The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 19: Object Relations

Humans have a far more richly developed capacity for imagination than other animals, and one of its quieter uses is that we can hold inside the mind an internalized representation of the people who matter to us. This is a bit like having an “imaginary friend,” but the point 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. 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. 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. Psychoanalysts call 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 child to tolerate separation without panic, and it is the same inner resource we draw on much later to endure loss and, eventually, grief when someone we love dies. 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 fashions 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. 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.

Just like relationships with living people, individuals can become fiercely loyal to these internal figures—sometimes 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.

There is a dark 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 psychoanalyst Melanie Klein called splitting: the mind’s tendency, under strain, to divide experience into an all-good idealized figure and an all-bad evil 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 having to deal with one’s own capacity for harm. 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 don’t like—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.

References

Kirkpatrick, L. A. (2005). Attachment, evolution, and the psychology of religion. Guilford Press.

— Extends Bowlby’s attachment theory to religion, treating a believer’s felt relationship with God as an attachment bond.

 

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, 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 human conflict into cosmic warfare.

 

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; 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. Revised as the opening chapter of Playing and Reality (1971), where the idea is extended to art, culture, and religion. 

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