Moshe Halevi Spero Responds

It is always gratifying to be appreciated, whether the appreciation stems from agreement or disagreement or combinations of both. It was indeed an invigorating and rewarding task to scrutinize Mariam Cohen's essay, and I believe that, approached in tandem, our two articles might represent a watershed in psychoanalytic writing on this topic.

In her letter, Cohen suggests that I overemphasize the psychopathological and neurosogenic dimensions of Bruder's conversion from Judaism to Christianity, and suggests that this may stem in part from my own countertransference. The statement is probably true enough, but leaves unclear whether she regards this influence as constructive or less than constructive. And the latter question itself depends on how one defines countertransference and the way one interprets the manner by which it contributes to the analytic process. I should like to offer three brief comments in response:

1. I believe I offered in my essay ample consideration of the positive qualities of Bruder's religious experience, but this alone cannot mean that there are not mundane psychological processes at work as well, pathological, regressive, or otherwise, nor do I believe that religious processes—just like any other dynamic mental process—cannot have residues or even larger complements of oedipal (etc.) divagations within them.

   Mariam Cohen wants us to notice more “that the process of [Bruder's] conversion involved a maturation in her relationship to her god representation.” I, like Cohen, want to be as alert as possible to all signs of such maturation—regarding a divine or any other kind of mental representation. However, the burden is ours as psychoanalysts to be discerning when assessing the evidence for such maturation and related developments. I argued that without ample associative material and related data refracted within an analytic framework, this kind of assessment is difficult. Absent such data, we are tempted to turn to analytic inference from poetry