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영어

My principal concern in this study is to a explore God-human relationship in the psychology of religion, specifically in the perspective of object relations theory. Freud considers religion as an illusion defined by pathology, and thus, a product of neurosis. However, Winnicott does not see an illusion as negative like Freud’s view, but rather as positive and even as necessary for the self’s sustenance through a life-long experience. Winnicott’s conception of illusion is based on the child’s early experience of separation from its mother. Winnicott finds out, from this separation experience of the child, the notion of a “transitional space,” where the child comes to experience a middle area between illusion and reality. The child experiences this transitional space through “transitional objects, which plays an important role to suggest the relationship between religion and psychology, in terms of the interpersonal experience of the “intermediate area” between God and a human. Meissner and Rizzuto demonstrate the relationship between God and the human, building on Winnicott’s theory of transitional objects and the transitional space of reality and illusion. Now the concept of projective identification may provide an important possibility of psychologically postulating God-human relationship, in that a basic human relatedness to God come from the relationship between human limitation and ultimate Divine being. The image or representation of God as “an ultimate transitional object” can be suggested, according to Winnicott’s concept of the transitional object. Heinz Kohut’s concept of “selfobject” can be used for the analogy of God as a selfobjet in the concept of an ultimate transitional object. In probing God-human relationship in projective identification, intervention of the pastor will be inevitably involved in their projective identification. The pastors’ capacity then for toleration and containment is considered their most important therapeutic resource. The pastor can perceive that s/he plays an instrumental role in the relationship with the parishioners.