In the Image of God

A person may spend much of their life attempting to become the kind of person God would love. They pray, serve others, practice forgiveness, and attempt to live according to the commitments they have inherited. Their devotion may be sincere, and their religious life may provide an enduring sense of meaning and belonging. Yet beneath the ordinary activities of faith there may remain a peculiar uncertainty about whether they are good enough. Every disappointment becomes another occasion for self-examination, while even the smallest failure threatens to reveal something unacceptable about who they really are. They may understand the doctrine of grace with considerable sophistication while finding it almost impossible to imagine that they could be loved without first becoming somebody better.

This difficulty is not necessarily a problem of incorrect theology. The person may belong to a tradition that places unconditional love at the center of its understanding of God. They may have heard countless sermons on forgiveness, memorized passages about grace, and spent years contemplating the difference between divine love and human achievement. Yet knowing what one's religion teaches does not necessarily change the emotional arrangements through which a person experiences themselves. Someone may believe that God is merciful while continuing to feel that every disappointment deserves punishment. Another may understand that human worth does not depend upon achievement while experiencing failure as evidence that their life has become worthless. Their theology and their experience of being themselves have not necessarily come into conversation.

Christian theology has long considered the significance of humanity being made in the image of God. The language of imago Dei emerges most famously in the opening chapter of Genesis, although its meaning has been developed in different ways across Jewish and Christian traditions. The image has been understood through rational capacities, human relationships, moral responsibility, participation in divine life, and the vocation of caring for creation. These approaches are not interchangeable, and theology has never arrived at a single account that exhausts their differences. Still, the phrase has carried a consequential claim: human beings cannot be understood merely through the accomplishments, failures, or social distinctions by which their lives are evaluated.

The difficulty begins when the image of God becomes confused with the image of the person one ought to become. A religious community may affirm that every person possesses dignity while also offering recognizable examples of what spiritual maturity looks like. The faithful person is generous, obedient, forgiving, humble, sexually disciplined, and sufficiently confident in the goodness of God. These qualities may express important commitments, but they can also become the features of an idealized image through which a person attempts to secure recognition. Someone may begin to experience their faith less as a relationship to God than as the lifelong effort to resemble the sort of person who would be acceptable to God.

The word image acquires another significance within psychoanalysis. Freud's developing accounts of narcissism, identification, the ego ideal, and the superego consider how a person's experience of themselves becomes organized through relationships and the expectations of others. The ego does not simply emerge as an independent observer of an otherwise complete inner life. It develops through identifications, images, prohibitions, and ideals that become involved in the experience of being somebody. A person may come to recognize themselves as responsible, desirable, obedient, or indispensable while experiencing considerable anxiety whenever these identifications are threatened. The image becomes more than a description. It participates in determining what the person believes they are permitted to feel, desire, and become.

The theological imago Dei and the psychoanalytic imago should not be mistaken for the same concept. One concerns a theological understanding of human beings in relation to God, while the other concerns the psychological and relational organization of identification. Their similarity in language does not establish a similarity in meaning. Yet the difference becomes interesting when someone begins organizing their spiritual life around an image of who they believe God requires them to be. The theological image, which may be intended to signify a dignity that precedes human achievement, becomes entangled with a psychological image whose recognition appears to require continual effort.

A child does not ordinarily encounter religious language outside the relationships through which language first acquires meaning. The words father, love, obedience, forgiveness, and surrender become familiar through encounters with particular people, each carrying their own histories and expectations. Someone may have learned that affection depended upon being agreeable, while another experienced anger as an indication that love was about to disappear. A child may have discovered that expressing a need was considered selfish, or that questioning an authority threatened the security of belonging. These experiences do not mechanically determine what the person will eventually believe about God. But they may become involved in the emotional significance of religious language long before that language can be thoughtfully considered.

Ana-María Rizzuto's The Birth of the Living God makes an important contribution to this question. Drawing upon psychoanalytic theory and clinical material, Rizzuto explored the development of a person's representation of God through a complex network of parental relationships, identifications, fantasies, and experiences. She challenged the reduction of the God representation to a simple reproduction of the father. The God a person comes to imagine may be assembled through many sources and continue developing throughout life. This is consequential because two people may affirm the same theological beliefs while relating to remarkably different images of God. For one, God may be a comforting presence; for another, a demanding authority whose judgment can never be escaped. The difference cannot be adequately explained simply by comparing their religious doctrines.

A person may describe God as loving while continuing to approach prayer as though it were an examination they could fail. They may believe in forgiveness but experience confession as the necessity of providing an acceptable account of themselves. Another may describe surrender as an act of trust while finding that surrender has become indistinguishable from the abandonment of their own desires. The conscious theological meanings of these words may remain important, although their emotional significance cannot be assumed in advance. The same word may belong to a tradition of hope while also participating in a person's history of shame.

This is one reason pastoral counseling can become difficult when it begins by supplying a more accurate explanation of religious belief. Someone who fears punishment may be reminded that God is gracious. Another who feels ashamed may be reassured that their worth does not depend upon perfection. These responses can offer genuine comfort, especially when a person has encountered harsh religious instruction or spiritual abuse. Yet the person may already know everything the counselor is explaining. They may be able to repeat the language of grace while remaining unable to experience themselves differently. The difficulty is not necessarily a lack of religious information. The person may have become invested in an image through which they believe love must continually be earned.

Consider someone who has devoted much of their adult life to caring for others. They are recognized by their religious community as generous and dependable, often becoming the person who volunteers when everyone else is exhausted. Their service is meaningful, and they may feel sincerely called to help. Yet they also experience a growing resentment toward the very people they continue to serve. They complain that no one notices their sacrifices while finding it almost unbearable to imagine disappointing anyone who needs them. When a pastoral counselor suggests that they establish more reasonable boundaries, they agree wholeheartedly. They already know what they should do. What remains difficult to consider is why being needed has become so indispensable to their experience of themselves.

The person may be suffering from the demands of an identification that also provides a recognizable place within their world. They are the devoted servant, the faithful volunteer, the one whose love can be measured by how much they are willing to give. Their resentment threatens the image, particularly when aggression seems inconsistent with religious goodness. They may therefore experience the anger as evidence of a moral failure rather than become curious about the relationship between their generosity and their need for recognition. The counselor who responds primarily by praising their sacrifice may inadvertently strengthen the arrangement. Even reassurance that they deserve rest may become another occasion for the person to seek permission from an admired authority.

The analytic question is not whether service is admirable or whether the person ought to become less generous. It concerns what being generous has come to accomplish within their life. Someone may continue to care for others because they love them, while also depending upon the experience of being indispensable to secure a sense of worth. These motivations need not exclude one another. The difficulty arises when the person can no longer distinguish the commitments they value from the necessity of maintaining the image through which those commitments have become recognizable.

This becomes especially consequential when religious language is organized around prohibitions concerning anger and desire. Someone who believes that love requires the absence of aggression may be unable to acknowledge disappointment within an otherwise valued relationship. They may experience anger toward a parent, spouse, or religious leader as though it threatens the authenticity of their affection. Another may interpret the desire for independence as evidence of selfishness, particularly when obedience has been presented as the highest form of spiritual maturity. The excluded feelings do not necessarily disappear. They may emerge through guilt, resentment, withdrawal, or the repeated experience of being mistreated by people whose needs seem impossible to refuse.

Freud's work on ambivalence and unconscious guilt offers another way of considering these difficulties. Love and aggression are not always opposites that can be neatly separated into different relationships. They may coexist within the same attachment, particularly when dependence, disappointment, and rivalry become involved. A person may deeply love someone while also wishing to escape their demands. The experience can be troubling because it challenges the image of love as an uninterrupted benevolence. Religious ideals can make these contradictions especially difficult to acknowledge when the person believes that genuine goodness requires the absence of hostile feeling.

Grief offers an important example. Someone who has spent years caring for a dying parent may experience profound sadness after the death, accompanied by an unexpected sense of relief. They may be ashamed that relief appears at all, especially when the relationship has been framed through the religious obligations of love and sacrifice. Another may feel anger toward someone who has died and become frightened that the anger invalidates their mourning. A pastoral listener may be tempted to reassure the person that these feelings are normal. Such support can be helpful, but it may also leave unexplored the particular meanings through which the feelings have become unacceptable. The person may need a place to discover how love, resentment, guilt, and dependence belonged to a relationship that cannot now be repaired or completed in the ways they once imagined.

Religious communities sometimes offer a particularly recognizable image of the person who has suffered well. The bereaved parent may become admired for maintaining faith despite an unimaginable loss. The survivor of illness may be celebrated for courage and gratitude, while someone who has endured mistreatment becomes an example of forgiveness. These stories may provide meaning and connection, and they need not be dismissed as artificial performances. But they may also make it difficult for the person to speak about the anger, doubt, exhaustion, or disappointment that remains. The community recognizes the faithful survivor, while the person begins to discover how lonely it can become to inhabit an image that offers so little room for contradiction.

There may be something especially painful about becoming an inspiration to everyone except oneself. The person has acquired a meaningful place within the lives of others, yet their suffering has become difficult to communicate without threatening the image through which they are admired. They may begin to protect others from experiences they most need to speak about. A pastor or therapist who becomes too invested in the inspiring story can inadvertently participate in this exclusion. The person learns again that recognition is available so long as they remain who others need them to be.

Marie T. Hoffman's Toward Mutual Recognition offers a useful point of comparison. Hoffman brings relational psychoanalysis into dialogue with Christian narratives of incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection, considering identification, surrender, and gratitude as moments in a movement toward mutual recognition. Her account takes seriously the transformative possibilities of a relationship in which another person becomes capable of acknowledging an experience that has previously been excluded or disavowed. Recognition matters, particularly when someone has spent much of their life struggling to find another person willing to receive what they have been unable to communicate.

Yet recognition introduces another difficulty. A person may become increasingly invested in being understood by the therapist or pastor, particularly when recognition has been scarce or unpredictable elsewhere. They may begin speaking in ways that anticipate the listener's understanding, adopting the language of treatment or religious maturity as another means of becoming acceptable. The person who once needed to be the good child may become the insightful patient or the spiritually mature believer. Their language changes, and their understanding may deepen, while the necessity of securing recognition through another person's ideals remains intact.

My developing interest in Imago Psychotherapy approaches this problem by questioning the authority of the image itself. Rather than assuming that a more satisfying experience of recognition necessarily resolves the difficulty, I am interested in why the person continues to require recognition through a particular image of who they must be. The therapist's understanding may be important, but it can also become another place where the patient attempts to establish that they are finally acceptable. The relationship may need to become an occasion for discovering this demand rather than simply satisfying it.

Lacan's distinction among the Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real offers a structural way of considering the problem. The image of the faithful person participates in the Imaginary insofar as it provides a recognizable form through which the individual identifies themselves. Its significance, however, is sustained through Symbolic relations of language, law, family, and religious tradition. The image is not simply an internal picture that can be replaced with a healthier one. It acquires authority through a world of words and expectations in which the person has learned what it means to be loving, obedient, pure, or good.

The Symbolic also complicates the notion that there is an identifiable person whose approval ultimately determines the individual's worth. The religious believer may speak of wanting God's recognition, while what they experience as divine approval may be mediated through the expectations of parents, religious communities, authorities, and the language through which faith has become meaningful. The person may experience these demands as though they originate from a single source, although their authority has developed through a much more complicated social and psychological arrangement. In this sense, the problem is not simply an internal image of God. It also concerns the positions through which the person has learned to recognize themselves within the discourse of their community.

The Real requires particular care because it would be easy to confuse Lacan's account with theological transcendence. The Real is not another name for God, nor does psychoanalysis possess a method for encountering the divine reality beyond religious language. Lacan's Real concerns what resists complete symbolization, what cannot be finally accommodated within the images and explanations through which psychic reality is organized. Theology has its own accounts of divine mystery, transcendence, and revelation, and their conceptual differences should not be erased through a superficial comparison. Yet psychoanalysis may become important when someone discovers that neither a religious ideal nor a psychological explanation can make every experience coherent or satisfactory.

A person whose child has died may know what their religious tradition teaches about suffering, hope, and the possibility of life beyond death. Such beliefs may be genuinely sustaining, although they cannot restore the child whose absence has changed the conditions of ordinary life. Another may discover that an explanation of their grief does little to resolve their longing. The experience is not simply a mistaken belief waiting to be corrected. Something remains that cannot be made satisfactory through interpretation alone. The analytic listener does not need to turn this limit into a spiritual lesson or an occasion for demonstrating psychological sophistication. The difficulty may require remaining with what cannot be reconciled.

This is where pastoral counseling and psychoanalysis can enter a more productive conversation. A pastor may provide the language through which a person understands faith, worship, and the ethical commitments of their tradition. A psychotherapist may offer a setting in which the person's unconscious associations and conflicts can become available for consideration. When spiritual concerns are part of psychotherapy, the clinician's task is not to decide whether the person ought to become more religious or less religious. The interest lies in how religious experience has become organized within the person's life, including the ways faith provides meaning and the ways particular identifications may sustain suffering.

Both the pastor and the therapist must consider their own investment in the encounter. The pastor may need to be recognized as a faithful guide capable of helping someone recover confidence in God. The therapist may need to be recognized as an understanding professional who can identify the psychological meanings others have overlooked. These images may offer familiar ways of inhabiting a professional role, yet they can also interfere with listening. A person who expresses anger toward God may unsettle the pastor's image of faithful accompaniment, while a patient who questions the therapist's interpretation may threaten the therapist's investment in being insightful. In either case, the listener may respond by defending an image rather than becoming interested in what has occurred.

The therapeutic relationship is not immune to the identifications it seeks to understand. A patient may learn the language of analysis as readily as the language of religious devotion, becoming increasingly accomplished at expressing the kinds of insights that appear to please the listener. The therapist may begin to feel reassured by the patient's progress while something familiar continues to organize the encounter. The problem is not that learning new ideas is undesirable. It is that knowledge can become another means of preserving the relationship through which someone has learned they must become recognizable.

What I have begun to call imago dissolution concerns the possibility that an image can lose some of its authority without requiring the person to abandon the relationships or commitments with which it has become associated. Someone may remain devoted to their faith without needing to demonstrate unwavering certainty. They may continue to value forgiveness while becoming more capable of acknowledging aggression. They may serve others without depending upon being indispensable. The images do not necessarily disappear, and the person does not become free from identification. Something changes in the necessity of becoming recognizable through them.

The term does not refer to the destruction of the ego or the emergence of a person who possesses no identity. Human beings continue to live through relationships, language, commitments, and images of themselves. Nor does imago dissolution necessarily produce a more authentic version of the person waiting beneath their social roles. Such an image of authenticity could easily become another ideal that the person feels compelled to attain. The interest lies instead in what becomes possible when the image no longer determines everything the person is permitted to experience.

In religious life, this may create an unexpected difference between goodness and the need to be good. A person may continue to act generously without requiring generosity to establish their worth. They may be faithful without continually examining whether their faith has become sufficient. They may experience guilt without assuming that every guilty feeling proves the existence of a moral failure. Their ethical commitments remain consequential, but they are less completely governed by the image through which those commitments once promised recognition.

There is an important theological question here that psychoanalysis cannot settle on its own. If the imago Dei signifies something about humanity's relation to God that precedes achievement, recognition, or moral performance, then the dissolution of a psychologically necessary image need not contradict the theological claim. It might even make room for a different relation to that claim. But psychoanalysis cannot establish the truth of the imago Dei merely by demonstrating the limitations of unconscious identification. Theology and psychoanalysis remain distinct inquiries, and their relationship becomes most useful where neither claims to have completed the work of the other.

It would therefore be a mistake to suggest that pastoral counseling should replace religious instruction with interpretation, or that every person seeking spiritual care requires an extensive psychoanalytic treatment. There are moments when someone needs reassurance, practical guidance, religious community, or the familiar words of a tradition that has sustained them through suffering. Other circumstances require clinical stabilization or more structured psychological treatment. The work is not improved by turning every expression of faith into a symptom or treating every act of devotion as evidence of an unconscious conflict. The listener must remain attentive to what the person needs and what kind of inquiry is possible.

The more difficult task begins when neither religious reassurance nor psychological understanding seems sufficient to alter a familiar arrangement. The person may know that they are loved and still feel unacceptable. They may understand that they are allowed to disappoint others while remaining unable to tolerate doing so. They may recognize their resentment without becoming any less invested in the identity of the person who never complains. Such experiences call for more than the repetition of a correct idea. They may require the steady work of encountering how the person has become attached to an image that both sustains and confines their life.

The language of being made in the image of God may acquire a different significance when it is no longer confused with the necessity of becoming an ideal believer. Faith may remain meaningful without requiring the exclusion of uncertainty, aggression, desire, or disappointment. A person may become more capable of acknowledging the contradictions of their religious life without imagining that every contradiction must be immediately resolved. They may discover that the image through which they have sought recognition is neither identical to God nor sufficient to contain their experience of being human.

Perhaps the encounter between psychoanalysis and spirituality becomes most consequential where the person discovers that they can speak without first demonstrating who they believe they are supposed to be. They may confess anger without needing it to become a lesson about forgiveness, acknowledge desire without immediately explaining why it is acceptable, or speak of doubt without being returned to a familiar ideal of certainty. The listener does not need to decide in advance what these experiences mean. Their significance may emerge through the person's own associations, including the relationships and words through which they have learned to recognize themselves.

To be made in the image of God is a theological claim whose meaning remains open to considerable interpretation. To become attached to an imago is a psychological arrangement through which recognition may acquire the force of necessity. The distinction matters because a person can become so invested in appearing faithful, loving, or good that the image begins to obscure the life it was supposed to express. The work of analysis does not require the destruction of faith. It may begin where someone discovers that their relationship to faith need not remain confined to the image of the person they have always believed they must become.