God in the Mind: The Psychodynamics of an Unusual Relationship

In 1963, I was living a triple life in the city of Córdoba, Argentina, where I grew up. From early morning until afternoon, I was a hematologist and the co-chair of the radioisotope laboratory at the Hospital Córdoba, a state and university hospital. In the late afternoon, I was teaching child and adolescent development at the newly founded (after the fall of the Perón dictatorship) Catholic University. In the evening, I worked in my private medical office as an internist. It was an intense and interesting life. Before I decided to study medicine, I had trained in normal school as a teacher. The training was superb. We studied the history, philosophy, and theories of teaching, from Plato to Maria Montessori. We studied what was available about child and adolescent development, in particular what facilitates learning and the role of the personality of the teacher. For three years we practiced student teaching under very rigorous supervision, focusing on our ability to reach children by engaging their curiosity and initiative, keeping in mind age-appropriate modes of learning and establishing emotional contact with them. Looking back, I can see now that my normal school training sensitized me to the subtleties of children's experiences and the need for a meaningful relationship as a condition for teaching and learning. At the same time, the study of the history of teaching alerted me to the many and opposing ways in which adults may look at children's experiences. By 1963, I was teaching the process of development from childhood to early adulthood at the university.

That October, I received an unexpected invitation. The dean of the Roman Catholic seminary wanted me to teach a course on the psychological foundations of belief and pastoral care. The seminary had updated its curriculum and considered that the future priests had to have an understanding of the psychology of belief and its vicissitudes. I found the idea fascinating and the project daunting. I asked for some