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For Freud, religious belief was a childish illusion: wishing to feel supported or protected by an all-knowing, all-powerful parent, we invest deities, rituals and religious beliefs with power and authority. Such attempts to console ourselves for an original helplessness are symptoms of a refusal to grow up: ‘Men cannot remain children for ever; they must in the end go out into hostile life’ (The Future of an Illusion, ). (Yet what does it mean for a man to state unequivocally, axiomatically, that life is ‘hostile’?)
Freud's hostility to religious belief pervaded much of the analytic literature until quite recently. Practitioners were prone either to interpret religious belief as neurotic, irrational or obsessional (which we know it can be), or else to regard it as a private concern (like political affiliation) to be kept outside the boundaries of analytic investigation. But as psychoanalytically-informed therapy has metamorphosed, particularly in the last 15 years, the focus of the analyst's interest has changed. No longer is the question about a patient's religious belief: ‘Is that true?’ but ‘What in your personal history disposes you to believe that?’ As Adam Phillips puts it, ‘from a psychoanalytic point of view, belief changes from being a question about the qualities of the object of belief, to a question about the history of the subject, the believer’.
But this approach, as Herbert Strean (Director of the New York Center for Psychoanalytic Training) makes clear in his intermittently illuminating book, requires the analyst to be particularly alert to his or her countertransference responses to a patient's religious beliefs and practices. He reports strong negative countertransference feelings amongst his supervisees (Jewish and non-Jewish), and one of the strengths of this book is his disarming capacity to discuss the discomforting feelings evoked in him by certain patients.
Although he only alludes to this in passing, Dr Strean is drawing attention to the possib