Psychoanalysis and religion are often seen as opposites, but I've come to think they're asking similar questions. Both are concerned with what lies beneath the surface of everyday life, and both take seriously the idea that understanding ourselves requires sustained attention.
Many people who were exposed to religion as children find themselves turning away from it as adults. This is understandable—early religious experiences aren't always positive. But if we judged psychoanalysis by the same standard, we might dismiss it too. The question worth asking is whether there's something genuine beneath the surface.
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 have limitations. Freud's framework led him to see religion primarily as regression. Jung's framework allowed him to focus on transpersonal patterns without always grounding them in personal history.
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's View Is Incomplete
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 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 grow beyond our early circumstances.
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 many have become institutional structures that can sometimes obscure the very experiences they're meant 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 many faces, but its fundamental nature is caring, benevolent, and beneficial. We can lose sight of it temporarily, but it's always there.
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.
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 may well 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.