A Psychoanalytic Heuristic for Understanding Personality in Catholic Religious

In response to the Church's call to incorporate psychological sciences in assessing and guiding religious candidates, we present a psychoanalytic framework for understanding personality structure, as well as where and why to draw the cutoff for religious vocation suitability. First, we consider the level of personality organization, which refers to the severity of disturbance from healthy/neurotic to borderline to psychotic. Second, we outline six domains of functioning, including identity, object relations, defenses, aggression, moral functioning, and reality testing/reflective capacities, which are important in any substantive assessment of personality. We argue that individuals at the borderline level of personality functioning, owing to early relational deprivations, are not suitable for religious life because they do not have a consistently good, coherent, and realistic sense of self, which compromises essential domains of functioning, including their capacity for mature interpersonal relationships.