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This work is a loving, discursive, theoretical, and clinical essay on the psychogenesis of belief in God, or, in Rizzuto's terms, "God representation." Twice, at the beginning of the Introduction and at the Conclusion, she insists that "This is not a book on religion." "It is a book on object relations … about one object relation: that of man with that special object he calls God. God, psychologically speaking, is an illusory transitional object" (p. 177), one which, rather than being gradually decathected, is increasingly cathected. She identifies religion as being primarily a private, and secondarily a social, phenomenon. "The birth of the living God" consists of the early formation and lifelong modification of the God-representation (p. 41).
The first third of the book is a masterful review of the psychoanalytic literature on religion, from Freud through object-relations theory and on to the author's beloved Winnicott. Central to her argument is Winnicott's theory of transitional phenomena, the intermediate area of illusion and play which must not be questioned. The transitional object is found, yet created; similarly, God is both found and created at each new level of developmental integration. Unlike all other objects, however, "He is the only relevant object who had not undergone and cannot undergo reality testing… The believer, in spite of the uncommon nature of the relation, is not psychotic, or even necessarily neurotic. He or she may be an emotionally mature person" (p. 49). The middle chapters, case studies, richly portray four patients and the roles which God representations play in their dynamics, ranging from protective to persecutory to absent to enigmatic.
Throughout, Rizzuto seeks to refute the classical Freudian equation of religion with repetition compulsion, with its explicit overtones of pathology. She replaces it with an Eriksonian-epigenetic theory of religion in which, "once created, our God, dormant or active, remains a potentiall