The relationship between psychoanalysis and religion has long been fraught, yet religion or spirituality can play a significant role in patients’ lives or our own. When patients bring up material of a religious or spiritual nature, many clinicians find themselves at a loss. Can we understand and engage patients’ spiritual material in treatment in a way that is neither reductionistic nor uncritically accepting? Can we expand our frame to welcome this varied aspect of our clients’ experience? This presentation will consider theoretical and clinical approaches to working with the diversities of clients’ religious or spiritual experience, no matter what our own spiritual orientation (or lack thereof).

Lisa Cataldo, MDiv, PhD, is a psychoanalyst and Associate Professor of mental health counseling and spiritual integration at Fordham University. She is a faculty member and supervisor at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies and the Stephen A. Mitchell Relational Studies Center in New York. She is the author of many articles and book chapters addressing the intersection of relational psychoanalysis and religion, most recently around issues of trauma and moral injury. She maintains a private practice in New York.