ABSTRACT
I suggested in Chapter 5 that the psychoanalytic notion of a psychic `position' may give us a key to understanding what religions do, psychologically. The word position allows us to have the idea that what we regard as `I' is not always, so to speak, in the same posture in relation to its world: in particular, there are times when we are very aware of the reality of other people as subjects like ourselves, we can be concerned for them, sympathetically imagine their motives, and so on, and there are other times when we are dominated by our own concerns, perhaps our fear, excitement or ambition, and the reality of other people as subjects seems to be lost to us. Neither of these ego-states or `positions' need be seen as pathological in themselves: it seems to be part of normal experience to have access to both and to move between them.
