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SBL Annual Meeting Papers — November 2007 WORKING DRAFT: Please do not cite without permission of the author Forthcoming in International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies The Transference onto God Abstract: Magical religious practices, defined as instrumental uses of the divine, are devoted to gods and God, in Winnicott’s terms, as “subjectively perceived objects,” whereas the comparatively rare phenomenon of non-magical religion is devoted to “objective objects.” In a “bargain with fate,” the divine is a transferential figure whose response to symptomatic cultic behavior is predictable and makes cultic behavior a magical means to control fate. The bargain with fate may be treated as a sublimation of the mother-infant dyad that is isomorphic with preOedipal and Oedipal fixations. The therapeutic goal, at both interpersonal and religious levels of discourse, is to facilitate advance from “object-relating” to “object-usage.” Analysis of the transference, arriving at a conception of the divine as a free agent, replaces the concept of fate with a concept of divine grace, interrupting the religious repetition-compulsion. Freud's (1910, p. 123) claim that “a personal God is, psychologically, nothing other than an exalted father” took for granted that traumatic childhood memories of the father undergo repression and become fixated. In Freud's theoretic model, it is only when memories are unconscious and fixated that they undergo displacement and the father is symbolized as God. Rizzuto (1979, p. 52) demonstrated, however, that "the God representation changes along with us and our primary objects in the lifelong context of other relevant beings." Her case studies conclusively refuted Freud's claim that the God representation is fixated. Theism is not the manifest content of something unconscious that is secular. People relate to their God representations in all of the many ways that people relate to each other (Rizzuto, 1974, p. 88). Rizzuto’s findings have since been duplicated repeatedly (McDargh, 1983; Meissner, 1984; Finn & Gartner, 1992; Akhtar & Parens, 2001). Ideas and images of God may be unconscious (Frankl, 1975). Reviewing Rizzuto’s findings, Arlow (in Grossman, 1993, p. 760) recognized that God is or can be a “transferential figure.” Unlike Rizzuto’s findings, which are theoretic observations that arise as by-products of conventional psychoanalyses with religious patients, Arlow’s way of phrasing Rizzuto’s findings has implications for discussions of religious topics in the course of clinical practice. In historical studies, Haartman (2004) and I (Merkur, 1995-96, 2004, 2005) have demonstrated that therapeutic change has resulted from theological discussions of God or a god in several religions. Due to the transference onto God, theological comments can function as mutative interpretations, precisely as therapists’ participations in play therapy may do. It is a question of drawing on psychoanalytic theories in order to interpret religious sublimations at their level of sublimation. MagicLet me approach the topic of the transference onto God by beginning with a definition and clinical assessment of magic. In the nineteenth century, the founders of the comparative study of religion attempted to distinguish religion and magic. Freud (1913) adopted uncritically, and bequeathed to psychoanalysis, Frazer’s (1922) influential formulation that religion propitiates or conciliates whereas magic is mechanical and coercive. Durkheim (1915) attempted to justify a distinction between religion and magic on the sociological criteria, which Mauss (1972) later refuted, that religion binds individuals together into a community, whereas magic does not. Malinowski (1925) too defended Frazer’s distinction between magic and religion despite the increasing difficulties with its formulation. Malinowski began with a definition of magic that has, in one sense, found general agreement. Speaking of the Trobriand Islanders in Melanesia, he wrote: Magic is undoubtedly regarded by the natives as absolutely indispensable to the welfare of the gardens. What would happen without it no one can exactly tell, for no native garden has been made without its ritual....But certainly various kinds of disaster, blight, unseasonable droughts, rains, bush-pigs and locusts, would destroy the unhallowed garden made without magic. Does this mean, however, that the natives attribute all the good results to magic? Certainly not....His experience has taught him...on the other hand, that in spite of all his forethought and beyond all his efforts there are agencies and forces which one year bestow unwonted and unearned benefits of fertility, making everything run smooth and well, rain and sun appear at the right moment, noxious insects remain in abeyance, the harvest yields a superabundant crop; and another year again the same agencies bring ill luck and back chance, pursue him from beginning till end and thwart all his most strenuous efforts and his best-founded knowledge. To control these influences and these only he employs magic. Thus there is a clear-cut division: there is first the well-known set of conditions, the natural course of growth, as well as the ordinary pests and dangers to be warded off by fencing and weeding. On the other hand there is the domain of the unaccountable and adverse influences, as well as the great unearned increment of fortunate coincidence. The first conditions are coped with by knowledge and work, the second by magic (Malinowski, 1925, pp. 28-29). Malinowski suggested that when coincidences are regarded not as regular, predictable events, but as unpredictable miraculous ones, control over the events is thought possible. The exercise of control may be thought to be within human reach and mechanical in its action. It may instead be attributed to gods, spirits, or other beings that must be propitiated, begged, bribed, bargained with, or coerced. In all events, influence over coincidences is everywhere the ambition of magic. Working with Malinowski’s approach, I propose to define magic as any effort to produce miracles on demand. Although some miracles are claimed to violate laws of natural science, many and perhaps most are natural events whose miraculous character consists of their timing. Hultkrantz (1983, p. 240) remarked, "It is religious belief, and not exceptions from natural laws, that selects the miracle." Coincidental events arise synergically through intersections in time and/or space of separate lines of causally determined actions. Coincidences acquire religious significance, that is, come to be interpreted as miracles, when and because they have meaning or significance for their observer(s). A miracle is always felt to manifest an intention. Its occurrence implies its deliberate and purposive causation by something more than its manifest content. Its intention is both intelligent and cognizant of the observer's thoughts. A miracle is "referred to certain fictive wills or forces postulated by faith, in which it is conceived as a potentiality" (Arbman, 1939, p. 27). Unconsciously, the sense of human agency is projected onto the coincidence, which then becomes understood consciously as the result of a superhuman agency that acts voluntarily. At the same time, the projection involves an object relationship. An event that is interpreted as a miracle always invites a response from its human observer, even when the response consists of nothing more than guilt over a coincidence’s interpretation as a miraculous punishment. The interpretation of coincidences as meaningful is a cross-cultural constant. The interpretation of particular meanings varies, however, with cultural and personal factors. Miracles may be interpreted as divine rewards and punishments, as signs and warnings, as teachings, as opportunities, and so on (Merkur, 1999). For example, the devastating South Asian tsunami of January 2005 was explained by some Indonesian Muslims as punishment for Muslims being materialistic and neglecting their daily prayers, but others for killing Muslims in civil warfare. An Israeli chief rabbi considered the tsunami “an expression of God’s wrath with the world” that owed to needless hatred, lack of charity, and moral failings. Buddhists in Sri Lanka cited an ancient legend that attributed the tsunami to a sea god’s anger with a king’s murder of a Buddhist monk; they were uncertain as to which political leader was to blame in 2005. In other cases, the tsunami was treated as a vicissitude of nature, but individuals’ relations to the event might be interpreted as miraculous. For example, Hindu interpretations of a person’s failure or success to escape a naturally occurring tsunami might be attributed to the workings of karma, the belief that fate is causally determined by actions during previous incarnations (Broadway, 2005). Importantly, even secular, scientific explanations of the tsunami as consequences of laws of nature attribute an intentionality to the event: the lawfulness that we attribute to nature is a projection of rationality, and consequently of intentionality onto the perceptible environment. Starting from the premise that magic is the attempt to influence or control coincidences, Malinowski emphasized the instrumental character of magic. “While in the magical act the underlying idea and aim is always clear, straightforward, and definite, in the religious ceremony there is no purpose directed toward a subsequent event” (p. 38). It was at this point that Malinowski’s argument ran into difficulties. He had provided an excellent account of magic, but its very excellence created a problem. If magic is instrumental, what is left of religion? William James’s (1902) definition of religion asserted that an instrumental component is integral to every religion: “Were one asked to characterize the life of religion in the broadest and most general terms possible, one might say that it consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto” (p. 58). Whether or not “the belief that there is an unseen order” is magical, “the belief...that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto” is decidedly instrumental and, on Malinowski’s definition, magical. Religions everywhere seek favorable coincidences that involve the providence of food, physical health, good weather, and progeny. They also aspire to goals that are purely metaphysical not only post-mortem, but also during this life as the manifest contents of religious experiences. A widely accepted solution to the problem of defining magic and religion was to conclude that “magic and religion, instead of being treated as mutually exclusive entities, must be grouped together as magico-religion or magico-religious phenomena” (Hsu, 1952, p. 4; see also: Vetter, 1973, p. 168). Religion Without MagicBecause there are no criteria by which magic can be shown to differ from religion, all magic may be considered as religious. The question may legitimately be raised, however, whether religion is invariably magical. Is all religion instrumental? Do some or any aspects of religion differ from magic? Ehnmark (1956, p. 2) concluded that once magic is exempted, “there is indeed very little left in the whole history of religion which may be called religion.” This “very little” does exist, however. By defining the term “religion” with extreme narrowness, Soderblom, who was both a comparative religionist and a Lutheran priest, made the claim that magic and religion are ultimately mutually exclusive. The essence of religion is submission and trust. The essence of magic is an audacious self-glorification. Magic knows no bounds to its power; it deems itself able to make rain and to change the course of the heavenly bodies. Religion, in the proper sense, begins when man feels his impotence in the face of a power which fills him with awe and dread. In magic man is the master. In religion the deity is lord. Magic denies and destroys the feelings of devotion and reverence which uplift the soul of man. To this very day, religion comes to life in a person only when the perception of shortcomings and limitations have forced him to his knees before the superhuman, only when he has gained a true dignity by submission to the elemental power of existence, God. Magic is thus in direct opposition to the spirit of religion (Soderblom, 1933, p. 36). Phrasing himself slightly differently, Spitz (1972) similarly pointed to a domain of religion that is exempt from magic. Magical thinking knows nothing of transcendence....Even in the most highly developed magical cults, the basic principle remains the possibility of coercing the godhead. On the other hand, it is a characteristic of the metaphysical transcendental religions that they give up any thought of compulsion, and the godhead is implicitly looked upon as something different, as something higher, something transcendental.... Magical world-philosophy could be defined as that spiritual attitude which, starting out from the premise of an equal-in-rank external world, seeks to influence it by processes that have been achieved in an empirical way (pp. 2-3). Spitz argued that because magic is coercive, it cannot address the transcendent. Spitz’s observation may be better expressed, however, by substituting “instrumental” for “coercive” and interpolating a distinction between relative and radical or absolute transcendence. Instrumental use can always be made whatever is only relatively transcendent, which is to say, immanent or present. Unlike the radically transcendent, which cannot be thought, the immanent is at minimum always thinkable. It may additionally be imaginable or, if incarnate, subject to perceptible actions. When the immanent is conceived impersonally, action upon it tends to be accomplished through thought, or language, or symbolic action, and so forth. When the immanent is instead regarded as a personal being, it is subject to social interaction, whether petition, coercion, or any other manner of interpersonal behavior. None of the many means of acting upon the immanent is effective with the radically transcendent. The radically transcendent cannot be thought, imaged, sensed, spoken, or acted on, and so is intrinsically and necessarily beyond influence. When coincidental events are attributed to the radically transcendent, they are regarded as acts of grace--uncontrolled, unearned, and in a strict sense, uninfluenced. Spitz’s effort to equate religion with the radically transcendent is not feasible, however. Very little of religion pertains to the radically transcendent. Most of most religions is magical. On the other hand, magic is symptomatic of conflicted religiosity. Immanence is a compromise formation that manifests a conflicted attitude toward the radically transcendent. Unlike prayer, which expresses the wish for miracles, magic ignores the constraints of reality testing and presumes to produce miracles on demand. Magic treats miracles as though coincidences were subject to human agency. In so doing, magic alters the object relationship that is projected when a coincidence is experienced as a miracle. Magic is concerned with actions and effects that can be controlled by human agency. When magic is not mechanical but is instead attributed to the mediation of a superhuman agency, the agency is nevertheless treated, in Winnicott’s (1960, 1963) phrase, as a “subjectively perceived object” and not as an “objective object.” There is “object-relating” but not “object usage” (Winnicott, 1967). In Buber’s (1917 [1958]) terms, we might say that the superhuman agency is regarded as an impersonal It; it is not encountered as a person or Thou. Because magical actions are intrinsically powerful, anxiety is always present, at minimum, in the care that must be exercised to perform magic accurately. Magic must be used with caution; errors in its use can be dangerous. The anxiety may be conscious or it may be subject to a counter-phobic reaction-formation. In either event, the anxiety displaces unconscious concern over the quality of the object-relationship. The narcissism of magic produces a guilty conscience which, repressed, is displaced as anxiety (compare: Symington, 1993). It is not religion, as Soderblom and Spitz claimed, but only wholesome religiosity that is mutually exclusive with magic. Rituals Magical and TheatricalFreud’s (1907, p.127; 1913, pp. 26, 73; 1927, p. 43) analogy of religious ritual to neurotic compulsiveness gains new coherence in this context. Freud originally speculated that religious rituals are displacements of social instincts, whereas neurotic rituals are symptoms of repressed sexuality (Freud, 1907, p. 25; 1913, pp. 73-74; 1915, pp. 281-82; Reik, 1931, pp. 16-17). When Freud (1921) abandoned his theory of social instincts, he claimed that religious rituals are symptoms of inherited memories of the primal crime, the prehistoric murder of the father of the totemic horde; but the psychoanalytic consensus has always rejected Freud’s belief in a Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characteristics. As a result, Freud’s theory of religious rituals has remained incomplete (Merkur, 1991). Several alternative theories have been proposed. Devereux (1961) and Spiro (1967) collapsed the distinction between religious and neurotic rituals by suggesting that religious rites are neurotic symptoms that happen to be culturally acceptable. Other proposals diagnosed religious ritual as healthy. Winnicott (1953, 1971) likened religious ritual to play. Erikson (1966, p. 602) invoked ethologists’ concept of ritualization, which concerns “certain phylogenetically performed ceremonial acts in the so-called social animals”; Gay (1979) suggested that ritualization is a means for creating ego structures. The variety of psychoanalytic theories of ritual reflects an enlarged awareness of the phenomenology of ritual. Where older definitions of ritual typically referred to repeated, sacred, formalized, traditional and intentional (meaningful) actions, ritual studies today address both secular and religious phenomena (Grimes, 1982). Grimes's (1985) typology of ritual includes rites of passage, marriage rites, funerary rites, festivals, pilgrimages, purifications, rituals of exchange, sacrifices, worship, magic, healing rites, meditation rites, rites of inversion, and ritual drama. Grimes also included interaction rites, which include animal ritualization, habits, and secular rituals; and civil ceremonies, such as royal rites, enthronement, legal ceremony, and warfare. Several scholars have perceived a duality in the manifest content of rituals. Eliade (1954; 1959) suggested that the sacred symbols of rituals portray cosmos, “order,” and so banish the chaos of secularism. Turner (1969) contrasted structure with liminality, while Duerr (1985) expressed the distinction as a contrast of culture and wilderness. Smith interpreted the duality as a contrast of the ideal and the real. He maintained that it is the nature of religious ritual to represent ideal circumstances. "Ritual is a means of performing the way things ought to be in conscious tension to the way things are in such a way that this ritualized perfection is recollected in the ordinary, uncontrolled, course of things" (Smith, 1980, p. 125). Rituals enact how things ought to be. They provide guidelines, role models, and object lessons. I have elsewhere referred to a distinction between culture and nature or, more precisely, between the idea of culture and the idea of nature (Merkur, 1992). Chaos, liminality, and wilderness, so it seems to me, are ways of referring to nature without acknowledging nature's orderly and lawful character. Ritual imposes the idea of culture on the idea of nature as chaos, as a means to perceive an order and lawfulness that has not been perceived but is always really there. The idea of chaos is not derived from the external reality of nature, but is instead based on the internal reality of the unconscious. Both nature and the repressed are outside the subjective sense of self; and unlike nature, the repressed is inherently conflicted, disturbing, and incoherent. Rituals represent reality as a chaos when reality functions as a symbol for intrapsychic conflict. Seen from this perspective, rituals are attempts not to impose order on a chaotic universe, but to master the fear of inner chaos while adapting to the orderliness of reality. The ideal that ritual dramatizes is no other than the perceived orderliness of the real. The real is perceived as ideal when and because the sacred is split from the profane. If the whole of culture is play (Huizinga, 1950; Winnicott, 1953), the circumstance appears quite otherwise when it is seen from a perspective within a culture. To the understanding of culture members, some of the culture seems self-evidently to be play, but other parts have the quality of reality. How are we to conceptualize the aspects of culture that seem subjectively to be real? If cultural phenomena are play, their seeming reality must owe to a reification of the play of culture--a fallacy of misplaced concreteness (Whitehead, 1925). Reification fixates culture, whereas playfulness is comparatively uninhibited, creative, and wholesome. The therapeutic ambition, for the individual and for culture in general, then becomes obvious. As Winnicott (1971) remarked: Psychotherapy takes place in the overlap of two areas of playing, that of the patient and that of the therapist. Psychotherapy has to do with two people playing together. The corollary of this is that where playing is not possible then the work done by the therapist is directed towards bringing the patient from a state of not being able to play into a state of being able to play (p. 44). It is clinically significant to distinguish religious rituals whose symbols are concretized from religious rituals that are subjectively experienced as playful. Consider, for example, the rites of Christmas. The holiday celebrates the incarnation of God, which in Christian doctrine is the condition under which salvation is possible in the cosmos. The treatment of the holiday as the birthday of baby Jesus replaces the celebration of salvation with a celebration of the savior. It also fixates and limits the general concept or phenomenon of salvation to the finite mortal frame of a particular baby. The performance of obligatory rites in church similarly misses the underlying themes of joy, wonderment, and gratitude for deliverance. The spirit of Christmas is more readily available, by contrast, in several customs that have a greater measure of playfulness. For children, the receipt of gifts encourages a mood--among others--that is appropriate theologically for the gift of salvation. And a series of popular entertainments, from Dickens’ A Christmas Carol through such films as Miracle on Thirty-Fourth Street and It’s a Wonderful Life, continue to charm because they preach salvation without the narcissistic ponderousness of magic. One need not subscribe to Christian theology, nor dwell cynically on the commercial exploitation of the holiday, in order to appreciate the vast difference between magic and play in the rites of Christmas, in terms of anxiety, fixation, and genuine celebration. A Bargain with FateLet us next consider the transference implications of magic and play in religion. Freud (1913) introduced the concept of “the omnipotence of thoughts” in order to account for the psychology of magic. A general overvaluation has thus come about of all mental processes--an attitude towards the world, that is, which, in view of our knowledge of the relation between reality and thought, cannot fail to strike us as an overvaluation of the latter. Things become less important than the ideas of things: whatever is done to the latter will inevitably also occur to the former. Relations which hold between the ideas of things are assumed to hold equally between the things themselves....This attitude may plausibly be brought into relation with narcissism and regarded as an essential component of it. It may be said that in primitive men the process of thinking is still to a great extent sexualized. This is the origin of their belief in the omnipotence of thoughts, their unshakable confidence in the possibility of controlling the world [through magic] and their inaccessibility to the experiences, so easily obtainable, which could teach them man's true position in the universe (Freud, 1913, pp. 85, 89), Freud (1914) attributed newborn infants with “primary narcissism,” of which both the ego ideal and all later forms of narcissism are persisting residues. Ferenczi (1913) speculated about a series of developmental stages by which “omnipotence of thought” gradually develops into the “sense of reality” upon the resolution of the Oedipus complex around age five and a half (see also Róheim, 1930, 1955; Bergler, 1945). The details of Ferenczi’s typology of omnipotence were intended to co-ordinate with Freud’s theories of libidinal development as they stood in 1913 and would require considerable revision in light of current views of early childhood development. What remains valuable in Ferenczi’s proposal is his co-ordination of Freud’s theory of magical omnipotence with Freud’s distinction between the pleasure ego and the reality ego. Freud wrote of “the omnipotence of thought” in order to conceptualize magic as a pathological regression; Ferenczi asserted that the underlying fantasies are developmentally appropriate for young children. Róheim (1943-44) traced magical omnipotence to the child’s early relationship with mother. Infant and mother form a unity, the mother for the infant means the world at large. Happiness or unhappiness, satisfaction and anxiety depend in this world on the behavior of the mother. But the infant does not perceive this causation. It feels well when it is in possession of the mother and therefore to be good (or well) means to be in harmony with the world at large. Thus the belief that by being "good" we can influence the world at large is a survival of the infantile phase of magical omnipotence (p. 118; Róheim’s italics). Paris (1991), a psychoanalytic literary critic, aptly expressed the conscious experience of magical omnipotence in his concept of a “bargain with fate.” [Bargains with fate] are those in which we believe that we can control fate by living up to its presumed dictates not after it grants our wishes but before. If we think, feel, and behave as we are supposed to, we will receive our just deserts, whatever we may think they are. Fate is often conceived of as God, of course, and its dictates as His will; but our bargain can be with other people, with ourselves, with impersonal forces, with what we take to be the structure of the universe....the terms of the bargain are often not really determined by external forces but by the dictates of our predominant defensive strategy. Bargaining is a magical process in which conformity to the impossibly lofty demands of our neurotic solution (which Horney calls "a private religion") will enable us to attain our impossibly lofty goals (p. 2). Where discussions of magic and omnipotence of thought express the perspective of a solitary psyche, or one-person psychology, speaking of a bargain with fate is to use language that implies the two-person psychology of an object relationship. Referring to a bargain with fate also maintains the discussion at the phenomenological level of conscious religious experience; the unconscious psychodynamics have been formulated variously, for example, as “the moral defense” by Fairbairn (1952), “the basic neurosis” by Bergler (1949, 1959), and “narcissism” by Symington (1993). Paris (1991, p. 2) drew on the terminology of ego psychology when he suggested that “the terms of the bargain” often reflect “our predominant defensive strategy.” Now that the concept of “defense mechanisms” is giving way to the idea of “schemas” (Slap & Slap-Shelton, 1991) and “procedural memories” (Fonagy et al., 2002), it may be more useful to summarize that bargains with fate are modes of object relation in which the divine functions as a “transferential figure” (Arlow, in Grossman, 1993, p. 760). Bargains with fate depend on adjustments to the god’s desires, whatever the desires may be--ethical, unethical, reasonable, bizarre, and so forth. Consider, for example, the paradigmatic discussion of the concept of the sacred in the Hebrew Bible. The narrative in the sixteenth chapter of the Book of Numbers has nothing whatever to do with ethical concerns. The Priestly author tells us that the Levite Korah led a rebellion against Moses and Aaron, saying: "You have gone too far! All of the congregation are sacred, everyone of them, and Yahweh is among them. So why then do you exalt yourselves above the assembly of Yahweh?" (16:3). Moses consequently proposed a contest: "In the morning Yahweh will make known who is his, and who is sacred, and who will be allowed to approach him; the one whom he will choose he will allow to approach him." (16:5) So, next day, Aaron and Korah both prepared their censers, lit fires in them, laid incense on them, and stood at the entrance of the tent of meeting. When Korah assembled all of the Israelites assembled, Yahweh made his will known. The glory of Yahweh appeared to the whole congregation. And Yahweh spoke to Moses and to Aaron, saying: Separate yourselves from this congregation, so that I may consume them in a moment. They fell on their faces, and said, "O God, the God of the spirits of all flesh, shall one person sin and you become angry with the whole congregation?" (16:19b-22) A religious experience that was shared by the entire congregation validated Aaron’s designation as sacred. In response to the intercession of Moses and Aaron, Yahweh forgave the Israelites as a community. However, Korah’s party was singled out for punishment, implicitly because their offering of incense was not only not efficacious, but was no less than a desecration. And fire came out from Yahweh and consumed the two hundred fifty men offering the incense. (16:35) Yahweh tells Moses to command Eleazar, son of Aaron, to confiscate the two hundred and fifty censers that had been used by the dead Korahites (17:1-5 [Masoretic Text] = 16:36-40 [Septuagint]). The censers become "a reminder to the Israelites that no outsider, who is not of the descendants of Aaron, shall approach to offer incense before Yahweh, so as not to become like Korah and his company" (17:5). This story tells us that even though all Israel is sacred, and all Levites are sacred, only Moses, Aaron, and Aaron's descendants are sufficiently sacred to intercede with Yahweh on behalf of Israel. Korah performs a priestly rite at the cost of his own life; but Yahweh listens to the prayers of Moses and Aaron, who have prayed that Yahweh forgive the community. The sequel to the story of Korah adds a further detail to the biblical concept of sacrality. In this narrative, the Priestly author illustrates the circumstance when a general punishment of the population has already begun, so that it is too late for priests to make offerings and prayers in order to prevent it. 17:6 MT[=16:41 LXX] On the morrow all the congregation of the Children of Israel murmured against Moses and against Aaron, saying, "You have killed the people of Yahweh." 7When the congregation had assembled against Moses and against Aaron, they turned toward the tent of meeting; and behold, the cloud covered it, and the Glory of Yahweh appeared. 8Moses and Aaron came to the front of the tent of meeting, 9and Yahweh spoke to Moses, saying, 10"Get away from the midst of this congregation, that I may consume them in a moment." They fell on their faces. 11And Moses said to Aaron, "Take your censer, and put fire in it from off the altar, and lay incense on it, and carry it quickly to the congregation, and make atonement for them; for Wrath has gone forth from before Yahweh. The plague has begun." 12So Aaron took as Moses said, and ran into the midst of the assembly; and behold, the plague had already begun among the people. He put on the incense and made atonement for the people. 13He stood between the dead and the living, and the plague was stopped. 14Now those who died by the plague were fourteen thousand seven hundred, besides those who died in the affair of Korah. 15Aaron returned to Moses at the entrance of the tent of meeting, when the plague was stopped. Once again, the mass occurrence of religious experiences validates the social status of the sacred, and desecration is followed by punishment. In verse 11, Moses says that "Wrath has gone forth from before Yahweh. The plague has begun." We are apparently to understand that Yahweh's wrath either causes or turns into plague. We are also to understand that once it has "gone forth from before Yahweh," there is no point in appealing to Yahweh. It is no longer a topic for religious experience. The wrath has become an autonomous or independent thing, with a process of its own, and it has to be addressed in a manner that is independent of the sacrifices and prayers devoted to Yahweh. In this case, burning incense works magically to create a barrier that the plague cannot cross. Possibly we are to understand that the sacrifice of incense calms Yahweh's wrath whenever the wrath encounters it. These narratives in the Book of Numbers, which were presumably invented by the Priestly author, illustrate the theory of sacrality at the Temple of Solomon, perhaps as early as the reign of Hezekiah in the late eighth century. The Priestly concept of sacrality was the central premise of the sacrificial cult. Both the priests and the people who brought or paid for sacrifices entered Yahweh’s presence by virtue of eating a portion of the sacrifices. They were sacred, as he was sacred (Neusner, 1983, pp. 12, 51-52). The criterion of sacrality pertained to the banquet to which Yahweh was invited. It was a question of etiquette, not ethics. The meat, cereal, and incense offerings that were to be provided for Yahweh had to be items that he enjoyed. Yahweh’s personal preferences, his likes and dislikes, required that each item be pure and clean. The offerings had to be prepared from the correct species. They had to be prepared correctly, and the people who entered Yahweh’s presence had to meet Yahweh’s standards of purity. If, in a late stage of Israel’s development, ethical standards were added to the list of requirements, it was because Yahweh took offense at certain behaviors, not because they were intrinsically cruel, unfair, or evil. Priestly sacrality had no problem with misogyny, homophobia, racism, militarism, and other deviations from the equally biblical standards of justice, reciprocity, charity, and clemency. In the priestly conception, God is so intense a power, so purely himself, that he is dangerous to approach. Only the person who is extremely pure, that is, who is ritually clean and holy, can come near God without risk of offending him. Anyone who is at all sinful will instead trigger Yahweh’s anger and have all his sins punished immediately and severely. These ideas were responsible for the biblical description of God as a jealous god and a devouring fire. The truly pure or holy person is like a lesser fire, that can endure the presence of God; but the impure person, the sinner, contains what may be likened to fuel, that will burst into flames immediately that it encounters God. In psychoanalytic terms, we might say that God was imagined as a narcissist, easily provoked to narcissistic rage, who could be approached safely only by individuals who were acceptable as his subjectively perceived objects. The biblical narrative in Numbers 16 illustrates my contention that a bargain with fate is always made with a discrete “transferential figure.” The figure may be de-personified, as luck, fate, karma, and so forth. The result remains an object relationship--a bargain--with a transferential figure whose personhood is disavowed, repressed, or otherwise excluded from consciousness. Animistic and theistic belief systems acknowledge the object relationship consciously, but a relationship is implicit in even the most impersonal and mechanistic conceptions of fate. Like ego ideals (Pruyser, 1974; Britton, 1998), fate is always treated as though it were a person. It may be trusted, embraced, hated, rejected, and so forth. In Numbers 16, Yahweh is portrayed as a narcissistic personality whom Israelites felt obliged to accommodate. The portrait illustrates the tremendous anxiety that surrounds bargains with fate. A bargain may be either kept or broken, and the fear of failing to meet one’s obligations is a frequent part of magico-religious experience. The anxiety pertains not only to the consequence of breaking the bargain but also to the risk of inadvertently failing, despite one’s best efforts, to meet one’s obligations under the terms of the bargain. The bargain with fate involves an identification with God as an enticing object (Fairbairn, 1952), resulting in magical omnipotence, in reaction-formation against anxiety over God as a rejecting figure. In keeping with the narcissism of the bargain with fate, it constructs God, in Winnicott’s (1960, 1963) terms, as a “subjectively perceived object.” Resolution of the bargain leads to a relation with God as an “objectively perceived object.” To move beyond a bargain with fate into an orientation to religion that places faith exclusively in grace requires moving beyond the projections that construct the divine as a transferential figure. Adam Phillips (lecture in Toronto, 2002) suggests that the “desire for nothing,” that is, for the God of whom nothing can be known, is not only a theological move but also a maturational step in human development. It is tied to the resolution of the Oedipus complex, with its abandonment of incestuous desire for a known person (the parent of the opposite sex) in favor of desire for the unknown, future spouse. The inability to resolve incestuous desire regularly has its roots in a failure to outgrow the mother-infant dyad in the toddler years. In the absence of “libidinal object constancy” (Mahler with Furer, 1968; Lax et al., 1986) and the formation of an ego ideal (Nunberg, 1955; Jacobson, 1964), the Oedipus complex cannot be resolved, the bargain with fate cannot be abandoned, and God must remain a morbid transferential figure. Failing to individuate from the mother, a person imagines a God from whom individuation is similarly impossible. A participant in the bargain with fate, God is unconsciously imagined to be constrained by the bargain to be predictable. God is then incapable of acting freely—is unconsciously imagined not as a master of fate, but as subject to it. A religious person must individuate and embrace his or her own sense of agency before a comparable individuation—and a capacity to act in grace—can be attributed to God. Concluding ReflectionsInterpreting magical religiosity in terms of the transference onto God will provoke resistance in many or most religious devotées. Addressing the transference and the resistance is the analytic task. A bargain with fate transfers onto God the same characterological issues that manifest in relation to a therapist in the transference-countertransference matrix (Maroda, 2004); and even an atheistic orientation to fate can be conceptualized in parallel with narcissistic characterology, as a type of relationship (Mitchell, 1988, pp. 179-203) that proceeds by unconsciously denying and refusing to mentalize the unconsciously known objectivity of the object. When a client reports a magical religiosity to me, my immediate or eventual responses will aim to identify the anxiety that prevents the bargain with fate from turning into a sense of creative agency. 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