The role of religious imagery in adaptive psychotherapy

This paper presents the viewpoint of the adaptive approach in respect to manifest allusions to God and other religious themes from patients in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. Such imagery is understood and interpreted on a par with secular imagery, as reflections of encoded deep unconscious experiences, many of them in response to therapists' interventions. The article also explores the reasons why religious imagery is uncommon in adaptive modes of therapy, discusses encoded evidence that therapists' religious self-revelations and extended personal reactions to patients' religious images are maladaptively countertransference-based, and suggests that particular kinds of encoded nonreligious imagery suggest that the deep unconscious mind should be thought of as an inner god of divine wisdom and pristine morality. The decision as to whether this viewpoint speaks for the existence of a transcendental deity or is properly considered in secular terms lies beyond the province of psychoanalytic observations and thinking.