Religion and Psychoanalysis

Development of the interface between psychoanalysis and religion has moved from Freud's agnostic and antireligious stance to more open and challenging explorations of the meaning of human religious experience. The history of this engagement is one of constant struggle to find the common ground of dialogue while remaining respectful and tolerant of the disciplinary constraints and commitments of both sides. Freud's reflections on religion began with his view of religion as comparable to *obsessional neurosis, in 1907 and his phylogenetic fantasies expounded by 1913 in Totem and Taboo, postulating existence of a primal horde in which murder of the father-leader leads to worship of a totem-god as his substitute. More definitive formulations in his 1927 The Future of an Illusion and the 1939 Moses and Monotheism declared religion to be a form of *illusion, or even mass *delusion, based on infantile desires for a powerful and loving God to protect vulnerable humans from the forces of death and fate. His longtime friend and follower, the Lutheran pastor Oskar *Pfister, criticised Freud's approach. Pfister regarded identifying certain forms of religious behaviour with obsessional neurosis as emphasising pathologically tinged aspects of religious belief and practice that did not represent the full range of religious experience and reflection. Even before Freud's death, analytic thinking about religion began to diverge. *Jung, for example, developed his approach to the mythic, numinous,mystical and esoteric aspects of religion. While Freud's view saw religious beliefs as forms of illusory *wishfulfilment, Jung regarded spiritual entities, such as God, as psychic realities whose existence can only be established by psychic means. Jung never clarified this distinction between *psychic reality and actual existence - he was only concerned with 'psychic truth'. Freud could dispense with God, but for Jung God was a necessary and inevitable psychic fact although he was not concerned with questions of God's actual existence.

Subsequently, along quite independent lines, *Erikson broke decisively with Freud's orientation to religion, not only in his genial broadening of the scope of analytic concepts regarding personality development and the formation of *identity, but particularly in his interpretations of Luther and Gandhi. Erikson connected profoundly spiritual aspects of human experience with fundamental infantile roots and dynamics without entertaining the reductionistic fallacy that had plagued earlier efforts.

At this juncture, Winnicott provided a fresh orientation to analytic thinking about religion by way of his analysis of religious belief as transitional phenomenon. He focused on the interaction between mother and child in the earliest stages of life, particularly on the child's first apprehension of the real world. A critical step was formation of a *transitional object, referring to the chil''s emotional attachment to some external real object, often a doll or teddy bear, serving as a substitute for the mother, facilitating gradual separation from her. This transitional object became the child's first not-me possession and provided a transition from complete *subjectivity to dawning objectivity. The essential quality of the transitional object was that it existed objectively outside the child but at the same time was invested with subjective meaning. Winnicott called this an area of illusion that was neither exclusively subjective nor objective, but both. He argued, for example, that in feeding at the breast when the infant's need is responded to optimally by the mother, the infant's experience of the appearance of the breast in conjunction with his need was equivalent to his subjectively creating the breast his need required.