The Brill Dictionary of Religion

2. As this example illustrates, piety, religious belief, and religious activity can, in certain circumstances, take on diseased characteristics: psychic illnesses can be caused by religion, or determined in their content by religion. The basis for this phenomenon lies in the fact that, from the age of childhood to that of adult, religious development is part of psychosocial development. Developing faith is founded in a primitive trust—that is, in the very first nurturing relationship between child and principal nurturer. Religion is one of the transitional phenomena in the potential space between mother and child.¹

In today's Western societies, persons psychically deviating from the norm can take on no other roles than those of patients in or out of the hospital. According to the kind and gravity of the disturbance, they go to psychologists and psychiatrists, or are therapeutically cared for in psychiatric clinics. In non-Western cultures, however, they have role assignments that are imbedded in an interpretative context represented in magical ritual or mythology. In West Africa, for example, there are two role formations for psychic deviations: those of the ‘bewitched,’ and those of the ‘possessed.’ The former attest to their condition by going about naked, and are regarded as harmless. The latter, who are feared as aggressive, are variously recognizable: in this case, by the multiple layers of bicycle spokes and other pieces of metal that have been hung about his body. It is believed in West African voodoo that iron ‘protects’ the evil demons, prevents them from leaving the body, and destroys the human substance (G. Chesi)—a mytho-pathological ‘downward spiral’ in the course of which the possessed person sinks ever further into the ban of his role. Now he can no longer divest himself of the pieces of iron through the influence of his spirits (often their number actually increases), and thus prevents any exorcising ‘rescue attempts,’ thereby reinforcing his own position as an outsider and a person self-stigmatized. (Hubert Mohr)

A successful religious development depends on the extent to which it is possible for children, and maturing young persons, to adopt or develop a satisfactory notion of God and integrate it into their personality, to control their fears, and to bring their sexuality into harmony with their religion. If this does not succeed, the danger arises that these developmentally conditioned questions may become pathogenic problem areas for the believer's psyche.

a) Notions of God develop against the background of the child's notion of his or her principal nurturer, that is, along the course of interaction with a mother or father experienced as almighty. When the needed interplay between permission and prohibition gets out of balance, and the forbidding, punishing, and threatening aspect outweighs the other, a ‘super-father’ or ‘devouring mother’ can develop.

In every image of God, Sigmund → Freud saw a super-powerful, interiorized image of the father. By way of the aggressive fixation of a psychic infantilism, and inclusion into a mass delusion (→ Insanity), religion, Freud held, succeeded in sparing many persons an individual neurosis—because, in the collective neurosis of religion, infantile feelings of helplessness on the part of individuals is set into an illusionary collective web of meanings. This religious concept of development is reductionistic: Freud has effaced the meaning of the mother. Klauber (1976), as a psychoanalyst, reintroduced the meaning and importance of the mother, as it were, in his formulation: “Religious faith emerges from the fantasies the child creates in order to justify the trust that the mother will not cease to protect and direct him, and—from the child's standpoint—will be here for all time.” (→ Security).

b) In terms of aspects of developmental psychology, religion also serves to control the uncontrollable. The religious notion of an almighty God can occasion the fear-reduction of the developing individual: the more the child can perceive situations of helplessness reflectively, the more the idea of an omnipotent God can block these feelings of helplessness. Tales of the devil and evil spirits, then, will necessarily reinforce these fears, if the reconciling and supportive aspect of an idea of God comes up short (→ Fear/Dread).

c) Too strict an upbringing, one hostile to love, which especially emerges in the question of sexuality from the basic principle of ‘tabooing’—thus, from simultaneous silence, prohibition, and threat—can occasion the development of a neurotic relationship to sexuality (Bartholomäus 1994).

3. In terms of religious pathology, two pictures of illness can be primarily distinguished:

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Reactive psychic illnesses (‘decompensations’), arising on the basis of family influences that have been rigoristic in the area of religion, lead primarily to fear neuroses, depressive illness, and compulsion neuroses;

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Conceptions of religious matters in terms of the mythical and mystical, on the other hand, can slip into psychotic delusions.

Persons with compulsion neuroses develop a strict, rigid, inflexible superego. Thus, in a strict religious upbringing, God, as the highest instance, appears as the embodiment of an instance pervaded with a ‘choking’ conscience. The same holds true for persons subjected to a particularly strict religiosity, and who, on the basis of a corresponding upbringing, seek to be especially pious. When these persons fail to satisfy their self-legislated goals, experienced as religious demands, and fall short of a ‘god-given,’ or even ‘saintly,’ conduct, it may happen that they feel guilty, and become depressed.² Through compulsive-neurotic decompensations, persons perform compulsive rituals, and entertain compulsive thoughts, in order to ward off harm and disaster nevertheless on account of ‘sinful’ failings. Here too, tendencies to self-punishment are impossible to overlook. Developments in terms of fear neuroses, depressive decompensation, and compulsive neurotic deviancies in the wake of too strict and rigid a religious upbringing are well known—the attested aftereffects of an unhealthy socialization conditioned by religion. This image of the disease is described in the literature as ‘ecclesiogenic neurosis.’

In psychotic conditions, in the profile of a fleeting or chronic delusionary system, patients may have the experience of believing themselves to be a prophet, for example, or Jesus or Mary. Again, with the disease picture of a multiple personality disorder, it can occur that patients perceive the existence of two or more distinct personalities within their own persons; and one of these personalities can be a religious figure (angel, apostle, etc.). With many of these psychopathological wonders that manifest themselves in religion, it is a matter of narcissistic grandiosities, such as the conviction of being or becoming God.

Similar phenomena are presented as well with hysterical personality disturbances.

4. Mystics of all times, in meditation, in the experience of satori, or with Sufi dancing, have experienced short-term and reversible border traversal, linked to experiences of fusion, union, and gladness. But in psychosis it is a matter of a longer-term dissolution of the frontiers of the ego and the self, without the opportunity of extricating oneself from this condition. It must be assumed that numerous individuals with ‘divine visions’ are examples of medically explicable cerebro-organic or psychic illnesses in the form of epileptic auras or hallucinations. Or it may be a matter of the capacity to perceive ‘inner images,’ as they occur in → meditation and other circumstances of immersed consciousness (e.g. in ‘repose hypnosis’ (→ Trance). It would be mistaken, however, always to designate religious experience as pathological. Depth experiences, or experiences of exalted feeling, of out-of-the-ordinary or extraordinary, or transcendental things, belong to the normal inventory of mental experience, whether in the form of night or day experiences, or those occasioned by experiences that evoke mental imagery—‘letting images arise out of the unconscious.’ Phenomena such as daytime dreams (one dreams, and at the same time knows that one is dreaming), in which the dreamed dream goes further, and one considers it as if from without, as an observer, or glossolalia (speaking in tongues in charismatic Pentecostal movements), represent dissociations of consciousness—which can figure as psychopathological phenomena, it is true, but which can be intentionally evoked by the individual. With → conversions to new religious movements, such extraordinary experiences play an altogether decisive role, as they are connected with the group as enlightenment experiences, or revelations, and are appraised positively as an achievement.

5. A look into history shows that, in the thirteenth century, nearly half of the female saints demonstrate behavioral patterns accompanied by an anorexic desire (with the symptoms of anorexia nervosa; Bell 1985). There then arose a new ideal of female piety, closely connected with renunciation of nourishment. The anorexic females experience a twin morality in woman's role, finding themselves between ‘sinful Eve’ and ‘pure Mary.’ There came to be nuns who claimed to survive without eating, and when they were detected in their attacks of gulping food, they were regarded as possessed by the devil or by demons, and burned alive as → witches. From a psychiatric standpoint, → demons (the → Devil, etc.) are ‘partial ego fractions,’ appearing through processes of the splitting of psychic processes and content (phenomena of dissociation). These then manifest a strong tendency to autonomy and personification, and relate, as separated, split-off ego-portions, to what they experience as if they, themselves, were demons, and independent, substantial unities. For centuries, epileptic patients, as well, were looked upon as possessed by demons, and exorcisms were employed with them—finally as late as 1976, in the sensational case of Anneliese Michel of Frankish Klingenberg.

6. The more charismatic the personality of the leader of a religious group, and the more convinced and definite the ‘willingness to subjection’ of the converts, the greater and more defined a commitment can form as submission to the master. This submission can even lead to a self-surrender that abdicates the will, as the self-immolation of the members of the Hare Krishna movement shows, or the tragedies in Guayana in 1978 (more than 900 members of the People's Temple poisoned themselves), or, in Switzerland in 1994, where forty-eight members of the Solar Temple died by murder and suicide. A recent example is the anticipated flight with an expected UFO, on January 8, 1998, on Tenerife, planned by the followers of ‘self-appointed goddess’ Heide Fittkau-Garthe. When offers of relationship, or meaning, on the part of the small religious group or its leaders agree complementarily with potential converts' sensationalistic personalities, personal traits, or pathological personality traits, then a kind of ‘lock-and-key phenomenon’ occurs: the convert seemingly looks for exactly what suits him or her in the scene of the sect or psycho-cult, be it in the form of compensation for undesirable insufficiencies in the personality, or in the form of a protest—either of which leads him or her precisely to this group.

Religion, in the form of a misuse of power (spiritual abuse) on the part of strictly moralizing religious groups, can lead to the development of guilt-consciousness, fear, and a desire for atonement and subjugation. On the other hand, new religious groups and sects must not be hastily and polemically ‘psychiatrized.’ Approach to, and integration in, a small religious group may also evoke the feeling of acceptance, and lead to a stabilization, and positive development, of the personality.

→ Crisis, Devil, Fear/Dread, Insanity, Intoxication/Drugs/Hallocinogens, Possession, Psyche, Psychoanalysis, Socialization/Upbringing