Ana Maria-Rizzuto's God Image

God image’ is the subjective emotional experience of God. It is shaped by our experience of our parents and enables us to continue earlier learned relational patterns. The term, God Image is used to refer to one’s internal, intra-psychic, emotional representation of God. The God Image develops during childhood as the children are confronted with their limitations, and recognizes powers beyond their own work in their environment. This essay will focus on the ‘God image’ as it will be trying to explain ‘how Rizzuto show that as the image of one changes, so too, does one’s image of God change’. Before that, this paper will start by briefing a history of Rizzuto.

Ana Maria-Rizzuto was an American psychoanalyst who began her interest in looking at Religion through the eyes of her discipline in 1963 when she was asked to teach a course in the seminary on the psychological foundations of belief. She was inspired by Freud’s insights into the role of parents in search of project with patients admitted to a private psychiatric hospital. Twenty patience were studied, ten men and ten women. The goal of her project was to study the possible origins of
What is known is that, the child has an image of God which he/she spontaneously uses in his/her questioning about him and in his own religious behavior? This early image may, to be sure undergo changes in later life. “This does not alter the fact that the child has formed his image of God out of interpersonal experiences before he is intellectually mature enough to grasp the concept of God”( Horowitz 63). When the time comes for the child to receive formal religious teaching, his image of God and the concept of God will also change just as the image of one change