Two years before William James published his classic Varieties of Religious Experience, a relatively unknown doctor named Sigmund Freud authored his first great work, the interpretation of Dreams, ushering in the new field of psychodynamic psychology. Ten years later, Freud published Totem and Taboo, his first major work that attempted an analysis of religion. In the following years, the work of Freud and other psychodynamic theorists would provide a rich—and sometime contentious—platform for a religion-psychology, dialogue.
Psychodynamic theories focus on cognitive, emotional, and relational dynamics within the individual, especially mental processes that are unconscious and outside of awareness. In particular, psychodynamic approaches focus on one or more of three different types of processes: (1) drives or instinctual processes that motivate behavior, (2) structures or internal patterns that provide organization for the personality, and (3) relations between the self and external or internal objects. Each of these types of processes has provided a basis for a psychological perspective on religion. In this chapter, we will consider Freud’s drive-oriented approach to religion, the theory of Erik Erikson that has important structural features, and the object-relational theories of Harry Guntrip and David Winnicott. We will also consider the unique contributions of the psychodynamic theorist Carl Jung.