Correspondence

I am delighted that my article prompted Moshe Halevi Spero to reflect so deeply on the questions that engage both of us. It is as though I knocked timidly on a door that opened and I was showered with gifts The bibliography to Spero's comments should stand on its own as a review of the pertinent literature on psychoanalysis and religion.

Spero devotes a considerable portion of his comments to reviewing Judith Bruder's life in psychoanalytic terms. He finds evidence of neurosis, screen memories, distortions, and unfulfilled oedipal longings. I am troubled by this portion of his essay, as it verges on the sort of analytic reductionism that would see all religiosity as pathology. I do not believe that was Spero's intent, but I would want to underscore that my own project in examining Bruder's (1993) autobiographical conversion narrative was not to reduce her experience to neurotic mechanisms but to demonstrate one small point—that the process of her conversion involved a maturation in her relationship to her god representation.

Spero emphasizes the importance of awareness of countertransference in working with religious issues in psychoanalysis, and I wonder if there was some element of countertransference in his analysis of Bruder. As he points out, I—a Jew—chose to examine the conversion of a Jewish woman to Roman Catholicism and to treat that conversion as a valid process involving divine intervention in this woman's life. As a Jew, do I find the idea of conversion in that direction troubling? I must admit I do at times, but then since my own conversion was in the opposite direction, perhaps the scales are balanced.

The history of the article to which Spero has responded is embedded in my own experience in becoming a psychoanalyst as well as a religious Jew. My first analysis was with a Jewish analyst who declared that at the end of my work with him I would be “cured of those religious delusions.” It was not surprising that that declaration was followed