“I Think of God, in Order Not to Be Aware”: Defensive Dissociation and the Use of Religious Objects

This article explores the relation between defensive dissociation and the use of religious objects from three related directions. First, religious objects and their attributes provide an interpretative framework that generates, for the believer, an unassailable and thoroughly self-consistent experience of agentic hate and hostility and a concomitant sense of worth, power, and efficacy, which together keep intolerable anxiety unformulated and thus outside of awareness. The unassailable religious object (e.g., crucifix or swastika) points to the collapse of potential space whereby doubt and ambiguity, which are necessary for the construction of new meaning, are eliminated. Second, I depict how unthinkable anxiety is dissociated, in part, through the formulation of omnipotent identifications and these identifications represent a collapse of potential space — a refusal to recognize likeness in difference and difference in likeness. Third, the collapse of potential space attends the breakdown of the dynamic tension between generating and submitting to experience. On the one hand, this collapse enables a compulsive, omnipotent construction of experience, a concomitant rigid subjectivity, and the foreclosure of new meaning. On the other hand, it leads to an intrapsychic, desymbolized space: an empty space from which subjectivity, meaning, and value are absent. The hidden presence of desymbolized space is indicated in the intentional construction of a depersonalized other and by the wish or plan to annihilate real and imagined others.