Psychoanalytic Perspectives on the Religious Experience

This paper carries out an analysis of the nature of mature religiosity on the basis of psychoanalytic findings and concepts, rather than attempting a philosophical and theological approach to religion. It highlights a striking correspondence between the characteristics of mature religiosity, derived from the various sources of development of the ego-ideal and the superego, and reflecting a dominance of love over hatred, of libido over the death drive as an aspect of psychological health and maturity, on the one hand, and the characteristics of the Deity in Judeo-Christian religions, on the other. At a clinical level, one of the functions of the psychotherapist is to explore the extent to which religiosity as a mature desire for a transpersonal system of morality and ethical values is available to our patients. Psychotherapy also has to help certain patients to free themselves from the use of formal religious commitments as a rationalization of hatred and destructiveness directed against self or others.