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“God is not male. Nor female. It is we humans who attribute connotations to God, who is an ineffable mystery par excellence“. That’s the conclusion of the 16th international Conference “Gender and religion: male-female and religious phenomenon”, organized by Aiempr (International Association of Medical-Psychological and Religious Studies). The Conference, meeting in Granada from 3 to 7 September, brought together over 160 delegates to discuss the mental representation of God and the biological, psychological, cultural and theological aspects that condition gender and religion. According to Ramón Nogués, anthropologist at the University of Barcelona, “it’s difficult to speak of God without forms of conditioning, given that we humans are conditioned by sexuality. God is mysterious and incomprehensible”. One of the main speakers was the American psychoanalyst Anna Maria Rizzuto, who has spent over ten years studying the images of God that we create for ourselves already in childhood. In her view, “Freud was mistaken in saying God is only a father figure. The child elaborates its image of God on the basis of father, mother and the married couple itself”. And even if a child has no parent, it often “transforms this absence into a negative presence, and perhaps finds a point of reference in the teacher instead”. The psychologist Àngels Bayod, Spanish delegate of Aiempr, explained that “each person has a different representation of God, Christ or Mary, depending on his or her own experience, and affective and socio-cultural structures”. A survey conducted on 400 people in Catalonia reached the conclusion that “a change can be perceived in people: the image of a persecuting God has been reclaimed by that of a loving God”. “The various mental representations we have of God concluded Bayod are more motivated by socio-cultural factors than by biological conditioning”.
