79 A pplied Article Seeking ‘sacred moments’ in psychotherapy and in life J Ames W. l omAx And K enneth i. p ArgAment summAry This paper describes a particularly powerful event in a long-term psychotherapy. A patient reports an experience which could be variously classified as sacred, paranormal, or anomalous. The importance of this event and the way in which it was handled in therapy seems confirmed by the subsequent evolution of the therapeutic work. The consequences are described by a series of vignettes from a psychoanalytic perspective. Key Words: paranormal, anomalous, sacred, internalization, spiritual, psychotherapy, psychoanaly- sis Psyche & Geloof 22 (2011), nr. 2, pag. 79-90 i ntroduction This paper describes a clinical experience with what could be variously described as an anoma- lous, ‘paranormal’, or sacred phenomenon, and then discusses it from a psychoanalytic perspec- tive. This patient had been silently concerned that what she had thought of as a ‘paranormal’ expe- rience provided further evidence of herself as an ‘odd’, ‘weird’, and ‘severely pathologic’ individual for over a year before the session in which she reported her unusual experiences. The evolution of this experience as an element of the therapeu- tic growth and increased personal capacity of the patient about a year later is also described. This clinical story illustrates the importance of achiev- ing clinically useful understanding of unusual experiences. The purpose of the paper is to encour- age openness to descriptions of anomalous experi- ences and to work with patients to construct mean- ings of these experiences which promote health, positive coping, and personal growth. ‘Anomalous’ is used as a generic term to describe statistically unusual experiences of connectedness that may be considered paranormal in some contexts, but ‘sacred’ in others. In longer term treatment rela- tionships, the intersubjective/co-created construct by patient and therapist of these experiences has profound outcome implications. clinicAl vignette A mid career ICU Cardiologist had been in treat- ment for over a year when the following session occurred. Her DSM IV diagnosis had been major depression. She was distressed by a series of disap- pointments in her personal and professional life. A simplified version of her developmental history is that she had a long series of severe, but not tech- nically ‘traumatic’, developmental interferences beginning with rather extreme and somewhat odd failures of ‘self object function’ (acceptance, mirror-