Unconscious ambivalence towards God in psychoanalysis and in Judaism

The experience of God has been the subject of psychoanalytic discussion, beginning with Freud's focusing on its unconscious defensive aspects. Object relations theorists describe an unconscious relationship with an internalized representation of God, which can be a source of growth for the development of self and object relations. Relating to an omnipotent, perfect Being engenders unconscious feelings of awe, fear, reverence and even envy, while simultaneously creating feelings of love and gratitude, and a wish to identify with and connect to this Being. These intensely ambivalent feelings create conflict for people, whatever their individual beliefs. Monotheism and atheism can both be characterized as compromise formations, integrating wishes of the id, moral concerns of the superego, and reality testing of the ego. Secularism and agnosticism can likewise be viewed as attempts to avoid the anxiety engendered by unconscious ambivalent feelings about God.;Like psychoanalysis, Judaism views the feelings evoked in people's relationship to God as inherently conflicted and challenging. These affective experiences are not only described by Judaism on phenomenological and theological levels, but also in terms of a religious depth-psychology, not unlike the theory of psychoanalysis. Belief in God is seen as a developmental process, with the faith experience involving both cognitive and affective aspects of personality, including a wide range of often ambivalent feelings.;One of the difficulties people encounter in their relationship to God is His ineffable nature that can neither be described fully in words nor perceived in images. The incorporeal and infinite characteristics of God do not allow Him to be reduced to the meaning of words or to the sensual experience of imagery. In Judaism, the prohibition against having graven images representing God, the reluctance to describe Him in words, and the taboo on taking His name in vain, all serve to highlight the element of our experience of God that is beyond words and images. In psychoanalysis, Ogden's idea of autistic-contiguous experience, Lacan's notion of the "Real" and Bion's concept of the experience of "O," free from memory and desire, each describe ways in which we have experiences beyond words and images.