The Search for Meaning in Psychotherapy Spiritual Practice, the Apophatic Way and Bion

2020 American Board & Academy of Psychoanalysis (ABAPsa) book award winner!

If, when a patient enters therapy, there is an underlying yearning to discover a deeper sense of meaning or purpose, how might a therapist rise to such a challenge? As both Carl Jung and Wilfred Bion observed, the patient may be seeking something that has a spiritual as well as psychotherapeutic dimension. Presented in two parts, The Search for Meaning in Psychotherapy is a profound inquiry into the contemplative, mystical and apophatic dimensions of psychoanalysis.

What are some of the qualities that may inspire processes of growth, healing and transformation in a patient? Part One, The Listening Cure: Psychotherapy as Spiritual Practice, considers the confluence between psychotherapy, spirituality, mysticism, meditation and contemplation. The book explores qualities such as presence, awareness, attention, mindfulness, calm abiding, reverie, patience, compassion, insight and wisdom, as well as showing how they may be enhanced by meditative and spiritual practice.

Part Two, A Ray of Divine Darkness: Psychotherapy and the Apophatic Way, explores the relevance of apophatic mysticism to psychoanalysis, particularly showing its inspiration through the work of Wilfred Bion. Paradoxically using language to unsay itself, the apophatic points towards absolute reality as ineffable and unnameable. So too, Bion observed, psychoanalysis requires the ability to dwell in mystery awaiting intimations of ultimate truth, O, which cannot be known, only realised. Pickering reflects on the works of key apophatic mystics including Dionysius, Meister Eckhart and St John of the Cross; Buddhist teachings on meditation; ??nyat? and Dzogchen; and Lévinas? ethics of alterity.

The Search for Meaning in Psychotherapy will be of great interest to both trainees and accomplished practitioners in psychoanalysis, analytical psychology, psychotherapy and counselling, as well as scholars of religious studies, those in religious orders, spiritual directors, priests and meditation teachers.

Preface; Introduction; Part One: The listening cure: Psychotherapy as spiritual practice 1 Spirituality and psychotherapy 2 An open heart and an open Hearth: Towards an ethic of analytic hospitality 3 The listening cure: Presence, awareness, attention 4 The state of contemplation and analytic reverie 5 Some Buddhist teachings on meditation 6 Primordial purity and spontaneous presence: The Great Perfection of Dzogchen 7 ‘I do not exist’: Śūnyatā and the terror of non-being 8 Bearing the unbearable, imagining the unimaginable: Intergenerational transmission of trauma Part Two: A Ray of Divine Darkness: Psychotherapy and the Apophatic Way 9 The trace of the infinite in the face of the Other: Lévinas’ ethics of alterity 10 The origins of the apophatic way 11 The apophatic mysticism of Dionysius 12 The apophatic way after Dionysius 13 Transcending all knowledge: St John of the Cross 14 Apophatic contemplation in Christianity 15 Apophatic epistemology in Bion 16 Without memory, desire or understanding: A commentary 17 Bion’s O and the apophatic way; Inconclusion

Judith Pickering is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, analytical psychologist, couple therapist and scholar of religious studies working in private practice in Sydney, Australia. She is the author of Being in Love: Therapeutic Pathways Through Psychological Obstacles to Love (Routledge, 2008) and has over forty years’ experience in meditation, prayer and contemplation.