Ana-Marie Rizzuto - Birth of the Living God: A Psychoanalytic Study

Preface

This book reports the results of clinical research and theoretical thinking on the genesis of a persons representation of God in the course of his development and on the use of this representation by the individual during the life cycle.

My interest in this subject was aroused in October 1963, at Crdoba, Argentina, under unusual circumstances. I was asked to teach a course for the students of the Pontifical Seminary on the psychological foundations of belief and pastoral care. The dean of the seminary offered me complete freedom to teach whatever I thought pertinent and relevant for men who would spend their lives dealing with peoples struggles with God and their fellow men. The focus, we agreed, would be on the process of developing a belief in God and the facilitating and interfering factors that present themselves during the course of peoples lives, and most specifically during the formative years.

The course had never been taught before. The students were eager to learn. I was at first exhilarated by such a promising enterprise, but I soon found myself in a predicament. The available literature provided bits and pieces but no systematic studies that answered the questions raised by the dean.

Freud offered brilliant insights into the role of the parents in the formation of the representation of God. Jung accumulated complex elaborations about religion, symbols, archetypes, and the archetype of the self. Adler converted God into a value. Other analysts have elaborated aspects of Freuds or Jungs ideas, but I found no extensive clinical studies at hand to assist me. There None included clinical observation of the development of the God representation. The most complete were Gesells systematic observations of the childs interest in God and religion, but he did not correlate these with the childs subjective experience. In summary, existing studies contributed to a description of an observable process but threw no light on the secret, unconscious weaving of images, feelings, and ideation which converge in the childhood process of elaborating a representation of God.

Scientific studies of religion offered little help. Endless research reports, each difficult to evaluate, competed with each other to offer either minor or sweeping understandings of arbitrarily defined religious behavior. Others offered statistics comparing some of Gods attributes with parents characteristics or types of religion. That overwhelming mass of paper, graphs, and statistics, marked by contradictory definitions and points of view, gave no help to a teacher whose task was to describe to students of religion the nature of psychological processes underlying a persons belief or lack of belief in God.

The literature on pastoral care was more promising because catechists have collected relevant observations about the reactions of children to their teachings and about some of the developmental factors that facilitate or impede a childs normal religious development. However, no theory provided a relevant frame of reference to integrate these observations into a theory of the developmental process involved in the belief in God. Furthermore, no theory had relevant data about unconscious processes in the private world of the child, which, as Freud suggested, contribute so powerfully to creating the representation of God as a living psychological being.