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In Part I of this paper I described case material that struck me as rich in reference to religious, spiritual, and demonic themes. A religious theme, ranging from pagan demonism to a quest for spiritual transcendence, became central to understanding a depressed patient with a history of abuse in childhood. Reflecting on this material as well as other patients (both my own and those of supervisees), I conjectured that religious and spiritual experiences may be legitimately understood as aspects of psychoanalytic metapsychology. In this vein, the myth of Christ intertwines with that of Oedipus and illuminates concepts such as innocence, original sin, and sacrifice. These spiritual themes are also described as manifestations of Winnicott's concept of object usage as an aspect of normal development. That a religious theme, considered in its many components, may qualify as a metapsychological perspective is a concept that has already been hinted at by Bion (1970, 1992, personal communication), Rizzuto (1974, 1976, 1991), Meissner (1984), and Symington (1994). I feel that these elements of mental life have been “bleached out” by the dazzling illumination of the Enlightenment and by its sterile descendant, logical positivism. Ultimately the fate of man's soul rests on the dialectic between man's sense of innocence and his sense of guilt.
The following themes emerged from my patient's material: (a) the importance of innocence and of its dialectical counterpart, original sin, the psychoanalytic version of which is the psychic identification with (ownership of) and putative use of one's instinctual drive endowment (the potential guilt for “object usage” [Winnicott, 1969, 1971]), and also of blessing,