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영어

In this study, I try to connect religion to psychology, while considering the relationship between the self and others. Heinz Kohut’s self psychology provides us with a very important clue with which we postulate the relationship between God and human beings at the juncture of religion and psychology. This is because Kohut emphasizes the relationship between the self and selfobjects in his self psychology, and because, in this context, this indispensable relationship of self/selfobjects can be applied to the relationship between God and human beings, by means of analogy of God as a selfobject. Selfobject functions, such as the mirroring selfobject function and the idealizing selfobject function, along with the alter-ego/twinship selfobject function, are essential not only for the child’s narcissistic needs but also for the maintenance of the cohesive self in one’s later life. Kohut demonstrates how basic the psychological unit of self/selfobjects is for psychic life, and how important the functions of selfobject are via empathy for the cohesive self in the lifelong narcissistic needs. The relationship between God and human beings is inevitable to weak and vulnerable human beings. Kohut recognizes a fundamental human need for the restoration of the fragmented human being before God via his concept of the Tragic Man. His concept of Tragic Man implies one of the bases of Christian theology, i.e., the human limitation and dilemma before God. I am not talking about the whole paradigm of Christian theology in the broad sense, but, specifically, about the psychological relationship between God and human beings. I believe that this relationship to God can be a basic presupposition of Christian theology, based on the analogy of Kohut’s theory, particularly of Kohut’s matrix of self/selfobjects. Through this method of analogy, I can see the attribution of Kohut’s self psychology, particularly of his theory of self/selfobjects, to religion especially in God-talk. Finally, we can function as selfobjects for others and we may serve one another as selfobjects while empowered by God’s empathic selfobject function.