New Developments in the Psychoanalytic Study of Religion: A Bibliographic Review of the Literature Since 1960

Readers familiar with the reviews of psychoanalytic studies of religion in the Annual Survey of Psychoanalysis 15 may well question the justification for discussing “new developments” in a field that so recently bore the stigma of a “research lag” relative to other fields of applied psychoanalysis. Certainly the editors' delineation of the shortcomings of the psychoanalytic study of religion, especially the failure to develop Freud's original insights in the direction of clinical findings and the continued production of speculative rather than definitive works, warrants a less than optimistic view of the future of the discipline. Yet there was a time when the study of religion was the most promising of the nonmedical applications of psychoanalysis. Freud's short paper entitled “A Religious Experience”14 was written with a confidence of interpretation absent from his studies of Leonardo and Michelangelo. While he was all too aware of the limitations of psychoanalysis in investigating the origins of creativity,11 Freud had no reservations about its ability to lay bare the infantile roots of religious beliefs and practices. He considered the evidence “incontrovertible.”12 Bibliographic reviews published in the 1930's and 1940's generally shared Freud's enthusiasm,19, 22 but by the 1950's, as the Annual Survey indicates, the psychoanalytic study of religion was in trouble. The literature has not been reviewed since 1959, and, while the psychoanalytic study of religion certainly cannot match the prodigious output of the psychoanalytic study of literature or art, there are signs of renewed vitality in at least three areas. First, psychoanalytic investigators have been expanding Freud's ideas about the psychodynamics of religion in the direction of current thought on the importance of the pre-Oedipal period and ego