ABSTRACT
There is a crisis within psychoanalysis and within the psychotherapy schools that derive from it. Criticism and challenge can only sharpen our minds to think more clearly and reflect more deeply upon our practice and its methods. The cardinal sin in religious practice and devotion is pride in the Christian tradition, hubris in classical thinking, or mana in Buddhist practice. These words are equivalents of omnipotence or grandiosity. Within the Judaeo–Christian tradition, this pride is simply condemned as bad with no reason for it. Within Buddhism, it can be understood to stand in the way of reaching nirvana as it is an aspect of dukkha. The radical obliteration of our being is the source of neurosis, psychosis, addiction, perversion, and psychopathy. Science, aesthetics, and religion refer to three different mental vertices. Revealed religion, which is the sophisticated elaboration of primitive religion, is the cultural reification of this primitive state of mind.
