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This is a FREE CEU offered by KSCSW. Attendees must register: https://kscsw.app.neoncrm.com/nx/portal/neonevents/events?path=%2Fportal%2Fevents%2F32393Between Repression and Revelation: A Psychoanalytic Exploration of Religious Convictions
What is the role of religion in psychotherapy? Are religious values to be treated as sacred taboos—existing outside the clinic and beyond the reach of both clinician and patient? Are religious values purely within the mind of the client shaped by traumatic sociopolitical and familial histories, awaiting interpretation and resolution through skilled clinical work? What is a clinician to do when religious values complicate therapeutic work or when patient and clinician find themselves on opposite sides of deeply held beliefs? More fundamentally, where do religious convictions come from, how do they take hold in the psyche, and how might they be meaningfully engaged—rather than prematurely neutralized—in the clinic?
This workshop examines religious convictions through the lens of contemporary psychoanalytic metapsychology, drawing primarily on the work of Ernst Troeltsch, Jean Laplanche, and Avgi Saketopoulou. Within this framework, religious faith is not treated as an achieved belief but as a dynamic language that mediates between trauma, desire, and otherness. This workshop will consider the ways in which religious convictions may function as both a defense against and a sublimation of traumatic excitation. Participants will engage with clinical material to explore how religious language and experience can be approached not as ideological content but as an elaboration of a client’s fundamental humanity. The aim is to cultivate a psychoanalytic understanding of faith as a site of ongoing psychic work—where convictions persist as a “foreign body” which demand continued interpretation rather than resolution.
Learning Objectives
By the conclusion of this workshop, participants will be able to:
Conceptualize religious convictions psychoanalytically by articulating how faith may function as a dynamic psychic language mediating trauma, desire, otherness, and unconscious conflict rather than as fixed belief content.
Identify defensive and subliminatory functions of religious conviction through application of contemporary psychoanalytic metapsychology to clinical material.
Engage religious language clinically without premature neutralization or interpretation, demonstrating an ability to hold religious convictions as an ongoing site of psychic work and meaning-making within the therapeutic relationship.
Competencies
Clinical Attunement to Religious Meaning-Making
Demonstrates the capacity to recognize and work with religious convictions as expressions of unconscious processes, trauma, and relational dynamics while maintaining analytic openness and ethical neutrality.
Psychoanalytic Formulation and Intervention
Integrates contemporary psychoanalytic theory to formulate and intervene thoughtfully when religious convictions emerge as points of tension, resistance, or transformation in the therapeutic process—particularly when clinician and patient hold differing beliefs.
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
200 W High St, Lexington, KY 40507-1828, United States
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