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Expanding psychoanalysis beyond Freud is always a delicate endeavor. One method, used by the early object relations theorists, is to cautiously expand the theory while declaring allegiance to Freud. A more recent approach, used by Stolorow and Atwood (1978) to challenge Freud's
theory of psychosexual development, is to delve into Freud's personal psychodynamics in order to identify their influence on his theory. Psychoanalysts interested in the psychology of religion have sought to advance the field beyond Freud in comparable ways. Loewald, Meissner, Rizzuto, and Spero have all respectfully broadened Freud's foray into the psychology of religion, acknowledging and expanding on the kernels of truth buried beneath his antireligious bias. In her new book. Why Did Freud Reject God?, Rizzuto takes the second approach, putting Freud once again on the couch. In so doing, she exposes the biographical influences that may have limited the founder of psychoanalysis. One result of this is to give license to present-day practitioners who would extend their thinking into areas Freud never considered.
In posing her seemingly simple question, Rizzuto stretches the reader far beyond Freud. With it, she introduces the ideas that rejecting God is a psychological position it behooves us to understand, that perhaps other options were open to Freud (such as accepting God), and indeed that God may exist as an entity to accept or reject. In answering the question, she provides an analysis of Freud's atheism, the analysis itself serving to remind us that atheism is a choice, though a largely unconscious one.
In her previous book, The Birth of the Living God: A Psychoanalytic Study, Rizzuto (1979) unfolded an object relations approach to understanding the development of internal God representations. In the first section of this new book she examines the God representation that evolved from Freud's relationship with his father. In this, she follows Meissner (1984). Her examination of Freud's