Meetings of the New York Psychoanalytic Society

DISCUSSION: Dr. Renato Almansi agreed with Dr. Ross that the essential psychology of religious belief is rooted genetically in the universal fear of object loss and its equivalent, death, and in the need to offset this by illusion, by the attempt to fuse with the everflowing breast, by the search for the protecting all-powerful father, and by the free use of magical thinking. In addition to the dread of object loss, Dr. Almansi cited the need to control libidinal urges, the need to control aggression to resolve ambivalence, and the intrinsic human need for moral codes in which both the ego and the superego are involved. Dr. Almansi also spoke of the great psychological differences between the mystic who experiences religious ecstasy, the obsessive for whom religion is reduced to an endless repetition of ceremonies, and the individual to whom religion represents merely a controlled illusion. He postulated that stranger anxiety is one of the early infantile determinants of the need for belief in religion.

Dr. Earl Loomis felt that the fear of object loss as the basic unconscious motive for religious belief was a cogent hypothesis. He cited William James on the varieties of religious experience, and raised the question whether these applied to all such experiences. While it is true that religion exploits fear, according to Pfister, Loomis commented on the religious ideology of Protestantism which protests and demands doubt. This need for questioning was contrasted with Erikson's concept of basic trust and the need for the establishment of constancies in order to allow doubt to appear.

Dr. Jan Frank felt that Dr. Ross did not sufficiently differentiate between institutionalized religions with dogmatic codes and personal religious beliefs. Dr. Otto Sperling raised several points. If religious belief is based on fear of object loss, one would expect it to increase in soldiers in combat; a study directed to this question showed that this is not the case. He wondere