The Annual of Psychoanalysis. VI, 1978: Psychoanalytic Aspects of Religious Experience. W. W. Meissner. Pp. 103-141.

The author elaborates on the psychoanalytic aspects of religious experience. His arguments are introduced by a consideration of various historical polarities, such as consciousness versus unconsciousness; freedom versus determinism; the teleological versus the causal, the epigenetic versus the reductionistic; the moral versus the instinctual; and finally the supernatural versus the natural. In all of these he attempts to reconcile psychoanalytic concepts with some form of religious belief. The only one in which he feels that they are quite irreconcilable is the last one, the supernatural versus the natural. Then, in great detail and in scholarly fashion, he discusses what he considers to be various errors in Freud's theory of religious experience, although none too convincingly. The next large section of his article, titled "Developmental Schema," is divided into three major areas: 1) narcissism; 2) dependence; and 3) faith. His discussions of the first two are quite clear and provide interesting reviews; in the third, however, the schema he develops is somewhat difficult to follow. In his concluding postscript, he writes "The burden of the preceding argument has been that human religious experience, like many other parameters of