The transference onto God

✍ Scribed by Dan Merkur

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2009
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 189 KB
• Volume: 6
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1742-3341
• DOI: 10.1002/aps.201

✦ Synopsis

Abstract

Magical religious practices, defined as instrumental uses of the divine, are devoted to gods and God, in Winnicott's terms, as “subjectively perceived objects,” whereas the comparatively rare phenomenon of non‐magical religion is devoted to “objective objects.” In a “bargain with fate,” the divine is a transferential figure whose response to symptomatic cultic behavior is predictable and makes cultic behavior a magical means to control fate. The bargain with fate may be treated as a sublimation of the mother–infant dyad that is isomorphic with pre‐Oedipal and Oedipal fixations. The therapeutic goal, at both interpersonal and religious levels of discourse, is to facilitate advance from “object‐relating” to “object‐usage.” Analysis of the transference, arriving at a conception of the divine as a free agent, replaces the concept of fate with a concept of divine grace, interrupting the religious repetition‐compulsion. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.