http://www.aeonmagazine.com/being-human/let-me-introduce-you-to-my-imaginary-friends/

Essentially, we used to have something like a ‘personal god’ and it was (an experience of) a nonhuman intelligence superior to our own, and yet somehow intimately ‘produced’ by the deformation or simplification of the complex field of self that arises from myriad relationships… we are evolutionarily, intellectually and relationally adapted for this experience in the way birds are adapted for flight, but our cultures amputate our wings, chain us to cages, and demand we crawl or simply die in place, instead. Children begin this practice, and the culture shuts it down so that it must become pathological if it is to merely survive within our culture…