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This is not a book about religion; it is, rather, a psychoanalytic study of early object relations with particular focus on the importance of transitional objects. The author considers that what she calls “a representation of God” is a special form of transitional object that may change over the developmental life of the child.
The first part is devoted to a review of Freud's well-known views. The author makes a case for her own view that object relations theory is an advancement beyond Freud's ideas regarding the role of God in intrapsychic functioning.
The middle section covers four cases from her practice to support her thesis that:
The use of the God representation for regulation and modulation of object love and related self-representations begins in childhood, continues throughout life, and finds its final and critical potentialities at death … at the moment of lasting separation from the world of loved and hated objects.
She includes patients who believe and those who do not believe in God and presents their biographies, traces their primary objects, analyzes their psychic defenses, gives their diagnosis, and discusses their God representations as they relate to early psychic traumas. She attempts to show that as with all transitional objects, the God representation has the function of maintaining psychic equilibrium.
The last part is the best written, the most interesting, and the richest part of the book for the clinician. I particularly recommend her discussion of Winnicott's concept of mirroring—that early eye contact and facial response