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In 1907 Freud called our attention to the similarities between religion and compulsion neurosis in his paper Compulsive Acts and Religious Practices. (1) Since that time a number of psychoanalytic works, both in the general area of the psychology of religion and the more specialized one of clinical case presentations, have confirmed this connection and demonstrated its manifestation in many varieties of human behavior.
A little observation which I made while travelling in Italy seems to me qualified to throw a little more light on this interesting connection, and to demonstrate again what psychoanalysis has so often proved, that the inconspicuous and seemingly insignificant fragments of human behavior, about which no one else cares to bother, can nevertheless assist us in our gigantic task of extending the frontiers of human consciousness.
I was in Padua, visiting the church of Sant’ Antonio, before which stands Donatello's impressive equestrian statue in bronze of Gattamelata, the fifteenth century Generalissimus of the Venetian Republic. The huge church is dedicated to Saint Anthony of Padua, the Franciscan saint who died in that city in the year 1231. Construction of the church began a year later, the same year in which Saint Anthony was canonized by Pope Gregory I, and the building houses the saint's bones.
These relics of Saint Anthony are contained in an altar which is so constructed that it integrates the sarcophagus of the saint, the back side of which, a slab of marble, is exposed