While empiricists believe these categories are based on experience, idealists understand they cannot derive from experience since they condition it, being therefore a priori. According to Durkheim these categories have a social origin and are essentially collective representations dependent on the ways societies are organized. Omnipotence and sacredness are universal ideas just like the categories. The only problem is to decide whether they exist a priori as the idealists believe, or are generated by societies, as Durkheim prefers. Such questioning is hardly relevant to psychotherapists since we are interested only on the uses the individual makes of the function of omnipotence, be it revealed or hidden.
Religion institutionalizes the functions of sacredness and omnipotence.
Psychotherapy employs theories and methods that can be tested and questioned. Religion employs catechization, a systematic instruction of theories based on faith and revelation. The ideas transmitted by catechization originate from unquestionable dogma and are taken as the absolute truth. Psychiatrists and psychologists used to ignore religious and spiritual problems. These definitions leave out the atheists and materialists.