No abstract

During adolescence. prayer begins to function less as a way to bend God's will to one's own and more as a way to search for better wishes, cope with diJicult feelings, and foster a feeling of closeness to God.William James (1902, p. 464) provided the following simple, pleasing definition of prayer and its significance: "[Prayer is] every kind of inward communion or conversation with the power recognized as divine. . . . Prayer in this wide sense is the very soul and essence of religion." Given the central role that James assigns to prayer, it is difficult to explain why his account is so brief and tucked away in a late chapter titled "Other Characteristics" (of religion). Even more perplexing is that since James's time there has been so little written about the psychology of prayer. Prayer's significance to the religious life and the paucity of research on prayer require us to take a closer look at its forms, functions, and place in the lives of those who pray.But how are we to understand prayer? To answer this question we need to look at personal (not institutional) prayers constructed to meet the demands of particular situations. And we need to look at how prayers develop. By looking at personal prayers and their development we can best hope to capture the inner dynamic of prayer, as revealed in its changing forms and contexts.Our purpose here is to provide an analysis of prayer's functions and a particular model of prayer's development in terms of those functions. To clarify this purpose, we need first to say something about the issue of development and prayer because it is not at all self-evident that religion in general and prayer in particular develop into states we can call "mature."The legacy of Freud left us with a bias toward seeing prayer as rooted in illusion, an activity functioning solely to make us feel better by avoiding ourselves, our troublesome feelings, and our sometimes impossible predicaments. Freud would have us face reality stoically and rationally rather than remain propped up by illusions that soothe. From Freud's perspective, there may be a time in childhood when we need illusions, but maturity means growing beyond this need: