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KMID : 0385320080190020111
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Journal of Korean Psychoanalytic Society
2008 Volume.19 No. 2 p.111 ~ p.124
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Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Psychopathologic Religiosity
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Choi Young-Min
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Abstract
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Historically, psychoanalysis has been widely perceived as implicitly questioning religious values and organized religious systems. This view of psychoanalysis is primarily attributable to Freud’s critical writings concerning religion as a collective obsessional neurosis and an illusory fulfillment of infantile wishes. However, the relationship between psychoanalysis and religion has changed in the past 20 years. During this period numerous psychoanalytic books and articles rejecting what is commonly presented as Freud’s reductionistic understanding of religion and his negative evaluation of religion have been published. While the view that religion should not be so simply reduced has gained acceptance in mainstream psychoanalysis, many of these newer writings on religion go further to claim that, from a psychoanalytic perspective, certain forms of religious beliefs and practices should be positively evaluated as a healthy development, an expression of a kind of achievement that could be expected to emerge through a successful psychoanalytic process. Furthermore, these post-Freudian theories, especially those of Klein, Kohut and Kernberg, enable us to recognize the maladaptive, regressive and psychopathologic aspects of religion as well as its creative and adaptive aspects. Although Klein herself did not address the question of the psychological underpinnings of religious experiences, and although her theory does not appear to offer concepts immediately relevant to its psychoanalytic understanding, a closer look shows that Kleinian theory can illuminate certain psychological functions of Christianity. In addition to extending Freud’s patricentric analysis of religion in developmental time to include the subject’s earliest relationship with the maternal object. Furthermore, the distinction between paranoid-schizoid disposition and depressive disposition precisely denotes the distinction between infantile(or psychopathologic) and mature forms of religiosity that Freud failed to make. Kohut’s theory of self-selfobject relation also illuminates other aspects of deeper psychopathologic religiosity.
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KEYWORD
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Psychopathologic Religiosity, Psychoanalysis, Freud, Klein, Kohut
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