Toward A Psychology of Religious Experience – Meissner

Psychoanalysis and Religious Experience, W.W. Meissner

Published with assistance from the Louis Stern Memorial Fund

W. W. Meissner, S.J., M.D. (1931-2010) was University Professor of Psychoanalysis at Boston College and Training and Supervising Analyst Emeritus at Boston Psychoanalytic Institute. He is the author of many books, including The Cultic Origins of Christianity: The Dynamics of Religious Development; and The Therapeutic Alliance: The Vital Element of Clinical Practice.

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Dr. Meissner contributed a significant literature to the interface between religion, religious experience, and psychoanalysis expanding and clarifying Freud’s understanding of the field. His book Psychoanalysis an Religious Experience (1984) is a classic in the filed. As a psychoanalyst, he also explored the historical perspectives of the origin of Christianity, cultic elements, Messianism and Sabbatianism, the Messiah and the Millennium and many other related issues. He wrote about the psychology of grace and contributed many papers to theological and philosophical journals. His Ignatius of Loyola:The Psychology of a Saint” (1992), focusing on the psychological understanding of the dynamic factors involved in the religious experiences of a remarkable man and saint, is a masterpiece. (Ana-Maria Rizzuto, M.D.)

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Introduction

TOWARD A PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

An earlier version of this chapter appeared in Communio 4 (1977): 36-59.

Psychoanalysis versus Religion

Traditionally there has been a powerful opposition posed between psychoanalysis and religious thinking. The reasons for this are multiple, not only having to do with Freud’s own iconoclastic and atheistic posture but also reflecting the basic nature of psychoanalytic concepts as they emerged historically. The concepts of psychoanalysis emphasized a reductive view of man—that is, a view of man that focused primarily on the instinctual roots of behavior. The psychoanalytic account, at least in its beginnings, emphasized the sexual-libidinal aspects of human behavior. Consequently, psychoanalytic explanations for a wide range of human behaviors were cast in terms of a reductive frame of reference that related such phenomena to the causal aspects of the libido theory.

But the form of psychoanalytic explanation cannot bear the full weight of responsibility for this state of affairs. Psychoanalysis arose in a cultural context in which powerful forces were at work that were basically antithetical to a religious orientation. When Freud entered the picture, scientific rationalism and naturalism had reached their high watermark. The scientific world in which he took his place was the world of Newtonian physics, of determinate and determinable causes and effects, all of which could be accurately and definitively measured and quantified. The universal laws that had only recently been discovered were thought to govern all natural processes, physical and psychological, animate and inanimate.

The laws of thermodynamics provided the context for Freud’s scientific thinking. These laws governed all natural processes, including the direction and exchange of energy, the thresholds of stimulation and response, and the principles of inertia and constancy—processes that served as a basis for Freud’s attempts to construct a model of the mind, as well as for broader scientific explanations of cause and effect. It was a world of universal scientific determinism.

The scientific mind of Freud’s day thought it had found the universal key to understanding all natural phenomena. Nothing existed but particles and forces—all else was illusion.

Freud himself served as an eloquent disciple of this scientific attitude and its tradition; his Project for a Scientific Psychology (1950b) reflects the strength and extent of his assimilation of it. Although this attempt to physiologize his psychology was doomed to failure, given the tools with which he had to work, it continued to exercise a powerful influence on the direction of his thinking and psychoanalytic theorizing. Needless to say, such a naturalized and secularized view of nature was antithetical to any view that allowed for forces outside the range of these explanatory concepts. Consequently, anything that smacked of the spiritual or the “supernatural” was anathema.

Such an attitude left little room for religious ideas. Religious thinkers could not help viewing not only psychoanalysis in its earliest forms but also the whole scientific mentality of the day as threatening and as inevitably working to undermine and overthrow religion. Freud thus walked in the footsteps of Charles Darwin, who had preceded him by roughly half a century. Darwin’s view of man and his origin was an affront to the religious thinkers of his day. And if the intensity and bitterness of the debate over Darwin’s ideas was cast at a higher pitch than the argument over Freud, it was undoubtedly only because Darwin was a goodly step ahead of Freud. The argument was essentially between Science with a capital S and Religion with a capital R. It took another century before the fundamental ideas had been sufficiently worked through to allow for an amplified understanding that there were no inherent contradictions between the religious and the scientific views and that the respective conceptual systems could coexist with mutual respect and even reinforcement.

This enlightened view has by no means achieved universal acceptance. The teaching of evolutionary theory, for example, is still challenged in parts of the United States, usually by fundamentalist religious groups.

Over the years, repeated attempts to address, rethink, and reshape this adversarial dialectic have achieved considerable success. Thoughtful religious men have carefully weighed Freudian arguments and have gradually come to see that there is no necessary connection between Freud’s scientific thinking and his religious persuasions. Here and there, intrepid souls might even be found who could embrace psychoanalysis as a conceptual framework and as a therapeutic technique without finding themselves compelled to surrender their religious orientations and convictions. Freud’s student Oskar Pfister, a Lutheran pastor, was one, and as we shall see Freud himself begrudgingly conceded that psychoanalysis might have a place in thinking about and dealing with souls, even those in spiritual distress.

But, despite such pioneering efforts, the opposition between psychoanalysis and religious thought persists in the minds of less informed individuals, whose thinking has not advanced beyond the adversarial opposition of the 1920s. The number of religiously minded persons who are terrified by the thought of exploring their unconscious lives, whether in the context of psychoanalysis or even psychotherapy, is by no means insignificant. Despite many years of effort by pastoral counselors of all religious faiths, an attitude persists among the clergy that is antithetical to any psychiatric, psychological, or psychoanalytic intervention. The stalking-horse of Freud’s secular and antireligious pronouncements and the myth of libidinal license still haunt the view of many.

The maxim has it that “people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.” If the psychoanalytic house is not made of glass, nonetheless it has a number of transparent panes. Psychoanalysts are not comfortable with religion. They tend to regard religious thinking and conviction as suspect, even to hold them in contempt at times. There is a latent persuasion, not often expressed or even articulated with the inner voice, that religious ideas are inherently neurotic, self-deceptive, and illusive. These are the residues within the psychoanalytic tradition of Freud’s own idiosyncratic attitudes. Psychoanalysis lives on the inheritance of his fundamental insights; even though the science has moved well beyond the limited perspective he provided, his basic positions remain a powerful force in the thinking of many psychoanalysts. The prejudices are rarely expressed and remain more or less implicit, but at times they can be heard with striking impact.

I do not wish to give a false impression of psychoanalysts and their thinking about religion, so I must hasten to add a qualifying note. The psychoanalytic community is strikingly—I would even say amazingly— open-minded. By and large, practicing clinical psychoanalysts keep open and often surprisingly accepting minds regarding religious thoughts, feelings, beliefs, fantasies, and convictions. They are respectful of their patients’ religious beliefs and values, more out of a sense of psychoanalytic ethics than because of any regard for religious ideas as such. The good analyst knows his place, knows that it is not his role to shape, modify, or mold the patient’s beliefs or values; rather, it is his function in the psychoanalytic situation to help the patient to explore the roots, causes, meanings, and implications of whatever beliefs, values, convictions or attitudes he holds.

Where infantile residues, areas of conflict, and neurotic organizations can be identified, the potentiality exists for further exploration, understanding, working-through, and resolution. If an individual’s religious orientation rests on neurotic foundations, the analytic supposition is that they will be eroded and the patient will either retreat from his religious views or replace them with a new constellation of religious orientations, whose basis is more adaptive and less reflective of underlying psychopathology. If the patient’s religious orientations have a relatively healthy, adaptive, realistic, and psychologically mature basis, they will only find reinforcement and amplification through psychoanalytic inquiry. The situation is not much different from that of the patient who is troubled by an unsatisfactory marital relationship. If the relationship is based on neurotic components, the analytic effort, insofar as it serves to expose these components and to resolve the underlying issues, will lead to the dissolution of the marriage. Where elements of solid and meaningful relationship, love, and mutual respect can be identified, the expunging of neurotic contaminants can only strengthen that relationship.

“A subject as complex and rich as the psychology of religious experience requires that we remind ourselves of the inherent limitations arising from the nature of the science and its methodology.”

When we turn to the enterprise of establishing the basis for a meaningful psychoanalytic account of religious experience, we are faced with some difficult questions that require preliminary discussion, concerning the broader context within which a psychoanalytic study of religion would take place. These questions have to do with the nature of a scientific psychology of religion, the role of such a psychology in relation to religious experience, and the potentialities and limitations of such an enterprise. A subject as complex and rich as the psychology of religious experience requires that we remind ourselves of the inherent limitations arising from the nature of the science and its methodology.

The first important point is that the psychology of religious experience is before all else a science of human behavior and experience; insofar as religious experience can be focused and understood through the methodology of such a science, it must be seen as specifically human experience. The implications of this limitation are considerable. There is no area of human endeavor or existential involvement more profound, more far-reaching, more full of implication and significance than religious experience. But through the eyes of psychology, such experience remains essentially human in its dimensions.

The guiding supposition is that a psychology of religious experience can grapple with this profound realm of human experience only in terms of the impact of this experience on man’s psychic capabilities. Whatever else one may say about religious experience, it is inherently a human experience and can be approached and understood from that perspective. Thus, a psychology of religious experience does not concern itself with the suprahuman—the supernatural or divine aspects that may be intermingled with the human elements in given religious context or manifestation. The psychology of religious experience in fact must pass over the suprahuman precisely because it has no resources even to attempt to understand that loftier dimension.

This does not imply that a psychology of religious experience must be inherently reductive or must deny the supernatural dimension. Rather, it can remain openly and authentically empathic to the supernatural dimension while it goes about its business on the natural level. The psychologist studies religious experience or behavior as a psychologist, and the methodology and means of conceptualization at his command belong to the science of psychology. Thus, the psychological approach puts aside the supernatural character of religious phenomena and restricts itself more or less to their natural manifestations.

Consequently, we may say that the psychology of religious experience does not pay attention to the formally supernatural or specifically religious qualities of the phenomena it observes, describes, and tries to understand. It does not depend on the verification or acceptance of a revelation, for example. It in no way requires a faithful acceptance of or commitment to a set of religious beliefs or categories in order to do its work. While we can readily admit that the account that a given psychologist renders of religious experiences may be more or less sympathetic, depending on his own religious convictions, nonetheless it remains true that those convictions do not and should not serve as the basis of his psychological understanding.

While an insistence on psychological and methodological purity has its place, science, it turns out, is not always scientific. A case can and should be made for the usefulness of empathic observation or even participation in the psychological approach to religious phenomena. Freud’s limitation was that he was not a believer, and that he held fixed and prejudicial ideas about the role of religion in human life, so that he could not be an objective or perceptive observer of it. There is much in his life history that gave rise to this posture, but here it is sufficient to note that such influences do play a significant role.[*] We might argue, then, that the psychologist who sets out to study religious experience must possess an empathic openness to and a respect for the meaning and relevance of the phenomena he studies. His own religious experience may supply important data, but it also runs the risk of creating a tension between his respective roles of scientifically objective and critical observer on the one hand and emotionally and cognitively involved participant on the other. Interestingly enough, this was precisely Freud’s dilemma in his attempts to analyze and understand his own dreams (Freud 1900).

[*] An extended reflection on the influence of Freud’s own psychology on his religious attitudes and doctrines can be found below, in chapter 2.

The psychological approach assumes that in every religious experience there is a specifiable and analyzable human dimension. Even the phenomena of the most exalted mystical states do not take place in vacuo but find their expression and their realization within the human psyche; further, they are substantially an expression of dynamic mental forces and functions. Consequently, the psychology of religious experience would reject any form of spiritualism that attempted to categorize religious experience in transcendent spiritual terms beyond the reach of inherently human experience. An effective psychology of man’s religious experience would see it as integrated with the other realms of human experience and as reflecting many of the drives, impulses, and affective and cognitive resources that characterize these other realms.

The psychology of religious experience, then, must take its place in the ranks of other human sciences that address the understanding of man’s religious experience. Much depends on what one chooses to examine. Religious behaviors and experience, even of individuals, range from the more or less superficial patterns of behavior involved in religious rituals and in extrinsic forms of religious activity to the profoundly moving and uplifting experiences of the loftiest mystical states. They may also include dimensions of group behaviors. If the natural scientist chooses to study patterns of behavior in groups, we are more likely to call him a sociologist than a psychologist; if he focuses his attention on individual behaviors and experience, we tend to regard his approach as psychological. But even within these denominations, what one chooses to examine, and the methods by which it is examined, vary widely.

From this point of view, the psychologist would insist that behavior is behavior even when it occurs within a context that we generally accept as religious in connotation and implication. But there is a wide variety of theoretical contexts within which the analysis of religious experience can be articulated and through which the attempt to understand religious behavior and experience can be undertaken. One can study religious behaviors of almost any kind—church attendance, birth-control practices, frequency of confession, religious rites, and so on—or survey attitudes and beliefs by means of interviews and questionnaires.

Beyond this, however, lies the vast range of private, intrapsychic religious experience, not merely the inner set of lived beliefs by which a believer guides his life, but more particularly the quality of inner experience, affective and cognitive, that characterizes the believer’s approach to his realized and lived experience of a relationship with his creator. Once we have taken the focus of our concern away from the superficial and behavioral aspects of religious experience, which can be evaluated by extrinsic and peripheral techniques, we are left with a subject that is extremely complex, ephemeral, difficult to elicit and to study, and yet of the most profound significance to man’s existential reality. We must employ a method of study that is adequate to the sensitivity, depth, and elusiveness of the subject.

What Can One Expect of a Psychology of Religious Experience?

If we accept these potentialities and limitations in our putative psychology of religious experience, we are led to a further question of particular relevance to the emerging dialogue between theological and behavioral sciences. Simply put, the question is, What can one expect of a psychology of religious experience? In other words, what kinds of questions can a psychology of religious experience answer? What kinds of understanding can it bring to the theological enterprise?

The answer is obviously not simple or very straightforward. It depends in part on the methodology of our science and on the kinds of behavior we choose to study. If we adopt a behavioral approach and decide to study certain patterns of action characteristically found in people who profess religious adherence, our psychological understanding will have a correspondingly limited scope. Even here, however, there is a great deal to be studied and learned. Many otherwise unusual states or patterns of behavior that are of considerable inherent interest to the psychologist occur more frequently within religious contexts. These include forms of ecstatic behavior, mystical trances, glossolalia, pentecostal experiences, and a host of other phenomena. If, however, we are convinced that man’s religious experience is primarily and centrally a phenomenon of his inner psychic life, then mere behavioral observation will have only limited use in approaching its core, and we must appeal to alternate methodologies.

Guided by the dual theologically derived suppositions that gratia perficit naturam and that the core of human religious experience under grace has to do with specifiable aspects of man’s subjective experience, unconscious as well as conscious (Meissner 1964, 1966a), we can take a further step. The theory of human functioning and of the organization of the human psyche that lends itself most powerfully and convincingly to the exploration of man’s subjective experience is that of psychoanalysis. Consequently, our approach to the questions we have posed will be taken from the psychoanalytic perspective and will focus primarily on the subjective aspect of human experience, conscious and unconscious, as it plays itself out in the realm of religious participation.

What, then, might one expect? This question is related to an equally important question, namely, What is religious experience? A primary task of a psychology of religious experience is description. We do not have an adequate description of the varieties of religious experience. Very little has been done to extend or amplify William James’s seminal but rudimentary work at the turn of the century ([1902] 1961). Following his lead, we are able to sketch out the general terrain and find reasonable agreement on the broad categories of religious experience, but a detailed and penetrating descriptive analysis remains to be done. This task must essentially fall to a descriptive introspective psychology.

A first step in addressing the question of what constitutes religious experience is to determine what religious experience is not. One reason why the psychology of religious experience remains an area of chronic fascination to the psychologist is precisely that it overlaps, and to a significant degree is intertwined with, mental processes that, from a clinical perspective, can be described as pathological. This point brings us to an extremely complex area, since it is not always easy to draw a line between what is pathological and what is not. Often the behavior itself or the state of mind involved serves adaptive functions within a specific social or cultural context; what we might describe in clinical terms as disordered behavior or disordered mental states nonetheless is acceptable in such a context and in fact is often abetted by forces within that context, in order that the disordered behavior may be put at the service of cultural objectives. This problem is particularly pertinent to the outer reaches of religious experience, where various mystical states, for example, may seem to the clinical observer to be full of pathological elements.

The problem, incidentally, is identifiable not only at those far reaches of religious experience but also in the ordinary range of religious thoughts and feelings. Religious observance and the adherence to credal systems can become a vehicle for pathological tendencies and needs in individual believers. More often than not, such adherences are a matter of common acceptance and fall well within the limits of unremarkable socially and culturally adaptive behaviors, but at times they may express underlying prejudicial attitudes and in extraordinary circumstances may escalate to the level of paranoid distortions. One need only think of religious wars and persecutions to be convinced of this point.

Despite these complexities, the question of what religious experience is not remains a valid one, on which the psychological observer can often cast considerable light. Thus one frequently enough encounters pseudomystical or conversion experiences that may be the external expression of underlying pathological processes. To take a gross example, mystical experiences may be hallucinatory and may manifest a paranoid delusional system. Or a sudden, dramatic, and seemingly inexplicable conversion may be a form of resolving impending psychotic chaos. I am not raising the important question of the value of such phenomena, but wish only to indicate that they cannot be taken at face value, and that the trained psychological observer is best equipped to discriminate between authentic religious phenomena and pathological distortions.

Besides the consideration of psychopathology, there are more subtle issues surrounding the relation between the supernatural and the natural in human experience. Within a theological context that allows for divine influence on human experience through the action of grace, the question of how the supernatural and the natural are integrated and with what effect becomes one of central importance.

Whatever else we can say about religious experience, we can postulate that the form of divine intervention does not violate the nature and functioning of man’s capacities—gratia petficit naturam—and that the form of the experience is determined significantly by the nature of the psychic organization and functioning of the person affected. The analysis of this experience is not merely a process of teasing out the effects of grace from those of nature; rather it is an attempt to understand the way in which man’s natural capacities and propensities become the vehicle for divine action. While grace must act through nature, in so doing it must shape and adapt itself to nature—not in a general or absolute sense, but concretely and particularly to the characteristics and capacities of the given recipient of grace. The task of describing, studying, and understanding the various components of man’s nature and functioning, particularly in individual personalities, is the work of psychology.

While the science of psychology generally undertakes to describe man’s psychological functioning, psychoanalysis and the psychological approaches derived from or influenced by it have contributed most significantly to the study of individual personalities. It is in this area of psychological endeavor that it seems to me the richest fruit is to be sought for an evolving psychology of religious experience. The understanding of any personality requires an exploration of that individual’s capacities, inclinations, attitudes, and beliefs, and includes an understanding of the affective and dynamic concerns that form the fabric of his motivational life.

Each human personality is the product of a personal history and a course of development. The residues of that history and development are embedded variously in each personality, with varying outcomes. The analytic understanding of these components directs its attention to the way in which the residues of previous developmental experiences become incorporated into the personality structure and affect the way in which the individual adapts to his environment. Such issues are of primary importance to the understanding of religious experience. It was Freud who originally pointed out that the believer’s attitude toward God may contain resonances and residues of earlier attitudes toward parental figures. This critical insight has provided a firm basis for an analytic psychology of religious experience. One of the challenges for an analytic psychology of religious experience, then, is to explore the ways in which early development phenomena interact with other forces to produce various religious experiences.

The Relevance of a Psychoanalytic Psychology of Religious Experience for Theology

The question of the relevance of religious experience to the enterprise of theology has arisen explicitly only in contemporary contexts. Previously in the history of theology, concern with religious experience was left pretty much in the realm of connotation or implication. Although the traditional methodology of theological reflection was the somewhat bookish lectio meditativa, the lectio was not carried out in isolation from the lived subjectivity of the lector. But the role of that subjectivity in the genesis of theological reflection was left muted and unfocused. Contemporary theological reflection, however, is considerably more self-conscious and inclined to include reflection on one’s subjective experience among the creative roots of theology (Bozzo 1970). My point is that theological reflection has never been actually divorced from religious experience and in fact has constantly been derived from and powerfully influenced by it.

If we accept this point of view, the psychoanalytic psychology of religious experience becomes a basic science to which theological reflection must turn in order to explore one source of its own vitality. Theological reflection is not sustained in terms of its object alone; that is, it does not carry out its complex function simply in a frame of reference articulated by scripture and tradition. Rather, it gains its impetus and impact by reflecting on the roots of the religious impulse embedded in the ongoing current of psychic experience; thus it has its origin in the interior grasp of a lived and experienced faith that is nourished and enriched by grace. Moreover—to turn the process around—theological reflection does not serve as an end in itself, but has a further objective: to enrich the experienced life of faith by giving it form, shape, and substance.

This way of looking at things opens the way to mutual interaction, translation, and communication. We are trying to define an area of interdisciplinary collaboration between the psychoanalyst who is concerned with religious experience and the theologian who is concerned with deepening the resources of theological reflection on that experience. The theologian must base his reflection to some extent on an underlying theological anthropology. That anthropology has often been implicit in the theological enterprise. More often than not its elements have been drawn from philosophical sources. A ready example is the Thomistic synthesis, in which an elaborated rational psychology provides the image of man and his nature with which the theological enterprise works and on which it bases its understanding of the theological dimensions of the existence of that human nature. This is not the place to go into the inadequacies of that psychological view and its correlative anthropology; suffice it to say that it has been bypassed by contemporary modes of thinking and has proven entirely too static and abstract to reflect the more dynamic and specific emphases reflected in contemporary psychological accounts.

In any case, the point I would like to make is that the theological enterprise cannot do without a sound and informed theological anthropology as one of its basic underpinnings. It would serve the theologian well, therefore, to enrich his reflection with the resources of a more sophisticated and developed psychological science. Here the theologian is in a position analogous to that of the contemporary historian. The historian’s methodology does not allow him to deal simply in terms of verifiable external facts and data. Rather, his account must embrace important elements of the psychology and motivation of the historical figures he deals with. It is difficult or impossible, in rendering a historical account, to recapture the specifics of motivations that were often hidden or even unconscious. Consequently the historian must infer such motivations from the data at his command. But this aspect of his historical reconstruction rests upon an implicit psychology. It is this difficulty that has given rise to the interdisciplinary effort known as psychohistory. Psychohistory attempts to replace supposedly commonsense but often erroneous approaches to psychological interpretation with a sounder, more sophisticated and scientifically verifiable account of psychological parameters.

Even if one regards the objective as praiseworthy, it is evident that the enterprise is fraught with difficulty. From the psychologist’s point of view, it is hampered by the inadequacy of data, which often leads the psychohistorian beyond the appropriate range of his methodology. Despite the limitations, many psychohistorians hasten to point out that the result is far preferable to that of the previous uninformed approach and should therefore be pursued. Many historians, however, are uncomfortable with a methodology that is quite foreign to their own and frequently conflicts with it.

The picture I am painting is analogous to what I see as the area of overlap between a psychology of religious experience and theological reflection on that experience. While theological reflection cannot take place without a presumptive underlying anthropology, it is equally true that the psychological attempt to understand religious experience will remain naive and misguided unless it is informed to a significant degree by theology. Unfortunately this interdisciplinary effort has remained hesitant and inchoative. The sustained and systematic reflection this important area requires has not yet risen to the level of a felt need for either psychologists or theologians.

Part of the problem is that the whole area has an unfortunate history of mistakes, misunderstandings, misconstructions, and even plain paranoid distortions on both sides—in the psychological naivete of theological accounts when they touch upon aspects of religious experience, and in the theological naivete, or even simple ignorance, of psychological attempts to penetrate and understand religious experience. Ignorance and prejudices aside, the two disciplines desperately need each other but seem unable or unwilling to collaborate in their mutually implicating and potentially enriching enterprises.

Some Perspectives on the Psychology of Religious Experience

I would like to turn to more substantive issues within the psychology of religion itself that may, I hope, advance the dialogue to some degree. Too often the discussion of religious experience remains trapped in more or less classic categories, to the considerable disadvantage of any attempt to illuminate it. The psychological resources that could be brought to bear on it have been considerably enriched in recent years, but little attempt has been made to exploit them for this purpose. This is particularly true in the framework of psychoanalytic thinking, which has often maintained a stereotypic adherence to a Freudian perspective. However, other perspectives have emerged to enrich and expand the original Freudian perceptions which consequently promise a considerably more penetrating and nuanced account of religious experience.

These issues will be developed later in greater depth. A preliminary discussion at this juncture has a twofold merit. It will provide the reader with a concrete appreciation of the kinds of psychoanalytic perspectives I have been describing—perhaps clarifying my argument. It may also provide the reader with a focus and a sense of direction as he pursues the path ahead.

One of the important perspectives to emerge within psychoanalysis is the developmental perspective. It was of course Freud who gave the original developmental impetus to analytic thinking and applied the developmental analogue to the understanding of religion. His premise was that religious experience, in common with all areas of human experience, is influenced by and expresses the residues of earlier development. This basic premise remains valid and extremely important as a guiding principle for the exploration of religious experience. Freud’s limitation was that he saw religion only in terms of a pathological model—as a vehicle for the expression and maintenance of infantile needs and dependencies (Ricoeur 1970). He argued that religion was essentially an expanded form of obsessional neurosis, serving the neurotic infantile needs of many in the larger cultural context, rather than the intrapsychic neurotic conflicts of one. In religion we were all children, related in our trusting infantile dependence on a powerful god who replaced the oedipal parents. Thus religious dependence and faithful acceptance of belief systems were for Freud a regressive expression of human needs that he hoped could be overcome through the more realistic and mature efforts of science. Freud’s own scientific account therefore became restricted by his prejudicial view of religion and his theological ignorance.

If we suspend for the moment Freud’s judgments on the matter, it seems reasonable to maintain the basic developmental premise. We can characterize levels of religious experience as reflecting various phases of development from very primitive infantile stages to the most mature, integrated, and adaptive levels of psychic functioning. Limited by his predilections and frame of reference, Freud was able to envision only a segment of the broader developmental spectrum. He focused his account primarily on the infantile elements, which he considered characteristic of religious experience, and in fact limited most of his account even more narrowly to the obsessional and ambivalence-ridden developmental conflicts of the anal period.

We now understand that developmental vicissitudes are considerably more complex, and that their expression in religious phenomena may derive either from even more primitive strata of developmental experience or from more advanced and more highly integrated and differentiated levels. Frequently religious experience may express residues from a number of developmental strata, but usually they are integrated in an overlying modality of personality functioning that predominantly reflects the attainments of one developmental phase (Meissner 1978b).

The developmental perspective is readily supported in these terms by the experience of anyone who deals in a pastoral relationship with religiously inclined individuals. The most primitive levels of infantile fusion and narcissistic omnipotence can be found in the religious delusions of psychotics. A caricature of religion, which Freud himself employed as an analogy to obsessional states, is not infrequently found among religious people in whom blind adherence to ritual and scrupulous conscientiousness, as well as conscience, dominate religious life. In fact, we can safely say that the great mass of believers lend credence to Freud’s formulations.

More mature and integrated forms of religious experience are modestly distributed among the people of God. Those who reach the highest level of religious experience and achieve the maximum expression of religious ideals are very rare indeed. The argument here rests not on statistics, but rather on an understanding of the quality of religious experience. The psychologist is frequently limited in his attempts to understand religious experience by the fact that those with whom he deals have integrated their religious lives in only a limited and often immature fashion. Unfortunately, to study the religious experience of those more advanced and saintly souls who have gained a high level of religious maturity, we must rely on secondhand historical accounts that leave many questions unanswered and unapproachable. One of the recurrent gaps between the account of the psychology of religious experience and the theological account has to do with this distributive factor: the psychologist generally deals with some limited degree of religious attainment or some relatively impaired form of religious experience, while the theologian directs his attention to a more or less idealized, rarely attained level of religious maturity. Nonetheless, the developmental perspective provides a framework within which a more comprehensive understanding of religious phenomena can be attempted.

An important dimension is added to this perspective through the object relations approach. The developmental progression is intertwined with the individual’s history of object relations. Each step in the developmental schema is characterized by a different quality of object relations, moving from symbiotic dependence in the early phases to an increasing capacity for independence and for establishing more differentiated and mature object love. The object relations point of view was more or less implicit in Freud’s formulations, but has been articulated as an approach within psychoanalysis only in recent years.

An important line of thinking and investigation has been opened up by the work of D. W. Winnicott (1971), particularly in his notion of transitional phenomena. Winnicott starts with the idea of the “transitional object” in the developmental experience of infants. In the earliest days of life infants are generally capable of a variety of autoerotic stimulation and of pleasurable attachment to the mothering figure, focusing particularly on the gratification derived from sucking on the breast. Within a few months, however, one may see the infant transfer his attachment, often fiercely, to the first “not-me” possession—a doll, a toy, or a blanket, for example. The child may suck it or cling to it; he cannot be without it. In Winnicott’s view, the transitional object represents the infant’s first attempt to relate to the world outside of the mother. Moreover, it is a replacement for the mother and indicates the child’s emergent capacity to separate from the mother and to make substitutions for her as he grows into an individual in his 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 child’s original transitional object, for example, has in addition to its objective reality a transitional quality that depends on what the child contributes from his subjective inner world. 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.

Winnicott’s point is that all children pass through stages of transitional relatedness to objects and gradually refine such transitional experiences, becoming increasingly capable of responding to objects in the environment in terms of their objective reality rather than their transitional illusoriness. But the need for a capacity for illusion, however modified or diminished by the growth of objectivity and realistic adaptation, is never completely eliminated. In fact, in a healthy resolution to crises of development, there emerges a residual capacity for illusion that is among the most significant dimensions of man’s existence. Within this area of illusion Winnicott locates man’s capacity for culture, creativity, and, of particular relevance to this study, religion and religious experience. He writes:

I am here staking a claim for an intermediate state between a baby’s inability and his growing ability to recognize and accept reality. I am therefore studying the substance of illusion, that which is allowed to the infant, and which in adult life is inherent in art and religion, and yet becomes the hallmark of madness when an adult puts too powerful a claim on the credulity of others, forcing them to acknowledge a sharing of illusion that is not their own. We can share a respect for illusory experience, and if we wish we may collect together and form a group on the basis of the similarity of our illusory experiences. This is a natural root of grouping among human beings. (Winnicott 1971, 3)

Consequently, when we address ourselves to religious experience in these terms, we are not talking about a phenomenon in terms of its objective reality, nor are we focusing on a derivative of total subjectivity. The former is essentially beyond the realm of mere human experience, and the latter falls in the realm more of delusion than of illusion. Psychotic delusion is wholly made up of the subject’s disordered imagination and his fragmented relationship to reality. Illusion, on the other hand, retains not only its ties to reality but also the capacity to transform reality into something permeated with inner significance. Man cannot do without illusion, since it gives meaning and sustenance to his experience of himself.

The concept of transitional phenomena and its role in structuring the area of illusion opens the way to a more profound exploration of the psychology of religious experience. 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 specifically theological or divine influence embedded in it; at the same time, it allows a fuller scope to the exploration of psychological factors in that experience. Moreover, the transitional object schema focuses the issues around specific developmental components, particularly those derived from the child’s pattern of relationships with significant 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.

The analysis can be carried a step further. Transitional phenomena are composed, a’s psychological constructions, from elements of subjective experience. The image of a divine being, a godhead, that every man shapes for himself within this area of illusion, is comprised of 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. Within an organized religious system, the church authoritatively teaches and proposes a specific set of concepts that provides the dogmatic context for the idea of God. That image, formed and held internally as a significant 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 believer’s sense of self—the distinctive qualities and characteristics that distinguish him from other men. Consequently, in psychological terms, each man creates his own image of God, even though that individualized image is in contact with a shared set of communal beliefs that delineates a concept of God to which the group of believers adheres.

This consideration introduces us to the complex world of psychic mechanisms by which these processes arise. The projective elements that are embedded in the illusory experience and in the formation of transitional components are derived from the organization of the inner world of the experiencing and believing subject. The processes by which the inner world arises are termed “internalizations” in the parlance of analytic thinking. The basic notion is that the inner world takes shape through the child’s evolving developmental experience, whose course is shaped by the internalization of the child’s relationships to specific objects. Thus the child’s evolving psyche is formed under the influence of his object relationships and comes to bear their imprint, no longer as a force extrinsic to his experience, but as an internal possession through which his own internally constituted and subjectively grasped sense of self comes into existence.

It is from these internalized elements that the projective components of transitional illusion arise. They reflect dynamic elements of the believing subject’s inner world; at the same time, they cannot be sustained merely by the motivational forces that drive them from the subjective side. Rather, they require 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.

The whole network of projections, transitional formulations, and sustaining cognitive and credal systems serves the important psychological purpose of sustaining the integrity and cohesion of the believer’s sense of self; ultimately the power of belief is inextricably linked with the forces that sustain a consistent and coherent sense of personal identity. I have attempted to describe these complex mechanisms elsewhere (Meissner 1978a). It is clear that the religious sphere is not the only realm of human experience within which these forces are at work, but within it they operate with particular poignancy, significance, and intensity.

The study of the psychology of religious experience is undergoing considerable flux, even within the perspective of psychoanalysis. The historical development of this perspective has often been rehearsed, but I have tried to emphasize current and emerging trends that promise a more profound capacity to understand the human dimensions of even the loftiest and most developed forms of religious experience.

I have, however, been suggesting the direction of future trends in this field. The work by and large remains to be done, particularly on the level of concrete and specific clinical investigation. Here again, as in so many areas, the fields are ripe for the harvest, but the laborers are few. Not only is there great challenge in this for those who have the interest and capacity to investigate these matters, but there is a pressing urgency for efforts in the psychology of religion to be informed by astute and informed theological opinion.

Psychoanalysis has advanced well beyond the limited perspective that Freud’s understanding of psychic functioning allowed him. Psychoanalytic theory today is considerably more nuanced and sophisticated and allows us to approach the understanding of religious phenomena without necessarily being reductive or being forced to deal with religious experience in the limited terms of psychopathology.

Nonetheless, the divergences in points of view, the differentiation of respective philosophical perspectives and orientations, and even the tensions and disagreements over the uses of terminology need to be articulated and understood in order for the dialogue between psychoanalysis and theology to advance in any useful way. In this respect, then, it becomes essential to explore and compare the implicit nature of psychoanalytic understanding and the characteristic dimensions of religious understanding. It is only when these different emphases and their implications, particularly the nature of the understanding appropriate to each field, are adequately grasped that their capacity to complement each other in the central task of understanding human existence becomes apparent.