Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

life cycle from birth to death’ (Rizzuto 1979: 179). Rizzuto expands how god-
representations engage with the wider philosophical and religious experiences in a desire to
be real and discover a true self. 222
Rizzuto suggest this ‘silent communication with transitional objects, God or others, will
continue parallel to the analytic process’ (Rizzuto 1979: 205) where analysis helps clarify
the nature of God-representations, but not replace them. Rizzuto concludes that Winnicott
offers a more creative theory by locating religion and god/God in transitional space, adding
‘I have arrived at the point where my departure from Freud is inevitable … reality and
illusion are not contradictory terms … to ask a man to renounce a God he believes in may
be … cruel and … meaningless’ (Rizzuto 1979: 209).
In the end I had to disagree with Freud - but not totally: only with one Freud, the one
of science, intellect, and reality, the Freud, who said: “No, our science is no illusion”
… I follow the other Freud … the Freud of object relations … until through my
research I arrive at one of his own conclusions about some individuals in the
Western world: “The idea of a single great god - an idea which must be recognized
as a completely justified memory, ... has a compulsive character: it must be
believed” (Freud, 1939, p. 130) (Rizzuto 1979: 212).
Only one review of her work was published in a psychoanalytic journal and while it admired
the ‘masterful review of the psychoanalytic literature on religion’ (Stein 1981: 125)
concluded dismissively ‘Object relations theory is thus used as a crypto-Jungian basis for a
psychoanalytic theology’ (Stein 1981: 126). Rizzuto dared to challenge psychoanalytic
222 ‘God may or may not be the official God of the child's religion. But as a personal companion … he belongs
to the “ineffably private” side of human experience where we are irredeemably alone. A convincing sense of
being alive, connected, in communion with ourselves, others, the universe, and God himself may occur when,
in the profoundest privacy of the self, “an identity of experience” takes place between vital components of our
God-representations, our sense of self, and some reality in the world ... The histories of religious conversion
and mystical experience provide endless examples. Winnicott (1965) speaks about this area of private
communication as indispensable for a sense of being real, … what he calls a true self ... I agree with Winnicott
and propose that the private God of each man has the potential to provide “silent communication”, thus
increasing our sense of being real. Those who do not find their God representation subjectively meaningful
need other subjective objects and transitional realities to encounter themselves’ (Rizzuto 1979: 204f.).
93