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This paper by Dr. Cohen looks at the process of religious conversion from a psychoanalytic perspective examining a book by Judith Bruder (1993), Convergence: A Reconciliation of Judaism and Christianity in the Life of One Woman. In this narrative, Bruder described her relationship to God as beginning in an early identification with the Judaic God of her father experienced in the presence of men at temple and the resplendent light emanating from the ark, which she referred to as God's Shekinah. At the same time, she described her mother's God as fearsome, associated with magical things in an unsafe world: ‘household idols’, jealous of ‘all human happiness, beauty, and accomplishment and who must be constantly propitiated with protective rituals’. During her life journey Bruder was introduced to Zen meditation and the mystic poetry of John Donne, had several ‘big dreams’ that gave her direction, and recounted several visionary experiences of the feminine aspect of God, imaged as dark woman or the Virgin Mary. She also reported several powerful ‘epiphanies’ in which she felt that God spoke directly to her.
Bruder preferred to use the word ‘convergence’ rather than ‘conversion’ to denote her movement to Catholicism. She did not experience it as a reversal of who she was but as a convergence in which ‘two things ordinarily thought of as incompatible were meeting’ (p. 395). In this convergence not only was there a reconciliation between her childhood Judaism and adult Catholicism, but also an integration of the patriarchal God image of father and Church with the missing feminine of mother through her visionary and dream experiences.
Cohen's review of the current psychoanalytic view of religion is worth the price of admission. It appears that the reduction of religious experience to an illusion based in infantile origins still holds sway with many psychoanalysts. Although now this stance is tempered by the acknowledgement that the ‘oceanic feeling’ often associated with reli