Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

her work in a fresh reading of Freud for both academic and psychoanalytic audiences. 216
Rizzuto breaks new theoretical ground by developing the concept of god-representations, a
clinical study of the ‘possible origins of the individual’s private representations of God’
(Rizzuto 1979: 3) presented through twenty cases studies. 217 Rizzuto is clear that her work
is not on religion, philosophy or theology, rather ‘exclusively a clinical, psychoanalytical
study of “postulated superhuman beings” as experienced by those who do and do not
believe in them’ (Rizzuto 1979: 3), later adding ‘God’s help cannot bypass the
psychodynamic laws that govern the functioning of the psyche’ (Rizzuto 2001: 23).
Rizzuto bases her work on several foundations. Firstly, the use of interviews,
questionnaires and drawings to link information about early life, understood
psychoanalytically in terms of psychological objects and object loss, with later religious
belief or unbelief. Secondly, the assumption that ‘most western people either believe in, or
have at least heard of, a personal God’ (Rizzuto 1979: 8). While this was true when Rizzuto
was writing, it reflected her background of Roman Catholicism in Argentina, and both
Protestantism and Catholicism in Boston. Later Rizzuto notes ‘for a given individual the
word God does not refer directly and specifically to an existing superior being - as
216 Rizzuto had already published key articles working towards this text for both an academic and
psychoanalytic audience (Rizzuto 1974, 1976).
217 The subject of god-representations had been pioneered by Antione Vergote in The religious man: a
psychological study of religious attitudes (Vergote 1969) and ‘Concepts of God and parental images’ where he
concludes, ‘In comparing the results of our research with the Freudian theory about the father, we may
acknowledge an extraordinary analogy between the Oedipus structure and the structuring of the religious
attitude. But there is also a great difference in so far as Freud stresses the neurotic nature of the religion of the
father. The sole fact of the presence of the polarity father-mother in the divine image shows that, beyond the
conflict introduced by certain parental connotations, the faithful tend to find in God also reconciliation and
pacification’ (Vergote et al. 1969: 87). Vergote combined an academic career (he founded the Centre of
Religious Psychology at the University of Louvain) alongside a psychoanalytic practice. He had trained in
Paris at the French Psychoanalytic Society run by Lagache and Lacan, and later co-founded the Ecole Belge de
Psychanalyse in 1965 (Alsteens 2005). Vergote and Tamayo were to develop these ideas further in their The
Parental Figures and Representation of God (Vergote and Tamayo 1981). He contributed to the first
international conference on moral and religious development held in the USA in 1979, as did Rizzuto, and
their respective contributions were subsequently published.
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