Reconstructing the sacred: Evolving conceptualizations of religious faith in psychoanalytic theory and practice

Freud's original understanding of religion was categorically depreciative, and tended to portray religious faith in exclusively western and patriarchal terms (S. Freud, 1913/1989, 1927/1989). More recently, many of Freud's assertions about religion have been questioned. The psychoanalytic contributions of W. D. Fairbairn (1954), and D. W. Winnicott (1971) as well as the work of feminist scholars (N. Chodorow, 1974, 1989; C. Gilligan, 1993) and multicultural theorists (A. Roland, 1996) have profoundly shaken the metapsychological substructure upon which Freud rested his critique of spiritual faith. This paper describes how a gradual historical evolution has occurred in psychoanalytic theory, so that the work of such theorists as A. M. Rizutto (1979), M. H. Spero (1992), and H. Kohut (1984, 1985) now delineates the adaptive and creative place that religious experience can have in human development and psychological life.