The self may be integrated with its ideals but, as the case of Satomi Myodo demonstrates, both may proceed in de nial of the instincts, rather than in their accommodation. Psychotherapy, in the traditional psychoanalytic sense of the ego's reconciliation to repressed instincts, aims at a different type of transformative integration and may be appropriate as an independent adjunct to spiritual development. The interpretation of coincidental events as miracles, acts of providence, acts of magic, and so forth, is a normative religious practice cross-culturally. Gods and spirits may be regarded, in part, as theoretical explanations of the oc currence of miracles. Prayers everywhere seek the occurrence of miracles.
Magic attempts to produce miracles on demand.
Religious moralities, observances, taboos, and rites hope to manage favorable and unwanted miracles. Interpretations of coincidental events as miracles differ from culture to cul ture, as the examples of Inuit hunter religion, popular American Christianity, and early Hasidism show. In all cases, however, miracles project judgments of conscience externally onto coincidental events. The superego's interpretation of a coincidence as a judgment on the self causes the event to be experienced as a miracle. A theory of random symbol formation is an important commonsense observation that is too often overlooked in the more sectarian and polemical literature about mysticism.