalysis as a model of the mind and as a therapeutic practice. In this essay, I suggest that it also represents a contemporary incarnation of the gnostic effort to elaborate an Ineffable Self. As such, it engenders an integrative experience that reunites the sacred with the mundane. From this vertex, psychoanalysis is, in part, a psychospiritual “self-righting” in reaction to the profane tilt of our “scientized” culture. Intimations of this notion have been present in psychoanalysis from the beginning, and it re-presents itself as an ineluctable current in analytic thinking again and again. I review the relevant writings of three analysts who have developed this theme directly and in detail: Christopher Bollas, James Grotstein, and Michael Eigen, and through them the work of Winnicott and Bion. I then suggest that current relational theory, particularly a synthesis of Benjamin's work on recognition and Ghent's work on surrender, offers a psychological understanding of this enduring psychospiritual process.