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Spirituality and religion can be examined from a psychoanalytic point of view. I shall try to discover what they are, what effect they can have on us, and how their influence works. I shall go on from there to discuss mood regulation and then discuss spirituality and religion that might be called negative, that is, demonic. Finally, I shall consider fundamentalism, which currently presents Western Christian civilization with a serious challenge from the East.
In its primary gratifying form spirituality is a simple, often spontaneous experience. It is the experience of feeling that one is in intimate communication with a loving, divine entity, unconventional but gratifying. Perhaps the sentiment is most directly conveyed by the opening verses of Psalm 19: “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky recites the work of His hands”.
This is the kind of experience that seems to impose itself on us without having been invited. We feel as though we are in contact with a transcendent entity, a very gratifying contact that, when it occurs, we would like to prolong, and we regret its disappearance.
The word spirit itself requires some thought. Is the spirit in the spiritual experience the entity within us that is sensitive to the external influence, such as that which we call the soul? Or is it the transcendent object we perceive or the presence of which we yearn to feel? The Hebrew Ruah and the Greek word Pneuma both signify each of three items: spirit, breath, and wind. That coincidence suggests that these three items are related to each other.
I recognize three types of spiritual experience. First, awe is the feeling that we observe in the presence of an offscale perceptible object, especially if it is immense or extraordinarily beautiful, such as an impressive landscape or a moving piece of