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The International Journal for
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The Psychology of Religion in
Italy
Mario Aletti
Published online: 16 Nov 2009.
To cite this article: Mario Aletti (1992) The Psychology of Religion in Italy, The
International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 2:3, 171-189, DOI: 10.1207/
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THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION, 2(3), 171-189
Copyright O 1992, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
PERSPECTIVE
The Psychology of Religion in Italy
Mario Aletti
Theology Faculty of Northern Italy-Milan
Although the psychology of religion appeared relatively early in the history of
psychology in Italy, it remained only a marginal academic concern for many
years owing to suspicion and disagreement between Catholic religious institutions on the one hand and academics, psychologists, and practicing psychoanalysts on the other. It emerged as an independent discipline in ecclesiastical
universities in the 1960s and has since produced a substantial corpus of empirical research on Catholic religious behavior as well as numerous theoretical
studies, mainly reassessments of Freud's view of religion. The psychology of
religion is still relatively unimportant in state universities in Italy, but numerous conferences and publications on a range of epistemological, methodological, and empirical research topics testify to a steady growth of interest in the
subject.
Although regarded as only marginally relevant to mainstream academic and
social concerns, the psychology of religion as a discipline appeared relatively early in the history of psychology in Italy. The earliest publications
date from the start of the century, but until the 1960s at least, research and
study papers appearad only sporadically and were of uneven and often negligible scientific value.
The idea that the psychology of religion should be regarded as an academic discipline in its own right met with considerable opposition and suspicion. On the one hand, many academics and intellectuals avoided the
subject entirely, regarding religion as a cultural remnant of the superstitions
Requests for reprints should be sent to Mario Aletti, Viale XXV Aprile, 46, 21 100 Varese,
Italy.
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of the past rather than as a valid expression of the human psyche. On the
other hand, Italy's religious institutions and community-almost exclusively Catholic in a country whose capital, Rome, is also the seat of the
Holy See-were often equally suspicious, fearing that an essentially "atheist" discipline like psychology would tend to be dismissive of religion in
general and would show scant respect for more specifically religious concepts like the "sacred" and transcendence.
The first scientific study of the psychology of religion in Italy, devoted to
religious conversion, was published by Sante De Sanctis (1924), director of
the Experimental Psychology Institute in Rome. He made full use of Flournoy's methodological principles (which exclude transcendence to establish a
biological interpretation of religion) in an explicit attempt to make his
study as objective and scientific as possible. Indeed, De Sanctis stated that
conversion, whether instantaneous or gradual, is always a mental process
and, as such, is an appropriate subject for psychological enquiry.
The opposite pole of this controversy was represented by the Franciscan
friar Father Agostino Gemelli (1878-1959) speaking, as so often, on behalf
of mainstream Catholic culture in Italy. His basic view (1913) was that psychology should limit itself to studying the psychic mechanisms of religion,
although he resisted the exclusion of transcendence on principle because
this would encourage explanations of religion based on immanence, which
would, in turn, exclude the study of extrahuman factors such as the operation of divine grace (Gemelli, 1924). Gemelli (1936) eventually concluded
that the empirical methods used in the study of all other types of human
behavior could not be applied to religion.
It is important to remember that psychoanalysis has had a long and
troubled history in Italy (see David, 1991) and that its relations with the
Catholic church have been stormy. Psychoanalysis has made headway in Italy only over the past 20 years, and the Catholic church's suspicion of it has
been made plain on numerous occasions (see Aletti, 1977). Yet this conflict
has usually been the outcome of institutional hostility and rivalry, rather
than of any recognized need for open debate and discussion. Starting in the
1960s, a gradual move by some Catholic psychiatrists and psychologists towards psychoanalysis, their joint membership in international organizations in which real dialogue has long been taken for granted, and greater
mutual tolerance on the part of religious psychoanalytical establishments
have done much to reduce suspicion and remove barriers.
Leonardo Ancona, a disciple of Gemelli and his successor as head of the
Institute of Psychology at the Catholic University of Milan, now a professor of clinical psychiatry at the Catholic University of Rome and a member
of the Italian Psychoanalytical Society (SPI), has been instrumental in establishing closer links between psychoanalysis and religious institutions.
Active (together with Father Gemelli) in European organizations of Catholic psychologists (Ancona, 1991b), especially in the Association Internatio-
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PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION IN ITALY
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nale dY8tudesMCdico-Psychologiques et RCligieuses of which he was
president, Ancona has recently promoted a special Psychology and Religion Division within the Italian Psychological Society (SIPS), which has
provided a forum for most of Italy's specialists in the psychology of religion since its founding in 1987.
Ancona (1961; see also Mailloux & Ancona, 1958) has used the models
and clinical instruments of psychoanalysis to describe four levels of religious behavior corresponding to the oral, anal, phallic, and genital stages
of personality development. In later studies (Ancona, 1983, 1990), he proposed a psychoanalytic reading of religious institutions and their mechanisms. Concerning the religious experience of individuals, Ancona (1986b)
has advanced a new concept of surlimation to replace the older one of sublimation, and he suggests that external energy may be able to open up the
unconscious mind to spiritual experience. This development should be seen
in the light of Ancona's highly personal approach, which, in a number of
recent studies (Ancona, 1986a, 1986b, 1991b), has been openly at variance
with approaches generally regarded as standard in the psychology of religion. Ancona is especially interested in the interface between religious experience and the unconscious mind, an interest that has led him to suggest
that psychologists in possession of a religious faith are endowed with an
"extra eye," a new cognitive awareness that saves them from the reductionism that can mar the work of nonbelievers. In this view, which to some has
seemed injustifiably fideistic (i.e., more based on faith than on science; see
Fossi, 1990), various forms of atheism are seen as neurotic in origin.
REVIEW OF RESEARCH: 1960 TO 1990
Scientific research into the psychology of religion came to prominence only
in the early 1960s. In spite of the detailed scholarship of their authors, the
first general surveys of the psychology of religion published in Italian
(Grasso, 1960, followed by Lorenzini, 1962, and Milanesi, 1966a) were able
to cite only a tiny number of Italian publications, and they refer throughout, almost exclusively, to non-Italian authors.
Important publishing developments testified to increasing academic, cultural, and ecclesiastical interest in the 1960s. This is most notable in the
1967 publication of the Italian translation of Vergote's Psychologie Religieuse,' a fundamental work that had appeared in 1966 in French. This and
other publications of Vergote became a driving force behind the development of the psychology of religion as an academic discipline in Italy. A
'An English translation, The Religious Man, was also published in 1969 by Gill and Macmillan, Dublin.
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number of Italian academics studied under him, and many more became
disciples after reading his books.
In the meantime, Father Roberto Zavalloni's Psicologia Pastorale [Pastoral Psychology] had appeared in 1965. Intended mainly for religious and
sacerdotal training institutions, this wide-ranging, well-documented survey
examined religious experience in the context of related disciplines like psychology, psychopedagogy, psychopathology, and psychosociology. As in
later publications, Zavalloni (1981, 1987) took a humanistic view of psychology and saw religious experience as an integral part of the human personality. His book also indicated a new openness within the Catholic
church itself and represented a real effort to make psychology an essential
part of a priest's training. Zavalloni's recognition that psychology is important in the selection, training, and mental health of priests and religious
professionals led, not surprisingly, to a wave of publications in a country so
rich in vocations as Italy was until twenty years ago (Aletti & Mologni,
1987; Filippi, 1972, 1973; Gemelli, 1957; Giordani, 1964; Riva, 1969; Stickler, 1987).
Luigi M. Rulla and his colleagues at the Institute of Psychology of the
Gregorian University in Rome have made some of the most detailed and
significant studies of vocations. Their studies of the psychodynamics of entry, perseverance, and effectiveness in the vocations of priests and religious
professionals (Rulla, 1971; Rulla & Maddi, 1972; Rulla, Ridick, & Imoda,
1976) are based on earlier formulations of a Christian anthropology in
which theological and philosophical approaches converge and interact with
psychology and the Christianity-based human sciences in general. In this
perspective, the priestly vocation is seen as the expression of a more universal Christian vocation in which the limitations and possibilities of human
nature, the calling to self-transcendence through God, and the operation of
divine grace intermingle and combine (Rulla, 1985; Rulla, Imoda, & Ridick, 1986).
Another highly influential publication was Giorgio Zunini's Homo Religiosus (1966).2Zunini was one of Gemelli's closest colleagues and head of
the Institute of Psychology at the Catholic University of Milan. Zunini exposed with considerable acuteness and exemplary scholarly detachment the
reductionist tendencies implied by many previous psychological interpretations of religious experience. He criticized the tendency, for example, to
concentrate on emotional rather than on rational and intellectual content
or to see religion exclusively either in terms of biological or utilitarian functions, as the outcome of determinism in the individual or collective unconscious, or in terms of the influence of social factors. Adopting what was
essentially G. W. Allport's (1950) theory of personality, Zunini reasserted
2Published in English in 1969 as Man and His Religion: Aspects of Religious Psychology
by Geoffrey Chapman Ltd., London.
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the uniqueness of religious experience as a universal experience that shapes
individual and collective consciousness throughout history, while he recognized its wide variety of origins, content, and expression as culturally
determined.
The most important event of this period was undoubtedly the introduction of the first university course in the psychology of religion at the Pontificio Ateneo Salesiano (Salesian Pontifical University) in Rome. The course
director, Professor Pier Giovanni Grasso, was interested in both the psychology and sociology of religion, and his publications had been as concerned with the theory and epistemology of religion (Grasso, 1958, 1963) as
with empirical research in the field (1954). Grasso was succeeded at the Salesian University in 1965 by his pupil Giancarlo Milanesi, who has been
more instrumental than any other scholar in establishing the psychology of
religion as a university discipline in Italy. He has made significant contributions in at least three major ways: (a) through his definition of the epistemological scope of the discipline, (b) through the quality of his empirical
research, and (c) through his commitment to teaching, from which countless pupils have benefited (some now being lecturers in the psychology of
religion). Basing his approach on critical and historical assessments of the
works of philosophers, phenomenologists, psychologists, and sociologists
who have concerned themselves with religion, Milanesi delineated an epistemological field able to accommodate the special requirements of the psychology of religion (Milanesi, 1966b).
Milanesi's many research publications have been notable for their methodological rigor, detailed documentation, and topical interest. They range
from studies of magical thinking in the religious behavior of preadolescents, which studies have entered the international cross-cultural debate on
the subject (Milanesi, 1967a), through links between shortcomings in religious education and religious doubt in adolescents (Milanesi, 1965), to the
social conscience, moral values, and ideals of young Italians (Milanesi,
1968; Milanesi & Fiori, 1967). His studies of the religion of young people
have dealt with atheism, the difficulties of faith in a secularized society, the
strains of openly belonging to the Catholic church, and their expectations
from religious teaching (Milanesi, 1967b, 197la, 1971b, 1972). With his
enormous scholarship and detailed knowledge of the international literature (as summarized in two critical reviews, 1966a, 1981a), Milanesi has
been an active member of many international organizations, and he has
been instrumental in broadening the hitherto narrowly Italian outlook on
the psychology of religion in Italy.
Milanesi's work as a scholar culminated in the publication of a collection of research papers (1970a) and two major books, Psicologia della Religione [The Psychology of Religion] (Milanesi & Aletti, 1973) and
Sociologia Religiosa [The Sociology of Religion] (Milanesi, 1970b). These
are both widely reprinted and translated and have become essential reading
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for all students and scholars. Psicologia della Religione is in two parts, the
first being a critical survey of the theories of psychologists who have concerned themselves with religion: James, Allport, Freud, Jung, and Fromm.
The second consists of a description of religious attitudes in childhood and
adolescence based on the most significant international research in this
field; this description is complemented by chapters on the epistemological
and methodological assumptions of the psychology of religion and a discussion of religious maturity. Sociologia Religiosa marked a shift in Milanesi's academic interests, and he subsequently devoted himself almost
exclusively to sociology, in which his interests range from general sociology
to the sociology of the family, religion, education, and deviant behavior.
Milanesi's multidisciplinary scholarship has recently been channeled into a
major national survey of religion and young people that raises many questions of interest to the psychosociology of religion (Milanesi, 1981b).
Since 1973, the prestigious chair at the Salesian University in Rome has
been held first (at the special invitation of the university) by Professor AndrC Godin, the Belgian Jesuit and leading European authority on the psychology of religion, then by Albino Ronco, and finally by the present incumbent, Eugenio Fizzotti, a former pupil and then the main disciple in
Italy of Viktor E. Frankl (see Fizzotti, 1974). Taking Der Unbewusste Gott
[The Unconscious God] (Frankl, 1973) as his fundamental text, Fizzotti
(1987, 1990) saw religion in terms of the values and meanings towards
which human existence naturally tends. As "an experience of fragmentariness and relativity against the unchanging backdrop of the absoluteyy(Fizzotti, 1987, p. 617), religion seems to give a satisfactory answer to the
modern person's existential crisis in its appeal to self-transcendence. Fizzotti (1991) also offered interpretations of new religious groups and movements that may provide answers to today's need for gratification,
self-realization, and self-discovery, with all the ambivalence such a functional use of religion inevitably implies.
The faculty of Educational Sciences at the Salesian University and its international review, Orientamenti Pedagogici [Educational Orientations],
have played and continue to play a key role in research in the psychology of
religion. One recurring feature of this review is its articles on ideas of God
(Sarti, 1968, 1970). Comparisons of the spontaneous concepts, images, and
attitudes related to or inspired by God in Italian preadolescents with those
of young people from other cultures and religious persuasions (Braido &
Sarti, 1967) have drawn attention to the influence of culture and religious
education on the forms of religious belief. It has been found that religious
inculturation of this sort persists even when late adolescents begin to distance themselves from institutionalised religion (Sarti, 1964, 1979a, 1979b).
By using Likert scales and semantic differential, factor, and item analyses,
Ronco and Vincenti (1980) have found a positive correlation between the
structuring and development of spontaneous religious behavior in adoles-
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cents and adolescents' perceptions of parental love, positive images of God,
and levels of self-esteem. Cavallotto (1987) has confirmed this, although his
reading of Vergote and Tamayo (198 1) and his own original research (Cavallotto, 1984) led him to prefer explanations of parental influence on representations of God in terms of the symbolic, rather than in terms of the
actual force of parental figures. Orientamenti Pedagogici has also reported
widely and fully on attempts to devise objective tests for the measurement
of religious behavior and knowledge (Calonghi, 1965; Giannatelli, 1966a,
1966b). The stress in these articles on practical religious education has been
welcomed in Italy, where virtually all preuniversity students receive religious
education at school. Even more recently, other researchers have devised new
achievement tests to measure the expected learning levels of pupils receiving
religious education in various kinds of Italian schools (Aletti, 1990;
Manello & Oholeguy, 1986).
Midway between the largely empirical approach of the Salesian University and the more deductive, theoretical approaches of other Rome universities, Gertrud Stickler, professor of the psychology of religion at the
Pontificia Facolti di Scienze dell'Educazione "Auxilium" ["Auxilium"
Pontifical Faculty of Educational Sciences] in Rome and former pupil of
Vergote at Louvain, has established a middle position that combines the
quantitative strengths of data-based surveys with the phenomenological insights of psychological and philosophical interpretation. This enables her
to reconcile the unique intentionality of religious behavior with the specific
modes, environments, and cultural contexts through which they find expression. The main aim of this approach-in studies of the relation between religion and personality-is pursued at various levels. Comparison of
extensive questionnaire and attitude scale measures concerning the religion
of young people (Stickler, 1964), their images of their parents (Stickler,
1970, 1971), and their representations of God (Stickler, 1974) has shown
that religious behavior in adolescents is influenced by psychological factors
characterizing their respective stages of cognitive and emotional development, although traces of earlier infantile conceptualizing persist in their
representations of God. More specifically, there is a correlation between
positive images of God and a positive experience of parents (especially the
mother) in childhood. Stickler's broad use of a dynamic depth psychology
enables her to combine many aspects of Freudian psychology with a considerable degree of psychological self-determination in her studies of the
emergence and development of religious awareness in personality dynamics
and in her studies of the influence of religion on the development and restructuring of personality (Stickler, 1989, 1991). She has used the same
model in psychodynamic reinterpretations of the lives of some of the great
saints (Stickler, 1975, 1987).
I myself, while a graduate of the Catholic University of Milan, presented
a thesis, under Zunini, on empirical research into adolescent concepts of
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God (Aletti, 1971). I then worked with Milanesi at the Salesian University
before becoming a professor of the psychology of religion at the Facolta
Teologica dell'Italia Settentrionale [Theology Faculty of Northern Italy],
Milan. I, too, have favored the integration of empirical and phenomenological approaches, and my epistemological studies (Aletti, 1984b, 1985,
1991a, 1991c) have stressed the need for an objective scientific approach of
"benign neutrality" towards religious experience (which, from a psychologist's point of view, can be regarded only as a psychic experience). Although acknowledging my indebtedness to Vergote (1983), I have also
stressed the need for a narrower definition of religion as the intentional acceptance of a relation with transcendence shaped by the cultural context in
which a believer lives. As a Freudian psychoanalyst, I (1977, 1991d, in
press-b) reviewed Freud's writings on religion and stressed parallels between
the psychoanalytic view of human development and the dynamics of becoming a Christian. My other publications range from studies of child religion (Aletti, 1977, 1978; Aletti & Vianello, 1978) to research on concepts of
God, in which I used word association techniques deriving from Deconchy's (1967) models.
Factor and item analysis has indicated that both preadolescent (Aletti,
1988; Aletti & Tiengo, 1982) and adolescent concepts of God (Aletti,
1984a, 1991b; Aletti & Tagliente, 1982) have five dimensions: institutional,
rational, relational, naturalistic, and problematic. Having established the
multidimensional nature of adolescent religion, I (1990) have devised a test
that relates the concepts of God to cognitive aspects of the content of religious education. This has shown that young people find the language of institutional Catholic religion unimaginative and uninspiring, with the result
that many of them construct their personal universes of religious experience
specifically to accommodate images of God and religion that leave wider
scope for emotional involvement, affective relationships, and existential
commitment (Aletti, in press-a). My studies have also demonstrated a relation between the experience of God and the experience of adolescents9ideal
self, parents (father and mother), and friends (Peri, Ricci, & Aletti, 1982).
Taken as a whole, my research shows how complex the relations among religious experience, culture, and language are. If it is true that the person who
accepts or rejects God always does so in a historically deternnined cultural
context using the language available at the time, so that "man does not say
the word God in the absence of other words or speakers" (Aletti, in pressa), it is also true that the gradual acquisition and appropriation of religious
"language competence" is a function of individual personality.
Renzo Vianello, professor of developmental psychology at the University
of Padua, has won an international reputation as one of Italy's leading
phenomenological psychologists and is especially interested in child religion. Some of his studies, mainly carried out using Piaget's clinical interview technique, have concerned the child's acquisition of religious concepts.
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Vianello has shown that an ability to understand divine attributes like creator, omnipotence, omnipresence, spirit, and eternity develops through the
entire period of childhood (Vianello, 1976, 1980). Using Piaget's models of
the development of intelligence in children, Vianello has shown that realistic, egocentric, anthropomorphic, animistic, artificialistic, and magical tendencies have an especially powerful influence on the acquisition of religious
concepts up to the age of seven. The fact that children do not seem to see
any organic relation between religious awareness and the secular awareness
they develop in their everyday lives seems especially significant, and
Vianello (1976) has spoken of a "rupture between God and the world" (p.
268) in the child's cognitive universe. This also seems to indicate that the
small child's religious world is a "conceptual" outcome of language learning, unaffected by the affective and emotional components of personality.
Other studies by Vianello (1980) have concentrated on the affective and
social aspects of religious behavior in children. Using semantic differential
and Q-Technique procedures, Vianello and his colleagues have shown that
the image of God resembles the figure of the father more than of the
mother and that institutionalized children have a less positive image of God
than do children reared in families. Institutionalized children have also been
shown to assimilate major religious concepts and divine attributes more
slowly than do their counterparts reared in families (Vianello, Carraro, &
Lis, 1978). Other studies (Vianello & Marin, 1989b) have shown, contrary
to Piaget, that the concept of "justice immanent in things" is not often
found in children and seems to be instilled in them by adults rather than to
be learned spontaneously. Magical thinking, which tends to persist alongside maturer modes of thought, even after the acquisition of hypothetical
and deductive thinking (Vianello & Marin, 1989b), would also seem to be
the result of environmental and cultural influence rather than a spontaneous tendency. Another theme of Vianello's work has been the child's understanding of death. Contrary to what has been said in the past and what
parents and adults in general commonly believe, Vianello and his colleagues
have found that the idea of death is already present in some form by the age
of 2 to 3 and that by the age of 4 to 5 almost all children have already acquired that concept as something irreversible and universal, as the cessation
of vital functions (Vianello & Lucamante, 1988; Vianello & Marin, 1985,
1989a).
CONCLUDING COMMENTS
I now take stock of the situation as a whole in order to assess the shortcomings of what has been done so far and to identify what the main theoretical
and research trends, opportunities, and prospects seem to be.
A number of basic epistemological and methodological questions still re-
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main open, and although they have rarely been dealt with explicitly, their
unsolved presence has pervaded much of the Italian literature on the psychology of religion up to the present. Of prime concern is the degree to
which researchers themselves are emotionally involved in their own research. A significant majority of scholars believes that objectivity (at least
in the weaker sense of "shared subjectivity") in the psychology of religion
can be achieved only if researchers adopt an attitude of agnostic neutrality
in relation to the objects of faith and an attitude of sympathetic neutrality
in relation to those in possession of faith. Others regard personal involvement, or even the possession of faith, on the part of researchers as a valid
instrument of research-an extra and advantageous opportunity-although
this view naturally raises the problem of how to distinguish between believer and researcher. This problem is more acute in Italy than elsewhere because many scholars are personally involved or have institutional links with
the official Catholic church.
Many of the issues now facing the psychology of religion in Italy can be
reduced to two simply stated questions: Which psychology? and Which religion? The present trend is towards religion as an intentional relation with
transcendence that takes place within a culturally determined symbol system. In the newer view, psychologists see religion as a manifest component
of the behavior of believers who live their faith according to the formulations they have been exposed to in their own culture.
The question of "which psychology?" seems rather more difficult to answer because it involves defining similarities and differences between psychology on the one hand and related disciplines like philosophy, theology,
and sociology on the other. This problem has been well analyzed by Milanesi (1966b) and Ronco (1980), although more work is needed and not
only in Italy.
Concerning the relation among psychology, psychiatry, and religion, it
can be said that reductionist or pathological approaches to religion, and the
institutions' special pleading and infighting over issues of mental health
and the role of religion, are now a thing of the past. A number of psychiatrists are showing increasing interest in mystical and pseudomystical phenomena and in related modified states of consciousness (Rapisarda & Virzi,
1985). In particular, Margnelli and Gagliardi have made detailed observations of the psychological and physiological phenomenology of ecstasy in
which psychogalvanic responses confirm the presence of hypertonic responses in the sympathetic nervous system and a loss of contact with reality
(Gagliardi, Margnelli, & Maccarini, 1990; Margnelli, 1984). They have also
studied apparitions of the Virgin Mary and stigmatization (Gagliardi &
Margnelli, 1989; Margnelli, 1988; Margnelli & Gagliardi, 1989).
"Which psychology?" also implies the question of "which interpretative
model?" because different theories of personality imply different concepts
of mental dynamics and structure. Each psychologist interprets religious
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experience differently so that their procedures on research and study are
strongly influenced not only by methods and operating concepts, but also
by their personal expectations. Scholars rarely feel inclined to clarify or justify their own theoretical positions, but it is possible to identify two main
trends in Italy, one based on humanistic approaches (Allport, Frankl,
Maslow, Thomae), the other on psychoanalytic approaches.
Most empirical research has stressed the conscious, cognitive, and motivational aspects of personality. Less attention has been paid to conscious
and unconscious emotional aspects, and religion has been seen as a response to a search for meaning in which transcendence is taken as the principal focus and reason for religious interest and devotion.
General studies and interpretations of religion have been mainly based
on depth psychology, usually Freudian rather than Jungian (Fiori, 1989) or
Adlerian (Grandi, 1986, 1991), or they have been based on forms of image
analysis (Dominici, 1989; Sartori Modena, 1991). Relations between psychoanalysis and official religion have improved considerably, and a highly
productive debate is now in progress. A number of Catholics are now practicing psychotherapists, and many nonpracticing academics adopt a psychoanalytical approach to the psychology of religion. A number of
associations and groups in Italy are concerned with the relations between
psychoanalysis and religion, including the Association for the Study of
Psychoanalysis and Religion, which, since its foundation 10 years ago, has
organized numerous conferences and published several volumes of papers
by psychoanalysts of various schools (Associazione di Studio Psieoanalisi e
Religione [ASPER], 1985; see also Spaccapelo, 1986; Morandi, 1984).
These papers often seem to be a result of attempts to confirm, refute, or go
beyond the fundamental approaches of Freud by concentrating on epistemology, examining the internal consistency of Freud's texts, and taking
stock of wider speculative issues. They have, however, been less often concerned with clinical practice and case studies (although this is evident in
Freud's own writings on religion), and psychoanalysts have tended to ignore
or exclude the religious experience of their patients in their clinical work
(see Aletti, 1991c; Grandi, 1986, 1989). Within the epistemological debate
mentioned earlier, there is a growing conviction that psychoanalysis should
now refrain from commenting on the origins, aims, and value of religion
and limit its enquiry to the functional relationship that emerges between
analyst and patient within a clinical setting (Aletti, 1977, 1984b, 1985;
Fosgi, 1990; Magnani, 1984, 1986). The only religion a psychoanalyst has
access to and can comment on is religiosity, the psychic experience of a subject who "speaks his life" to the analyst. For the analyst, then, "religious
faith is a psychic experienceyy(Fossi, 1990, p. 210). If this is true, the belief
of some psychoanalysts (Ancona, 1986b; Matte Blanco, 1984, 1986) that
the unconscious mind may in some way be naturally disposed or inclined
towards religious experience will have to be examined in some detail.
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The development of the psychology of religion in Italy would be further
encouraged if a number of practical and organizational difficulties could be
solved, although it should be added that this has already been partially
achieved. The 1980s saw an upsurge of interest in the psychology of religion, which produced a significant number of publications and conferences
such as the one in Turin in 1987, whose proceedings were published in two
volumes (Psicologia Religione Cultura [Psychology Religion Culture],
1989). Courses and seminars on religious experience and behavior are now
held in a number of state universities, although specific chairs and lectureships are, at present, limited to Catholic and ecclesiastical universities. The
barriers of isolation and suspicion that have separated Catholic and lay academics in the past are now beginning to disappear, but that is a slow process, and in the absence of a specialized periodical, the need for a common
forum is increasingly being felt. Until recently, only a small number of Italian specialists were known outside their own country, so a wider and more
significant contact with the international scene would also be welcome.
Some of the organizational and scientific needs mentioned earlier are being met by the Psychology and Religion Division of the SIPS, founded
within the Society in 1987. Since 1989, it has held three annual conferences,
whose proceedings have been published as Psicoanalisi, Bisessualit2 e Sacro
[Psychoanalysis, Bisexuality and Religion] (Ancona, 1991a), La Religione
in Clinica Psicologica [Religion in Clinical Psychology] (Societa Italiana di
Psicologia, 1991), and I1 Vissuto Religiose nella Pratica Psicologica [Religious Experience in Practical Psychology] (in Societa Italiana di Psicologia, in press). The Psychology and Religion Division now offers a forum
within Italy for the dissemination and discussion both at home and abroad
of Italian research into the psychology of religion.
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