FREUD ON RELIGION – GOD AS AN INFANTILE ILLUSION



FREUD ON RELIGION – GOD AS AN INFANTILE ILLUSION

▪ Freud's main critical work on religion was The Future of an Illusion, published in 1927.

▪ In it he analyses religion as a contemporary social phenomenon: Religious ideas are teachings and assertions about facts and conditions of external (or internal) reality which tell something on e has not discovered for oneself and which lay claim to one's belief.

▪ In considering what is at the basis of the claim to one's belief, Freud suggests three explanations:

▪ The first is that we should believe without demanding proofs. Freud questions the validity of this and suggests we only do so because we are aware that the truth of the claims is so uncertain and groundless.

▪ The second is that we should believe because our forefathers believed. Freud points out that our ancestors believed a great number of things that have proved to be incorrect.

▪ The third explanation is that we should believe because we have proofs that have been handed down to us from primeval times. Freud objects that the writings constituting these 'proofs' are untrustworthy, full of contradictions, frequently revised and often simply false.

▪ Freud maintains that the most important assertions considered to solve the puzzles of the universe and to give our lives meaning are the least well authenticated of any and are entirely undemonstrable.

▪ In explaining the psychological origins of religion, Freud considers the model of wish fulfilment discovered in dreams and neurotic symptoms. He claims the religious ideas were not precipitates of experiences or end results of our thinking but illusions, fulfilment of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind. The secret of their strength lies in the strength of those wishes.

▪ The wishes to which Freud was referring were those if the helpless human being craving protection from life's dangers, for justice in an unjust society, for a life beyond death, for knowledge of the origin of the world and an explanation of the relationship between the physical and the mental. Freud accounted for a belief in God in terms of projections the unclear, inner perception of one's own psychical apparatus stimulates thought illusions that are naturally projected outward and – characteristically – into the future and into a hereafter. Immortality, retribution and the hereafter, are such representations of our psychical interior ... psychomythology. He regarded these wishes as infantile wishes, rooted in conflicts of childhood arising from the father-complex, and never wholly overcome.

▪ The childhood conflicts may be understood in two senses: that of the individual, and that of the whole human race. For Freud the childhood of the individual was an image of the childhood of mankind: in both cases religious needs derived from longing for a father and could be explained in terms of the Oedipus complex. In The Future of an Illusion Freud emphasised the childish helplessness of the individual and of mankind in the face of dangers with which he is confronted both in the external world and within himself.

▪ Culture creates these religious ideas in the individual, and religion springs from the necessity of defending oneself against nature and fate, and represents an attempt to make contact with and influence the great supernatural powers to our benefit, after having humanised and personified those powers. As the individual cannot associate with these supernatural powers as with equals, they are ascribed paternal characteristics: man creates gods that are to be feared and are to be won over.

▪ Freud maintained that gods had a triple function: to counter the terrors of nature; to reconcile individuals to their fate and death; and as any culture is based on the necessity of work and the repression of the instincts, to provide compensation to mankind for his suffering.

▪ Gods offer mankind a higher purpose in life, justification for their moral views, and the promise of life after death. For people incapable of interiorising the moral rules governing interpersonal relationships, the threat of divine punishment provides an additional motivation.

▪ For Freud, then, religion derived from the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind, and merely amounts to wishful thinking and illusion. For Freud, all religious doctrines are illusions. However, Freud also admitted that these doctrines were irrefutable: Freud was concerned only with the psychological nature and origin of religious ideas, and not with their truth content: to assess the truth-value of religious doctrine does not lie within the scope of the present enquiry. It is enough for us that we have recognised them as being, in their psychological nature, illusions.

▪ Freud made clear that his belief of having discovered the psychological origins of religion has informed his attitude towards its truth content and said We shall tell ourselves that it would be very nice if there were a moral order in the universe and after-life; but it is a very striking fact that al 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.

▪ One could object that religious has served a function in sustaining individuals through great hardships with the promise of consolation. Freud countered that religion has had a great deal of time to show what it can do to increase human happiness, and has failed to improve the lot of mankind significantly.

▪ He noted that the influence of religion is in stark decline in modern times, and said this could be accounted for because of the increase of the scientific spirit in the higher strata of human society. He says criticism has whittled away the evidential value of religious documents, natural science has shown up the errors in them, and comparative research has been struck by the final resemblance between religious ideas which we revere and the mental products of primitive peoples and times ...in this process there is no stopping.

▪ Freud acknowledged a potential danger associated with any precipitous dismantling of religion, particularly with regard to the morality of the uneducated and oppressed masses, and suggested that there should be a revision of the relationship between religion and culture. He believed that a new, rationally substantiated Weltanschauung was needed that omitted God but included an acknowledgement of the human origin of all cultural institutions and regulations. This would entail rational justification of morality on the basis of social necessity, and not divine revelation.

▪ Destructive instincts should be controlled by intelligence and reason rather than by religious prohibitions of thinking and by inhibition of sexual thoughts.

▪ Freud regarded religion as a transitional phase of human development and maintained that neither as an individual nor as a species could man remain a child forever: he had to grow up and master reality with his own resources and the aid of science, as well as face up to inescapable realities such as death, abandoning hope of a life after death and instead concentrating resources on the achievement of progress in this life, which is our only one.

▪ Freud had much more confidence in science than in God, as it entailed the acquisition of knowledge by verifiable experience: We believe that it is possible for scientific work to gain some knowledge about the reality of the world, by means of which we can increase our power, and in accordance with which we can arrange our life. If this belief is an illusion, then we are in the same position as you. But science has given us evidence by its numerous and important successes that it is no illusion.....No, our science is no illusion. but an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere.

▪ In 1933 Freud wrote the New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis and returned to the question of the relationship between religion and science.

▪ He returned in this to the question of the relationship between religion and science.

▪ He believed religion to be the greatest opponent of the scientific Weltanschauung.

▪ He defined the three functions religion is recognised as fulfilling for human beings: It gives information about the origin and coming into existence of the universe, it assures them of its protection and of ultimate happiness in the ups and downs of life and it directs their thoughts and actions by precepts which it lays down with its whole authority.

▪ He emphasised that religion amounted to wishful thinking, and stated that religious doctrines bore the mark of the times in which they developed, which were ignorant times at the childhood of humanity.

▪ He underlined the importance of the ethical demands on human society stressed by religious doctrines, and maintained that it was dangerous to link obedience with religious faith.

▪ He described religion as a counterpart to the neurosis which individual civilised men have to go through in their passage from childhood to maturity.

▪ To replace religion, Freud declared himself in favour of a scientific Weltanschauung, whilst at the same time acknowledging that this may not provide him with all the fulfilment that he needs.

▪ Freud also reconstructed the Moses legend to explain the origin of monotheism. According to his reconstruction, Moses was an Egyptian who had accepted the monotheistic faith of the pharaoh Ikhnaton and converted the Jews to it. In a rebellion, Moses was killed, leaving the Jewish people with a guilty conscience. For Freud, the murder of the prophet in monotheistic religion corresponded to the murder of the primordial father in totemism, and the murder of the Son of God in Christianity, which were all consequences of the Oedipus complex. The work was published in German in 1939 with the title The Man Moses and Monotheistic Religion.

▪ Like Freud, the psychologists Adler and Jung were concerned with depth psychology, that is the workings of the unconscious, which was to be analysed scientifically and opened up therapeutically by means of such means as dream analysis and other therapeutic methods and tests. Freud's theory contains certain theses that did not gain universal acceptance, namely the negative understanding of the unconscious as a pool of repressed wishes, the ascription of all intentions beyond the instinct for self-preservation to the libido, the sexual urge, even if sexual is understood in rather a broad sense in Freudian psychology; and the definition of the structure of the psyche exclusively in terms of past events and not in the light of a meaning and purpose in life that the individual has accepted for himself and which extends to future plans and expecations.

▪ In 1911 Alfred Adler (1870-1937) gave a series of lectures under the heading A Critique of the Freudian Sexual Theory of Mental Life. Central to Adler's scientific theory and account of mental disorders was not as with Freud a conflict between the ego and the sexual instinct, but instead the striving for superiority, for power. Neuroses were an expression of an inferiority feeling that is reinforced by new negative experiences of life, preventing the individual from reaching his goals, which is often overcompensated by the instinct to dominate. Adler maintained that the authentic human state was centred on the group in community feeling rather then egocentric. he maintained that an individuals inferiority feeling had to be overcome by a community feeling. Carl Gustav Jung (1875 – 1961) rejected Freud's sexual theory and concept of the libido in Symbols of Transformation (1912). According to Jung, the libido must not be regarded as a man's sexual drive, but was instead undifferentiated psychic energy which lies behind the four mental processes, (thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition).

▪ Jung believed that the dark side of the soul, its shadow, should be made conscious, accepted and involved in personal responsibility.

▪ The element of the opposite sex in a person's psyche, which for man was the anima and for woman the animus, should be recognised and realised, and the persona, the mask that we show to others, should be brought into the right relationship with our ego.

▪ A person can only develop his identity and come to be himself, a process Jung calls individuation, by accepting these elements in himself. The unity of a person was an authentic combination of consciousness and the unconscious, and neuroses were disturbances of the individuation process.

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