When the Light Shed By God is Dimmer than the Light Shed Upon God: Countertransference Illumination of Latent Religious Object Representations of a Jewish Patient in Psychoanalysis

A report is offered of the psychoanalysis of an emotionally constricted, religiously devout ko'hen, a member of the Jewish priestly class, undertaken with the author, himself a religiously committed Jew. While the analysand brought a great deal of material to his hours and was deeply committed to the analysis, the sessions were emotionally vapid, obsessively repetitious and ruminative. For more than three years, the patient's steadfast production of a plethora of dreams did not much alter the brittle quality of work and the restricted range of the transference. At first, though religious themes as such abounded, the patient's relationship with God and his representation of God seemed to play no role in the working dynamic. This vacancy played a negating or absenting role, distancing the analyst from his own sense of a living divinity, parallel to the basic aporia in the patient's emotional representation of his significant parental objects and the image of God that rested upon the former. The countertransference dimension of the analytic relationship peaked during a spontaneous but complex enactment that helped refract the patient's and analyst's shared and divergent religious perceptions, leading to a significant transformation in the analysand's religious experience.