2. Setting the Scene: Defining the Human in Anglo-American Philosophy of Religion

Philosophers of religion in the Anglo-American tradition have tended to focus their attention upon the analysis of religious belief.Footnote ² Such an approach presupposes, firstly, that all aspects of human life – including the religious dimension – can be assessed according to rational criteria; and, secondly, that human beings are defined primarily by their ability to reason. Both assumptions lend themselves to an account of religion where its value is assessed in terms of its truth-claims.Footnote ³ Under this model, a properly philosophical investigation of religion must be aligned to – or at least informed by – the ideals of scientific method. As a result, the worth of religious beliefs is assessed according to their ability to reflect accurately the nature of reality.

Emphasising those aspects of religion most amenable to rational exposition inevitably prioritises belief with less attention paid to other aspects of religious life and experience. Recent interventions in the subject suggest a growing awareness of these limitations, with Amy Hollywood writing extensively on the need to take seriously the role of religious practice in any account of religion,Footnote ⁴ and Mark Wynn using a cognitive account of the emotions to support an argument for the emotive content of religion.Footnote ⁵

A further, and possibly more radical, attempt to broaden the perspective of the philosophical engagement with religion is found in the work of Grace Jantzen. Jantzen's criticism of the primacy given to reason and rationality in analytic philosophy of religion is framed against a tacit acceptance of the psychoanalytic account of the ‘dynamic unconscious.’Footnote ⁶ While her approach is not unprecedented,Footnote ⁷ it is distinguished by her concern to employ psychoanalytic ideas in order to enable a philosophical investigation of the desires and fears that inform religious narratives and images. In similar vein, I want to suggest that an analysis of the relationship between religion and superstition proves particularly enlightening as a way of considering the nature of those fears and desires. Like Jantzen, my approach necessitates challenging the model of human being that underpins mainstream analytic philosophy of religion. Emphasising the rational subject allows the embodied experience of human beings to be largely ignored. Subjectivity is primarily structured through the idea of the thinking self, rather than the experience of being a vulnerable, mortal creature in a physical, mutable world. More than that, by limiting the investigation of thought to an assessment of which ideas are rational, logical and well-grounded, means that the thoughts and feelings elicited by the anxieties attending to embodiment can go largely ignored. What I want to suggest is that placing the idea of the psychoanalytic subject at the heart of philosophical discussions of religion enables a deeper engagement with the vulnerabilities that shape human individuality – expressed through that which seems irrational – while also opening up the importance of religion as a way of engaging with human anxiety.

3. Identifying the Unconscious

When Freud places the idea of the dynamic unconscious at the heart of his theorising, he goes some way to undermining the claim that human nature can be equated primarily with the ability to reason. The claim for an unconscious aspect to human behaviour is not peculiar to Freud; it can also be traced in the work of SchopenhauerFootnote ⁸ and Nietzsche.Footnote ⁹ Freud's account is distinctive because it emerges from his clinical work. The claim that there is a dynamic unconscious that influences action arises from his attempt to understand the experiences of his neurotic patients, and particularly those suffering from hysteria.Footnote ¹⁰ In attempting to understand bodily symptoms for which there was no discernible physiological or biological source, Freud came to the conclusion that his patients were troubled by ‘unacceptable ideas’ that had been driven from consciousness but which still had the power to affect behaviour. In order to bring about a ‘cure’, Freud's therapeutic method acted as a means of making that which was unconscious conscious. Through the practice of free-association, whatever sprang into the patient's mind during their conversation with the analyst was discussed, regardless of how irrelevant or shameful it might seem. This enabled the source of the symptoms, now outside of consciousness, to be recognised. When this happened, Freud claimed, the symptom disappeared.Footnote ¹¹

This ‘clinical achievement’ led Freud to wider conclusions for a more general anthropology. The unconscious may lie outside that which is immediately accessible to consciousness, but this does not mean that it is without influence over behaviour. In neurotics, this might take on extremely debilitating forms, but all human beings are similarly subject to unconscious forces. Not all human action is conscious. In some ways this might seem an obvious claim: after all, not all our actions are consciously chosen. For example, when walking, I do not have to consciously think about placing one foot in front of the other. But Freud's contention goes further than this: unconscious desires and fears also shape human behaviour. In order to underscore this claim he provides, in the aptly named Psychopathology of Everyday Life, examples of parapraxis. Once analysed, apparently meaningless actions – forgetting and losing things, miswritten or misspelled words, slips of the tongue – reveal unconscious fears and desires. For example, forgetting a place name associated with an estranged friend suggests a desire to forget that friend. Such ordinary, everyday examples supported his contention that the unconscious influenced not just the behaviour of the mentally ill, but also that of the fully-functioning individual.

The effect of Freud's project was to suggest a complex account of the human psyche where the rational faculty was only one part of the picture.Footnote ¹² Factors lying outside the conscious, rational mind were equally significant for understanding the actions and beliefs of the individual. Particular emphasis was given to considering the fears and desires of earliest childhood, now long forgotten, that shape human psychosexual development.

Allowing the unconscious realm to take centre-stage in one's theorising can seem bizarre, even meaningless, as is evident from some of the most famous philosophical critiques of psychoanalysis.Footnote ¹³ There is, after all, something self-contradictory about allowing what is ‘unconscious’ to shape one's theorising: how can that which stands outside of consciousness be known or talked about at all? For Sartre, this was the major problem with the Freudian project, for ‘bad faith’ could only result from the postulation of this mysterious and unknown agency, as another person – the analyst – is required if the individual is to identify the unconscious forces that are (allegedly) influencing their behaviour.Footnote ¹⁴

Freud recognised the difficulty of identifying the unconscious and suggested that knowledge of it can only ever be indirect. In order to get some sense of the concerns of the unconscious, it is necessary to take seriously phenomena which operate outside the scope of rationality and consciousness, and his early work was concerned to document such phenomena.Footnote ¹⁵ Alongside the investigation of dreams, jokes and parapraxis, he also considered art and creativity as activities which reveal long-forgotten fears and desires;Footnote ¹⁶ something to which we will return later in this paper.

If one becomes convinced that there is an unconscious, it is almost inevitable for the practice of philosophy to come under scrutiny.Footnote ¹⁷ The attempt to track the workings of the unconscious involves paying attention to those things which are often excluded from philosophical discussions on the grounds that they are irrelevant or irrational. To include such features involves a different kind of analysis: in order to identify the unconscious at work it is necessary to consider not just what is present but what is absent; not just what is said but what is not said; not simply that which is coherent, but also that which is not. The benefit of such an approach is that it leads to more complex and arguably more realistic accounts of human experience. For my purposes, it also opens up a broader philosophical discussion of what religion involves. The psychoanalytic self – because of the emphasis on the unconscious – is defined by obscurity rather than transparency, and this affects the investigation of religion. As Julia Kristeva notes, ‘we are strangers to ourselves’, whose lives are shaped by unconscious fears and desires of which our conscious selves know little.Footnote ¹⁸ I might think I know who I am, why I do what I do, but the apparently trivial actions to which Freud draws our attention – forgetting, slips of the tongue, dreams, jokes – reveal much about myself of which I am not aware. In such a context, a philosophy of religion that is primarily concerned with establishing the coherence of belief runs the risk of ignoring what religious strategies and feelings might reveal about that which lies beneath the surface of ratiocination.

Philosophers of mind such as Sebastian GardnerFootnote ¹⁹ and Marcia CavellFootnote ²⁰ have accepted the importance of engaging philosophically with that which is apparently irrational, not in order to show why such ideas or actions are wrong-headed or false, but in order to understand what irrational thought and behaviour might tell us about the nature of the mind and what it means to be a subject. In their respective explorations of the irrational, both Gardner and Cavell employ psychoanalytic categories. In not dissimilar fashion, I want to suggest that taking seriously that which is apparently irrational in religious formulations might lead to deeper, richer accounts of the sources of religion than an approach which limits its attention to establishing the coherence or otherwise of religious beliefs and practices. At this point, the discussion of how the relationship between religion and superstition might be understood becomes particularly helpful.

4. Like or Unlike? Connecting Religion and Superstition

The attempt to discredit religion by exposing it as a form of superstitious practice has proved a popular strategy with its critics. While the meaning of what is considered ‘superstitious’ has changed over time, philosophers of the European Enlightenment came to view it as a form of ‘bad science’.Footnote ²¹ In the struggle between science and religion, the religious, like the superstitious, could be seen as holding beliefs about the world which postulate false connections between disparate phenomena. Read thus, prayer is aligned with superstitious actions (like crossing one's fingers) as both seem to reflect the belief that blind universal forces can be controlled through employing the right form of words or actions. For the religious, such similarities are problematic. If religion is to be seen as a ‘serious’ endeavour, it is tempting to seek ‘clear blue water’ between what might be called ‘genuine religion’ and the erroneous practices of the superstitious.Footnote ²²

The most interesting exemplar of such an approach is D.Z. Phillips, not least because his philosophy of religion was defined by his trenchant criticism of the discipline's dominant analytic model. Challenging the attempt to offer justifications of religious beliefs, Phillips adopted a Wittgensteinian approach where the task of philosophy was to describe with utter clarity that which the religious do and say.Footnote ²³ Such an approach entailed rejecting accounts of religion which he considered to be based upon philosophical ‘misunderstandings’ of what the believer means when they perform certain actions or make certain claims. If we are to understand the nature of religion we should listen to what the believer says they are doing, rather than constructing a ‘philosophers’ myth' of religion that bears little relationship to what the believer understands their words or actions to mean.Footnote ²⁴

Phillips is particularly critical of the methods philosophers employ to abstract religious claims from their roots in the religious life. Religious beliefs are not abstract assertions which can be distilled from the patterns of a life, and to treat them thus leads to distortion. Instead, the philosopher should act more like an anthropologist, engaging directly with what the believer thinks they are doing.

An example of this approach is amply illustrated by his account of immortality. What does it mean for a believer in the Christian tradition to talk of ‘eternal life’? The philosopher looking at such language might assume they know what this phrase means; presumably that death is not the end, that one can live ‘forever’. But if attention is paid to the complexity of religious texts, and the understanding given to such words by the believer, a different conclusion may be reached about the meaning of ‘eternal life’ that does not necessitate considering the coherence or otherwise of its rendition as that contradictory notion ‘surviving death’. Considered in their proper religious context, the commitment to eternal life reveals the religious experience of a new quality of life in the here-and-now, freed from the fear of meaninglessness. To understand ‘eternal life’ as ‘immortal existence’ reveals a philosophers' misunderstanding that ignores the way in which such phrases relate to particular forms of the religious life.Footnote ²⁵

Paying attention to the believer and what they think they are doing is undoubtedly important if one is to avoid the distortions that can arise in the academic theorising of religion: although it should be noted that Phillips ignores the fact that many of his opponents are themselves religious, and presumably their rather different accounts of the religious terms he considers suggest at the very least that there are a myriad ways of ‘being religious’ within any given tradition; but that's another story. My interest is in exploring Phillips' attempt to distinguish what he calls ‘genuine religion’ from superstition. This attempt reveals an anxiety about forms of religious practice that fail to cohere with rational criteria remarkably similar to that of the philosophers he criticises.

Phillips is aware of the troubling similarities between religious and superstitious practices, and in attempting to distinguish the one from the other he assesses the intentions which lie behind each. The results of this method are expressed most clearly in this discussion of what makes a prayer genuinely religious:

The nature of one's intentions, then, determines whether an act is religious or not. In coming to this conclusion, Phillips goes beyond an analysis of what the believer thinks they are doing, and brings into play his own views of what makes something ‘religious’. And the distinction he employs revolves around the extent to which fear comprises the backdrop to any ritualistic practice. A prayer is superstitious if it arises from fear and involves the attempt to manipulate the powers of the universe. This distinction effectively aligns religious actions with scientific principles: a genuinely religious form of prayer cannot have at its heart the belief that it is possible to influence the processes of the universe through saying the right kind of words or performing the correct ritual.

Phillips' attempt to distinguish religion from superstition mirrors his more general approach to religion. Religion through his lens is defined as a coherent way of life involving a set of beliefs that shape one's attitude to the world and its processes. As a result, for an action or belief to be religious it must be placed in an appropriate framework of other beliefs: ‘the importance of prayer, to a large extent, depends on the role it plays in the life of the person who offers it’.Footnote ²⁷ In case we are not clear what this means, he offers a further example:

Phillips has no truck with the kind of ‘crisis faith’ and the superstitious practices that attend to it that the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer was similarly critical of.Footnote ²⁹ But to neglect such practices and what they might reveal about the vulnerabilities inherent in human experience is, I think, unfortunate. By limiting philosophical discussion of religion to the claims of the seriously committed, we ignore its grounding in the more general attempt to engage with the fragility and transience of human life. We also ignore the way in which religious beliefs and images might allow us to engage with the fears that arise from the experience of being vulnerable beings in a mutable world that can destroy us.

Terrence Tilley's critique of Phillips' approach makes apparent something of its limitations. Tilley claims that by excluding practices designed to manipulate external forces or those which arise out of fear, Phillips limits his engagement to ‘only a part of religion’;Footnote ³⁰ namely, that which is coherent and grounded in serious epistemic and existential commitments. By excluding that which he deems ‘superstitious’, despite their similarities to religious practice, Phillips ignores what such excluded practices might reveal about the nature of religion itself. Indeed, Tilley goes so far as to argue that ‘in actual religious practice… “religious belief” and “superstition” are rarely, if ever, unmixed’.Footnote ³¹ What we have in Phillips' attempt to remove superstitious elements from religious belief and practice is evidence of ‘the sort of philosopher's gloss on religion that Phillips otherwise would normally oppose.’Footnote ³²

Tilley suggests that an analysis of superstition might reveal much about the nexus of desires and beliefs that inform religious positions, and that the problem with Phillips' approach to this discussion is that it shuts down prematurely an investigation of this kind. This refusal to consider the common ground between religion and superstition seems strange, given that elsewhere Phillips notes the importance of recognising that religious concepts are not ‘technical concepts; they are not cut off from the common experiences of human life, joy and sorrow, hope and despair.’Footnote ³³ If this is the case, why not consider the role that fear might play in the construction of both superstition and religion? Tilley is right to suggest the fruit this might bear for the study of religion; and what follows pursues this line of enquiry. Exploring the connection between religion and superstition enables not just an illumination of religious beliefs and practices; it also holds out the possibility of relating religious ideas and behaviours to the very patterns and experiences that establish human individuality in the first case.

5. Psychoanalysis and the Investigation of Religion

At first glance the application of psychoanalytic theory to such an endeavour does not seem particularly promising. Despite William James' attempt to develop a philosophy of religion that takes seriously human psychology,Footnote ³⁴ psychoanalysts have on the whole been loath to consider religion as anything other than a form of pathology. There are notable exceptions in the case of Carl JungFootnote ³⁵ and Donald WinnicottFootnote ³⁶; and we will return to Winnicott's ideas shortly. But until very recently,Footnote ³⁷ Freud's account of religion as a form of sickness to be eradicated from human life and society limited the extent to which religion might be approached by analysts as something that might have a positive role to play in understanding the psychic processes forming the human individual.

Freud's rather simplistic dismissal of religion reflects aspects of his various models for the workings of the mind.Footnote ³⁸ His early attempts to map the unconscious are matched by his later concern to devise ways of bolstering the ego against the unruly demands of the id.Footnote ³⁹ The tension between id and ego is mirrored in his identification of two principles that shape the infant's engagement with their world and which influence the way in which Freud approaches religion. Freud argues that the primary engagement with external reality is through the ‘pleasure-principle’ which seeks to maximise pleasure by placing the infant's needs and desires at the heart of the world. Accompanying the desire to maximise pleasure is the need to manage the anxiety which arises from the mother's absence. The mechanism that he identifies in this process involves a form of hallucination where the mother is ‘conjured up’ in the child's thoughts. So, when the child sucks their thumb, they are in effect seeking to replicate the satisfaction of feeding. There are, of course, limits to the success of this activity. Thumb-sucking might allow for the phantasyFootnote ⁴⁰ of the mother's presence, but it does not provide ‘real’ nutrition, and so, faced with the limits that reality places on the experience of pleasure, the child comes to develop a second principle for mental functioning: the ‘reality-principle’ against which the pleasure-principle must be tested.Footnote ⁴¹

The rule of the reality-principle shapes Freud's explicit discussions of religion.Footnote ⁴² Maturation involves adapting to the way the world is, rather than staying as a child trapped in illusions about the relationship between thought and the external world. This progressive development in the individual's mental functioning must be mirrored, Freud argues, in societal structures: as the scientific age emerges, so the death-knell is sounded for religion. Religion – grounded in the illusions of the child's earliest experience – works with a view of the universe that science reveals to be false. There is no kind benevolence at the heart of the universe; there is no providential care overseeing what happens to us. If we are not to remain children forever, we must put aside religious beliefs that reflect our experiences in the nursery and go bravely out into hostile life.Footnote ⁴³

There is something decidedly odd in these conclusions. In many ways, psychoanalysis suggests that we do remain children forever, our attitudes and lives shaped by those earliest experiences of childhood. Indeed, Freud's final comments on the extent to which it is possible to affect lasting change in the patient through analysis suggests the limitations of therapeutic interventions when confronted with patterns established in infancy.Footnote ⁴⁴ It seems strange to dismiss the importance of religion on the grounds that it is a formation of the nursery when so much else in human life shares this categorisation.

Given this tension, it is worth pursuing an alternative approach grounded in the interests of the Freud who James DiCenso calls ‘the other Freud’.Footnote ⁴⁵ This is the Freud who is fascinated by the weirdness of human experience and who seeks to explore that which is not rational rather than eradicate it;Footnote ⁴⁶ the Freud who allows the presence of the irrational to inform and shape his anthropology.Footnote ⁴⁷ By considering that which is not coherent – that which is apparently irrational – we might discover much about the forces that shape human life and culture.

In particular, the path to be pursued here involves investigating two important and interconnected features which, according to psychoanalytic theory, are particularly important for shaping human behaviour: the desire to make connections and the need to deal with the anxiety that accompanies becoming an individual. Religious and superstitious positions, I shall argue, both involve strategies for achieving psychic reassurance and – far from undermining the significance of religious positions – recognising this connection gives some sense of the importance of religious strategies for the human animal.

6. Only Connect: Superstition, Religion and Being Human

The frontispiece of E.M. Forster's Howards End declares ‘only connect’. For Forster, making connections between experiences that appear, at first sight, to be disparate and unconnected has political significance, opening up the public world to challenge and change. These words can be applied, albeit with a different intent, to the psychoanalytic account of what it is to be human. When Freud attempts to illuminate the sources of neurotic illness, he considers the fallacious connections his patients made between their thoughts and the world. In the case of the Rat Man, a young man's ability to function was severely restricted by a number of bizarre, self-imposed rituals. Through his analysis, these apparently incomprehensible rituals were shown to be connected to a series of phantastical fears. For example, his conflicted sexuality was apparently structured by this belief: ‘If I have a wish to see a woman naked, my father will be bound to die’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Far from being meaningless, his rituals were attempts at influencing an external fate perceived to be threatening his loved ones. And as Freud makes clear in his Psychopathology of Everyday Life, this need to connect is not something peculiar to the sick.

Here the analysis of superstitious beliefs becomes interesting. Superstitions are notable because they reveal explicitly the attempt to connect things that are not connected. Take the common superstition that seeing one magpie heralds bad luck: analysed rigorously (or not even that rigorously!), the causal link between ‘one magpie’ and ‘sorrow’ cannot be established. But the desire to make the processes of the world readable through postulating a fate responsible for what happens is a powerful one; so powerful, indeed, that even Freud was not immune to its spell. In an addition to The Psychopathology of Everyday Life made in 1907, he tells of an incident that followed the recovery of his eldest daughter from a serious illness in 1905. Passing through his study, ‘I yielded to a sudden impulse and hurled one of my slippers from my foot at the wall, causing a beautiful little marble Venus to fall down from its bracket’.Footnote ⁴⁹ As it breaks into pieces, Freud finds himself quoting “quite unmoved” a passage from Busch: “Oh! The Venus! Lost is she!” Freud sees “the wild conduct and my calm acceptance of the damage” in the following way:

As Michael Palmer has shown, this is not an isolated example of Freud's superstitious inclinations.Footnote ⁵¹ At various times in his life Freud was convinced that he would die at the age of 51, 61 or 62, the last number being derived from the publication date of The Interpretation of Dreams and his own telephone number.Footnote ⁵² Similarly, he was fascinated by ideas of clairvoyance and telepathy. What drives all these connections is the same as the impulse that he identifies in religious theorising: attempts are being made to make connections where there are none; attempts which are all, in differing ways, designed to locate the individual's life in a broader, more supportive context, where something – or someone – is in control of the seemingly chance events of one's life.

Now, when Freud explores the connections made by his patients he is, of course, aiming to help them establish coherent connections; connections that relate to the universe in an accurate and appropriate way. Thus his therapeutic method coheres with his scientific principles. He is not exposing such connections in order for them to remain a part of the individual's experience. Reality-testing lies at the heart of his clinical practice in order that the sick might find healing. And this method to a large extent forms the basis for his engagement with religion. The religious make false connections between self and world that are based upon infantile desires for security which must be put aside in order to live more healthy lives.Footnote ⁵³

His ‘metapsychological’ speculations, however, suggest the basis for a rather different approach. Here, the movement is away from the clinical towards the theoretical and, specifically, towards the attempt to understand the psychic processes that shape what it is to be human. When Freud criticises religion as a form of wishful illusion because it claims that the world has been set up with us in mind or that prayer can alter the outcome of events, he may be drawing attention to the lack of evidence for seeing the world in such terms, but he is also doing something else that arguably opens the way for a rather different discussion of religion. The kind of connections that Freud details the religious making can be related to the more general human attempt to deal with the anxieties that surround being human.

At this point, we need to return to that which prompts superstitious activity; namely, its emergence from the fears that attend to transient human life. Now, for D Z Phillips, if a supposedly religious action is grounded in a false sense of causality and arises from fear it cannot be deemed properly religious. My concern is that this kind of approach ignores the importance of engaging with the vulnerability that arises from being human in a troubling and changing world. Rather than avoid considering the role that fear might play in both religious and superstitious connections, we might be better advised to explore why we seek to make such connections and what they might tell us about the experience of being human.

One of Freud's favourite analogies for psychoanalytic practice was to describe it as a form of archaeology, where the task was to go ‘beneath the surface’ in order to discover the long-forgotten origins of our actions.Footnote ⁵⁴ Employing psychoanalytic ideas about the process of individuation suggests some interesting possibilities about the origins of religion and the role that it plays in the attempt to manage anxiety.

7. Religion and Anxiety

It might appear that I am following the countless critics of religion who locate its development in fears of one kind or another and then proceed to reject it on that basis. In part, this neatly describes Freud's critique. Show religion to be based, like superstition, in the desire for psychic reassurance and you can reject it as a meaningful attempt to deal with life. This is not my intention. While it would be possible to consider the all-too-real fears that accompany being human in this world – fears of natural forces and so on – I want to consider the kind of fears that emerge from the stresses and strains that psychoanalysts associate with the processes that shape individual development. Consideration of such fears might reveal much about the usefulness of religion as well as its origins.

There are a number of different psychoanalytic descriptions of psychosexual development, but all suggest something of the precarious nature of that process. There is nothing sure or certain about how an individual will turn out, given the lengthy process of individuation and socialisation.Footnote ⁵⁵ Much depends upon the nexus of early experiences and relationships as well as inherited traits from one or other parent. The precarious nature of this process suggests something of the anxiety that attends to being human in the world, and as R D Hinshelwood notes, “the history of psychoanalysis has been one of trying to understand the core anxiety of the human condition” (Hinshelwood 1991: 218). It is the notion of anxiety that will be pursued here, as it illuminates some of the fears that shape religious attempts to make sense of the change that defines human experience.

In the years after Freud's death, psychoanalysts paid particular attention to the role of the mother in managing the child's experience of the external world. In part, this shift in emphasis reflected the changing practice of psychoanalysts who were increasingly working with children, and mothers and babies.Footnote ⁵⁶ For analysts such as Wilfred Bion and Donald Winnicott, for the world to be experienced as something supportive rather than overwhelming, the mother must be able to ameliorate the infant's potentially frightening experience of it.Footnote ⁵⁷ According to Winnicott, if the child is to develop a sense of security, it needs a ‘good enough mother’Footnote ⁵⁸ who can provide an environment where the child is the sole focus of her attention. As the object of this ‘primary maternal preoccupation,’Footnote ⁵⁹ the child experiences itself as omnipotent. The mother's responsiveness to the child gives it ‘the moment of illusion’Footnote ⁶⁰ when it feels that its wish has created the object that it desires but which, in reality, has been produced by the mother. This ‘experience of omnipotence’Footnote ⁶¹ enables the child to feel that its wishes can make things happen, and this illusion is necessary if the child is to develop a sense of the world as a safe rather than a threatening place. Confronted too soon with the realities of the external world, the child's psychological development will be stunted. For the discussion of anxiety, this is an important point. If the child does not experience a ‘good-enough environment’ where its needs are met and where it has this illusion of power, its psychic health will be disturbed. The mother might be physically or emotionally absent, she might be too intrusive, or she might be incapable of responding to her child. For healthy development to take place, the experience of ‘maternal failure’ has to be gradual as the mother acts to disillusion the infant's sense of omnipotent control.Footnote ⁶² As the child comes to realise that its wishes are not omnipotent, it feels dependent for the first time. The feeling of dependence opens up a gap between what is desired and the satisfaction of that desire. Desire, as Lacan might say, is based upon a sense of what is lacked.Footnote ⁶³

Where might religion fit in this model? Winnicott's notion of the ‘transitional object’ lends itself to one possible account.Footnote ⁶⁴ As the child develops, it needs to negotiate between inner and outer worlds. A transition must be made ‘from a stage of being merged with the mother to a state of being in relation to the mother as something outside and separate,’Footnote ⁶⁵ and this requires an object which exists between mother/world and child, and which shares aspects of each. This might take the form of a toy, a blanket, even a sound.Footnote ⁶⁶ The chosen object shares features of both worlds and thus allows for connection between what is experienced as inside and what is outside the child. The object both ‘is’ and ‘is not’ the child. This transitional object between self and world must be resilient, capable of supporting the child's feelings, both good and bad.Footnote ⁶⁷ Eventually, the child puts aside this object, but it is never totally rejected: rather, ‘it loses meaning, and this is because the transitional phenomena have become diffused, have become spread out over the whole intermediate territory between ‘inner psychic reality’ and ‘the external world as perceived by two persons in common’, that is to say, over the whole cultural field.'Footnote ⁶⁸

This intermediate territory provides the space for play and creativity, and, interestingly, for religious feeling. In this space, it is possible to play with the relationship between what is inside and what is outside, and it is in this realm that Winnicott locates the importance of religion, not least because the establishment of the relationship between what is inside and what is outside is never finally complete:

Religion, it would seem, provides a safe space where self and world are in some sense felt as one; where it is possible to retain that first illusory sense of connection between thought and the world. And this need for connection suggests something of the vulnerability of human psychic experience; not least because the process of individuation in psychoanalytic theory is precarious. Much may happen in the child's early years that can lead to varying degrees of instability and insecurity. Even the most stable of beginnings has to confront the vulnerabilities inherent in transient human experience. The transitional space identified by Winnicott provides a safe place to play with experience. While Freud emphasised play as the child's attempt to master the external world,Footnote ⁷⁰ Winnicott develops a more subtle account of the purposes of play. Play is not simply about mastering reality; indeed, it is not something that is limited to the experience of the child. When practised in the analytic setting it enables fresh perspectives on the past to be developed.Footnote ⁷¹ Out of this playful engagement, healing can occur.

The religious space can be thought of in similar terms. Religious art, read against this backdrop, provides a space where the fears and desires that arise in childhood and that continue as we negotiate our way through the adult world might be played with. For Freud, art and creativity allowed a glimpse of the unconscious at work, and Julia Kristeva extends this view, reading religious stories as forms of psychodrama which illuminate aspects of individual experience. Kristeva's analysis of Holbein's painting of ‘the Dead Christ’ thus employs a religious theme – the body of Christ taken down from the cross – to explore the experience of depression and loneliness. Here, a religious image is connected to the stuff of ordinary human life.Footnote ⁷² Following this method, discussion of the anxieties accompanying the move into the world beyond the nursery might be illuminated by some of the disturbing images that have haunted the religious imagination.

As Piero Camporesi has documented, the fear of hell has plagued the western religious imagination,Footnote ⁷³ and perhaps it is in this doctrine that the merger between ‘religion’ and ‘superstition’ is most keenly felt. Read literally as metaphysical claims, they might easily be dismissed as baseless fears that have no logical support. We might, for example, challenge the belief on the grounds that it defies the laws of physics for such a place to exist, or that eternal torture would be impossible. But the tenacity of this belief may have little to do with metaphysical claims and much more to do with the ordinary experience of life in this world and the attempt to engage with our deepest fears concerning our vulnerability.

Arguably the most famous images of hell are to be found in Hieronymous Bosch's graphic paintings. Bosch's depictions of the fate of the damned retain their power to repulse and fascinate not just the religious. For Freud, emotional responses of this kind herald ‘the return of the repressed’Footnote ⁷⁴ when the desires and fears of infancy, now long forgotten, are reawakened. If viewed in this way, Bosch's strange and disquieting paintings might be read as providing insights into the tensions that defined the infant's formative experiences. Following Winnicott, his paintings might also be viewed as providing safe spaces for playing with the anxieties that attend to human life.

Consider ‘The Haywain’ (1485–1490), a picture that might be read as representing the anxieties attending to the child's move from mother to world.Footnote ⁷⁵ The left-hand panel details the events of Eden: Eve is created, the first couple fall from grace and are expelled from the garden. The central panel depicts the dangers of the fallen world; earth is portrayed as a seething mass of humanity fighting over a loaded hay cart, which is being pulled, inexorably, towards the right-hand panel, and its depiction of the torments of hell. Hell itself is chaotic, a place where the body is fragmented or threatened with destruction, consumed by monsters, destroyed by fire. The lost paradise is a distant memory, with the only hope in the presence of an angel astride the cart, who is pleading with God for help. God's presence offers at least the possibility of safety, although His ability to save seems limited, Bosch's God being a rather weak and distant figure.

Such a painting opens up space for engaging with the anxieties that attend to the experience of entering the world that lies outside the relationship with the mother. Freud claimed that the task facing human beings was to find some way of feeling at home in a world that has not been set up with human happiness as its goal.Footnote ⁷⁶ Adults, like children, retain that sense that the world is not always a supportive place for human growth. In a telling phrase, Freud describes the human task as the attempt to find ways of being ‘at home in the uncanny.’Footnote ⁷⁷ The uncanny (or the ‘unheimlich’) is defined by Freud as the experience of the familiar in the unfamiliar that, if analysed, leads back to the formative experiences of infancy. Translated literally, this process could be rendered as the attempt to feel ‘at home in the unhomely’.Footnote ⁷⁸ The world is not an easy place for human beings and the possibility of unresolved emotions from earliest childhood make safe passage through it even more difficult.

It is here that religion is of particular importance, offering stories, pictures and rituals which aid the attempt to engage with the struggles inherent in the continuing process of individuation. So in Bosch's images of the fears that attend to embodiment, we are confronted with ways of coming to terms with the vulnerabilities of life in this world. By refusing to accept fear as an appropriate factor in the shaping of the religious response to the world, philosophers of religion like Phillips miss something important. In addressing the importance of establishing psychic security, psychoanalysts suggest the importance of addressing our fears and desires.

Considering the connections between religion and superstition offers the possibility of exploring the unconscious pressures that attend to being human in a world like this. In religious stories and beliefs we find reflective spaces for the continuing struggle to cope with the anxieties of being human. By seeing religious pictures as ways of making the unconscious conscious, we might be able to find some kind of psychic security in a changing and troubling world.