Draws on psychoanalytic criteria to demonstrate that the traditional shamans among the Inuit of North America are expert in the religious uses of alternative psychic states, and that the sleight-of-hand, ventriloquism, and other tricks that have led other researchers to label them pathological perso

In Relating to God: Clinical Psychoanalysis, Spirituality, and Theism, Dan Merkur conceptualizes religious discourse within psychoanalysis. He proposes that God be treated as a transferential figure whose analysis leads to a reduction of the parental content that is projected onto God. Merkur notes that religious conversion experiences regularly involve theological intuitions that are either rational or, owing to morbid complications, have undergone displacement into irrational symbolism. Analysis renders the religiosity more wholesome. Traditionally, psychoanalytic thought has been...

This volume surveys the history of psychoanalytic treatments of myths variously as symptoms of psychopathology, as cultural defence mechanisms, and as metaphoric expressions of ideas that may include therapeutic insights.

First Published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.