The Experience of Religious Transformation During Psychoanalysis as an Event Horizon

摘要

Reflection upon the psychoanalytic literature dealing with religious faith and practice indicates that our conceptualizations since Freud's original formulations have run into a blind alley and are in danger of becoming repetitious. It is clear that the decision to focus upon the more general phenomena of faith and “spirituality,” which do not demand a firm commitment to the belief in an independent entity known as God, evades all that is of theological relevance to the religious believer and all that is clinically complex for the psychoanalyst. I suggest that the notion of the event horizon, borrowed from astrophysics, offers a better, if frustrating, portrait of the apparent encounter with the divine object representation.