ABSTRACT
Although there is no consensus about where psychoanalysis and indeed psychotherapy belong there is consensus about where it does not belong. To accommodate religion requires criticism of Sigmund Freud. Adam Phillips claims: When Freud insisted that psychoanalysis had nothing to do with ethical inquiry, was not in the business of moral-world making or of providing a new Weltanschauung, he was trying to dissociate himself from the Judaism of his forefathers, and trying to dissociate psychoanalysis from any connection with religion. If psychoanalysis had been compatible with traditional religious belief it would lose its scientific credibility and its apparent originality. Today the suspicion of religion held by practitioners is largely to do with religious institutions, rather than Freud's original presupposition of religious belief as pathological. Metaphysics, anthropology and literature have continued to have more credibility in the psychotherapeutic community, than has religion.
