Abstract
abstract In qualitative psychoanalytically‐informed research the author explores how the internal object‐representational world of six stipendiary male Anglican priests might illuminate the psychological significance of their relationship with God. Viewing personality development as a lifelong process permits a more synthetic view of existing theories of God as maternal object, transitional object or oedipal father. A relationship with God may reinforce a good relationship with primary objects, but when failures in maternal containment have resulted in disturbances of the spatio‐temporal organization of the infant's mind, new experience – including religious experience – will be superimposed on this distorted psychic substrate. When space‐centred thinking dominates, religious objects may offer exogenous structural support to the personality, but in the absence of transformative object relationships they will remain unassimilated. The priestly quest may sometimes be an attempt to establish or repair a triadic internal relationship with a maternal containing object and the symbolic father.
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