Hm. I've just been reading an article about Marian visions, which turned out to be by a Freudian, who advanced the (not very interesting) theory that it was All A Bit Oedipal.
This is reasonably straightforward to apply to male visionaries (so simple, in fact, that it makes me suspicious), but I can't help feeling that the argument that women who have visions of Mary are therefore vicariously identifying with her as someone who got to fulfil an Oedipal fantasy is straining things a bit. The more so as the accounts of Marian visions which I have read which most obviously seem to have an element of wishfulfilment are invariably motherhood fantasies. And, it should be added, often seem to be stimulated by the devotional practice of the convents where they occur - so it's not just a matter of the subconscious, either. Even if one grants the premise that all religious experiences (or paramystical phenomena, as I'm afraid we sometimes call them in the trade) are all a matter of hallucination,† I don't think it helpful to assume that all desires are about sex.
† Which, as a matter of fact, I don't; at least in the mediaeval period, there was an awareness that people did hallucinate, and in many cases the 'vision' seems to have been something different, and I think is more likely to be a sort of internal visualisation process. Actually, the minute someone claimed to have really, physically seen Christ or Mary or whoever, the authorities tended to get extremely worried and start talking about delusions or deceptions. This isn't, of course, to say that it isn't possible to have religiously-tinged halluciations, as it obviously is; equally, I don't think the 'internal visualisation process' theory isn't incompatible with the visions or revalations having some sort of truth-value.
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