Rethinking Selfobject and Self: Implications for Understanding and Studying Religious Matters

Research having to do with psychoanalysis and religion customarily explains a religious experience, expression, or event in terms of psychoanalytic methods and concepts. In marked contrast, this essay pursues a different objective by way of an alternative route, revealing how a theory and model of self opens up to and implies a way of understanding and studying religious matters. It accomplishes this objective through a series of steps: reflecting on how theories and models function and change; illustrating a particular instance of theory change—examining the emergence of Heinz Kohut's self-selfobject model in relation to the subject-object model embedded in classical psychoanalytic theorizing; discussing the warrant for and outlining the contours of a revised way of reading the self-selfobject model; identifying implications of this model, now re-read, for understanding and studying religious matters.