Psychoanalytic theory and loving God concepts: parent referencing versus self-referencing
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Updated: Nov 6, 2026

Assessing the Coherence of Parents' Short Narratives Regarding their Child Using the Five-Minute Speech Sample Procedure
Published on: September 19, 2019
1Department of Psychology, University of St. Thomas, St Paul, MN 55105.
Abstract:
We investigated the relationship of college students' conceptions of the wrathfulness-kindliness of God to their parents' nurturance, their parents' permissiveness, authoritarianism, and authoritativeness, and the students' own self-esteem. Although parents' nurturance, authoritarianism, and authoritativeness were related to participants' conceptions of God (thus providing some support for psychoanalytic assertions), the variable of self-esteem far outweighed all other variables in accounting for the variance in God concepts. These results suggest that self-referencing explanations better account for individuals' conceptions of God than do parent referencing (i.e., psychoanalytic) explanations.
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