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Can psychoanalysis and religion be respectfully enriched by each other? Can these two fields survive the interest of scholars who
have traditionally perceived them to be in irreconcilable conflict? Freud's devastating critique of religion and the intellectual success of psychoanalysis in our scholarly culture have mainly challenged the religious. Psychoanalysts have rarely taken up the case of religion as a challenge to classical psychoanalysis.
With the exception of Ana-Maria Rizzuto's The Birth of the Living God,1 it has indeed been quite some time since psychoanalysis has been presented with a scholarly investigation of the theoretical problems evoked by the traditional conflict between psychoanalysis and religion. Psychoanalysis and Religious Experience by William W. Meissner, a recognized authority among psychoanalytic scholars and a devoted student of both psychoanalysis and religion, is a study offered in an attempt to fill the cultural gap. It aims explicitly at making room for the one field as well as for the other and yet, without maintaining too rigid boundaries, to inform both psychoanalyst and theologian about the normal as well as abnormal vicissitudes of religious experience. In what follows, I shall first tell about Meissner's study and then comment on its import for both psychoanalysis and religion.
In the "Preface" to his study, Meissner states that he will address "The Freudian argument on religion … on its own ground and in its own terms" (p. viii). Rather than describing the religious experience in reductionist terms, he says he will account for the religious register as it unfolds epigenetically and finds its full expression in various types of religious perception, religious experience and religious attitude.
Part I of the study consists of the "Introduction" (Chapter 1). The first question for the field of the psychology of religious experience is: what can one expect of it? Answer: a description of the varieties of religious experi