Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

Rizzuto critiques Freud’s early object representations focused on the father-son relationship
and the development of the Oedipus complex, which ‘excludes other possible early object
relations: son-mother, daughter-father, daughter-mother’ (1979: 15), thus limiting the
psychic impact of early relationships central for the formation of god-representations.
Rizzuto rectifies Freud’s ‘oedipal bound’ limitations by offering a new theoretical
understanding of object representations through ten concepts supported by four detailed case
studies illustrating the development of god-representations in early life leading to adult
belief and disbelief. 221
Rizzuto concluded,
This is not a book on religion. It is a book on object relations. Indeed, a book about
one object relation: that of man with a special object he calls God. God,
psychologically speaking, is an illusory transitional object ... transitional space
(Winnicott, 1953) is the locus where God comes to existence (Rizzuto 1979: 177).
Rizzuto sees a positive value in illusion, where god-representations and transitional objects
combine and ‘God, like all transitional objects (Winnicott, 1953), is located simultaneously
“outside, inside and at the border”… God is a special transitional object, because unlike
teddy bears ... he is created from … representations of primary objects … he does not follow
the course of other transitional objects’ (Rizzuto 1979: 178). Rizzuto’s god-representation
as a form of transitional object, gets caught up in the oedipal dynamics and may ‘lose
meaning … [be] rejected, ignored, suppressed, or found temporarily unnecessary … as is
true of all other objects, God cannot be fully repressed. As a traditional object
representation he is always potentially available for further acceptance or further rejection’
(Rizzuto 1979: 178f.). Rizzuto adds ‘this personalised representational transitional object
never ceases in the course of human life. It is a developmental process that covers the entire
221 A summary of Rizzuto’s concepts of god object representations can be found in appendix five.
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