Forms of the sacred

This paper is an attempt to demonstrate an operative procedure of clinical psychoanalysis that I believe to be similar to archaic therapeutics, a "return to the past." By translating this procedure into terms of archaic thought we are saying that the cure is to begin living all over again--that is, to repeat the birth, to make oneself contemporary with "the beginning." This is no less than an imitation of the supreme beginning, the cosmogony. As Eliade (1957) observes, "At the level of archaic thought, owing to its cyclic conception of Time, the repetition of the cosmogony presented no difficulty; but for the modern man, personal experience that is 'primordial' can be no other than that of infancy. Within the horizons of modern spirituality, and in comformity with the Judeo-Christian conception of historic and irreversible Time, the 'primordial' could mean only one's earliest childhood, the true individual initium" (p. 53). The experience of perilous situations, heroic ordeals, death, and resurrection are our personal constructions of the sacred. Our ability to become contemporary with the creation, along with the capacity to be born again, rests within ourselves. Through the medium of primary narcissism and the transference/countertransference matrix, a narcissistically organized theomorphism is given both voice and experience in clinical psychoanalysis.