It is odd that psychology and religion are so often in conflict with one another. After all, they are both concerned with the meaning people give to their lives, their sense of inner peace and their ability to live in harmony with the world and people around them. Freud, for example, was hostile to religion, although he borrowed from it extensively, and many psychologists today scorn religion as unscientific.
Yet psychology's founding father William James thought deeply religious people had an ability to open up to that part of the mind that is normally hidden from 'full sunlit consciousness'. They have privileged access to the psychological realm that is particularly hard for scientists to study. Their faith is proof of a special pathway to what Freud later described as the unconscious - or some sort of no-man's-land between what we can and cannot know. This is because people such as mystics, said James, were willing and able to passively surrender their will.
Some people might argue that some of today's talk therapies attempt a sort of systematic version of this experience. Free association, for instance, is the technique used by some therapists in which patients are encouraged to say whatever comes into their minds, however bizarre or potentially evil or offensive, before their conscious mind has time to block or channel the stream.
However, one main difference is the intention behind the activity. Deep religious faith, as James saw it, is a direct source of spiritual enrichment through an opening up of channels between the conscious and unconscious. Freudian talk therapy, on the other hand, is more like a one-way information gathering process, a sort of methodological archaeology of the spirit.
Unlike Freud, James struggled with his inability to believe in God. He saw the benefits of religion in the lives of believers. Since his time, generations of psychologists have found ample evidence of these advantages.
Indeed, religion's extraordinary power to bestow peace of mind is one of the many reasons psychologists keep coming back to the subject. But neither the empathy of James nor the clinical eye of Freud was able to fully deconstruct the phenomenon.