Hearing the faith in time: countertransference and religious metaphor in an oncology patient's psychotherapy

Material from the psychoanalytic psychotherapy of a patient with breast cancer demonstrates the emergence of constructive meaning in areas of psychological experience burdened by conflicts regarding the dimension of time and faith. During analytic work, the spontaneous appearance of religious metaphors revealed deeper layers of memory where time, faith, language, and the sense of being listened to once interacted in ways whose significance could be conceptualized, with the help of the countertransference, as a rediscovery of a hearing breast, or even a sacred hearing breast. Implications for the psychoanalysis of religious experience are discussed.