Here are some of my notes on Freud and a reconstruction of his critique of religion. Comments, additions, and corrections are welcome. Please send them to: email: KAGAN@maple.lemoyne.edu
Freud--Life and Influences
Briefly discuss Freud's life. the world of 19 century Vienna. The possible Jewish roots of psychoanalysis, rabbinic psychology, the importance of dreams in Jewish mysticism, the variety of Freuds to be found. Present Freud as a synthesizer and founder of a school. Mention that Freud died on Yom Kippur. Discuss his earlier biological physicalist stage. His experience in France with Breuer. Possible influence of Janet.
Freud is known for his development of the concepts of resistance, repression, and transference.
Interpretation of Dreams, Psychology of Everyday Life, Totem and Taboo, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Ego and the Id (1923), Future (1927), Civilization and its Discontents (1930), Moses (1939). Note that he had lifelong archeological and cultural interests, and that his work tended more and more towards an overt concern with religion and religious experience for all that he thought it pathological.
Basic concepts, theory, and methods
Fundamental thesis include psychic determinism, the power and influence of the unconscious (as opposed to pre-conscious). Metapsychology includes the tripartite division into id, ego, and superego. The role of instincts libidnic and thanatos (in contrast to eros). The severe task imposed on the ego of balancing inner strivings and demands (both lower and higher) with the pressure imposed by the reality principle. Need to satisfy these instincts to a certain degree. The story of the donkey.Go through the stages. Oral Anal Phallic Latency Genital. Discuss Freudian concept of maturity in terms of having freed up energy for love and work. Concept of pathology as poorly resolved Oedipus and concomitant fixation.
The method of free-association. The interpretation of dreams. Resistance and transference as related to the oedipal drama. Discuss Oedipus and Electra[1] .
Discuss the early guilt in terms of magical thinking and overarching desire. Discuss the normal resolution in terms of imago, identification. The formation of the super-ego differing between men and women due to the flexibility of the woman who had to change parts early in the life drama.. Goal of psychoanalysis to replace unconscious with conscious awareness, "where id was ego shall be". Self control, reasonable satisfaction of instincts, sublimation.
Freud's Critique of Religion
Freud's Critique of Religion [Material from M. Kagan's "Psychology vs. Religion--Ad Hominem?: The Ad Hominem Fallacy and Freudian and Skinnerian Psychological Criticism of Arguments from Religious Experience" (Ph.D. dissertation, Washington University in St. Louis, 1988)].
1. Freud's Notion of Religion
According to Freud, religion is characterized by a belief in the "rule of a divine Providence," "the establishment of a moral world- order," and "the prolongation of earthly existence in a future life."[2] According to Freud, the central characteristic of the religious world-view is a belief in a higher purpose and a higher power. According to this view, we are essentially spiritual beings who are part of a higher plan in which we play an important, even if presently obscure part. The higher power makes of our death not an end, but a beginning. The universe despite appearances is ruled by moral law, with one divine father in control. According to Freud, the move from many gods to one father-god was a great advance and a source of pride to its originators. "Fundamentally," he writes, "this was a return to the historical beginnings of the idea of God. Now that God was a single person, man's relations to him could recover the intimacy and intensity of the child's relation to his father."[3]
B. Prong 1--Aetiology & Diagnosis: Religious Experience is an Oedipal Projection with Roots Extending to the Pre-history of Our Species
1. Summary of Prong 1 (Aetiological)
According to Freud, the idealized and incorporated image of the parent as experienced by a young child lives on the adult as the parental imago[4]. Religious experience is a function of the subject's perception of his or her projected parental imago, the characteristics of which were produced by the inherited trauma of the pre-historic experience of humanity along with the subject's resolution of the Oedipal crisis. This psychological crisis results when a young child's sexual desire for the parent of the opposite sex collides with the competition, rivalry and overwhelming power of the parent of the same sex. According to Freudian theory, the ghosts of this Oedipal crisis haunt us our entire lives. The experience of the projected imago as real is a function of wish-fulfillment, i.e., it is tied to illusory beliefs accepted on the basis of their conformity with the subject's wishes. The resulting condition, religion, may be diagnosed "as a universal obsessional neurosis."[5]
2. Prehistorical Roots of Religious Experience
According to Freud's reconstruction of the history of religion,[6] we humans once traveled in tribal bands or hordes. The method of social alignment was crude and based on power and size. For most of us, life was nasty, brutish and short. For the leader of the human pack, life was brutish and short, but not as nasty. Due to his domination of the others, he possessed the power, wealth, and women of the community. So long as this leader could beat or cow the rest, he was the all-powerful patriarch of the tribe, and progenitor of most of the children.Eventually, the other denizens of this savage realm, the rest of us, realized that we could collectively accomplish that which was individually impossible--we could kill this patriarch, eat his body to gain his power for ourselves, and share the booty with each other.
We did so and found that the solution introduced its own set of problems, both practical and psychological. Left without a leader, the once unifying rebellion over, each of us was free to do what was right in his own eyes. Such a state of affairs threatened us with a "war of all against all" and provided a motivation for finding an external unifying and controlling force. Also, we were devastated psychologically. For many of us, the man we had killed was our own father; we were stricken with remorse, a remorse so powerful as to be mutagenic, to become a genetically inheritable acquired characteristic.[7]
At this point primitive religion enters the scene as the answer, with its totemic representation of the deposed father. In this kind of religion, the totem is then worshipped and eaten with a ceremonious ritualistic cannibalism (as was the slaughtered father of the primal horde). We then identified with and placed ourselves under the authority of the totemic deity, which worked to assure our obedience to the first moral imperatives (imperatives which once came directly from the father leader) forbidding incest and requiring exogamy. In eating the totem god we gained his power; furthermore in identifying ourselves as the people of the totem god we regained the father we had killed; he was resurrected in enduring glory as the ensign of our tribe, the securer of our primitive morality, and our protector from the heavy sense of sin which not only stained us, but our descendants also, through all generations.
3. Transference, Projection, and the Oedipal Roots of Religious Experience
According to the Freudian reconstruction presented here, the aetiology of religious experience is compound. The divinity take its roots in our primitive perceptions of the father slaughtered by the primal horde. To a child (even before this prehistoric patricide) the father is perceived as the godlike omniscient and omnipotent source of the standards and rules the child must obey. These perceptions of the father survive in the unconscious. They there combine with the inherited memory traces of the primal experience and continue to influence our behavior and perceptions.
a) Oedipus, Transference, and the Experience of Projected Divinity
As Freud is fond of relating in his various histories of the psychoanalytic movement, the fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis were derived from Freud's early encounters with the resistance discovered when attempting to get hysterical patients to recall their experiences. Freud inferred an inner repressor and deemed both repressing agency and repressed material unconscious. Psychopathology, slips of the tongue, dreams, and religious experience all were understood to be functions whose origins and energy resulted from this repressed material. In his later work, Freud interpreted the reports of his clients (reports offered under hypnosis, under verbal encouragement and suggestion, and finally, in the later work, reports given through free-associations) as revealing a universal Oedipal drama. Freud found what he took to be evidence for the universal existence of the Oedipus in the testimony of patients, in his analysis of the repressed in dreams, in slips, wit, the transference phenomenon, as well as in art, philosophy, and religion.Briefly stated, the Oedipus complex is the preservation in the adult individual of the perceptions, strategies and scars of a conflict the individual underwent during his or her preschool years. According to Freud, these perceptions, etc., later color and shape the individual's future experiences: The individual relates to present experiences in ways appropriate to the child's perception of the preschool experiences endured years before. The adult projects these childhood experiences outward, and then experiences them as real. Relationships extensively colored by projections are called transference relationships. Sometimes the scars of childhood experience are too deep or improperly healed and an individual is among the walking wounded. These Oedipal struggles may then interfere with the healthy progress of psycho-sexual development. This interference cripples the individual's ability to enjoy life, diverts the energy needed to work whole- heartedly, and may make it impossible to develop mature sexual relationships.
b) Progression of an Individual's Psycho-Sexual Development from Oedipal Drama to Religious Experience
The child is born into the world with a certain quantity of psycho-sexual energy (termed `libido') which is initially attached to or cathected to the child's self. As the child develops out of this stage of infantile narcissism, libido is cathected to the primary organ of sensual pleasure in a stage-like progression. The preschool phases of this progression are oral, anal, and phallic. These three phases overlap the childhood Oedipal drama which seems to subside, along with expressions of sexuality, in the school-age child. During these preschool stages the child initially forms a strong libidnic attraction to the breast and the mother. As the child matures, s/he realizes that s/he has a rival for the maternal love object--the father. According to Freud, the child wants to possess the mother sexually, and is in such grievous rivalry with the father as to want to do away with him. The child realizes that the father is too powerful to contend with, since at this stage of development the parents are perceived as all-powerful, all-knowing beings, who know the secrets of the child's innermost heart. Furthermore, at this level of maturity, the child is still persuaded of the power of magical thinking, and believes that intentions and desires are as real, and as praise- or blame-worthy as actions carried through with those intentions. And given the repressed memories of the iniquities committed by the primal horde, magical thinking and racial memory conspire to over-determine a state in which the child "knows" s/he is a murderer and fears punishment in the form of castration (a fear which was doubly charged by the parents of Freud's patients who threatened castration as a consequence of infantile masturbation).One resolves the complex by a process of identification and renunciation. The child identifies with the parent of the same sex and renounces incestual desire. This renunciation is achieved and strengthened by the formation of a super-ego, a section of the child's ego identified with the childhood image of the parents (the parental Imago) perceived in consciousness as conscience and as the ego-ideal. When projected onto or into the world, the Imago is taken by the experiencer to be a veridical perception of a divine being. Depending on the child's sex, a full resolution of the Oedipus awaits many factors. These include successfully surviving the resurgence of the Complex in adolescence with the onset of adolescent sexuality and the libidnic excesses of that time of life, as well as the full identification made possible only through finding a mate outside the family circle and actually becoming a parent.[8]
Throughout life, these experiences of this childhood conflict are alive and present in the unconscious of the individual. This childish, magically thinking, ever-desiring, instinctually driven self is described topographically by Freud in his tripartite division of the person as the "id". That part of the individual responsible for maintaining congress and connection with reality and mediating between the id and reality is the "ego." That part of the ego, largely and usually unconscious, which bears and enforces the ego-ideal is the "super-ego."[9]
Later in life, one tends to transfer or project one's Oedipal perceptions onto the universe and all that dwells therein. Unless one has enjoyed an extremely successful resolution of the Oedipus, problems and pathology may emerge, among them, religious experiences. This lack of resolution, including its powerful springs of guilt from childhood wishes, combines with the unconscious recollection of the drama of the primal horde.[10] Together these create a human being who copes by denying the childhood (in wish) and prehistoric murder (in deed) of the divine father, a person who experiences this god's continued existence as an all-powerful, all-knowing source of both nature and morality.
4. Diagnosis
Freud claims that religious belief when allied with religious practices is a "collective neurosis" of humanity.[11] Although Freud fleshes out this view in later works, most particularly the Future of an Illusion and Civilization and its Discontents, this theoretical alliance of religion with neuroses and psycho-pathology occurs as early as his 1907 paper "Obsessive Acts and Religious Practices."[12]
C. Prong 2--Prescription and Prognosis: "Illusion" qua "Illusion" to be Rejected as Destructive to the Ego According to Freudian View
1. Summary of Prong 2: (Pragmatic)
An activity is ego-syntonic just in case it strengthens the ego in its function of mediating between the demands of reality, basic instinctual drives (of appetite, aggression, and sexuality), and conscience. As mediator, the ego needs to make adequate contact with both the external and internal demands involved. Thus, one of its main tasks is "reality testing"--making an accurate determination of the limits imposed on the organism by the external world including one's own body. Illusory beliefs are not ego-syntonic and are thus ultimately destructive if allowed to control individuals and societies, even if they should happen, e.g., by accident, to be true.[13]
2. Illusions: Nature and Effects
a) The Nature of an Illusion
Freud has an unusual definition of "illusion."[14] For Freud, although illusions are usually false, they are not false by definition. According to the definition Freud offers in Future of Illusion, what characterizes illusions is one's motivation for believing them. Freud begins by distinguishing illusions from falsehoods. Though illusions "are derived from human wishes," they, unlike delusions, are not necessarily false. A middle-class child's expectation of a royal marriage is one example Freud gives of an illusion; the belief in the coming of the Messiah is another. Freud is aware that, "whether one classifies this belief as an illusion or as something analogous to a delusion will depend on one's personal attitude." In an attempt to focus on the motivation of the beliefs in question he defines a belief as "an illusion when a wish- fulfillment is a prominent factor in its motivation, and in doing so we disregard its relations to reality, just as the illusion itself sets no store by verification."[15]
b) Illusory Belief Destructive
Belief based on illusion undermines the ego's reality-testing function which is needed to deal with the environment. Such belief is thus destructive for the integration of individual persons and societies. The step from inadequate neurotic response to reality--as a function of transference and illusion--to a blatant and dangerous inadequacy in perceiving reality is a short one. The acceptance of illusions paves the way to living in a world of delusions.Freudian psychoanalysis provides grounds for a pragmatic criticism of both popular argument from religious experience and "Will to Believe" type arguments. That Freud holds such illusory belief to be destructive is made clear in his New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis.
Freud there rejects the use of non-scientific methods such as "intuition and divination," since they are wish-fulfillments. Science, Freud cautions us, leads us to be wary of emotional demands and wishes. Though such wishes may function in the production of (science's rivals) art, religion and philosophy, Freud claims, "it would be illegitimate and highly inexpedient to allow these demands to be transferred to the sphere of knowledge." To let wishful demands dictate that knowledge Freud holds evidence alone has the right to indicate would lead us down a path to insanity which would preclude us from finding the truths that are there to find. It would "lay open the paths which lead to psychosis . . . and would withdraw valuable . . . energy from endeavors which are directed towards reality . . . ."[16]
That these remarks are directed particularly against the "illusions" of religion, Freud makes clear when he writes, "Of the three powers which may dispute the basic position of science, religion alone is to be taken seriously as an enemy."[17]