Drawing on phenomenology and his clinical practice, the author explores religious experience and the dynamics of the numinous. The article opens with the argument that psychoanalysts, like religious healers, should be able to work with religious phenomena as part of psychoanalytic therapy. The origin of the term 'numinous' is explained, and two types of human religious experience, mysterium...
Abstract For the Scandinavian tradition of the history of religions, in which I was trained, not the numinous, but the experience of the numinous is the sui generis subject matter of the discipline; and historians routinely emphasize the experiential aspects of religions. The better to understand religious experience, I work interdisciplinarily with psychoanalysis. Freud's treatment of group...