Humans have a far more richly developed capacity for imagination than other animals, and one of its quietest uses is that we can hold inside the mind a representation of the people who matter to us. This is not childish fantasy; it is a normal and indispensable developmental achievement—the capacity to keep another person in mind when they are not physically present. Think of how an adult, long after a parent has died, can still hear that parent's voice—its counsel, its disapproval, its reassurance—and be genuinely steadied by it. The person is gone; something of them remains, and it remains inside. This is one of the foundations of object relations theory, the branch of psychoanalysis—running from Fairbairn and Klein to Winnicott—that takes the inner world to be populated not by drives alone but by internalized images of others.
Developmentally, we are at first comforted by a literal parent who is physically there. Over time we also come to carry in memory an internalized representation of that parent—an inner sense of their presence, their values, their voice—which can console us even when we are alone. The developmental psychoanalyst Margaret Mahler called the mature form of this achievement object constancy: the gradual consolidation of a stable inner image of the caregiver, one that survives the caregiver's absence. It is what allows a small child to tolerate separation without panic, and it is the same inner resource we draw on much later to endure loss and, eventually, grief. The person is gone; the internal representation remains.
For many people, religious life includes this type of internalized relationship, with an idealized figure they call God. Ana-María Rizzuto, in her study The Birth of the Living God, showed that each believer creates a personal "God representation" out of the same materials as the rest of the inner world—parental images, early longings, the imprint of how love and authority were first encountered. In much Western Christian imagery, and in many people's mental pictures, this figure is imagined in human form: often a bearded white man, despite the Middle Eastern setting of the biblical "Holy Land" and the obvious diversity of human appearance. (Other traditions refuse the picture entirely—Islam and Judaism are largely aniconic—which is itself a revealing difference.) Some people experience this inner figure as gentle, fatherly, wise, consistent, almost coach-like or therapist-like; others internalize a God who feels stern and frightening, poised to punish. These images tend to track what a person first learned to associate with safety, love, and authority in their own family and community.
The psychologist Lee Kirkpatrick took this a step further, arguing that the bond with God behaves like an attachment relationship in John Bowlby's sense: a figure turned to for comfort in distress, a "secure base" from which to face the world, and a "safe haven" to return to when afraid. It is why people so often pray hardest in fear and grief—the same conditions under which a frightened child reaches for a parent.
Now, is such a figure "real"? Here the most useful idea in this book comes from Donald Winnicott. Winnicott studied the child's first treasured possession—the blanket or the soft toy that must not be washed and must not be lost—and called it a transitional object. Its importance lies in a peculiar dual status: the blanket is not simply found in the world, like a stone, nor simply invented, like a daydream. It lives in between. And Winnicott's crucial move was to insist that we must never ask the child the question—"Did you find this or make it up?"—because the question itself misunderstands the kind of thing it is. He came to believe that a whole intermediate area of human life works this way: art, culture, play, and religious experience all inhabit the space that is neither purely inner nor purely outer. This reframes the question the whole book keeps circling. To demand of the believer, "Is your God real or imaginary?" may be, in Winnicott's terms, the wrong question—the one that misses what sort of thing a God representation is, and what it is for. That the figure is fashioned inwardly does not make it a lie; the inner mother who steadies the grieving adult is fashioned inwardly too, and no one calls her a delusion.
After all that, I'll confess something. I have often found this kind of psychoanalytic theorizing tiresome—it is the impression I have had all through my career, and one reason I compared psychoanalysis to religious doctrine earlier in this book. Insightful at times, yes, but burdened with jargon and a generous dose of overconfidence on the theorist's part, and sometimes needing hundreds of pages to convey a few simple ideas. Here is the whole thing condensed, at least as I see it: we form imaginary friends, many of them crafted from past experience, present longing, and our own personality. God, in a sense, is the ultimate imaginary friend.
But as with any very important friendship, we can be intensely loyal, and we can defend it fiercely. Sometimes people go to extremes, including a willingness to suffer or die in service of what they experience as sacred. And because the relationship is felt as profoundly real, it is no surprise that believers often respond with anger or grief when someone calls it "imaginary," a mere construct rather than an external reality. They are not defending a proposition; they are defending a bond.
There is a darker side to this. Many traditions personify not only the good but also the bad—a concept of ultimate evil, cast in devil-like terms. This is an example of what the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein called splitting: the mind's tendency, under strain, to divide experience into an all-good idealized figure and an all-bad persecutory one. The loving God and the malevolent Devil are a textbook split pair, with every scrap of goodness gathered onto the one and every scrap of badness projected onto the other.
Psychologically, a personified evil makes moral struggle vivid and coherent: it recasts temptation, cruelty, or one's own worst conduct as a battle against an outside adversary, rather than something to be faced in oneself. In a tight-knit community this can even ease reintegration. If a wrong can be blamed on the Devil rather than the wrongdoer's character—particularly once a ritual of repentance, prayer, or "deliverance" has been performed—the community may find forgiveness easier.
But to locate evil outside oneself is to blunt accountability; and once evil has a face, it is too easily seen in people we simply dislike—in outsiders, dissenters, scapegoats. The historian Elaine Pagels followed this in early Christianity: the figure of Satan, she argued, became the name for the human "other," the device by which a community demonized its rivals. The result, down the centuries, was fear, prejudice, and recurrent moral panic—the same dynamic I described earlier in connection with the witch hunts, in which a community's anxieties were given a satanic shape and then hunted down among its own neighbours. The inner world, it turns out, does not stay inner. We build our gods and devils from the materials of early life, and then we live—sometimes gently, sometimes violently—as though they had built us.
References
Kirkpatrick, L. A. (2005). Attachment, evolution, and the psychology of religion. Guilford Press.
Extends John Bowlby's attachment theory to religion, treating a believer's felt relationship with God as an attachment bond—a source of comfort in distress, a secure base, and a safe haven in fear. Kirkpatrick marshals evidence that people turn to God under the same conditions that lead a child to seek a parent, and that a person's style of attachment to God partly mirrors their attachment history with early caregivers.
Mahler, M. S., Pine, F., & Bergman, A. (1975). The psychological birth of the human infant: Symbiosis and individuation.Basic Books.
The classic statement of the separation–individuation process in early childhood. Its culminating phase is the consolidation of emotional object constancy—a stable inner representation of the caregiver that endures through absence and underwrites the later capacity to tolerate separation and loss.
Pagels, E. (1995). The origin of Satan. Random House.
Traces how the figure of Satan, in early Judaism and Christianity, became a means of demonizing one's opponents—rival Jews, then pagans, then heretics—transforming ordinary human conflict into cosmic warfare. Pagels shows that the Devil is most often invoked not against distant strangers but against intimate enemies: members of one's own broader community who have come to be seen as traitors. A personified evil slides readily into the persecution of the human "other."
Rizzuto, A.-M. (1979). The birth of the living God: A psychoanalytic study. University of Chicago Press.
The foundational object-relations study of the personal "God representation." Drawing on Freud, Erikson, Fairbairn, and Winnicott, Rizzuto shows that each individual constructs a private image of God from parental figures and early experience—one that functions as a living element of the inner world rather than an abstract doctrine. The work effectively launched the empirical study of God-images.
Winnicott, D. W. (1953). Transitional objects and transitional phenomena: A study of the first not-me possession. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 34, 89–97.
Introduces the "transitional object"—the child's blanket or toy—and the "intermediate area" of experience, neither wholly inner nor wholly outer, of which Winnicott insisted one must never ask whether it was created or found. The idea was revised as the opening chapter of Playing and Reality (1971), where Winnicott extended it to art, culture, and religion.
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