(2.1) Psychoanalytic Theory of Religion.docx

A Psychoanalytic Theory of Religion

  • Sigmund Freud (1856 Austria -1939 UK)
    • Austrian neurologist who founded psychoanalysis; prolific writer
    • Studies on Hysteria (1895)
    • Interpretation of Dreams (1900)
    • Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905)
    • The Ego and the Id (1923)
    • The Future of an Illusion (1927)
    • Civilization and its Discontent (1929)
    • Moses and Monotheism (1939)
    • And so much more…but you don’t need to memorize this list of his books. I just have it here to illustrate the range of his works.
    • Nazi Germany and the Holocaust
    • In January 1933, Nazi party rises to power when Hitler is name chancellor of Germany in January. By May of 1933, Nazis burned Freud’s books.
    • In March 1938, Germany annexed Austria in what’s known as the “Anschluss.”
      • Within days, Nazis seized Freud’s money and much of his property, and Freud was mostly confined to his apartment in Vienna (capital of Austria).
      • Within a week, the Gestapo subjected his daughter (Anna Freud) to a frightening 12-hr interrogation.
    • In June 1938, Freud and members of his family fled Austria, but four of Freud’s sisters couldn’t get exit visas. (Rosa, Marie, and Pauline were murdered in the gas chambers of Treblinka. Adolfine died in the Theresienstadt ghetto.)
    • Freud spent the last year of his life as a refugee in London.
  • Freud’s Models of the [Religious] Mind [see Psychoanalysis Handout on Folio]
    • Topographic Model of the Mind: conscious, preconscious, unconscious
    • Much of the mind’s content lies just outside our awareness but still influences our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
      • Much of our religious experience is motivated by unconscious processes.
    • Structural Model of the Mind: ego, superego, id
    • Our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are shaped by multiple motivations, which operate simultaneously and in conflict with one another.
      • Much of our religious experience is driven by the need to reconcile competing motivations, especially between the super-ego and id. (Religion is a big part of our super-ego.)
  • The Future of an Illusion (1927)
    • According to Freud, religion is passed down from our ancestral past, generation to generation, and questioning religion is highly taboo.
    • Religious ideas are “the most precious possession of civilization, as the most precious thing it has to offer its participants.” (p. 20)
    • Why is religion so precious and questioning it so taboo? According to Freud, religion gives us three things we really need:

  

  1. Religion promises us some form of eternal life or continuity of the soul

    • “Death itself is not an extinction…but the beginning of a new kind of existence which lies on the path of development to something higher…In the end all good is rewarded and all evil punished, if not actually in this form of life then in the later existences that begin after death.” (The Future of an Illusion, p. 19)
    • Death is hard to fathom because…
      • We form a mental representation of ourselves that we can’t shut off
        • From “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” (1915), an essay Freud wrote during World War I: “…[A]t bottom, no one believes in his own death, or, to put it another way, in the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his own immortality…Towards the actual person who has died we adopt a special attitude—something almost like admiration for someone who has accomplished a very difficult task.”
      • We form mental representations of other people, and those mental representations outlive those people
        • From “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” (1915): “What came into existence beside the dead body of the loved one was not only the doctrine of the soul, the belief in immortality and a powerful source of man’s sense of guilt, but also the earliest ethical commandments…‘Thou shalt not kill’ It was acquired in relation to dead people who were loved…and it was gradually extended to strangers…and finally even to enemies.”
    • Otto Rank (1884 Austria -1939 NYC): another psychoanalyst interested in religion; wrote Psychology and the Soul (1930), among lots of other stuff
    1. Religion offers us a sense of protection from the natural world
    • “…[T]he principal task of civilization, its actual raison d’etre, is to defend us against nature” (The Future of an Illusion, p. 15)
      • “There are elements which seem to mock at all human control: the earth, which quakes and is torn apart and buries all human life and its works; water, which deluges and drowns everything before them; there are diseases, which we have only recently recognized as attacks by other organisms; and finally there is the painful riddle of death…With these forces nature rises up against us, majestic, cruel, and inexorable…” (pp. 15-16)
      • “Impersonal forces and destinies cannot be approached; they remain eternally remote. But if the elements have passions that rage as they do in our own souls, if death itself is not something spontaneous but the violent act of an evil Will, if everywhere in nature there are Beings around us of a kind that we know in our own society…we can try to adjure them, to appease them, to bribe them…” (pp. 16-17)
      • Freud believed people viewed these divine beings/forces/powers as father figures (stern but protective)
    1. Religion protects us from our OWN nature
    • This also goes back to Freud’s idea of gods as father figures (we must obey them, or they’ll punish us)
      • “…[E]very civilization must be built up on coercion and renunciation of instinct… [because] there are present in all men destructive, and therefore anti-social and anti-cultural, trends…” (The Future of an Illusion, p. 7)
      • “It is in keeping with the course of human development that external coercion gradually becomes internalized; for a special mental agency, man's super-ego, takes it over and includes it among its commandments…Those in whom it has taken place are turned from being opponents of civilization into being its vehicles.” (The Future of an Illusion, p. 11)
      • From “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” (1915): “What came into existence beside the dead body of the loved one was not only the doctrine of the soul, the belief in immortality and a powerful source of man’s sense of guilt, but also the earliest ethical commandments…‘Thou shalt not kill’ It was acquired in relation to dead people who were loved…and it was gradually extended to strangers…and finally even to enemies.”
    • In essence, in The Future of an Illusion (1927), Freud says that humans need to (1) believe death isn’t final, (2) feel in control of nature, and (3) rein in the baser human instincts, so they created and perpetuate religion to directly meet these needs. BUT, he adds, in the future, other institutions might meet those needs. Religion might one day become unnecessary.
    • One more hot take from Freud: “We shall tell ourselves that it would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent Providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be. And it would be more remarkable still if our wretched, ignorant and downtrodden ancestors had succeeded in solving all these difficult riddles of the universe.” (The Future of an Illusion, p. 33)
      • Freud clearly wasn’t a fan of religion, but he still had great respect and genuine affection for (and decades-long relationships with) religious folks
      • Dr. Girindrasekhar Bose: Indian Physician and Psychoanalyst; Hindu
      • Rev. Oskar Pfister: Swiss Pastor and Psychoanalyst; Christian