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Have psychoanalytic insight and interpretation of religious experience
and religious phenomena been overly circumspect or at times even prejudicial? Carrying his analysis of religious phenomena farther than perhaps any psychoanalytically inspired work, Antoine Vergote scrutinizes instances of religious experience drawn from such varied sources as classics of the Christian mystical tradition, clinical material, and autobiographical and historical documents.
Antoine Vergote is Professor Emeritus of the University of Louvain, Belgium, where he taught in the faculties of psychology, philosophy, and theology. He is founder of the Center for Psychology of Religion at that university, and is a practicing psychoanalyst and past president of the Belgian School of Psychoanalysis. Vergote has published several books and numerous articles in the area of psychology of religion, some of which have been translated into as many as five languages. Guilt and Desire was originally published in French in 1978. In the opinion of this reviewer, who completed doctoral studies under Vergote's direction, it is Vergote's most important work.
While maintaining the neutrality of psychoanalytic listening, Vergote accords the religious phenomena he studies their own autonomy and respects their proper context. His bipartite study considers the consciousness of evil and of guilt, and the vicissitudes of desire. Guilt and desire, as Vergote says, are two words charged with an uncanny, disquieting familiarity, summoning up two basic dimensions of human existence which are at the heart of both religion and psychoanalysis. They are the two axes he pursues, corresponding to the two tendencies Freud analyzed as a propensity to the obsessional or to the hysterical neurosis. Nonetheless, Vergote's analysis of various forms of psychopathology that draw upon religious symbolism is not restricted to classical neurotic phenomena. For example, it takes into account what he calls "malignant obsession,