Religion can be viewed very differently by different individuals. For some people it forms the basis of emotional safety while others regard it as the main obstacle to true humanity. One reason for this wide variance of opinion lies in the different ways that God can be percieved even within the same religious tradition. He can, for example, appear as a cosmic sadist torturing men eternally or as the vicariously suffering Christ sharing and containing the evils of mankind.

These and other images of God are analyzed by a systematic psychoanalytic instrument constructed upon the object relations theory. It describes five inner objects created by different partial drives or aspects of these drives. The inner objects are regarded as unconscious phantasies in the Kleinian sense. Five corresponding analogous emotional images of God are abstracted from the Christian tradition.