Differences in Religious Attitudes in Mental Illness

Abstract

There is agreement from a variety of sources that heightened religious concern and conflict characterize patients in psychiatric hospitals. One such source is personality theory. Freudian psychoanalysis thus has related psychopathology to religion by regarding religion as a projection of unconscious needs. Freud regarded religion as an attempt to gain control over the sensory world by means of the wish world. More particularly, Freud saw in religion an attempt to displace one's dependence upon the father. While Freud himself did not systematically develop the place that religious delusion occupies in schizophrenia, other psychoanalysts have felt that excessive religiosity is a hallmark of the substitution of the primary process for a secondary process which takes place in paranoid schizophrenia. Clinical evidence also relates heightened religious concern to mental illness. Thus Anton Boisen,1 describing his own religious experience in a psychotic state, comes to the conclusion that religious delusion can be therapeutic. While he also sees the excessive religious concern of the paranoid as being a distortion of reality, Boisen regards it as a desperate attemDt to find a necessary part of reality which has hitherto eluded the person because of unresolved unconscious conflict. Instead of seeing heightened religious concern as being an attempt to deny responsibility by projecting dependency needs upon a paternalistic deity, Boisen sees in this process the attempt of the person to gain independence by calling upon irrational and hitherto unconscious thought processes to help break the tug of war that is within him. While both psychoanalytic personality theory and clinical evidence relate heightened religiosity to disordered personality states, there has been little work of an empirical nature done to test such a hypothesis in a clinical setting. Two studies which have compared psychiatric patients with normals have both cast doubt upon the belief that increased religiosity occurs in mental illness. Armstrong, Larsen, and Mourer2 compared the religious attitudes and practices of psychiatric patients and normals, and found that patients were significantly less interested in religion than normals. Reifsnyder and Campbell8 compared newly