Cormac Gallagher – A Stranger To Myself
 
Issue 65 (Summer 2017) Pages 89-97
 
Alienation in the Spiritual Exercises
 
The need for Ignatian Spirituality to engage with Freudian psychoanalysis.
 
Keywords: Ignatian Exercises; Id quod volo; Freud; Lacan; Psychoanalysis
 
What I do is me: for that I came.
                                                              Gerard Manley Hopkins
 
What did I come into this world to do?
The honest man, I take it, comes to his spiritual guide with some such question as this. The praxis set out by St. Ignatius under the name of Spiritual Exercises gives the one to whom this question is addressed some indications as to what he should say and do in reply. It is his vocation to support the desire of the man who in asking so radical a question has exposed himself in his weakness to the uncompromising demands that may be made of him.