People strive to make sense of their lives. Indeed, this activity may be the defining characteristic of human existence. We cannot help but make meaning of our experiences, whether they are commonplace or life changing (see Volume 1, Chapter 8, this handbook). As clinicians, we observe firsthand that our patients do not exist in a vacuum of meaning and that such a state appears to be abhorrent (Frank & Frank, 1991), if not impossible. As Freud (1915/1961) discovered, we are never devoid of meaning; unbeknownst to ourselves, we have already tried to answer the fundamental questions about life's origins, purpose, and final destination (Lear, 1990(Lear, /1998Rizzuto, 2002). As children, we form conceptions of the universe and our place within it and strive to locate our personal experiences within the surrounding familial, historical, and cultural systems of meaning that are available to us, including the grand metanarratives, which religions supply, linking the believer to a universe or a God that transcends the individual (Rizzuto, 2005). Indeed, religion is the cultural manifestation of humankind's efforts to give meaning to life (Rizzuto, 2002, p. 184) in addition to its other functions, for example, in coping, providing opportunities for social affiliation, or in self-regulation. For many people, as discussed in this handbook, religion and spirituality furnish important pathways upon which significance is constructed. Although much of the discussion has examined the role of conscious beliefs, attributions, and behaviors, consideration of unconscious factors, what William James (1902) referred to as the "hither side" of religion, provides a necessary and complementary viewpoint. In this chapter we take up this issue, with a clinical perspective in mind, and focus attention on religious and spiritual (R/S) experience as it appears, is understood, and is addressed within psychoanalytic treatment.
PREFACE: AN ORIENTATION TO THE PSyCHOANALyTIC PERSPECTIVEA foundational psychoanalytic perspective is that early experience teaches us important lessons about our nature and worth, whether engagement with others is safe, and the extent to which the world we inhabit is benevolent and approachable. We are biologically driven to attach to those who are entrusted with our care and, as a consequence, our basic ways of relating to others bear the unconscious imprint of these early relationships. We also learn about desire, its expression and frustration, and we become familiar with the complex emotional states that form our subjective experience and arouse our motivation to seek satisfaction. Based on the sum of our experiences, our minds develop tendencies or principles, which structure, or more accurately, prime the ways in which we make meaning of the events that constitute our lives, relate to others and to ourselves, and form compromises between the expression of impulses and other psychological motivations. These organizing principles, which are usually outside of conscious awareness, literally shape our experience and a...
