A cross-cultural, psychoanalytic examination of subjective religious experiences through myths, narratives, rituals, and communal actions express the multifacted dimensions of trauma and their impact on individuals and their social cultural contexts. Exploration of ways religious narratives and social practices encode multiple levels of psychodynamic processes that attempt to symbolize unbearable anxiety, grief, loss deriving from personal and social traumas. Different religious and cross-cultural narratives and popular spiritualities will be explored, focussing on ways they may both reproduce and symoblize trauma while also providing resources for healing. Cross-cultural case studies examining the depth psychodynamics of individual and group trauma from the perspective of psychoanalysis, psychology and anthropology that emphasize emotional creativity and healing potential without relying on discourses of pathology will be considered.