Religion, Mental Health and the Psychoanalyst

That the psychoanalyst must deal with his patients’ religious problems during analysis is not a new observation. However, it is relatively recent that such problems seem to be arising more frequently, with a greater urgency and perhaps in a different context. This development is due in part to changes in today's concepts and functions of religion, and in part to the increasing involvement of the psychoanalyst in mental health. This paper will attempt to examine some of these changes and the questions they may raise for the modern psychoanalyst.

All the major religions are undergoing much turbulence and turmoil today. I daresay one might even speak of a crisis, Modern Man's Religious Crisis, perhaps, and to extend the classical definition by analogy, an Identity Crisis, which involves both theological and organizational aspects. Newer concepts of God are being advanced by many modern theologians to replace the traditional real and personal, existant, transcendent yet immanent God. These vary from the God-is-dead concept (Altizer, Vahanian, Cox) to the “doing away with spatial images of God” (Pike), to the “demythologizing” of God (Bultmann), to the God-in-Man concept (Altizer), or to the “God is a place to be” (Hamilton). Existential notions have been applied to concepts of God by such religious leaders as Tillich, with his non-personal “God is the ground of Being instead of Transcendental Deity”; by Maritain with his “God as the Intuition of Existence”; and by Sartre with his “Man is being God.”

In their organizational aspects, the denominational religions are also changing. We are seeing a decentralization of religious authority, a questioning of papal infallibility, the laicization of clerical dress, a giving way of celibacy for the clergy, a secularization of many rituals and a challenging of many religious dogmas. The role and functions of religion are likewise changing. It can no longer concern itself only with other-worldly spiritualism, removed from the complex