This paper considers the question of psychoanalysis and religious belief in the context of the three Abrahamic religions and with particular focus on Christianity. The classical psychoanalytic view of literal religious belief and post-Freudian views of religious belief are briefly summarised.

The author briefly considers religious belief as a combination of objective and subjective modes of thought in Winnicott's transitional space. Despite its explanatory value, the author agrees with Winnicott himself, who recognised the limitations of transitionality in approaching Christian symbolisation. This paper turns briefly to theology in order to begin to construct a complementary model to transitionality. Turner's dialectical model of linguistic representation in Christianity is considered. This approach includes literal religious belief in a dialectic with a disruptive, metaphorical mode of representation.

The author aligns Klein's concrete mode of thinking in the pre-symbolic paranoid-schizoid position of infancy with literal religious belief. Paranoid-schizoid thinking initially suggests, in line with Freud, that literal belief is psychopathological in adults. But Turner's dialectical modes of linguistic representation in religious belief, both literal and metaphorical, are then linked to the wider psychical dynamics in the self that have been suggested by Britton. Employing Klein's paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, Britton's perspective can dynamically re-contextualise literal religious beliefs in the adult so that literalism can no longer be considered to be necessarily immature or pathological.

Finally, the author argues for a synthesis of Winnicott's consoling transitional, and the disruptive Klein-Turner dialectical model. Drawing on the Pleasure Principle, the two approaches may be seen as two countervailing but nevertheless complementary models which offer a more inclusive psychoanalytic approach to literal religious belief.