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The prologue and epilogue to this series of essays introduce and create convergence among otherwise widely ranging reflections on issues at the threshold between religion and psychoanalysis. The stretch the reader must make in reading them is well worth
the effort. Each contribution stands on its own and has its own value, and the chorus raised by all of them together is impressive if not harmonious.
These papers emerged from the presentations of individual participants in a seminar on psychic transformation that met once a month for eight years, from 1993 until 2001. Taking as a springboard narrative accounts rather than systematic analysis via any particular methodology, the participants sought to explore whether perspectives of psychoanalysis and psychology could help to describe, interpret, or perhaps to explain the “transcendent,” the “Really Real,” and why persons are religious.
Ana-María Rizzuto, a believer and psychoanalyst, defines belief as a basic function of the mind that is ever present and no more optional than experience (p. 5)—that is, “unconsciously and consciously organized structuration of patterns and contents … registered and articulated into dispositions and action patterns as well as into conscious imagery and verbal contents” (p. 3). Transformational processes are internal perceptual, emotional, feeling events that modify defenses and relate experienced realities in new ways, challenging existing beliefs and transforming them into new beliefs. The ongoing transformation of self-experience throughout the individual's personal development interconnects separate, plural versions of self and nonself within the matrix of societal beliefs, both cognitive and affective, shaping the neurological processes by which a person perceives and experiences.
The psychoanalyst facilitates a dialectical processing as unconscious beliefs come to verbalization, and pathogenic, preverbal, somatic beliefs are brought to transformation, Rizzuto continues (p. 6). Thes