In Relating to God: Clinical Psychoanalysis, Spirituality, and Theism, Dan Merkur presents a clinical alternative to both the dismissal and the culturally relative endorsement of the client's religion, proposing a contemporary psychoanalytic distinction between wholesome spirituality and its symbolic and symptomatic displacements. Spirituality compatible with psychoanalysis is identified with the via negativa, "way of negating," that is found historically in selected Christian and Jewish encounters with God.
