The question, "Is God Dead?", first entered my consciousness when I was ten or eleven years old. I saw it on the cover of a Life magazine, and it's lingered in my mind ever since. At the time, though, I wasn't too concerned with His possible demise. I had pretty much determined that God lived inside each of us. No matter how hard I tried, I hadn't been able to find God in the lukewarm rituals of the Protestant faith. Instinctively, I knew God wasn't dead, He was just hiding within each of us, waiting to be discovered.

I became interested in Freud in high school and entered college as a psychology major. After several years studying psychology, I underwent an existential crisis: I couldn't bear the thought of my future career as a psychologist consisting of continuously instructing strangers about how to live their lives. It would be too boring to endure. So, I transferred to art school (a Nietzchian choice, I now see). For years, the question languished in the back of my brain: "Is God dead?" Or was the idea only yellow journalism or intellectual coffeehouse chatter? But all this background is bringing me ahead of myself.

It wasn't until last month that I finally learned God's death was first announced by and perhaps directly attributable to the philosopher Frederic Nietzsche. Only now am I beginning to understand the enormous impact of those three little words.

As a newly-renewed psychology major, I am fascinated by Nietzsche's bold declarative question, "Who among philosophers before me has been called a psychologist at all?" (Nietzsche, 16), and how his thoughts anticipate, influence, and in fact, define modern psychology. Therefore, in this essay, I am attempting to interweave the death of God with the mission of contemporary psychology, and to offer some of my own thoughts and experiences. If I have added a distinctly personal spin to the proceedings, forgive me; I believe Nietzsche would have accepted the voice of personal experience.

"Whither is God" he cried. "I shall tell you. We have killed him