“But who do you say that I am?1
Matthew 16:15
When asked about our beliefs about God, we generally respond with what we have been taught by our early caregivers, learned through religious formation, or gleaned from sacred texts. Drawing upon these teachings, we might describe the Divine’s character as faithful, loving, and merciful and further go on to define his nature as all-mighty, omnipotent, immanent, and transcendent. This is an understanding that resides in the intellect, and in psychoanalytic and theological terms is referred to as the God concept.2
But we also have a separate understanding of the Divine, distinct from the intellect. One might be tempted to label it as an embodied knowing. Yet, that term alone connotes something much broader, and at its deepest level, mystical.
Psychoanalytic Foundations of the God Imago
Around the early part of the 1800s, prominent philosophers and psychoanalysts raised up for consideration the formation of a person’s God imago, or image. Specifically, they were interested in how the mental representation of God, formed in the unconscious, first comes into being in the child.
This was the height of the modern era when critical analysis and scientific methods were gaining increasing importance. The scientific theories that emerged out of it would serve to challenge many long-held cultural and religious beliefs. Underlying the thought on the idea of God, was the question: Was an individual’s representation of God merely a projection, or a wish fulfillment designed to meet psychological needs?
In the psychoanalytical world, Sigmund Freud, broadly held to be the father of psychoanalysis, was the first to offer a comprehensive analysis on the formation of the mental representation of God. Central to his theory on the structure and functioning of the mind was his belief that primitive instincts are the primary driving force of the personality. Present at birth and rooted in the id, these drives operate at the unconscious level, and are balanced against external demands by the ego.
Freud considered the idea of God to be an infantile instinct that forms after the resolution of the Oedipus complex. Described in a non-scientific way, the resolution occurs when the young boy (ages 3 to 6) resigns himself to the fact that he will not be able to possess Mommy as Daddy does. Feelings of envy and jealousy for the father are repressed—replaced by love and affection. As part of his acquiescence, the young boy begins to identify with the father and in doing so, a mental representation of him is “taken in,” or internalized. Freud termed the internalized father representation the superego, which he said functions as the conscience. 3
For Freud, the God representation emerges as an attempt resolve ambivalent feelings toward the father—for example, jealousy, envy, love, and guilt—and address myriad psychological needs.4 In the end, the God representation then is just a projection of the father—only idealized. This “exalted father” thus becomes a way for the child to possess the unattainable: Daddy, the new aim of his love and affection, without the previous conflicts and tensions, nor the fear of his loss.
Ironically, it was in Freud’s concept of “taking in” of an object’s representation, specifically, the father representation, that would become the cornerstone of a new psychoanalytic school of thought—object relations.
For more than a half a century, Freud’s concept of the formation of the God representation was generally accepted in psychoanalytic thought. Interestingly, the first serious challenge to it came from within. In 1979, Ana-Maria Rizzuto, a Freudian analyst published The Birth of the Living God; A Psychoanalytic Study in which she offered an alternate thesis on the formation of the God representation—one now framed by object relations theory.
Object Relations
“‘God’ is not the name of a person. God is the name of the relatedness of the Three
[that is, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit of the Trinity]…
In the Christian tradition, our primary image for God is not a person or a thing.
Our primary image for God in the Christian tradition is a relationship.
God is a kind of relationship!“5
Excerpt from Images of God (Fr. Michael Himes, 1993)
Psychoanalytic theory explores the structures, components, and processes of the psyche, and how their functioning shapes our sense of self, personality, and worldview.6 7 Central to object relations, a branch of psychoanalysis, is that the actual catalyst behind how we see the world and ourselves is our early childhood relationships. At first this may seem evident, but the mechanics of how it plays out in our psyche are at once surprising and enlightening, offering insight into both our inner and external worlds.
In object relations theory, our most significant early relationships are encoded in the mind as mental representations, referred to as objects. These mental representations capture the whole of our experience of another—our sensory experiences of them; how they interact with us; and their way of being in the world.
Our mother’s voice as she coos to us; the scent of her skin as she holds us close to her body; the attentive glint of concern in her eyes when we cry—from these sensory experiences, our first conceptions of love and safety are formed and internalized as part of our early mental representation of her. These same sensory experiences also begin to shape our first mental representation of our “self”—for example, as deserving of love and protection. In the same way, the father who listens attentively to the young child, and provides support and encouragement, contributes to the child’s understanding of self as worthy and capable. 8 9
What gives meaning to these experiences, are the emotions tied to them. As relational beings, it is the varied emotions and feelings that in the end matter to us—at both conscious and unconscious levels.
There is another aspect of our early mental representations fundamental to object relations: They become the framework for how we interpret and engage with all subsequent relationships. They shape how we perceive others; influence our feelings, desires, and expectations of them; evoke physiological and defensive reactions; and may lead us to behave in ways reminiscent of our interactions with the original object.10 And although we may sometimes be able to recognize the association we make between our current relationships and those of our formative years (e.g, between our demanding, hard-to-please boss and our critical grandparent), for the most part the underlying processes operate in the background without our awareness.
“For psycho-analysis has taught us that the individual’s emotional attitudes to other people, which are of such extreme importance to his later behaviour, are already established at an unexpectedly early age. The nature and quality of the human child’s relations to people of his own and the opposite sex have already been laid down in the first six years of his life. He may afterwards develop and transform them in certain directions but he can no longer get rid of them. The people to whom he is in this way fixed are his parents and his brothers and sisters.”11
Excerpt from Some Reflections on Schoolboy Psychology (Freud, 1914)
In the years since Freud first explored these ideas, studies across the scientific disciplines have confirmed the centrality of our early relations on our personality. These studies increasingly affirm Freud’s emphasis on the significance of parents and siblings, while also revealing the profound and far-reaching influence of the mental representation of the primary caregiver(s)—an impact even more extensive than Freud himself may have imagined.
The God Image
What caught people’s attention in Ana-Maria Rizzuto’s 1979 book, The Birth of the Living God is her groundbreaking theory that our God representation—which she termed the God image—also derives from our early childhood relationships. In her study of 20 individuals, she found a striking correlation between each person’s God image and their primary caregiver(s).12 13
What does this mean, then? Are we held captive to the mental representations formed in our early childhood years—including their impact on our experience of the Divine?14 Was Freud right in his proposition that our idea of God is merely a projection of an early caregiver, created to meet psychological needs? Or might there be a greater intelligence behind it all, providing the young child a way in which they can begin to understand and relate to God?
In the continuation of this series, we’ll explore how the God image is formed; the impact our early God image might have on our relationship with the Divine, and ourselves; and ways in which the God image is transformed and healed.
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First Published: June 3, 2026
1 Photo by Arifur Rahman on Unsplash.
New American Bible, Revised Edition (NABRE), Matthew 16:15, United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, https://bible.usccb.org/bible/matthew/16.
2 Moriarty cites Lawrence (1997, 214), who defines the God concept as “an intellectual (mental dictionary) definition of the word ‘God,'” shaped by religious education and existing more as an abstract concept than an immediate emotional reality.
Glendon Moriarty, Pastoral Care of Depression: Helping Clients Heal Their Relationship with God (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2006), xv, Kindle edition.
3 Our description of the resolution of the Oedipus complex in the text has been simplified for accessibility. A more detailed explanation follows: Freud’s Oedipus complex refers to a foundational stage in psychosexual development, involving libidinal (sexual) desires for the mother and fear of castration by the father. Freud’s psychosexual development model posits that children progress through five stages (oral, anal, phallic, latency, genital), each marked by a focus on a different erogenous zone and its associated conflicts. During the phallic stage (ages 3–6), the boy’s libidinal desires for the mother and rivalry with the father (fear of castration, jealousy, guilt) create the Oedipal tension. Freud argued that unresolved conflicts at any stage—including this one—could lead to fixations shaping adult personality. The Oedipus complex thus explains the sexual and aggressive undercurrents of the child’s early attachment dynamics, which later influence their inner world, including the God representation. These concepts, though debated, remain central to Freudian theory.
4 Freud posited that the girl’s God representation was largely inherited from cultural and familial traditions, rather than arising from a process as actively conflict-driven as the boy’s Oedipal resolution. However, he did not provide a detailed analysis of how this inheritance unfolds or how it might differ psychologically for girls. This gap reflects Freud’s primary focus on male psychosexual development in his theories.
5 Michael Himes, Images of God, ed. James M. Gaffney (Cobb Creek Enterprises, 2009), Kindle edition, location 128. Originally a lecture delivered at Sacred Heart Seminary, Hales Corners, Wisconsin, 1993. Emphasis mine.
6 The psyche refers to the totality of the human mind, comprised of all mental and emotional processes—both conscious and unconscious—which together form the framework for our inner world.
7 Personality here refers to the dynamic interplay of emotions, behaviors, defense mechanisms, and adaptive functions that characterize an individual’s unique way of engaging with the world.
8 Rizzuto provides a useful breakdown of the different elements that contribute to the formation of a mental representation or object: visceral (gut-level bodily sensations), proprioceptive (internal sense of body position/movement), sensory-motor (combination of sensory input and physical action), iconic (visual images/symbols), perceptual (raw sensory data), eidetic (vivid, detailed impressions), and conceptual (abstract beliefs or frameworks).
Ana-Maria Rizzuto, The Birth of the Living God: A Psychoanalytic Study (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 56.
9 The parents’ general way of being also becomes part of the mental representation the child has for them. But there is another impact; that is, the parents way of being—shaping the environment of the home in which the child lives—affects how the child perceives the world at large. It is at this point that the child’s first impression of the world as safe—or unsafe—is formed.
10 Our early mental representations not only affect our perceptions, expectations, feelings, and behaviors of the other, they shape our wishes and desires with regard to them; can unconsciously provoke our defense mechanisms (e.g., avoidance or projection); play into our fantasy life (e.g., inner narratives or daydreams); and bring about physiological responses (e.g., bodily reactions to relational triggers) that we experienced with the original relationship / object of the mental representation.
11 Sigmund Freud, The Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. Ivan Smith (2000–2011), 2873, accessed Jun 6, 2026 https://dn760100.eu.archive.org/0/items/freud-complete-works/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf.
Freud adds, “All those whom he gets to know later become substitute figures for these first objects of his feelings. (We should perhaps add to his parents any other people, such as nurses, who cared for him in his infancy.) These substitute figures can be classified from his point of view according as they are derived from what we call the ‘imagos’ of his father, his mother, his brothers and sisters, and so on. His later acquaintances are thus obliged to take over a kind of emotional heritage; they encounter sympathies and antipathies to the production of which they themselves have contributed little. All of his later choices of friendship and love follow upon the basis of the memory-traces left behind by these first prototypes.”
12 In her study, Rizzuto found that the God image often corresponded to one parent, but could also be a composite of both. In addition, it could comprise elements of other significant relations. (Rizzuto, 1979)
13 Moriarty, drawing on Lawrence (1997) and Rizzuto (1979), defines the God image as “ the subjective emotional experience of God.” “It is shaped by peoples’ experience of their [primary caregivers] and enables them to continue these earlier relational patterns. Familiarity is comfortable, so individuals pattern future relationships after what they learned in their relationships with their parents.” (Moriaty, 2006, xv).
14 Rizzuto assures us that our early mental representations, including of God, are not static, nor do they have a life of their own. As we mature and grow in wisdom, our mental representations are able to evolve, soften, or transform—reshaping how we see and experience others, ourselves, and the Divine.
