ABSTRACT
When working with patients who are religious, does it make any difference if the analyst has some openness to the possibility of transcendence or experience of the sacred? Or, to put it in terms more narrow and stark, does it make any difference if the analyst believes in God? 1 These are odd questions for psychoanalysis. Their oddity emanates from multiple sources. Beyond the traditional antipathy between psychoanalysis and religion, which stems from the more circumstantial element of Freud's confession of atheism personally, there are three more substantial objections: one philosophical, another clinical, and the third pedagogical.
