Moshe Halevi Spero

Countertransference envy toward the religious patient

Four illustrations have been presented which demonstrate the uses and interpretations of envy in countertransference reactions to religious patients. To be sure, envy reactions to any patient are significant, whether they simply distort the therapists perception or contribute to a deeper understanding of the patient. In the case of the religious patient, envy reactions in the therapist may serve as an additional instrumentality for under-standing the ways in which the dynamic determinants of religious behavior and metaphor become enmeshed in and also transform the pathology of the patient as well as the therapeutic process itself. Both the constructive and destructive object relational implications of envy must be borne in mind by the therapist in order to adequately explore the range of reciprocating forces between therapist and patient. Primitive mechanisms such as projective identification and psychotic transference are particularly prone to evoke envy reactions of surprising intensities, yet an empathic attitude will usually enable the therapist to differentiate the true source of his envy as he more carefully comprehends the quality of object relational and dynamic needs such envy serves.

The Experience of Religious Transformation During Psychoanalysis as an Event Horizon

Reflection upon the psychoanalytic literature dealing with religious faith and practice indicates that our conceptualizations since Freuds original formulations have run into a blind alley and are in danger of becoming repetitious. It is clear that the decision to focus upon the more general phenomena of faith and “spirituality,” which do not demand a firm commitment to the belief in an independent entity known as God, evades all that is of theological relevance to the religious believer and all that is clinically complex for the psychoanalyst. I suggest that the notion of the event horizon, borrowed from astrophysics, offers a better, if frustrating, portrait of the apparent encounter with the divine object representation.