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Elvin V. Semrad pointed to the value of psychoanalysis in studying the affective importance of patients' belief systems. The questions of the objectivity of religious belief and religious values and the use of symbolic religious rites beyond ritualistic or magical attitudes are complicated and warrant our study and attention.
In "Incidental Clinical Psychoanalytic Research into Religious Belief, " Herman M. Serota stated that opportunities for the psychoanalyst to observe aspects of religious belief occur in almost every analysis. Analyst and analysand are immersed in the Judaeo-Christian milieu of our day, and pragmatic contacts with religious concepts attend all rites of passage from birth through death and mourning. The extensive inventories concerned with identity problems, especially with regard to those of one's children, and resulting conflicts, compromise formations, resolutions, rationalized adaptations, suppressions and repressions are likewise familiar processes in the study of psychic operations surrounding the questions of religious belief.
Moral control of both sexual and aggressive acts is usually placed in religious frames of reference vaguely conceived but nonetheless stringent. It emerges in the form of superego themes or their derivatives. The superego introjects as revealed in the transference often come to bear the behavioral attributes of the church whose doctrines they once espoused. Religion conceived in these terms must necessarily be object related but is correspondingly analyzable.
As Freud pointed out, it is still customary today to attribute religious ideas to divine revelation and to object to disbelief. He then defines illusion as a belief in which wish fulfillment as a motivation is a prominent factor and the relation to reality is disregarded.
The clinical task is to demonstrate the function of religious belief in the