I learned early in my training to mistrust those who claim to know and to listen instead to those who are willing to think. This principle applies as much to religion as it does to psychoanalysis.
Many people who were exposed to religion as children are so scarred by the experience that they turn away from it entirely. This is understandable—irresponsible parents and religious leaders cause real damage. But if we judged psychoanalysis by the same standard we apply to religion, we might arrive at the same conclusion and dismiss it entirely. The question worth asking is whether there's something genuine beneath the institutional failures.
Two Competing Frameworks
There are two major psychoanalytic theories about religion, and both miss something essential.
Freud thought religious sentiment originated in infantile experience and was merely a repetition of childhood dependency. He believed the moral sense didn't extend beyond the internalized father—that the superego exhausted the entire domain of ethics and conscience.
Jung took the opposite approach, locating religious experience in archetypal patterns inherited from humanity's collective past. He saw religious symbols as numinous because they connected us to something transpersonal and timeless.
Both perspectives capture something real, but both also function as defensive systems. Freud's framework allowed him to dismiss religion as regression. Jung's framework allowed him to avoid examining his own childhood experiences by projecting them onto the species as a whole.
What Religious Experience Actually Is
The truth lies somewhere between them. Religious experience and childhood experience are one and the same thing—only religious experience is childhood experience as re-experienced by the adult.
Childhood has a vital, alive, numinous quality that gets lost as we age. Whether this happens through repression or simply through habituation doesn't matter—what matters is that something essential goes missing. The aim of religion, when it functions properly, is to put us back in touch with that vitality. For this to work, it must be real—not approached "as if" it were meaningful, but engaged with directly.
This is what Jesus meant when he said, "Unless you become as little children, you shall not enter the Kingdom of God." He wasn't recommending regression. He was pointing to a quality of experience that adults typically lose access to.
Why Freud Got It Wrong
Freud would say that religious experience is just a reawakening of infantile dependency. I would say that religious experience, as a reawakening of childhood vitality, reminds us that there's nothing our parents can actually give us. Everything we need is already within us, like an embryo or seed. The best parents can do is help draw it out. If this weren't true, it would be impossible to recover from an unhappy childhood.
Jung was right that all deep analysis eventually touches on religious issues, but not for the reasons he thought. Analysis must unearth both repressed childhood experiences and the repressed religious experiences that are their complement in adult life. Psychoanalysis, when done properly, rediscovers the good as well as the bad in the individual.
How to Approach the Religious
If we look at actual living religions and compare them with this model, we see that most of them do their job poorly. They've become institutional structures that often block access to the very experiences they're supposed to facilitate.
I've found two approaches to religious experience that work reliably: dream analysis and meditation. Both put us in touch with the spontaneous productions of our own minds—both are methods of approaching the unconscious and its creative potential.
Over many years of working with both methods, I've arrived at two convictions:
First: The world is ultimately non-material in nature. We are transcendent beings, which means the world has moral and ethical significance. For morality to have real meaning, life cannot end at the grave. If it did, ethics would reduce to Epicurean calculation—there would be no reason to do what's right when it brings disadvantage. The fact that most people throughout history have felt there's something beyond death suggests we should inquire into the source of this feeling rather than suppress it.
Second: There is a spontaneous power at the core of the mind that underlies all our experiences. It has the capacity to terrify us, as it sometimes does in dreams, but its fundamental nature is caring, benevolent, and beneficial. We can lose sight of it temporarily, but it's always there.
A Third Path
There's another approach worth mentioning: reading religious texts and attending religious ceremonies with an attitude of serious inquiry. Not "suspension of disbelief" as when watching a movie, and not literal belief as fundamentalists practice it. Instead, an attitude of trying something on to see if it fits—like testing a shoe or suit of clothes.
When I went to a bookstore years ago to look at Bible translations, I felt acute embarrassment. I reflected that it would have been less embarrassing to buy pornography than to purchase a Bible. This told me something about our modern age and about the pressures I'd internalized from my psychoanalytic training.
The tone of militant believers and militant non-believers is strikingly similar. Both are afraid of something.
Where God Resides Now
In our modern secular age, God may have set up residence at the core of the unconscious. Future forms of worship will need to take this into account as they continue to evolve.
To those seeking religious experience, I say: you must search without ceasing. "Ask and you shall receive, seek and you will find, knock and it will be opened." The multiplicity of religions corresponds to the manifold nature of childhood experience and the manifold needs of the human race.
The methods I recommend—dream analysis, meditation, serious engagement with religious texts—are all fundamentally religious in the original sense of the word. The etymology suggests "binding" or "giving careful consideration." All three bind us to something deeper than everyday consciousness and require sustained attention.
If the gaining of knowledge and wisdom continues throughout life up to the moment of death, then they must be preparations for something beyond death. They point at a purpose that transcends mortality. Love works the same way—if it were meant only to fill time and its purpose ended with death, we would never commit to it. The fact that we love knowing the beloved will die suggests an ultimate purpose beyond ending.
What that purpose is remains to be discovered. But I think there are grounds for cautious optimism.