ABSTRACT
The psychoanalytic literature on religion points to a major shift in recent years in the analytic understanding of the act of faith. The shift is from Freud's negative assessment of it as an unrealistic act based on infantile needs and wishes to Winnicottian assessments of it as a potentially positive act of relatedness within the realm of transitional phenomena. In the present chapter, I will explore the act of faith and this shift in understanding in the light of a psychoanalytic developmental model that has been evolved by Sidney Blatt and some of his collaborators in the course of the past two decades. This model, which considers the maturation process throughout the life cycle in terms of a dialectical relationship between two developmental lines, that of attachment (relatedness) and that of separateness (self-de®nition), helps elucidate central psychological dimensions of the act of faith and points to the ways in which these dimensions are overlooked in the shift from Freudian to Winnicottian understandings of this act. In turn, this clari®cation and the complex interaction between attachment and separateness that is revealed in the act of faith help re®ne the developmental model and the distinction between its different facets.
