I am not a Kabbalah scholar, but aspects of its teachings have become part of me, as has psychoanalytic work. The two have many points of convergence. The main psychoanalytic writer I use in this work is Bion, partly because of his striking statement that he uses Kabbalah as a framework for psychoanalysis, but largely because it is hard to miss connections between the two. Both are preoccupied with catastrophe and faith. Bion calls faith the psychoanalytic attitude. Both are preoccupied with infinity and intensity of experience. Both are preoccupied with shatter and the possibility of bearing and growing the kind of psyche that can work with the dimensions sensitivity opens. Both are preoccupied with ontological implications of the Unknown and the importance of emotional life. Bion, too, writes penetratingly about an ongoing crises of faith, basic to Kabbalah concerns.
As in all of my work, D. W. Winnicott plays an important background role. His writings on vital sparks connect with Kabbalah’s buried divine sparks scattered everywhere. His incommunicado core connects with Kabbalah’s Ein Sof, the infinite beyond bounds and conception. For Winnicott, too, faith is important, what I call a paradoxical faith (Eigen, 1998) because it spans and opens diverse dimensions without reductively taking sides. Winnicott also writes of the importance of creative illusion, which adds to richness of living, even helps one feel alive. He locates illusion in transitional experiencing, which takes different forms as one grows. It might be that what we call self is, partly, a transitional state, which, like dolls, games, hobbies of childhood, lose meaning as one grows. We outgrow self-identities once treasured as new dimensions of experience open and take us forward. Yet, paradoxically, old self-states might deepen when we touch them with who we are now.
Eigen, Michael (2012-07-02). Kabbalah and Psychoanalysis (Kindle Locations 74-87). Karnac Books. Kindle Edition.
authentic analysis 