Some neurotics use social institutions such as religion as part of the defensive system against anxiety. Such institutions, as Hartmann has said, can be used to channelize other tendencies besides projection and sublimation. Man created these institutions as aids for coping with his inner impulses and his external physical environment. The social institution aims to channelize instinctual energies into sublimatory, group-approved activities, and thus to enhance object relationships. The neurotic who weaves the institution into his defensive system in nonsublimating fashion presents a difficult problem because the defense becomes rationalized as an expression of the social institution, and is clothed with virtue and righteousness. The relevance of these postulates to clinical practice is explored in the analysis of an obsessive man, a devout Catholic.