Chapter 13 Self and Other in the Self-Psychological Approach to Religion: Discussion of Pamela Holliman's “Religious Experience as Selfobject Experience”

In the preceding paper, Pamela Holliman has made two important contributions to the possibilities offered by self psychology for understanding religious experience. First of all, she has placed the conversation between self psychology and religion within the context of the broader literatures concerning psychology and religion and pastoral care and counseling. Her introduction to these literatures reminds us that, over the course of the twentieth century, several psychoanalysts have written about religion, and many writers on religion have engaged psychoanalysis in ways that have both challenged Freud's ideas on religion and anticipated those of Kohut. Not only Freud (1913, 1927, 1933), but well-known psychoanalysts such as Harry Guntrip (1957), Erich Fromm (1950; Fromm, Suzuki, and De Martino, 1960), Erik Erikson (1962), and, more recently, analysts as varied as Ana-Maria Rizzuto (1979), W. W. Meissner (1984), Sudhir Kakar (1991), and Julia Kristeva (1982, 1987, 1995), have written books devoted to