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“God created man in His own image,
and man repaid Him in kind.” (Voltaire)
It is only within the last few years that a trend has developed in publishing contributions to the psychoanalytic literature on religion and spirituality (although this statement does not apply to C.G. Jung and his followers in depth psychology). In reading many of these recent works one can often infer a note of apology for bringing up the subject. God, religion, and spirituality were seemingly banned from Freud's own “religion” of “science,” logical positivism. Religion, consequently, belonged in the domain of the superego, and God was explained as a replacement for the parents when their all-too-human faultiness became manifest. In short, God, like the ego ideal, became a continuation of the legacy of infantile omnipotence and its demands for a corresponding cosmic perfection as its container. Bion (1992) is representative of many of these new psychoanalysts who believe that man has an instinct to worship and is constrained to create a deity in order to justify his need to worship and posit “the One who knows.”
It is important to make two distinctions in approaching this subject. The first is between religion and spirituality. The second, which I shall merely mention here and not pursue, is that between psychoanalysts who themselves are, by their own admission, “religious,” those who are agnostic or atheistic, and those who, like Bion (and others), acknowledge a religious or spiritual instinct in man that is as powerful as Freud's libidinal instinct. As to the first distinction, religion has come to mean administrative “middle management” for a subject