Magical religious practices, defined as instrumental uses of the divine, are devoted to gods and God, in Winnicott's terms, as “subjectively perceived objects,” whereas the comparatively rare phenomenon of non-magical religion is devoted to “objective objects” In a “bargain with fate,” the divine is a transferential figure whose response to symptomatic cultic behavior is predictable and makes cultic behavior a magical means to control fate. The bargain with fate may be treated as a sublimation of the mother-infant dyad that is isomorphic with pre-Oedipal and Oedipal fixations. The therapeutic goal, at both interpersonal and religious levels of discourse, is to facilitate advance from “object-relating” to “object-usage.” Analysis of the transference, arriving at a conception of the divine as a free agent, replaces the concept of fate with a concept of divine grace, interrupting the religious repetition-compulsion.