What started out as a creative writing exercise morphed into a Psychoanalytic shaggy dog story. I wanted to take an unexplained event and offer one kind of interpretation. ( I think I made the assumption that there was never an actual black dog. I suppose that gives away my underlying rationalism. That’s one of the many reasons that I left Fundamentalist Christianity behind.)

So. My black dog. My attempts at offering a psychological reading left me thinking about other “supernatural” stories. How to think about divine visitations. Virgin births, for example. Or burning bushes. Or the finger of God writing on stone tablets.( I’ll use biblical stories because that’s the tradition I know best.)

The tension between a faith interpretation of events and a psychological one is not new. Consider the nuns who had themselves walled in until they died of starvation. They saw this as evidence of their devotion to Christ. We might see it differently. Or Madame Guyon who ate her own faeces as evidence of her self abnegation.

In psychiatry there is a similar schism. The psychiatric saints and mystics see their experiences as evidence of breakthrough. A uniting with a more spiritual self. Others see hearing voices etc as evidence of psychosis. A breakdown.