You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The author, Antoine Vergote, is a scholar, a psychoanalyst, and an Orthodox Christian. He departs radically from the Freudian assumption that religion is neurotic. For Vergote, religion is a language about the world and man's existence and offers an all-encompassing discourse aimed at finding meaning and truth. His is a grand, philosophical, psychoanalytic, and religious vision. He comes to his subject matter with an open mind and poses the essential question as he sees it. How does the individual, the saint, the mystic, or persons from case studies use religious beliefs? The essential distinction is whether an individual's religion serves desire, that is, aids in confronting and resolving a major life dilemma and leading a creative life. Or is religion used in an attempt to protect and defend oneself from underlying conflict, which is then avoided, resulting in curtailed experience?
The word religion derives from the Latin religare and means “to establish a link.” Religion is attachment. God represents all the desired values in attachment unless a neurotic sense of guilt superimposes the figure of a ferocious persecutor. Religion cannot possibly be separated from psychic reality: God possesses the qualities of the mother; if the nature of this attachment is not addressed, it cannot stand up to the conflict that derives naturally from the confrontation between religion and the reality of the human condition. Faith emerges as an incessantly renewed response between these internal oppositions.
Vergote empowers religion but does not overinvest in its power. For example, religion put a restraint on the sexual impulses of Freud's Wolf Man, lowered the importance of family relationships, and protected the Wolf Man from the threat of isolation by connecting him to the community of mankind. But unlike psychological understanding, religion could not free him from illness. Furthermore religious neurosis is less successful than neurosis in general. Neurosis displaces conflict aw