Psychoanalytic Psychology 2009, Vol. 26, No.

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2009 American Psychological Association 0736-9735/09/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/0736-9735.26.2.210

THE GOD QUESTION IN PSYCHOANALYSIS

W. W. Meissner, SJ, MD
Psychoanalytic Institute of New England East and Boston College

This essay addresses certain complexities of dealing with the God-concept in psychoanalytic terms. Preanalytic philosophical and theological parallels to understanding the existence and nature of God nd their echoes in psychoanalytic formulations of the God-concept. Centered on the idea of the Godrepresentation, questions arise concerning the function of this representation as expressing the persons internal psychic reality as opposed to having some reference to a really existing divinity. Tensions in current analytic approaches to this problem are discussed, and suggestions are offered for advancing the potential dialogue in terms of the God-representation as a form of transitional conceptualization. Implications for the therapeutic handling of related issues are also suggested. Keywords: God-concept, God-representation, transference, interpretation, religion
Understanding and coming to terms with the concept of God has been a problem throughout the history of human thought. The question is no less problematic for psychoanalysis. Within the context of the ongoing dialogue between psychoanalysis and religion (Beier, 2004; Freud, 1927/1961d; J. W. Jones, 1991, 1996; Kakar, 1991; Kung, 1990; Leavy, 1988; Malony & Spilka (1991); Meissner, 1984; Pruyser, 1968; Rizzuto, 1979; Scharfenberg, 1988; Spero, 1992; Spezzano & Gargiulo, 1997; Vergote, 1988; Zilboorg, 1962), the God-concept has assumed a pivotal position. I propose to review some of the thinking about God in psychoanalysis in the hope that further clarication of these meanings might contribute to more meaningful discernment of the intentionality and limitations of analytic conceptualizations and their relation and interaction with corresponding concepts within the religious framework.

W. W. Meissner, SJ, MD, Psychoanalytic Institute of New England East, Needham, Massachusetts, and University Professor of Psychoanalysis, Boston College. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to W. W. Meissner, SJ, MD, St. Marys Hall, Boston College, 140 Commonwealth Avenue, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467. E-mail: meissner@bc.edu

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The God of Religion Versus the God of Philosophy

To focus briey on the intellectual traditions regarding the meaning of the God-concept, there persist two main conceptual currents. From the perspective of religious belief and theological reection, we know about God from revelation through faith. Within the Judeo-Christian tradition,1 that revelation is contained in large measure within canonical scriptures as interpreted authentically within the relevant belief systems. Scriptural scholars and theologians keep themselves occupied in continually deepening our understanding of the scriptural texts, in explicating their meaning, and in progressively rening the content of the revelation and clarifying the scriptural bases underlying beliefs in the nature and existence of the revealing God. In contrast, the history of philosophical reection has generated a variety of perspectives questioning and challenging the theological perspective, particularly insofar as the philosophic mind approaches the problems of understanding the world and the meaning of experience without any appeal to faith or the knowledge based on faith and revelation. Thus, in religious terms, God is assumed and accepted as existing, creating, acting in the world, and revealing religious truths. But in philosophical perspective, none of those assumptions are made. Putting aside religious faith and revealed truth, the philosopher asks, Relying only on the unaided and independent capacity of the human mind, what can I know about the existence and nature of God? In contrast to theologians, philosophers deal with what can be known and understood about reality using only the natural capacities of the human mind for knowing and understanding. This divergence in perspective has led to a gradual parting of the waystheologians following one path and philosophers quite another. One result of this divergence has been a comparable divergence in the concepts of God, embodied in the distinction between the God of the philosophers and the God of the theologians. Throughout much of early medieval Christian thinking about these matters, the philosophers were also believing Christians, so that much of their thinking about God was much inuenced by scriptural and theological perspectives. In modern times, however, the separation between philosophical speculation and religious belief has widened, and the contrast between philosophical formulations and religious concepts has intensied.2 I am suggesting that this division and conict has parallels in the contemporary dialogue between religion and psychoanalysis. If history tells us about a divergence between the God of the philosophers and the God of the theologians, I would suggest that we may encounter an analogous dichotomy between the God of the psychoanalysts and the God of religious belief. In the simplest terms, it is the contrast between God as known or knowable only by the inherent subjective capacity of the human mind as opposed to the concept of the Godhead as known objectively through revelation and faith as really existing, creating, revealing, and saving.

1 In this essay, I focus on the Judeo-Christian religious tradition both as a matter of convenience and in view of the fact that it was that tradition that Freud dealt with and that provides the primary religious background for the current reections on the God-problem within psychoanalysis. 2 The history of this problem in the medieval period is traced in considerable detail in Gilson (1955). Further elaborations of this issue in the modern period are discussed in Copleston (1946 1974).

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The God of the Psychoanalysts

It is striking the extent to which the ambiguous and conictual contrasts and divisions from the history of philosophical reection turn up in psychoanalytic orientations to the God question. There seems little doubt that Freud, for example, in the spirit of the Enlightenment and the deistic agnosticism and even atheism he embraced, was aligned with the philosophers for whom God was either unknowable or nonexistent. Many analysts have followed his lead, but many also have not. The spectrum of opinions parallels the points of view and arguments that have been generated in the long history of philosophical and theological reection on the problem. We can begin with Freud.

Freud on God
Freuds views on religion and on the concept of God are well-known and have historically provided the mold within which subsequent analytic thinking about God has for the most part been shaped.3 Basically, he viewed religious belief systems as comparable to an obsessional neurotic organization (Freud, 1910/1959b, 1927/1961d) constituted of defensively motivated constructions erected by the human mind to compensate and sustain the believer in the face of threats posed by the uncertainties of life, the perils of existence, and the ultimate certainty of death. The image of God in this picture was fabricated out of projections of the images of the parents, primarily the father,4 raised to an exalted, innite, and all-powerful gure who could guarantee the promise of salvation and transcend the limits imposed by the travails of life and death.5 Freud had studied philosophy with Brentano for several years and found himself embroiled in Brentanos proofs for the existence of God. Caught between his own disbelief and his inability to counter Brentanos proofs, Freud nally declared his unbelief and rejected Brentanos arguments. We can guess that besides the German idealists, he might well have had Brentano in mind when he (1927/1961d) wrote,
3 See my detailed reconstruction and critique of Freuds understanding of religion and God in Meissner (1984). For a detailed reconstruction of the developmental origins of Freuds religious orientation and particularly his rejection of the idea of God as real and existing, see Rizzuto (1998). As Rizzuto put it, Freud insisted that God was nothing but the wishful emotional clinging to an exalted childhood father transformed into a supernatural being (p. xix). 4 The absence of references to the mother in this conguration has been noted (Meissner, 1984; Rizzuto, 1998), especially in relation to the reconstruction of Moses and Monotheism (DoriaMedina, 1991). In addition, the entire analysis of the Moses book and the extensive literature following Freuds construction in it is misconstrued as deriving from Egyptian sources. The origins of monotheistic beliefs are thought to lie in Mesopotamian cults and concepts of the deity (Meissner, 1984). See also the discussion of this issue in Cross (1962, 1973) and Jacobsen (1963). 5 References to Freuds view of God as the projective derivative of the relation to the father can be readily multiplied. Instances occur in his derivation of the image of the father-God from the leader of the primal horde and his evolution into the totem object (Freud, 1919/1957c, 19121913/ 1957e, 1925/1959a, 1928/1961d, 1933/1964b), a theme that was resurrected and reapplied to his analysis of the origins of the mosaic religion (Doria-Medina, 1991; Freud, 1939/1964a; Meissner, 1984), with the supposed murder of Moses after the model of the leader of the primal horde setting the stage for the return of the second Moses, that is, Christ; in his discussion of the origin of Schrebers views of God based on projections from the image of his own father and Dr. Flechsig (Freud, 1911/1958, 1923/1961f; see also Meissner, 1976); in his examination of Haizmanns demonological neurosis (Freud, 1923/1961f), in which the devil, in addition to God, also qualies as a father substitute; and in his analysis of the Wolf Mans ideas about God (Freud, 1918/1957a; for discussion see also Meissner, 1979). These views are repeated variously in Freud (1910/1957b, 1914/1957d, 1930/1961a, 1928/1961b, 1928/1961e, 1939/1964a, 1933/1964b).

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Where questions of religion are concerned, people are guilty of every possible sort of dishonesty and intellectual misdemeanour. Philosophers stretch the meaning of words until they retain scarcely anything of their original sense. They give the name of God to some vague abstraction which they have created for themselves; having done so they can pose before all the world as deists, as believers in God, and they can even boast that they have recognized a higher, purer concept of God, notwithstanding that their God is now nothing more than an insubstantial shadow and no longer the mighty personality of religious doctrines. (p. 32)

Despite his earlier uncertainty and struggles with Brentanos proofs, Freud nally turned his back even on the God of the philosophers. The image of the believer in this portrait is one of childlike dependence and immaturity.6 Freud cast the relation of the believer to his or her God in the regressive model of the childparent relationship, with all the resonances of helplessness, passivity, dependence, impotence, and immaturity on the side of the believer and all the resources of power, innity, majesty, and transcendence on the side of the God-image (Freud, 1924/ 1961c, 1933/1964b). This theme was played out most denitively and dramatically in his The Future of an Illusion (Freud, 1927/1961d). None of this carried with it any recognition or acknowledgment of a really existing or loving God. Freud was, in this sense, a man of the Enlightenment, for whom the concept of God was cast in a deistic modea God who may or may not exist, but who in any case cannot be known by human knowledge or reason; thus, negative knowledge of God prevails to the exclusion of any other knowledge of God. So any concept of God must inevitably be the creation of the human imagination, a product of wish fulllment and need. For Freud, religious beliefs, including the belief in God, were illusionsThese [religious ideas], as he put it, which are given out as teachings, are not precipitates of experience or end-results of thinking: they are illusions, fulllments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind (1927/1961d, p. 30). Weak, helpless, and dependent humanity was forced to look for the omnipotent protection of the Godhead from the assaults and limits of nite reality; thus,
as we already know, the terrifying impression of helplessness in childhood aroused the need for protectionfor protection through lovewhich was provided by the father; and the recognition that this helplessness lasts throughout life made it necessary to cling to the existence of a father, but this time a more powerful one. Thus the benevolent rule of a divine Providence allays our fear of the dangers of life; the establishment of a moral world-order ensures the fulllment of the demands of justice, which have so often remained unfullled in human civilization; and the prolongation of earthly existence in a future life provides the local and temporal framework in which these wish-fulllments shall take place. (Freud, 1927/ 1961d, p. 30)

Illusions, then, are produced by wishes, whether they be in error or not. But Freud pushed the envelope even further, seeing religious beliefs as bridging over into the area of delusion:
What is characteristic of illusions is that they are derived from human wishes. In this respect they come near to psychiatric delusions. But they differ from them, too, apart from the more

This account may have greater application to obsessional forms of religious ritual or superstitious belief, but does not play well in regard to more mature and authentic forms of religious thinking.

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complicated structure of delusions. In the case of delusions, we emphasize as essential their being in contradiction with reality. Illusions need not necessarily be falsethat is to say, unrealizable or in contradiction to reality. . . . Thus we call a belief an illusion when a wish-fulllment is a prominent factor in its motivation, and in doing so we disregard its relation to reality, just as the illusion itself sets no store by verication. (Freud, 1927/1961d, p. 31)

Because Freud did not recognize the existence of God, we are warranted in concluding that belief in God was, as far as he was concerned, a delusion. As he would stipulate later on, Its [religions] technique consists in depressing the value of life and distorting the picture of the real world in a delusional mannerwhich presupposes an intimidation of the intelligence (Freud, 1927/1961a, p. 84).7 Religious belief was thus a form of mass delusion; as he put it,
A special importance attaches to the case in which this attempt to procure a certainty of happiness and a protection against suffering through a delusional remoulding of reality is made by a considerable number of people in common. The religions of mankind must be classed among the mass-delusions of this kind. No one, needless to say, who shares a delusion ever recognizes it as such. (Freud, 1927/1961a, p. 81)

In the nal analysis, Freuds synthesis of a psychoanalytic understanding of the God-concept opened a wide chasm separating his construction from the belief in God held by men of religious conviction, for whom God was real, existing, and meaningful. The response from the theological side was put clearly enough by the eminent theologian Hans Kung (1986):
The inuence of psychodynamic unconscious factors and particularly of the parent child relationship on religion and the image of God can indeed be analyzed psychologically, but contrary to Freuds assumptionthis does not allow any conclusions about the existence of God. Because the wish for a God (projection) certainly is not an argument for the existence of God, but neither is it an argument against it; the desire for God can nd correspondence in a real God. (p. 28)

God After Freud

The progression of psychoanalytic thinking about God in the years following Freuds death would do little more than reecho Freudian views for a good many years.8 The major division lies between those who hold strongly to the Freudian persuasion and reject any

7 Clearly, the psychiatric clinician encounters religious delusions, particularly in psychotic patients. See Grotsteins (2000) discussion of such phenomena. But one should not confuse such psychotic imaginings with normal and authentic forms of religious belief. See my discussion of the implications of the relation of illusions and delusions in Freuds thought in Meissner (1992a, 1996). The classic analysis of the delusion of identication with God was provided by Ernest Jones (1974) in his analysis of the God complex. He noted that identication with God specically as Creator was not very prominent or typical in this delusional system, but that excessive narcissism played a central motivational role in its genesis. His discussion is clinically rich, and the descriptions still seem clinically valid. 8 One can appreciate the extent of this rehearsal of Freudian themes by consulting, as an example, the extensive review of a series of books on the subject of the relation between psychoanalysis and religion by Ross (1958), in which the spirit of Freud seems alive and well, particularly with reference to the insistence on the dominance of a scientic perspective over a religious one and the preference for an agnostic resolution.

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notion of God as real and existing and those who nd room for the reality of the Godhead, some within the framework of psychoanalytic conceptualization and some beyond it. However, it should be clearly noted that for the most part the latter do not conclude to the reality of God on the basis of any analytic reasoning, but tend to assent to the existence of God on the basis of some form of religious belief system accepted in personal terms as a matter of faith. This in effect speaks to another variation on the theme of the distinction between the God of philosophers and the God of theologiansthis time, however, the theme is cast in terms of the distinction between a God as known psychoanalytically and God as known theologically through the medium of revelation and faith. The testimony of an analytic believer in the reality of a divinity beyond the scope of analytic reection was voiced by Stanley Leavy (1988), who wrote,
There is never a convincing answer to the skeptic, except perhaps to remind him or her that the act of questioning, or refusing to submit to received opinion, may, when it is not undertaken out of mere prudence or contrariness, itself be exemplary of the image of God in man. . . . We make the world, and our own nature, the object of our knowledge. To attempt to understand our world, to look for meaning in it, to add to the creation, and above all, perhaps, to make it the object of loving concernthese actions correspond with the picture of God that has been revealed to us. All we can do is to invite the skeptic to join us in the actions that we believe we perform in Gods likeness, omitting or maybe just postponing the specically religious actworship of God. (p. xi)

This stands as the credo of a religiously committed psychoanalysttestimony to the fact that one can espouse the principles of analysis and the beliefs of a religious creed without a sense of conict or contradiction. But for the most part, Freuds agnosticism prevails in analytic circles. Freud (1901/ 1960) at one point called attention to the familiar saying, in his words, God created man in His own image and the same idea in reverse: Man created God in his (p. 19). Winnicott (1965) expanded this to say,
The saying that man made God in his own image is usually treated as an amusing example of the perverse, but the truth in this saying could be made more evident by a restatement such as: man continues to create and re-create God as a place to put that which is good in himself, and which he might spoil if he kept in himself along with all the hate and destructiveness which is also to be found there. (p. 94)

We can hear in these phrases the echoes of Feuerbach (1957), for whom God was fashioned in the image of man. Man, in this sense, essentially creates God by projecting his own idealized self-image into a supremely grandiose object, and there preserves what is best in himselfas Freud might concur. Without doubt, an agnostic view of knowing God pervades in analytic thinking. The ambiguity of many, if not most, analysts was well expressed by Casement (1999):
It was already dawning on me, as others (such as Feuerbach) had said before, that it is by no means certain whether we are made in the image of God, as Christians proclaim, or whether it is out of our need to believe that we may have created God in our own image. In my opinion, this dilemma cannot be resolved either by adhering to some position of religious certainty or by adopting that other kind of certainty which some atheists proclaim. (p. 20)

From another perspective, Lacan apparently made it clear that he saw religion and psychoanalysis as diametrically opposedif religion triumphs, psychoanalysis would

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have failed, and if analysis triumphs, religion becomes emptied of any transcendent signicance (Richardson, 1986). What Lacan has to say about God falls in the interstices between the symbolic and the real. The symbolic order for the most part can signify the full range of reality, regardless of its linguistic and cultural variants. Following Zizeks (2001) analysis of Lacans views, Kirshner (2004) reported,
At the same time, every symbolic system possesses a signier that, like Freuds navel of the dream, touches upon the unknown and demands a supernatural authorization. The point here for Zizek is that the gure of God, for example, that underpins the entire logic of the Judeo-Christian-Moslem symbolic belongs to the unsymbolized real. God represents a place in the symbolic where the chain of arbitrary signiers is quilted down to an ineffable substrate of reality (that is, God really exists). (p. 74)

This support in the real can serve, not necessarily to authorize ones personal existence, but as its limiting foundation. This way of putting it seems to bypass (as irrelevant?) any concept of a revealed God in favor of a God buried in some vague and numinous way in the unreachability and relative unknowability of the Real. I would guess this plays out another variant on the theme of the Unknown God of negative theology who, if He exists at all, lies behind and beyond the scope of human knowing. Other analysts, following the model of Kohutian self psychology, have transcribed the image of God into selfobject terms. Knoblauch (1997), for example, presented the case of a dying woman
as an illustration of how a selfobject tie, congured in idealizing and mirroring dimensions, functioned to facilitate a selfobject experience of a protective deity . . . and providing continuity to the experience of safety and security provided by the presence of God. (p. 55)9

The appeal to a selfobject model is meant to replace the more traditional Freudian model, but the question remains open whether they are not in the end simply variants on the same theme. Whether cast in terms of the great protective Father or the securityenhancing selfobject, the God-representation remains essentially derivative from human needs and motives. Within the scope of analytic cognition, the shaping of the Godrepresentation may be accounted for, but this leaves out of consideration the reality and meaning of God Himself.10 As long as analysts concern themselves with no more than the intrapsychic representation of God, the descriptions are merely a matter of theoretical preference. But in terms of the dialogue of psychoanalysis and religion, such analyses can only lead into a cul-de-sac. Theologians would certainly have difculty with the analytic propensity for translating religious concepts reductively into psychodynamic or subjective or relational terms. The Judeo-Christian tetragrammaton will not yield to such a subjec-

This trend to interpret the concept of God in subjectivist terms is evident throughout the intersubjectivist and relational processing of these issues (e.g., Spezzano & Gargiulo, 1997). Reduction of the concept of God to such subjectivist terms, it seems to me, forecloses on the question of the reality of God and thus precludes any meaningful dialogue between psychoanalysis and religion. 10 It may be appropriate for the sake of clarity in the present discussion to distinguish between the God-concept and the God-representation. The God-concept is the more general term, embracing all conceptualizations of the meaning of the divinity in general terms; the God-representation refers more specically to the intrapsychic object representation formed in the mind of the individual reecting the image or concept of God, in fantasy or belief, as an aspect of the internal psychic reality of the individual, whether believer or not.

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tivist modication. The analytic formulas in this perspective might well be regarded as forms of reductive psychologizing. In any case, there is little recognition of the distance and disparity of context separating religious and theological terms from the psychoanalytic. In this interdisciplinary jungle, we analysts require greater sensitivity and awareness of the limitations of our discipline and its concepts, and greater respect for the divergence of meanings that continually challenge us and give us reason to rethink some of our most basic premises. Another theme that has found its way into analytic thinking about God is the alignment of God with the unconscious.11 The prospective parallels between characteristics of God as traditionally conceived and Freuds ve characteristics of the unconscious were addressed by Bomford (1990). He approached these associations in the framework of the symmetrical bilogic of Matte-Blanco (1975), which he envisioned as providing a perspective on the psychic viability of seemingly contradictory beliefs. Thus, the seemingly inherent contradiction between the concept of God as eternally innite and changeless and the view of God as immanent, loving, and acting within the world can be resolved in terms of the symmetrical tolerance of opposites in the logic of the unconscious. Similarly, in the mystery of the Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are all God, but there are not three Gods, only one. Although the contradiction remains opaque to conscious asymmetrical logic, it can nd some degree of resolution in terms of the symmetrical logic of the unconscious. In relation to the qualities of the unconscious designated by Freud, the timelessness of the unconscious is paralleled by the eternity of the deity, the spacelessness of the unconscious corresponds to the innity or ubiquity of God, the lack of contradiction relates to the divine ineffability, principles of displacement or condensation connect with the indivisibility or partlessness of the divine, and the equivalence of inner and outer reality in the unconscious corresponds to the existence of God as Pure Act or Omnipotence. The argument assumes that the parallels reect the derivation of the beliefs in the characteristics of God from the unconscious, presumably as an effect of projective devices. This line of inquiry was further pursued by Grotstein (2000), who, following Bomfords (1990), analysis, wrote,
I believe that the unconscious is as close as any mortal is likely to get to the experience of God. Bomford anticipated me in this belief. In his writings he suggests that the Christian belief in God corresponds in many ways to Matte-Blancos concept of symmetrical logic. He differentiates between the totally symmetrical God of pure Being and the asymmetrical God as the Creator. If God created mankind, then He is separated and isolated from man and creates images of Himself that are asymmetrically human. . . . The Hebrews and the Christians both opted for the concept of one God but ran into difculties with the idea of a God who

An early attempt to link the concept of God with the unconscious was provided by the Dominican Victor White (1953) in his book God and the Unconscious. White argued on the basis of a Jungian perspective that the unconscious, constituted of both personal and collective elements, contained archetypal symbols, specically the Great Mother and the archetypal Father, that corresponded to and reected the theological understanding of the Godhead. Thus, the image of God was generated intrapsychically not only as a symbol for the personal father of ordinary experience as in Freud, but also as symbolically representing the collective archetype of the Father in Jungs terms. The roots of this conception of the origins of the God concept in either case, however, remain projective, especially in the Jungian framework in regard to Jungs persuasion that these concepts were psychic contents without any implication of nonpsychic reference or existence. They were psychic contents, considered as phenomenological objects exclusive of existence.

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is totally abstract and yet interacts with mankind. In other words, Christians and Jews alike were confounded by the Innite (God as pure essence) and the less than innite God who deals with nite mankind. Moreover, if God is innite, He exists outside mankind and is therefore isolated nitely from man. (p. 80)

One could certainly question the theological assumptions in this statement, which echo gnostic assumptions, but the issue here is the relation to the logic of the unconscious. In Matte-Blancos (1975) analysis of the logic of the unconscious, it is characterized by symmetrical logic in which opposites coexist without contradiction, as Freud had indicated in his analysis of primary process thinking. This means that concepts in the unconscious coexist with their opposites as well as negations. Thus, by implication, only in this symmetrical logic of the unconscious can the concepts of God as innite and nite coexist without contradiction. In the asymmetrical logic of ordinary human reason, in this view, the concept of God as innite and pure existence would be contradicted by the concept of God as related to or involved in His creation. Within the scope of human conscious and secondary process reasoning, the concept of God as innite and abstract existence would be at odds with the concept of God as creating, and even worse as becoming incarnate in the form of the human person of Jesus Christ. The contradictions to Judeo-Christian belief systems are evident.12 Even further, Grotstein (2000) suggested that humans may have thought up the concept of God to come to terms with their unconscious mentation. Thus,
the raw experience of the unconscious would be absolutely everything (innite sets) and absolutely nothing (the black hole). . . . Unable to look within because of its awfulness and awesomeness, man translocated his unconscious outward and skyward and called it God, representing both absolutely everything and absolutely nothingand their container. (p. 81)

By his own admission, this way of thinking has a gnostic quality that allowed Grotstein to postulate a concept of God abiding within our creative unconscious as though in another level of subjectivity:
as the Ineffable Subject of the Unconscious in contrast to its counterpart, the Phenomenal Subject which is experienced directly. The former lies in a deeper stratum of bilogic and is therefore immersed largely in symmetry, whereas the latter lies on a higher level and is endowed with more asymmetry. (p. 81)

This amounts to another version of remaking God in the image of man. There are reverberations here of the age-old controversy between the God of the philosophersthe abstract, innite God of pure essence or existenceand the God of the theologiansGod as revealed in scripture and as encountered in the Incarnation. Theologians have learned to live with these contradictions because both are valid aspects of the theological understanding of God one aspect relying on the capacity of human reason to know something about God without the help of faith or revelation, and the other the product of theological reection on the data of revelation as viewed through the eyes of faith. The bottom line in these terms is that ultimately the actuality of the existence of
The view that God becomes nite when He acts immanently in dealing with nite man would be rejected by most theologians. It ignores the distinction between Creator and created, between transcendence and immanence, and between primary and secondary causality, and it passes over the concept of analogous predication. In orthodox Christian belief, there is no sense in which God can be viewed as nite.
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God must be accepted on the grounds of faith and that His nature is at bottom a mystery that exceeds our mere human capacity to know or understand. Furthermore, what Grotsteins (2000) formulation addresses is something about how we know God, whether in terms of our conscious reection or, more profoundly, in terms of the unconscious processing of our concepts of the meaning and nature of the innite. It should be noted that these concepts are fraught with difculty, particularly insofar as multiple connotations of the concept of innity are involved. It is not at all clear that concepts of mathematical innity in their complex variations have anything to do with the concept of innity as conceived in reference to the Godhead. These forms of primary process imagining can erupt in various forms of psychotic thinking, as in delusions of identication with God or being subjected to divine inuence in bizarre or perverted and often sexualized ways, as was the case for Schreber (Freud, 1911/1958; see also Meissner, 1976, and Eigen, 1986). Grotstein (2000) viewed these as expressions deriving from the Ineffable Subject of the Unconscious, which is the source of a form of projective identication into an externalized God-gure. As he explained,
Since God is ineffable and inscrutable (never an object of contemplation), then the only way He can be known is through the projective attribution of some essence within us that is proximate, that is, through the ineffability of our unconscious (or, more specically, of the Ineffable Subject of the Unconscious). Herein lies a problem that has beset religious thinkers since the beginning of the God concept. Is God located in heaven extraterritorial to earth or does He permeate our existence both inside and out? (p. 139)

I would not pose this problem as one of location, but rather in terms of the problem of transcendence and immanence does God exist above and beyond human involvement and reckoning or does he have presence and effect within the nite world of His creatures? Grotstein seems to disregard and prescind from any knowledge of God either through reason or faith in favor of an approach to God though the unconsciousfor him God can only be known by way of projection or projective identication. In this sense, his approach is congruent with and consistent with Freud, whose concept of the deity was totally projective and beyond that totally agnostic. The Freudian analysis of belief in God as regressive has been rejected or at least qualied by a number of authors (Fauteux, 1997; Meissner, 1984; Pruyser, 1968; Rizzuto, 1979, 1998; and Spero, 1992, among others). As I pointed out previously in relation to mystical states (Meissner, 2005), if we call the phenomenon of mystical merger and union regressive, we cannot mean so in the usual sense of psychological regression as we know it in clinical terms. Insofar as such mystical states preserve the mental integrity, individuality, and identity of the person, they present a very different phenomenon than pathological regression. As Fauteux (1997) put it,
Purgation of self and return to primitive psychological processes is regressive, but, rather than pathological, the loss of self can be the adaptive dismantling of the false self we have become, while the return to archaic processes can be the regenerative recovery of the true self repressed beneath that false self. (p. 15)

The same theme was declared long ago by Erikson (1962):

But must we call it regression if man thus seeks again the earliest encounters of his trustful past in his efforts to reach a hoped-for and eternal future? Or do religions partake of mans ability, even as he regresses, to recover creatively? At their creative best, religions retrace our earliest inner experiences, giving tangible form to vague evils and reaching back to the earliest

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individual sources of trust; at the same time, they keep alive the common symbols of integrity distilled by the generations. If this is partial regression, it is a regression which, in retracing rmly established pathways, returns to the present amplied and claried. (p. 264)

More recently, criticism of the Freudian analysis from the perspective of feminist rejection of classic phallic dominance has complained that the image of the mother seems to play no part in the analytic thinking about the image of God. As Rizzuto (1998) charged,
He [Freud] did not present clinical material about religion or about belief in God in his female cases, nor did he theorize about the formation of the God representation in little girls or address the role of the mother in the formation of the God representation. The father seemed to occupy most of the childs psychic space. (p. 164)13

Her own research into the development of the God-representation, however, indicates otherwise. As she pointed out,
Research on the formation of the God representation demonstrates the great signicance of the maternal object for the small childs conception of God. Positive attachment resulting from adequate maternal satisfaction of the small childs narcissistic and relational needs facilitates the later formation of an ego-syntonic God representation based on the emotional characteristics of the mother-child affective exchanges (Rizzuto, 1979, pp. 177211). (p. 235)

This complaint applies to most of the psychoanalytic approaches to God following the Freudian lead discussions of the maternal aspect of God are few and far between.

Religious Concepts as Transitional

One of the later developments in psychoanalytic thinking about the God-concept and religious beliefs was facilitated by Winnicotts (1971b) analysis of transitional phenomena. Winnicotts contribution was an important watershed in the analytic conceptualization of religion, shifting the ground away from the Freudian emphasis on illusion as opposed to or differentiated from the real to an emphasis on illusion as nourishing psychic life and development and as opening the way to encompassing realms of human experience beyond material reality. Winnicott started with the idea of the transitional object in the developmental experience of infantsthe doll, toy, or blanket that becomes the childs rst not-me possession. In Winnicotts view, the transitional object represents the infants rst attempt to begin to separate from the mother and relate to the world outside of the mother. It is a replacement for the mother and indicates the childs emerging capacity to separate from the mother and to make substitutions for her as the child grows into an individual in his or her own right. The analysis of the transitional object leads to a consideration of transitional phenomena in general. These can be categorized as having neither totally subjective nor totally objective status. Rather, they share in elements of both realms, so that the childs original transitional object, for example, has in addition to its objective reality a transitional quality that depends on what the child contributes from his or her subjective inner world. Essential

Rizzuto (1998) also documented some of the inuences from Freuds early life that might have contributed from the side of his own religious conicts to the emphasis on the Father God to the exclusion of the mother.

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to the transitional phenomena is the idea that the question, whether it exists or not, is not germane. The transitional phenomenon is both created and foundit is both created by the childs imagination and simultaneously found in reality. The interaction of the subjective and the objective creates a psychologically intermediate area of illusion within which the child can play out the drama of separation and attachment. But the need for a capacity for illusion, however modied or diminished by the growth of objectivity and realistic adaptation, is never completely eliminated. In fact, in a healthy resolution of crises of development, there emerges a residual capacity for illusion that is among the most signicant dimensions of mature human existence. Within this area of illusion, Winnicott locates mans capacity for culture, creativity, and particularly for religion and religious experience. Although many aspects of religious experience might lend themselves readily to an analysis in terms of these transitional and illusory aspects, I focus this discussion on the God-representation, which forms a central component of the individuals faith experience. Rizzuto (1979) documented extensively the developmental, defensive, dynamic, and adaptive aspects of the God-representations in a series of patients. She concluded that in psychoanalytic terms God is a special kind of object representation created by the child in the intermediate psychic space in which transitional objects achieve their powerful and illusory existence. Like other transitional phenomena, the experience of God or the God-representation is neither a hallucination nor totally beyond the reach of subjectivity, but rather is located, in Winnicotts (1971b) terms, in the transitional space which is outside, inside, at the border (p. 2). The concept of transitional phenomena and their role in structuring the area of illusion opens the way to a more profound exploration of the psychology of religious experience.14 On the one hand, it allows us to explore the dimensions of that experience without being driven into a reductive posture that truncates, minimizes, or abolishes the specically theological or divine inuence connected with it; at the same time, it allows fuller scope to the exploration of psychological factors in that experience. Moreover, the transitional object schema focuses the issues around specic developmental components, particularly those derived from the childs pattern of relationships with signicant objects. It creates the potential not only for an analysis of the pathological and infantile determinants of some forms of developmentally impoverished religious experience, but also for an enriching investigation of mature, integrated, and developmentally advanced modalities of faith and religious commitment. In the context of the persistent gap between the psychoanalytic and religious concepts of God, the analysis of psychoanalytically conceived understanding of religious concepts as forms of transitional conceptualization has, in my view, the potential not so much for resolving the differences, but rather can allow for a more meaningful and mutually accepting dialogue between psychoanalysis and religion. Transitional phenomena, as psychoanalysis has established, are composed, as psychological constructions, from elements of subjective experience. In this sense the image of a divine being, a Godhead that every person shapes for him- or herself within this area of illusion, consists in the rst instance basically of subjective elements derived from developmental experience with parental objects. But from the religious perspective and within the context of a faith-based

In addition to my own efforts to expand this line of thinking (Meissner, 1978b, 1984, 1990, 1992b, Kakar (1991) and Rizzuto (1979, 1998) have made signicant contributions to psychoanalytic thinking about God in transitional terms.

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religious framework, the concept of God is also open to objective elements that may derive from a variety of sources but are generally regulated and sustained by a communal belief system within a given credal society that professes belief in revelation and the real existence of God. Within an organized religious system, the church authoritatively teaches and proposes a specic set of concepts that provides the dogmatic context for the idea of God within the given belief system. That image, formed and held internally as a signicant psychological possession, is combined with elements derived projectively from the inner world of the experiencing believer. Thus, it is personalized and carries idiosyncratic elements corresponding to those inherent in the believers sense of self. Consequently, in psychological terms, each person creates his or her own image of God, even though that individualized image is shaped in contact with a shared set of communal beliefs that delineate a concept of God to which the group of believers adheres. The psychoanalytic approach, strictly speaking, however, eschews these extrinsic and objective determinants, because, in methodological terms, they lie beyond the scope of natural human cognition and are derived from nonpsychoanalytic sources. Ordinarily, exploration of the patients religious beliefs, attitudes, and practices is restricted to the subjective and intrapsychic aspects of their meaning and motivation and without advertence to their validity or external verication. Exploration of the God-representation, on these terms, would address the genetic, dynamic, defensive, adaptive, and personal meaning aspects of it as an intrapsychic construction with its own inherent intelligibility, meaning, and psychic reality. Ordinarily, the formation of any object representation is related to and derivative from an object relation, but the object in such cases is experienced as real and existingthe representation of the father, for example, does not exclude the existence of the real father but actually depends on the relation to that real object to sustain its validity, as a function of the reality principle and the relation to reality. But the real object in the case of the God-representation is not so available because it lies beyond the reach of natural (i.e., not supernatural or faith-based) human knowing. The psychoanalytic derivation from internalized elements, primarily from relations with the primary objects, that serve as the basis for projective components contributing to the transitional illusion of the God-representation in this sense is only a partial accounting of the believers God-representation. The God-representation so conceived must be regarded as an abstraction, one that has meaning regardless of whether the person believes in a really existing God or not. Such a God-representation is an intrapsychic and subjective construction that reects the developmental and dynamic elements of the persons inner world regardless of religious commitment; at the same time, when it comes to an accounting of the God-representation of religious believers, it cannot be sustained merely by an account of the motivational forces supporting it from the subjective side. Rather, it requires stabilization and integration in terms of the larger, objective frame of reference. These subjective derivatives and projections, as part of the complex of transitional illusory constructions, are embedded in and reinforced by larger cognitive schemata, which take the form of credal systems, dogmatic formulations, doctrinal assertions, and a wide range of cognitive organizations and integrations that carry doctrinal or dogmatic impact and are sustained within the interpersonal matrix of a community of like-minded believers.15 I would conclude that there remains ample room for continuing dialogue between psychoanalysis and religion, and I would hope that the framing of core concepts like the

15 This differentiation and related issues are pivotal in the different perspectives on the meaning and analytic handling of the God-representation clinically. See the following.

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God-representation as forms of transitional conceptualization can facilitate nding more meaningful and complementary understanding in terms that might be more acceptable to both sides of the debate. Although De Mello Franco (1998), along with others, has scored the traditional psychoanalytic approach for its tendency to view religion in reductive and pathological terms
The inference is that analysts start from a preconceived, a priori notion that religious behavior necessarily implies a primitive, neurotic concern to be decided and eliminated by interpretation, and that the nonreligious condition should not interest the psychoanalyst because it already represents liberation from infantile illusions (p. 114)

it is also true that there are any number of psychoanalysts engaged in the ongoing dialogue between psychoanalysis and religion who work validly within the psychoanalytic frame of reference and also believe in and espouse the concept of God as really existing, loving, creating, and revealing.

The God-Representation Within the Analytic Process

Nonetheless, we cannot fail to recognize that the whole complex network of projections, transitional formations, and sustaining cognitive and credal systems can serve important psychological purposes of sustaining the integrity and cohesion of the believers sense of self; ultimately, the power of belief is inextricably linked with the forces that sustain a consistent and coherent sense of personal identity (Meissner 1978a). But it is also clear that the religious sphere is not the only realm of human experience within which these forces are at work; however, within it they operate with particular poignancy, signicance, and intensity. The approach in terms of transitional conceptualization does not effectively bridge the conceptual gap between viewpoints, but only provides a framework for facilitating a potential dialogue across disciplinary boundaries. Within the transitional perspective, others have approached the gap more directly and sought to formulate a closer integration of psychoanalytic and religious concepts. Although most religiously oriented analysts have settled pragmatically for the division between the God of psychoanalysis and the God of religious belief, others have tried to bridge or at least narrow the gap. Spero (1992), for example, has attempted to recast the analysis of the God-representation, as found in the mind of religious believers, to extend beyond a merely intrapsychic representation to include the concept of an existing and real extramental God. He argued that God is really existing outside the human mind and that efforts to conceive of Him only in terms of psychic representation are false, not only epistemologically but also psychologically, as the meaning and intentionality of the God-representation in the mind of the believer includes the assertion and conviction of a really existing God. The typical psychoanalytic approach to this problem, restricting the meaning of the God-concept to the connes of religious experience (i.e., in terms of subjective experience to the exclusion of the question of real existence), does not in Speros (1992) terms do justice to the essence of the believers actual belief. Accordingly, he distinguished between two forms of God-representation. One form is akin to other psychic representations that are restrictively intrapsychic and have no more than subjective validity, that is to say, any psychic representation of an object is reective only of the persons internal psychic reality and says nothing about the reality of that content. A God-representation of

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this sort would involve no reference to an externally existing God. The second form of God-representation Spero proposed is of a different order. As he observed,
Chief among the areas where psychology has yet to put forth a useful contribution to religion is the conceptualization of the image of God in a manner that is compatible with the outlook of religion. By image of God I mean more than a static cognitive or ideational structure. Rather, one would be dealing with the nature of the important, emotionally idealized images or object representations that occupy human attention and interest and the process of internalization by which such images are taken in, projected outward, and related to. And inasmuch as religion views God as an objective (that is, real) aspect of reality, it anticipates from psychology some method for schematizing veridical object representations of God, a representation not confused with other types of representations that are modeled upon interpersonal relationships. (Spero, 1992, p. xv)

On these terms, Spero (1992) did not accept the Kantian division between the phenomenal and the noumenal, according to which the thing-in-itself remains unknowable. Rather, he embraced an epistemology in which the intentionality of the representation extends to the real object, so that equivalently we do not know merely the representation, as in the Kantian (and usually psychoanalytic) framework, but we know the object by means of the representation. Consequently, he concluded that we can form a Godrepresentation that enables the believer to know God objectively and not merely subjectively. Furthermore, he contended that the pale version of the God-representation that falls short of addressing the objective reality of God is a far cry from true religious belief. There has to be more there beyond the cognitive formation and consciousness of so-called religious experience. Spero (1992) continued, citing Hans Kung (1990), who noted,
The question raised [by humanists Fromm and Adler] is about the function of belief in God, not about the reality of God. . . . What is important [for them] is not so much the afrmation or denial of God, of whom we know nothing, but the afrmation or rejection of certain human values (p. 115, emphasis added). (p. 14)

To this, Spero added,

God representations themselves, according to this school, are attributed to psychic manufacture rather than to any actual form of interchange between a human and a veridically existing divinity. The fact that religionists believe in God, and have somehow built up psychic representations of this God, would not dent the psychologistic conviction that, in the nal analysis, the religionists do not possess what they believe they possess (save the belief itself!). (p. 15)

Rizzuto (1996), in turn, reacted to Speros (1992) model for representing the image of God. She noted rst that Speros model assumes the factual and objective existence of God, a proposition that might be theologically acceptable but that lies beyond the scope of analytic or phenomenological reection. Psychoanalysis of itself has no grounds for asserting either the existence or the nonexistence of God. Second, Spero postulated the immediate formation of an objective representation of God simply as a result of Gods existence, an assumption that can neither be proven nor disproven empirically. And nally, Speros God-representation
is not developmentally connected or integrated with the rest of the formation of the human mind. In Speros words, the objective God-representation only overlaps with drives,

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intrapsychic structures, and human object images. A psychically integrated experience based on such distinct and separate God representation does not seem possible. (p. 418)

Although Spero did take into account the intrapsychic and developmental aspects of the God-representation, the question remains whether the rest of his analysis and its basis can be accepted as validly psychoanalytic. In agreement with Rizzuto (1996), I would draw a clear line of distinction between the properly psychoanalytic and the religious or theological realms, a distinction that Spero (1992) seemed to blur. One could argue that his epistemology has some validity when it comes to knowledge of experienceable realitiesa post-Kantian critical realism would accept the concept of an object representation as capable of real and objective reference as long as the object falls within the range of experience. The veridicality and validity of the representation, however, is established by separate ego functions of perception and reality testing. But we can still ask in deference to Spero, what does the objective God-representation represent? There is no immediate objective experienceable object to which it might refer and intend. But it must and does mean something! For the religious mind, God exists beyond and above the range of human experience. Thus, we would have to conclude that Speros objective God-representation is not derived from ordinary human experience but is based in some part on a body of revelation known and accepted through faith and communal belief.16 There is, therefore, validity in his claim that the believers God-representation refers to an objective and really existing deity, but this object is known and recognized only through religious faith. To the extent that Spero (1992) sought to bridge the gap between the psychoanalytic and religious perspectives by including data from a faith-based religious tradition as part of the foundational material included in the God-representation, Rizzutos (1996) criticism would seem to hit the mark. In this sense, any inclusion of religious belief in this manner in a psychoanalytic formulation is unacceptable according to the canons of psychoanalytic method. In his effort to bridge the gap between analysis and religion, Spero may have gone too far. Psychoanalysis is concerned only with the internal psychic reality of the God-concept and not its external reality, and with the psychology of this belief and not its reality status. Spero, it seems, has tried to wed the God of the theologians with the God of the psychoanalysts. Accordingly, he has effectively taken a step beyond transitional conceptualizationthe God-representation, as a transitional conceptualization, leaves open the questions of reality and existence, but does not stipulate it. Spero, in contrast, places the aspect of reality and existence within the God-representation itself, so that it includes not merely a subjective intrapsychic construction as an aspect of the individuals internal psychic reality, but equivalently takes on the connotations of an expression of belief in an existing and real divine objectas an objective God-representation. Speros (1992) argument thus challenges the Freudian and generally psychoanalytic view of religious concepts as illusory. In the light of the view of religious experience as related to transitional phenomena, we can return to the basic Freudian question of whether religion and the concept of God are no more than wishful illusions, or whether they can

16 This may be what Spero (1992) had in mind in his insistence on the objective quality of the God-representation, not necessarily the reality of God as He exists as a real object in Himself, but as He is known through the objective presentation and conviction of other believers and the belief system of the religious group. Obviously, the really existing God stands behind and can be inferred in the belief system, but He remains unknown and beyond the reach of human cognitive powers, and that not only in psychoanalytic terms.

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stand for some reality beyond the psychic. Both Spero and Rizzuto (1996) and my own approach to transitional conceptualization respond to the Freudian view negatively, namely by asserting that the concept of God in religious terms is not merely an illusion in any sense that would exclude the possible reference to reality, but that it represents the reality of religious belief. But we would part company over the question of the meaning and reference of the God-representation as such. Spero interpreted the God-representation in the mind of the believer as equivalently asserting the divine reality, whereas Rizzutos and my own response is that to the extent that the God-representation is no more than a form of internal psychic reality, it neither asserts nor denies or eliminates the reality of the divine object as conceived through faith and religious belief. The question of the reality and existence of the divine object is simply beyond the scope of psychoanalytic conceptualization. If it can be said, then, as Ricoeur (1970) claimed, that psychoanalysis is inherently iconoclastic, as is evident in Freuds (1927/1961d) perspective, it also seems true in this post-Freudian era that psychoanalysis no longer feels compelled to destroy humankinds illusions on the ground that they express their inmost desires and wishes. Rather, psychoanalysis has moved to the position of staking a claim for illusion as the repository of human creativity and the realm in which peoples potentiality may nd its greatest expression (Winnicott, 1971a). The differentiating point separating the RizzutoMeissner approach from that of Spero (1992) is that for the former the God-representation is the product of intrapsychic developmental, defensive, and dynamic components, so that the resulting representation has nothing to say directly about the existence or reality of God as the object of the individuals belief system; however, for Spero the God-representation is partially constructed in terms of the image of the divine object of credal belief and includes an objective reference to that object. In other words, the believer has not only formed a representation of the divinity intrapsychically, but also asserts its existence as a reality extrapsychically. The critical point, however, is that the image of God in terms of religious belief is known and accepted as such only through faith and acceptance of the credal system. These lie beyond the scope and capacity of psychoanalytic method. The problem remains, however, whether and how far these distinctions can be pushed in any hard-and-fast sense. Rizzuto (1996), reecting on the data on the experience of God reported by the participants in her research, took the case further to explain the inherent value of the God-representation in psychic life. She wrote,
This God, created and found, is a most vital transitional object due to the childs belief that the divine being is always there to love and help, to punish and reward. God is also available for rejection and hatred. The being always there is the most frequently mentioned characteristic of God described by the research subjects (Rizzuto, 1979). Psychically, the God representation may be put at the service of maintaining psychic equilibrium, to keep a minimum of relatedness and love in moments of abandonment, to sustain self-respect and hope when the blows of life make it nearly intolerable. It is also available for love and hatred, exaltation and humiliation, as well as for any other feeling that may nd difcult integration in human relationships. Furthermore, the divinity becomes a companion for better and for worse. God may offer consolation in lonely moments while remaining an unavoidable witness to secretive actions, sexual explorations, and aggressive wishes. Whatever the situation and age of the person, from childhood to the moment of death, the transitional God representation is there, consciously or unconsciously, available to be called to psychic duty, whether to be accepted, believed, and loved, or rejected and despised. (p. 416)

It remains questionable whether and to what extent the God-representation conceived in these terms can have any proportional meaning simply as an intrapsychic illusory

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representation. For many, these effects might only make sense if the God-representation is believed in as representing a truly existing and real God. In this sense, Spero (1992) may have a point. In strictly psychoanalytic terms, each individuals God-representation carries the marks of that individuals personality because it is created out of the inner psychic resources of each individual and reects his or her personal life experience, developmental vicissitudes, and individual dynamics and defensive needs. It is fashioned out of projective elements, congruent with Freuds projective hypothesis. But the relation of this God-representation to a really existing God is a further issue. Rizzuto (1996) went so far as to say,
Once created, the God representation affects the sense of self because it establishes a felt dynamic relationship between the believer and his God. Once the psychic representation is believed to be that of an actual existing God, it acquires the full relational reality. Thus, consciously, preconsciously, or unconsciously, the Gods [sic] representation will, in its reection of how we have created it and found God through its mediation, affect how we conceive of ourselves. (pp. 416 417)

Putting the matter in these terms may come at least halfway to agreement with Speros (1992) analysis. Insofar as Rizzutos approach resonates with Freuds hypothesis, the question is whether it goes beyond Freud in any sense. The fact that Rizzuto situated her argument within the framework of transitional phenomenashe dened God in these terms: God, psychologically speaking, is an illusory transitional object (1979, p. 177)states the essence of the psychoanalytic abstraction, but at the same time it does not offer any suggestion of renouncing the religious belief. In terms of the perspective of transitional conceptualization, the psychic status of the God-representation as illusory transitional phenomenon can and must be brought into dialogue with the concept of God as real and existing as represented in religious terms. We can thus entertain the possibility that framing the question in these terms may also advance the discussion of the intrapsychic meaning of the God-representation to a different and perhaps more productive level. Thus, Speros (1992) resolution, attributing objective reference to the Godrepresentation, closes the gap between the God of psychoanalysis and the God of religious belief, but it also amalgamates theological belief with analytic understanding in a way that might be methodologically suspect. In contrast, the view of the God-representation as transitional (Rizzuto, 1979) and analytic thinking about God and religious topics as forms of transitional conceptualization (Meissner, 1990, 1992b) maintain the distinction and respect for methodological differences, but open the analytic perspective in the direction of further dialogue and potential accommodation and mutual understanding with religious beliefs and theological doctrines. In these terms, the continuing dialogue between psychoanalysis and religion remains a challenge for both psychoanalytic theory and theological reection. In theoretical terms, accepting the validity and veriability of both the psychoanalytic and the religious perspectives, I would suggest that the potential dialogue between them would have to encompass further explorations of the connotations and implications of concepts of transcendence and immanence, of the modalities of predicationnegative, transcendental, and analogousand extensive inquiry into the consequences for both religious belief and analytic understanding of the formation of the God-representation intrapsychically in relation to and in mutual interaction with the data of revelation and the related theological elaboration. The implications, both for deepening understanding of psychological meaning and for the personal and psychologically meaningful reverberations of doctrinal and devotional religious practice and living, are signicant.

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Clinical Implications
There remain important pragmatic consequences of whether and how the analysts orientation to these questions might inuence his or her dealing with them in analysis and how the practicing psychoanalyst resolves these questions with the patient. In the clinical setting of the psychoanalytic process, we can schematize the putative goals regarding religious beliefs in terms of the various perspectives on the concept of God we have been discussing. In one option, that of the classic Freudian perspective, the goal might be put in terms of analyzing the neurotic determinants of the God-representation so that the patient is able to eliminate it along with the infantile motives that lie behind itthis would presumably have been Freuds preference. However, the attempt to deprive the patient of his or her religious belief in favor of the Godless atheistic stance implicit in this approach would be tantamount, in my view, to the grossest form of countertransference enactment. Analytic neutrality would require that the analyst remain indifferent to however the patient might resolve his or her religious beliefs and should only be concerned with the neurotic components they may contain and express. A second option in the classic scheme would be to nd ways to help the patient modify his or her God-representation and disengage it from whatever neurotic distortions might be built into it, thus opening the way to remodeling it in more mature and reasonable terms, prescinding it from any objective reference. Again, the emphasis in this approach would fall exclusively on the God of psychoanalysis, but the process would settle for its more adaptive modication rather than its elimination. This more often than not takes the form of modications of the excessively severe and judgmental superego on which the God-representation is modeled. This approach would be more consistently analytic in that it clearly would prescind from the patients religious beliefs as either irrelevant or as something about which the patient might be concerned as an important life goal and adaptation, but not a matter about which the analyst and the analysis would have immediate concern as an analytic goal. Speros (1992) approach, in which the God-representation is interpreted as including an explicitly objective reference to a really existing God, assumes a much broader perspective that extends the reach of analytic concerns; analyst and analysand would be concerned not only with the God-representation as intrapsychically constructed, but in addition would take into consideration the implications of the objective reference in relation to the aspects of the divine image as proposed in the individuals religious beliefs and the religious tradition in which the individual participates. This approach, I would think, would focus on the God of psychoanalysis but would also explicitly explore it in relation to the God of religious belief, so that the modication of the God-representation would take into consideration both intrapsychic dynamic and defensive inuences and doctrinal stipulations regarding the existence and nature of God as declared from the side of the religious belief system.17 In contrast, I would submit that the approach to the God-representation in terms of transitional conceptualization offers a more subtle and indirect approach to its understand-

It may not necessarily be the case, but this orientation to the patients relation to and involvement in a particular belief system may leave Speros (1992) approach open to the charge of conversion or proselytizing. As others have objected and I would agree, psychoanalysis can make no pretensions to competence in the interpretation of religious beliefs and theological reection, which simply lie beyond its scope. Any such attempts on the part of the analyst to inuence the course and direction of the patients religious beliefs, whether to encourage or foster religious belief or to discourage or dissuade from it, would constitute a form of countertransference enactment.

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ing and implications. The task in this schema does not differ in the rst instance from the classic orientation; that is, the objective of the analytic process is to explore and understand the developmental, dynamic, defensive, and compromise processes that have contributed to the formation of the God-representation. The God-representation in these terms can be regarded as a form of transference that is open to psychoanalytic exploration and interpretation as much as any other transference expression. To the extent that the patients neurotic God-representation can be successfully explored and interpreted and resolved, this may open the way to reformulation and renewed understanding, enabling the patient to nd new and more creative ways of reconciling his or her revised Godrepresentation with his or her religious beliefs. This remodeling and reconstruction of the God-representation, however, would lie beyond the scope of analytic concern and would be left to the initiative and desire of patients to reorient their thinking and attitudes about God and the meaning of God in their lives on their own termswhether that resolution be sought in more traditional religious terms of one or another of the established churches or in terms of some other idiosyncratic or other nontraditional belief system. In this view, as in the classical approach, it is not the business of psychoanalysis to be concerned with what religious belief system the patient chooses to embrace or whether the patient chooses to embrace any at all. The analytic process is only interested and concerned with whatever neurotic distortions or excesses may have found their way into the patients religious beliefs, including his or her attitudes toward and beliefs about God as reected in his or her God-representation.18 Beyond that, the way can lie open for the patient to engage in his or her own personal dialogue between his or her own personal God-representation and the God-concept espoused and preached in his or her religious tradition.19 However, in contrast to the classic approach, although the analyst is indifferent to the form of the

John Gedo (1978) stated this principle without equivocation: Although it is undeniable that the vast majority of people undertake the treatment with the hope that such [therapeutic] benets will be among the outcomes, this eventuality is by no means certain; the actual process can only promise increased self knowledge. From the vantage point of the analyst, the same issue can be stated even more emphatically: Only the wish to discover the truth about the analysands inner life is congruent with the performance of the task; any need to change the other person is in principle illegitimate and in practice counterproductive. When the basic issues have been uncovered, the analysand certainly has the right to decide not to use his new knowledge in the service of change. (pp. 76 77). I would merely add the emphasis that this principle applies fully and unequivocally to the patients religious beliefs and attitudes. 19 A further and much more complicated issue can arise when neurotic distortions and pathological tendencies are built into any given religious tradition and belief system. It can often enough be the case that the patient will use such pathogenic elements in the service of his or her own neurosis. The analyst has few options in such cases. The bottom line is that it is up to the analysand to determine, evaluate, and come to terms with such issues. The analysts concern lies more on the side of helping the analysand to gain sufcient maturity, autonomy, and capacity for independent judgment to allow the analysand to make his or her own assessment of such issues and to determine his or her own course of action and response. A simple example was provided by one of my patients who was consumed with guilt about his chronic masturbation, which he was convinced his church, in the person of the nuns and priests of his boyhood, had declared to be seriously sinful and worthy of eternal condemnation. The matter can be much more complex when seemingly neurotic and pathological elements are attributed to God in a religious tradition, say for example in the form of sadistic superego derivatives. The analytic task, as I would see it, is not to refute or modify the patients interpretation of his churchs moral teaching or God-concept, but to enable him to gain sufcient maturity and autonomy to allow him to decided the matter for himself on the basis of an informed understanding and reasonable judgment. See my further discussion of the relevance of ethical judgment in analysis in Meissner (2003).

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patients resolution of the problem of religious belief, the analyst does not take a stand for or against the validity or utility of religious belief but leaves this open to the patients initiative and decision as would be required by optimal analytic neutrality.

Conclusion
To sum up, I have tried to summarize the major currents in the ongoing discussion and debate concerning the psychoanalytic perspectives on the question of the existence and nature of God. The multiplicity of viewpoints remain divergent and oppositional and formulate the problem in varying terms. I have stated my own preferences in this discussion, but at this point no one point of view commands the eld. I would urge consideration of any approach that offers the possibility of facilitating the continuing dialogue between psychoanalysis and religion. I have offered the view of psychoanalytic conceptualization of religiously related concepts, especially the concept of God (as expressed most effectively and affectively in the God-representation), as forms of transitional conceptualization with the implications of such a dialogue specically in mind. I would hope that these considerations might advance that dialogue in some degree.

References
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