ABSTRACT
For many years, the dialogue between religion and psychoanalysis has been both frozen and polarized. The interaction reached a point of hostile stasis not merely because of Freud's dismissive treatment of religion as "illusion" (1927) nor because of his depiction of homo religiosis as essentially irrational, weak, and dependent (1907). Rather the schism and subsequent estrangement emanated from the very conceptual structure of psychoanalysis, then founded upon a metapsychology that enshrined drives, causality, and determinism as the exclusive motivational underpinnings of an emerging science of the mind. 1
