earticle

영어

I began this study after finding that many counsel clients were having dysfunctional God-representation as the cause for their pain. God-representation is not innate one but the one to be acquired through experiences. Freud and religious psychologists proved that it is formed for a long time based on emotions experienced with their nurturers at childhood.For individual happiness and healthiness, the wrong psychological representations should be corrected. And those ranges include the self-representation, interpersonal representation and God representation. For the change of dysfunctional God representation, the individual’s psychological bruises should be cured, and their mind-structure should be re-organized. For such objective, in this study, I focused on Heinz Kohut’s self-psychology, and especially on selfobject concept. The selfobject is defined as the object to be perceived as a part of oneself. It provides psychological oxygen to the self, helping to escape from distorted dysfunctional representation and to replace them with correct and function ones. Then, if the healthy and functional God representation is so important, which one would be the case? In this paper, I proposed “selfobject God-representation” as the one needed for bruised people of modern society. The newly suggested God-representation should differ from the conventional, patriarchal and despotic representation of God, which has inflicted the human-being for a long time. The one we need for our era should embrace relatedness and diversity, as well as providing love and protection. And in my view, it is worth paying attention to the three sound characters of selfobject, which mirrors, becomes idealizing object and becomes the existence like the twin. That is because, in many respects, it is analogous to the nature of Trinity God who loves, protects and accompanies the human-being. Therefore, proposing selfobject God-representation would cast a new paradigm fitting the current era. And by this, we would be able to re-define the nature of God which is nurturing, embracing and cooperative, while it has been historically distorted as hierarchical, unilateral and patriarchal one. To explain about the selfobject God, I employed metaphorical theology as the main theological methodology. The nature of selfobject God is relational and is in various forms.