ABSTRACT
Sigmund Freud treated religion as an illusory belief system explaining natural phenomena and establishing inhibitors of instinctual drives as a pseudo-moral system-regulating behaviour. Religious experience, as against religious belief and religious observance, he seems to have dismissed as an oceanic, that is manic, process even more divorced than belief from the function of the ego to test reality. The fundamental religious experience must be the original animist panic which feels something greater than the self both without, immanent in nature, and within. The process of confession and redemption is much closer to the analysis of the depressive position than is indicated by the reputation of the Catholic church for persecution and retribution. Religion and psychoanalysis move toward a shared sense of the apprehension of the highest quality of mind as object. Contemporary psychoanalysis has taken the object's primacy to development as Melanie Klein described it and brought out its duality in the internal parental couple.
