The Faithless Analyst¹

In this lecture, I wish to speak about the faithless analyst. This is an analyst without fixed religious notions, without specific preferences with regard to religious faith and practice, without religious commitments or attachments of the kind that would influence the course of the analysis. Is this possible? Analysts like everyone else grow up in specific cultures that are deeply entangled with religious traditions. Can analysts shed this formation when they enter the consulting room? Should they? Values come with religious faith and practice. Should the analyst shed such religiously based values for the sake of absolute neutrality? I want to think about such faithlessness as an impossible ideal for analytical practice and how to work with failures to remain faithless in the presence of different faiths or the absence of faith among patients.