By: Lizette Kingwergs (psychologist)/ summarized text by Dr. Carlos Domínguez Morano

“We do not have other place from where to get closer to God and that He writes our own biography (Dominguez, C)”.

1. Infantile Religiosity: Child’s God

Within religiosity it is possible to displace infantile feelings of almightiness, underestimating the external conditions of reality (men that wish to conquer all limitations of life reality). It can be a fertile ground for certain neurotic structures.

“Religion can be used to protect oneself against anguish, as a magic clue to solve every mystery, as an immunity guaranty before the eventualities of existence”. “A religious experience that does not refer to reality may be reduced to pure ideology, an obsessive ritualism or a mere moral support”.

For example: when conflicts of personal reality or external reality are ignored, those facts that we have preferred to ignore, unfold. For example when there is aggressiveness because of low tolerance, a cruel and intolerant religion is developed towards those who does not recognize it. Religion is even used to justify destructive purposes.

Child’s God

• Edified according to the wishes and fears of our childhood.

• A “magic- Providence” A God that is there to reward and make us easier a hard life. A world where wishes frustration does not exist.

• He is a “good chest” almighty and omnipresent that magically responds to wishes.

• He is a jealous God regarding the sexuality area. He is more worried about these things than others like injustice, hypocrisy, greed, deceit or legalist and oppressing religion.

• He is a God of prohibitions, threats, punishments, constant surveillance of our acts and intentions.

a) The God of the double in the mirror:

• God is conceived as a continuation of our narcissism. God is confused with the own self.

• “The other” does not exist yet. There is no chance of encounter or link with the real.

• God does not exist either, since He has been reduced to a mirror image (to an inflated projection of the own self).

• Alterity becomes a deep threat. The others, as free, different and non-manipulable entities become very dangerous objects. In the attempt to erase and eliminate the threat that the other supposedly represents for him, violence appears (destruction of what is different).

• He is concentrated in the order of the idea, the belief and the dogma.

• Here we can find the fundamentalist and the religious fan.


b) The God of the imaginary Mother:

• The relationship with God hopes to eliminate our condition of separate human beings, because it is the only way that allows an authentical encounter with alterity.

• It is necessary an uninterrupted presence, a permanence of the fusional joy.
• Incapacity to assume the absence of the other (The inevitable distance that constitutes us as subjects).

• It prevents from awakening to reality, always unsettled, where distance and separation turn out to be intolerable.

• It concentrates in the affective experience, communication and love.

• It expects to relate with a God of pleasure (as in a sense of permanent pleasure).

• An example would be a pseudomystic and illuminated.

c) The God of Law and sacrifice:

• Anchored is the ambivalence of love- hate before the paternal.

• It constitutes a God that opposes to him, in front of whom, he creates a relation of permanent rebellion or destructing submission.

• Permanent affective ambivalence before God (you or me).

• The main point of his religious link is the law, obedience, rule, moral. A sacralized law that substitutes God Himself Who looses his mediator nature.

• His violence is displaced and hidden under a sacrifice ritual (destroys hate against the other and turns it towards himself in the form of guilt).

• Exaggeration and sacralization of pain. The prayer of purposes, guiltiness and permanent insatisfaction with oneself.

2. Mature religiosity: the God of Jesus

Having a mature religiosity or having the God of Jesus, means having the God that refers us to reality, with all the hard moments of our existence and, instead of solving problems, prefers to dynamize us so that we work trying to find the solution.

It comes with a life and salvation message and, in some way, to help us stop worrying in a distressed search of personal redemption, inviting us to a common transformation project of this world into a Kingdom that is worthy of God and worthy of man. He is not a God of power. He is not a God that frightens, looking for reverence or admiration.

He is the God of love: It is the love that chooses the weak, the oppressed and marginalized, socially and emotionally, not only the poor but also the poor in spirit. The love that does not avoid conflict, that faces things, that denounces, accuses and attacks those who are source of oppression, hypocrisy, hate and marginalization. A love that demands and compels.

The true mystic experience

• It does not destroy the personal identity (stabilizes, supports, enriches that identity). It is conscious that his own self does not disappear.

• It refers to the past to establish new ways to come back to a wider, clarified and enriched present.

• He knows he is obliged to carry out an important activity with his body and his mind to let in the presence of the longed for God.

• The mystic does not love the love; it loves the other whom he considers the love.

The mystic generally lives a creative experience, both, developing an important social and historic repercussion activity, and a literary creation.

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