This essay began as a discussion of Sigmund Freud and his views of religion. The essay has become an exploration that explores the way other psychotherapists have modified, expanded, and disagreed with Freud. I find that while Freud was wrong, he was wrong in intriguing ways that have spurred much creative thought on the part of others. I have found this to be an interesting journey. I hope the reader will as well.
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), highly regarded and argued with founder of psychoanalysis, has a largely cynical view of religion. He will explore, as an atheist, the anthropological basis for the self-evidently persuasive power of religion in human history, even in the modern period. If one can show that religion is simply a product of the human imagination and an expression of a human self-alienation, the roots of which one analyzes in a critical approach to religion, then religion with its tradition and message will lose any claim to universal credibility in the life of the modern age.[1] Such a radical criticism of religion stands or falls with the claim that religion is not a constitutive part of human nature, in spite of its persistent influence on humanity and its history. We must view religion as an aberration or at best as an immature form of the human understanding of reality, that the secular culture of the modern west has overcome in principle or by a new society that is still in process of creation, so that it will finally wither away. If, however, religion is constitutive, then there can be no fully rounded and complete human life without it. To put it another way, openness to the Infinite and Eternal, which we may describe as an orientation of the human being toward that which is Infinite and Eternal, a horizon that does not end with humanity, but rather, opens humanity to that which is beyond humanity, becomes constitutive of human life. Such an orientation, such a drive or intuition, is not something satisfied by secularity or humanism. It points us toward the truth and reality toward which all religions point. Impressing this fact on the public consciousness of the world of secular culture will thus be a potential danger to the continued existence of that culture.[2]
I want to explore in this essay the basis for the cynicism of Freud regarding religion. He admits that it does not derive from patients. He simply carries this cynicism with him. As we shall see, he will largely think of religion as a superstition, a notion I find naïve. It shows unwillingness to listen to the longings of the human spirit we find in religion throughout human history and broadly throughout the world. The purpose of this essay is to explore the unique contribution Freud makes to the naturalistic and reductionist interpretation of religion.
Before I do so, however, the apostle Paul has his reductionist interpretation of religions outside of the Jewish and Christian frame of reference. In Romans 1:18-23, Paul follows his Jewish tradition in looking upon belief in many gods as a corruption of what people could have known of God. They “suppress” the truth through their wickedness. They could have known the truth of God, for through creation they could have known the eternal power and divine nature. They could have known the true God through the things God had made. They knew God, but did not honor or give thanks to God. They exchanged the immortal God for images resembling human beings, birds, animals, or reptiles. In other places, the New Testament will have a more generous account of the longings of the human spirit represented in religion, especially in Acts 14:16-17 and 17:22-31. However, in Romans, Paul seems to object to the magical basis behind much of polytheism of his day. They were often attempts to control God by means of the image. By means of the image, they sought to win favor by ritual. Such a polemic focuses on the perversion of the religion. Such is the danger of all religious practice, manipulating the divine for human purposes. In biblical religion, of course, the transcendence of God is always a reminder that God is beyond all human attempts to manage the divine selfish purposes.
One way to view Freud is that he keeps directing us to the danger inherent in all religious practice. The point of the worshipping community is to focus upon what God wants, while the danger is always present to turn religious devotion into nothing more than the worshipper getting what he or she wants. Of course, for Freud, one has no true God to whom to relate. Yet, I think it helpful for us to realize that the Bible itself has a concern in the prophets and in Paul that human beings will corrupt their worship of God into little more than worship of themselves. The Bible would also seek to uncover in its own way what is truly going on the hearts and minds of worshippers.
Freud introduced the suspicion that the conversion of which one speaks when it comes to religion is not what it appears. Rather than an encounter with the divine realm, it is actually an obsessional neurosis. Ultimately, religion is the everlasting longing for the father. Although it has no basis in reality, the strength of religion as shown in human history is the strength of the wish that brings the illusion into being.[3] It becomes like an obsession with a radically new idea and exhibits similarities with other neurotic behavior. I want to explore some of the themes of Freud that relate specifically to religion.
The modern view of God as infantile wish-projection probably had its birth in March of 1907 when Freud read a paper "Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices." In that paper, Freud claimed, based on his work with neurotic patients, that the "petty ceremonials" of religion are basically a sort of personality sickness. God is only a symptom of deep inner insecurities. "One might venture to regard obsessional neurosis as a pathological formation of a religion, and to describe that neurosis as an individual religiosity and religion as a universal obsessional neurosis." Only sick people could be religious.
Freud begins by observing that, like others before him, the similarities between the obsessive actions of those suffering from nervous afflictions and the ritualistic expressions of piety strike him. However, he thinks that the resemblance is more than superficial and can teach us something about the psychological processes of religious life. He groups obsessive actions with obsessive thoughts, ideas, impulses, and the like. Nonetheless, we have no coherent understanding of the root illness and can provide, at best, a phenomenology. For him, ritual is a displacement of neurotic energy. Yet, in the context of the rituals of daily life that all human beings have, in the context of the rituals we find in religion, I would suggest that we may well find habits and symbolic acts that reflect valid human aspirations.
An obsessive act may be a totally commonplace one; what marks it as obsessive is the compulsion to do it in a certain manner/order, the anxiety that attends if it one neglects it, and the development of certain prohibitions or hindrances around the act. Any activity may become obsessive if given a certain rhythm with repetition and pauses. There is no sharp distinction between ceremonial and obsessive actions; obsessive actions often develop out of the former.
The greatest difference between the obsessive action and religious ceremony is the private nature of the obsessional neurosis. Such rituals are highly idiosyncratic and can continue for years without anyone knowing, surrounded as they are by an aura of shame and absurdity, while the religious ritual tends to be much more stereotyped (as in prayer), and involves a broad community that legitimates it. However, psychoanalysis reveals the distinction is largely specious. All private obsessive behaviors turn out to be very significant, giving, “expression to experiences that are still operative and to thoughts that are cathected with affect,” either through direct or symbolic representation.
Freud gives a few examples: the woman who refuses the best parts of food, directly after refusing sex to her husband (the best part); the woman who always arranges a tablecloth so a maid can see the stain, when the stain is representative of the red ink that her husband spilled on their bed after he proved impotent on their wedding night, etc.
Like the ordinary, pious individual, the neurotic performs these actions without necessarily being conscious of their significance. They may become conscious through analysis, just as there may be clergy members who understand the significance of the religious rituals.
As Freud writes, neatly summing his theory up:
“We may say that the sufferer from compulsions and prohibitions behaves as if he were dominated by a sense of guilt, of which, however, he knows nothing, so that we must call it an unconscious sense of guilt, in spite of the apparent contradiction in terms. This sense of guilt has its source in certain early mental events, but it is constantly being revived by renewed temptations that arise whenever there is a contemporary provocation. Moreover, it occasions a lurking sense of expectant anxiety, an expectation of misfortune, which is linked, through the idea of punishment, with the internal perception of the temptation.”
The ritual is a defensive measure. At its start, the patient may know why he or she performs the ritual and that it is to prevent some misfortune, but never understands the sort of retribution expected. This is parallel to the protestations of the pious that they are miserable sinners, and their consequent turn toward prayers or rituals to forestall divine retribution.
At the bottom of the obsessive action is a repressed instinct, which received free play in childhood, but then suppressed, in later life. In repressing this instinct, a certain “conscientiousness” is created, but it always feels threatened. Thus, it experiences the repressed instinct as a temptation. Anxiety arises in the process of repression and turns into “expectant anxiety,” about the possibility of succumbing to the temptation and/or suffering retribution. Thus, the ritual is a defense against the temptation of the instinct and an effort to ward off retribution. Ultimately, though, it is an endless battle, and the protective measures of rituals come to seem inadequate. Prohibitions come to replace them, as phobias meant to forestall hysterical attacks.
Rituals, then, represent the conditions in which something that would otherwise be forbidden is permitted. Marriage, for example, represents the conditions in which one still allows sex. These actions, then, serve as a compromise, allowing some outlet for the repressed instinct, while continuing to deny it full freedom.
Religious rituals work similarly, in that religions form through the denial of specific instincts, often mixed with a sexual component. Freud suggests that the sexual component might be one reason why backsliding into sin is so common in religion. These absurd rituals become central because displacement dominates them. The desire is realized through this tiny action; thus, the action comes to be the main thing, pushing everything else aside. Essentially, though, the main difference between private obsessive actions and religion is that neuroses tend to be strictly sexual, while religion aims at the repression of more egoistic instincts generally.
For many people, reducing most human phenomena to something that can be said to be "only" something else is a successful way of dismissing the views of others. Therefore, what we call "God" is only a projection of something within ourselves. What we call "music" is only a series of sound waves bouncing about the atmosphere. What we call "art" is only a series of marks upon a canvas that stimulate the neurochemical processes of the brain. Reductionism is a hallmark of modernity. Further, when Freud focuses on religious ritual as a way to dismiss it, he misses the significance of habit in all areas of life. Human beings develop habits because they move one toward a certain end.
Freud (Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics 1913) considers the notion of taboo, which is widely diffused in primitive societies. He notes that primitive humanity reveals itself through inanimate monuments and implements left behind, such as art, religion, and attitudes toward life. He used myth and fairy tales that remain in our modern lives. They are our contemporaries as well, as we see them in certain primitive cultures. He thinks the psychology of primitive humanity and the psychology of the neurotic will have numerous points so correspondence. He says such primitive cultures reveal an unusually high grade of incest dread combined with substituting the totem relationship for the blood relationship. Certain things, persons, places, and so on, are credited with a mysterious sort of sanctity or uncleanness and from this character spring a strict prohibition against contact with them. He noted some strong analogies between these taboos and certain compulsion neuroses, particularly those in which prohibitions are prominent. They are alike in the following features. First, the prohibition has no rational explanation or gives rise to anxiety out of all proportion to the reasons against violating it. Second, the prohibition has to do with the act of touching and secondarily with other sorts of contact. Third, the prohibitions are steadily displaced from their primary objects to others associated with them in some way. An example is that a person who has violated a taboo becomes a taboo, and a neurotic who finds it impossible to pronounce a certain name finds it impossible to have any dealings with anything on a street that bears that name. Fourth, violation can be expiated by carrying out certain stereotyped procedures such as repeated washings. The point Freud is making is that psychoanalysis can explain neurosis. In early childhood the individual has a strong impulse to touch, look at, or otherwise come into contact with something. Some external authority prohibited the child from doing so and backs the prohibition with strong sanctions. These threats plus the authority that the position of the father gave him stopped the overt actions, but the desires where not destroyed. Rather, they were repressed, driven into the unconscious, from which they seek satisfaction. The compulsion is a result of this psychic constellation of forces. The desire, blocked from its initial object, seeks substitute objects that are connected along various paths of association with the original object. However, the prohibition opposes each substitute in turn, the opposition now being manifested as a strange and inexplicable anxiety over the carrying out of the act. Therefore, both the tendency to touch the object and the fear of doing so derive from sources long forgotten.
To be specific, he directs us to sexuality. The first object selection of the boy sexually is the forbidden objects of mother and sister. The maturing individual frees himself from the attractions. The neurotic presents a piece of psychic infantilism. The fixations of the libido are still in play. Eric Fromm writes of the error in Freud in seeing in love exclusively as the expression or sublimation of the sexual instinct, rather than that sexual desire is one manifestation of the longing for love and union with another. He views the sexual instinct as the result of a chemically produced tension in the body that becomes painful and seeks relief. Fromm admits that sexual desire operates in a similar fashion to hunger or thirst. Paradoxically, Freud ignores the combination of biology and psyche, especially in the masculine and feminine polarity, and the desire to bridge this polarity. To Fromm, Freud does not sexuality deeply enough.[4] Paul Tillich will suggest that the libido is a good way to understand humanity in its estrangement from self, others, and God. Freud has helped us understand the human predicament. The libido is present in the highest of spiritual experiences. He thinks such notions are far closer the insights of early Christianity, especially regarding concupiscence, than are the taboos related to Christian morality. However, what Freud refused to see was that the endless desire of the libido to draw the universe into one’s particular existence is an element of love. The libido focuses on a finite object, of course, as it wants to unite with the bearer of love. For Freud, the libido is creative through repression and sublimation.[5] For Tillich, Freud missed the fact that the infinite, never fulfilled libido is the normal drive toward vital self-fulfillment.[6]
Freud will stress that taboo prohibitions lack justification and are of unknown origin, while religious and moral prohibitions result from a commandment of a god. He thinks that the primitive taboo may throw light on the dark origin of our own “categorical imperative,” a reference to the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant. The psychoanalyst will recognize that the primitive taboo is not foreign to the modern person. The prohibitions of the neurotic and taboo are similar in that both are unmotivated and enigmatic, resulting from an unconquerable anxiety. The prohibition arises from an unconscious pleasure impulse that keeps seeking satisfaction. The power of the compulsion will lead to repression. This creates forces for satisfaction and for lessening the existing tension. Such forces explain the compulsion of the neurotic. His account of the history of taboo is that the prohibition arises from an external authority. It prohibits a pleasurable or desirable act. The unconscious would like nothing more than to transgress. They are afraid. This fear is stronger than the anticipated pleasure. Such taboo prohibitions, if violated, can receive condoning through expiation or penance. The desire to violate is repressed in the unconscious. The taboo acts like a contagion, prohibiting desire that is displaced upon something else. Tillich will say that the church can have gratitude for Freud at this point as he helped the churches rid themselves of a distorted image of saintliness, as it became moralistically empty and ridiculous in its expression of no drinking, dancing, and so on.[7] Pannenberg points out that the decline of the doctrine of original sin in theology led to the criticism that Christian moralism seems to be a life-denying rigidity, turning the experience of guilt to be an expression of a neurosis. For many people, the unmasking of the neurotic character of the Christian sense of guilt demonstrated the oppressive nature of the entire Christian belief in God.[8]
To make the analogy between neurosis and totem, one would need to show that at some earlier period people had certain strong desires forcibly suppressed by external authority in such a way that both the desires and their suppression were forced into the unconscious. In this notion, Nietzsche (On the Genealogy of Morals, 1887) had already derived the idea of God from fear of the ancestor and his power and from the consciousness of indebtedness to him. They then emerged in the form of simultaneous desires for and fear of handling certain objects that are somehow associated with the original objects of desire. Freud brings totemism into the picture. A totemic group is one bound together by a special regard for a certain species of animal or plant, the totem. If we make the assumption that totemism is the oldest form of religion and social organization, then we can take the fundamental totemic taboos as the basic ones, out of which all the others are derived by various associations. Do not kill the totem animal. Avoid sexual intercourse with other members of one’s totemic group. Yet, how does that help? Such taboos seem inexplicable. To what primordial trauma could we relate them? Freud points to the totemic feast, in which one of the taboos is cancelled on a solemn yearly occasion in which a member is killed and eaten in a prescribed way. This is an occasion for mourning and a joyful celebration. It indicates the ambivalence typical of the neurosis. Freud finds another clue in the animal phobias of children. He refers to one case of the fear of horses by a five-year-old boy.
Pannenberg will offer that the analysis by Freud is not correct. The patriarchal family was not the original form of the human family. He refers to discussion of the original tyrannical father who drove away his sons because they were his sexual rivals does not show up in primitive families today. He refers to the separation of the family from the kinship group despite the security that the latter offered it its members. When a man can do better without relatives than with them, he will tend to ignore the ties of kinship.[9]As he further sees it, the cult of the ancestors, like the installation of the divinity as father, could be a compensation for the rejected authority of the clan.[10]
Freud continued this line of thinking in his infamous The Future of an Illusion (1927). Otto Rank, for example, dismisses the book as betraying his unconscious doubt concerning the future of psychoanalysis as a modern religion, taken up temporarily by under-privileged neurotics.[11] There he dismisses "the fairy-tales of religion" as only an illusion "derived from human wishes." "The effect of religious thinking may be likened to that of a narcotic." This, as you can imagine, was something like what Marx said when he charged that religion was "the opiate of the common people." Religion is a cheap drug. I would like to suggest the reader replace “illusion” with the more current phrase “worldview.” It seems as if what Freud wants to call an illusion is provocative when applied to religion. Yet, when he broadens it to political ideas or even his own psychoanalytic theories, he is really discussing what we might call a worldview. If so, he is discussing the future of the religious worldview, in contrast to scientific, psychological or political worldviews, as ways of interpreting the world as we experience it. Freud is on the side of those who think that science will eventually provide the answers to what he will describe as the normally religious questions of purpose and meaning in life.
Freud begins in the first section by saying that civilization exists because human beings fashion their lives in such a way to rise above animal instinct. Civilization accomplishes this objective through first, the knowledge people acquired in order to control the forces of nature and extract its wealth for the satisfaction of human needs; and through, second, the regulations necessary in order to adjust the relations of people to each other and especially the distribution of available wealth. Given the social nature of human beings, he finds it remarkable that civilization expects so much sacrifice from individuals in order to participate in it. The best way to improve civilization would be for civilization to renounce coercion and the suppression of individual instinct. In such a culture, people would devote themselves to the acquisition of wealth and its enjoyment. For him, that would be the golden age. Yet, human nature may move against the possibility of such a golden age, for people have within themselves anti-social and anti-cultural trends that can determine their behavior in society. The reason civilization cannot do without coercion is that people are not spontaneously fond of work and that they want their animal instinct expressed. In the second section, he writes of the importance of the successful integration of the superego into the psychic life of the individual. The prohibitions and regulations of animal instinct by civilization are the means through which individuals can participate in society. The success of this process in certain areas, such as incest, cannibalism, and murder, suggests that civilization can frustrate animal instinct or passion. The moral demands of civilization are also part of this process of forming the superego and support for the integration of these demands into the individual. Avarice, sexual lusts, lies, fraud, and misrepresentation will seek satisfaction in individual behavior unless civilization prohibits them. Envy of the wealthy class by the poor can be a good thing if it leads to seeking satisfaction of their desire for a better life through work. However, if the poor have no reasonable hope of lifting themselves up, and they experience suppression by wealthy classes, the discontent of the poor can lead to rebellion. In such a case, civilization ought not to expect that the poor will successfully integrate the superego. The spreading of this discontent to large numbers of persons will lead to the destruction of civilization. The point is the extent to which individuals integrate the rules of civilization is a form of mental wealth. It exhibits itself in the ideals of the people and artistic creations. The importance of ideals in a civilization is the pride people take in what civilization has already achieved. Civilizations claim the right to look down upon other civilizations based upon these ideals. The internalization of the ideal by participants in civilization is a narcissistic satisfaction. It combats the hostility that the animal instinct within individuals has against civilization. Even oppressed classes gain psychic satisfaction by their despising of other classes within civilization. Art offers substitute satisfaction for living in obedience to the standards of civilization. It reconciles individuals to the sacrifices the individual has made on behalf of civilization. Art heightens feelings of identification by providing an occasion for sharing highly valued emotional experiences.
Section 3 begins the discussion of religious ideas, which Freud identifies at the end of section two as the illusions of civilization. In what does the value of religious ideas lie? The purpose of civilization is to defend us against the aggressive, animal instinct of nature by creating for participants in civilization a superego that keeps instinct in check. Nature is against the individual. The natural elements are against human beings. Death, a force against which people will find no medicine, is always before us. Nature will overwhelm each of us. Individual life is hard to bear because of civilization itself and because of the bad fortune that often befalls us. Individuals, who have such high regard for themselves, demand an answer to the dilemma. One answer has been the humanization of nature. Although people are still quite weak in comparison, we can at least react to imagined personal forces. We do this, based upon our infantile reactions to father and mother, which contain both fearful and nurturing reactions. The gods become the means through which people remove the terrors of nature, reconcile themselves to the experience of good fortune and bad fortune, and compensate themselves for the sufferings of life. Human beings create a store of ideas from their need to make helplessness tolerable, an experience recoverable from infantile experiences. Such ideas protect human beings from the power of nature and from the harsh effects of bad fortune. Freud offers his summary of religious ideas. Life in this world serves a higher purpose, that of perfecting human nature. The soul detaches itself from the body and becomes the object of this perfecting purpose. An intelligence superior to us works behind the scenes, in ways mysterious to us, in order to perfect human nature. Death, rather than a return to inorganic lifelessness, is the beginning of a new form of existence. The moral laws that govern civilization also govern the universe. This supreme intelligence is also the judge of morality, rewarding good and punishing evil. This new existence of heaven obliterates the hardships of this life. What people missed here, such as wisdom, goodness, and justice, find fulfillment in this new life. The belief in one God laid open the divine father that was behind this religious search. The point of all of this is that religious ideas are the ways in which civilization has protected individuals from the harshness of the impersonal forces of nature, from the hard quality of human life due to suffering, and from the harsh finality of death.
In section five, Freud deals with the psychological value of religious ideas. For him, they are teachings concerning external or internal reality that tells one something that one could not discover oneself and which lay claim to one’s belief. These ideas are important for leading a reasonably happy life. One who has them is fortunate and one who does not lives in ignorance. Yet, as helpful psychologically as religious ideas want to be in explaining the riddles of life, they are the least authenticated of any group of ideas that civilization has. For this reason, most civilizations forbid questioning the authenticity of its religious claims. Authentication tends to reside in a past report. However, one tends to look around in the present for further authentication. The attempt to do so through religious experience is little more than private mental activity. While one may say, with Tertullian, “I believe because it is absurd,” as a way of placing religious ideas outside the realm of justification, I am not obliged to believe every absurd idea.
In the sixth section, Freud proposes that the psychical strength of religious ideas derives from the strength of the wishes of humanity to gain aid in its helplessness, the need for protection through the love provided by the father, and the helplessness persists throughout life and must find resolution beyond this life. Such a religious idea is an illusion, in the sense that it derives from human wishes. As such, they are psychiatric delusions. However, delusions are in contradiction to reality while an illusion may not be so. A belief is an illusion when a wish-fulfillment is a prominent factor in its motivation. As an illusion, it needs no verification in reality. One can neither prove nor disprove an illusion. For example, a girl may live with the illusion of a prince in shining armor rescuing her from her lot in life. Well, it can happen. It has happened in a few instances. One can neither prove nor disprove the illusion in this case. However, science is the best means we have to gain knowledge of the world outside ourselves. Intuition and introspection give us knowledge only of internal mental events. They are illusions when we apply them to the external world, even if on occasion they may prove true. It only satisfies a human wish when we tell ourselves that it would be very nice if there were a God who created the world, a benevolent providence, a moral order to the universe, and an after-life.
In the seventh section, Freud considers the possibility that other ideas of civilization may also be illusions, such as political ideas and relations between the sexes. He then comments that many people in western civilization find great consolation in religious ideas. In fact, much of modern civilization is full of them. It seems as if science wants to rob people of useful illusions. Yet, modern civilization runs a greater risk if it maintains its present attitude toward religion rather than giving it up. He admits that religious ideas have had many good effects upon civilization. However, this history is not enough. It has had plenty of time to show that it can civilize the animal instinct of human beings, but it has not done so. After all these years, human beings remain unhappy. People assert that the modern age has weakened the hold of religious ideas upon people because modernity has made the ideas less credible. He considers the possibility that educated people are the carriers of civilization, and thus become no threat to civilization if they cease to believe in God. However, the masses may need to believe in order to maintain social order. Yet, the masses will eventually join the educated classes in the rejection of religious ideas.
In the eighth section, Freud argues that religious ideas may have some accurate historical reflections. However, this fact makes the argument stronger that reason needs to replace religious ideas.
In the ninth section, he admits that his own zeal for science and reason may be an illusion. However, he also believes that one may dig up a treasure capable of enriching civilization through a non-religious education. The only reason that the masses appear to depend upon the religious illusion is their culture. It seems as if they will deal with the harshness of life only by living with religious illusion. However, other people may have had the good fortune of having a sensible childhood and youth. They live with the helplessness of humanity, its insignificance, its difficulties, and that they are no longer under the providential care of God. Humanity cannot always remain in childhood. It must go bravely into a hostile life. Such education without religious ideas is an education to reality. In fact, the purpose of this book is to help humanity take this step into reason and away from the consolation of religious ideas. One will then rely upon one’s own resources.
In section ten, he describes himself as a psychologist who does not deceive himself about the difficulty of finding one’s bearings in this world. He makes an endeavor to assess the development of humanity, in the light of the small portion of knowledge he has gained through a study of the mental processes of individuals during their development from child to adult. He admits that he now draws an analogy between that experience and that of humanity emerging from the childhood of religion and into the adulthood of reason. He admits that the analogy may not prove true. He thinks the religious person defends a lost cause. The primacy of intellect lies in the future, but it will become a reality. In a sense, the god of Freud is logos. The difference between Freud and the believer is that the believer must defend religious ideas at all costs, while if Freud believes in an illusion he can allow reason to correct his beliefs. Science gains knowledge of the world and in the process increases our power in accord with which we can arrange our life. He concludes by saying that science is no illusion. What is an illusion is to suppose that science cannot give us what we can get elsewhere.
Freud, in Civilization and its Discontents (1930), begins by observing that people common use false standards of measurement, such as power, success, and wealth, while underestimating what is of true value in life. Although Freud does not refer to Schleiermacher at this point, he does refer to a letter from a friend, Romain Rolland, who had just read a transcript of Future of an Illusion. His letter said that Freud had not properly appreciated the true source of religious sentiments, which he identified in a peculiar feeling, which he testifies that he always has, and finds confirmed in others and supposes is present in millions of other people. The feeling is a sensation of eternity, a feeling of something limitless and unbounded, an “oceanic” feeling. Freud notes that he does not himself have such a feeling and does not find it easy for science to deal with feelings. However, the idea of people receiving an intimation of their connection with the world around them through such an immediate feeling that directs one to purpose is not in line with his theory. He will therefore seek a psycho-analytic explanation for such a feeling. He finds it in the infantile melding of ego and world, a boundary one slowly learns to discern in the stages of infancy. Originally, the ego includes everything and later it separates an external world from itself. The infant feels this intimate bond between ego and world that growth toward adulthood will end. In this way, the oceanic feeling his friend identified is a residue of the initial phase of ego-feeling. Such a feeling is not the source of religious needs. The derivation of religious needs from the helplessness of the infant and the longing for the father is incontrovertible, and is his explanation for religion.[12] Fromm makes the appropriate point that for Freud, love in this context is limitless narcissism. In Fromm, the sexual desire is a special case of escaping the emptiness of our aloneness, the longing to love and be loved, and thus the longing for “union” and “participation” in the life of another. Freud will have none of this. The difference between irrational love and love as an expression of the mature personality does not exist for Freud.[13]
As Freud continues in Chapter 2, the common person cannot imagine providence in any other way than an enormously exalted father. He finds it humiliating to discover the large number of people who defend it with “pitiful rearguard actions.” He admits that the question of the purpose of life is one on which any system of religion will stand or fall. He thinks that we should focus on what human beings show by their behavior to be the purpose and intention of their lives. What do they wish to achieve? He does not doubt that they strive for happiness. They want to become happy and remain so. People aim at the absence of pain and unpleasure and the experience of strong feelings of pleasure. He identifies this as the pleasure principle. The difficulty we face is that unhappiness is easier to experience, threatened as we are by the decay of our bodies, the merciless forces of the external world, and the pain of relationships with others. The drug of intoxication is one way of defending oneself from suffering. Certain eastern practices like yoga seek to withdraw our attachment to the external world. One can try to re-create the world in our minds, even though reality is generally too strong for this attempt. The art of living for some people is a technique that locates satisfaction in internal mental processes. It obtains happiness from an emotional relationship to the external world. Love becomes the center of everything. It looks for satisfaction in loving and being loved. Others will seek satisfaction in the enjoyment of beauty. The aesthetic attitude to the goal of life offers little protection against the threat of suffering, but it can compensate for a great deal. The enjoyment of beauty has a mildly intoxicating quality. Beauty has no obvious use, even though civilization could not do without it. We will never fulfill the program of the pleasure principle, but we cannot give up our efforts to bring it nearer to fulfilment by every means we can. He thinks religion restricts the play of choice and adaptation of the pleasure principle. It imposes on everyone its path to the acquisition of happiness and protection from suffering. Its technique involves depressing the value of life and distorting the picture of the real world in a delusional manner. This approach presupposes intimidation of the intelligence. Religion succeeds in sparing many people from an individual neurosis, but little more.
In Chapter 3, he deals with a notion he finds prevalent in modern civilization. Many people within modern civilization have concluded that the civilization in which they have been born is largely responsible for our misery. They think they would be happier if they could give it up and return to primitive conditions. He finds it astonishing because civilization seeks to protect individuals from the sources of many of our sufferings. He finds it strange that so many people have hostility toward civilization. He notes that the neurotic cannot tolerate the frustration he or she feels between the cultural ideals of society and the possibilities of happiness. He notes that the admitted technological advances of modern civilization have not increased, for some, their pleasure. We may not feel comfortable, but how different are we from earlier ages? This civilization gives us greater protection from the forces of nature. Beauty, cleanliness, and order hold special positions within civilization. It encourages higher mental activities such as science and the arts. It also offers social relationships in the neighbor, in a mate, in a family, and within a political structure. Civilization must insure justice, but it does so at the expense of individual liberty. Much of the activity of forming a civilization balances the claims of individual and the claims of the group. This process involves sublimation of individual instinct. It will also include the repression of powerful instincts.
Chapter 4 summarizes in part his work Totem and Taboo. The communal life of human beings has the two-fold foundation of the compulsion to work that the external world demands and the power of love. In Chapter 5, he says the command to love the neighbor is helpful, but runs up against human aggression. In essence, we are not gentle creatures. He summarizes the problem with communism in this area by supposing that we are really good and well-disposed people while the existence of private property has corrupted us. He describes this as an illusion, for private property did not create human aggression. We are so aggressive that the attempt by civilization to limit our natural aggression makes us discontent. He thinks it quite just for people to raise a concern when civilization allows the existence of so much suffering. In Chapter 6, he discusses his notion that in addition to the instinct to preserve life, a contrary instinct in us seeks to dissolve life, that is, an instinct toward death. Paul Tillich noted that in this notion, Freud is close to the Christian doctrine of sin.[14] Eros and death are instincts that determine much of human behavior. He thinks civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, families, races, peoples, and nations, into one great unity, the unity of humanity. The death instinct opposes this program of civilization. In Chapter 7, he will say that the means civilization has in limiting human aggression is the internalization of that value in the superego of the individual. The superego will act through the sense of guilt, even if the individual is not caught in the act. For Pannenberg, the basic thesis that conscience has a social matrix and that it develops in the context of social relations is a strong point for which Freud has not received enough attention.[15] It will punish the individual, even if civilization does not do so explicitly. It will do so through the presence of a bad conscience and the fear of loss of love. The superego torments the sinful ego with the same feelings of anxiety as if punished by the external world. The field of ethics will strengthen the superego. The superego is an extension of external authority from civilization. The initial aggressiveness is the Oedipus complex, the desire to kill the father, and the associated guilt and remorse of having that desire. Otto Rank will suggest that this emphasis on external restrictions is not helpful. He argues that self-inhibiting impulse inherent in the individual creates protective limitations against the irrational self. He points to Jung, who saw the irrational unconscious as the thread of the demonic as expressed in mythological symbolism. Freud attempted to rationalize the irrational. Only later in his life did he try to internalize through his conception of the super-ego. Ultimately, this is yet another attempt to elevate the father to god-like power and make the mother into an infantile fixation. With this elevation and with its exploration in the Oedipus Complex is an attack on the intellectualism of the first Western thinkers who sought to solve the riddle of human existence by philosophical speculation. Psychoanalysis appears as a direct attack on the over-rated intellectual self upon the irrational.[16] James Hillman describes the exploration into Greek myth by Freud already suggested that the work of therapy is mythic and ritual. Psychology is mythology in that it pays attention to the stories of the soul. However, the story of Freud chose left psychology with cursed issues such as father-murder, wars of generations, unsolved incest longings and incestuous entanglements in both relationships and ideas, the distortion of the feminine into the Jocasta mold, the anima as an intellectual riddle with the body of a monster, and destruction is everywhere. He thinks a wrong myth at the center can distort psychological perceptions. Much depends on the recognition of the true father. The discovery of our authenticity could yield acceptance and legitimation within ourselves and society, freeing us from the need to turn to borrowed models. The search is for what continues to create in the psyche, for the specific nature of the creative principle within the field of psychology.[17]
I find this discussion of the superego incredibly helpful. Over the years, generational studies have fascinated me. One cannot easily think of an American culture because successive generations have had new social and political institutions to which to relate. The superego is the internal mechanism through which the culture exerts its influence upon the behavior of the individual. Thus, the conscience that could accept slavery when it already existed within America is challenged in the generations following the removal of slavery as part of the institutional life. Sadly, the ideas behind slavery found extensive influence in laws regarding segregation of the races and in general racial attitudes. It took the baby-boom generation to largely reject such racial stereotypes, distinguishing themselves from the silent and WWII generations in this regard. Future generations will not have to deal with race in the same way for that reason. Civil rights and the ensuring of the right to vote to all persons, regardless of race or gender, has been an important change throughout the first two-thirds of the 20th century. Such changes in social institutions change the contents of the superego. Of course, one can move against such changes, but even if so, one will need to deal with the guilt attached to doing so. The superego, then, is the internal mechanism of the cultural police, so that even if one transgresses a cultural norm, one will still experience shame and guilt.
One can see the reality of this in contrasting Islamic culture from that of western culture, influenced as it remains by the political ideas of freedom it inherited from the enlightenment, the morality and compassion we find in Christian tradition, and the morality and philosophy we find in the Greek and Roman tradition. One can read the moral side of the Ten Commandments, the vice and virtue lists in the New Testament, or the household relies we find in Ephesians and Colossians, and still find much symmetry with values today. Thus, in the west, while many people may still have strong concerns about a family member converting to another faith, one would not think of killing them or imprisoning them for doing so. The notion of freedom of religion finds deep embedding in the conscience of individuals. Yet, in an Islamic culture, imprisonment and death for someone who converts from Islam to Christianity is a lively possibility, due to its notion of blasphemy of the prophet Mohammed. In fact, in the Islamic culture, one who did respond in such a way would transgress a cultural norm. One could also trace such a difference with the presently existing tribal norms in Africa, Latin America, Australia, and Asia as well. The point is that such much of the policing of the behavior of individuals in any civilization is self-policing due to the internalization of cultural values that occurs primarily through parents and the extended family, and then finds confirmation in the educational, vocational, religious, and political life of the culture. Even when the external authority is not around, the punishment on the individual will still occur through guilt and shame.
In Chapter 8, he opines that the superego does not concern itself, in most individuals, enough with the happiness of the ego. He also offers that an analysis of the superego of a civilization would be an interesting avenue of research.
Pannenberg opines that Freud took too one-sided view when he conceived of culture as built on renunciation of instinct and the suppression or repression of powerful instincts. His theory of culture supposes a concept of instinct that does not pay sufficient attention to the unique biological character formation is always at every point essential to human nature and therefor to human sexuality as well.[18]
Freud, in Moses and Monotheism (1937), summarizes his position by saying that the argument started from some remarks by Charles Darwin and embraced a suggestion of Atkinson. In primeval times people lived in small hordes, each under the domination of a strong male. The strong male was the master and father of the whole horde. All females were his property, the wives and daughters in his own horde as well as perhaps also those robbed from other hordes. The fate of the sons was a hard one. If they excited the jealousy of the father, the father killed them, or castrated them, or cast them out. The sons robbed from other communities. The next decisive step towards changing this first kind of social organization lies in the following suggestion. The brothers, who had been driven out and lived together in a community clubbed together, overcame the father and all partook of his body. He wants to attribute to those primeval people the same feelings and emotions that he elucidates in the primitives in his own time. They not merely hated and feared their father. They also honored him as an example to follow. In fact, each son wanted to place himself in the position of the father. The cannibalistic act becomes comprehensible as an attempt to assure one’s identification with the father by incorporating a part of him.
After the brothers rid of the father, the affection that had all this time been pushed under was bound to make itself felt. It did so in the form of remorse. The dead father became stronger than the living one had been, for events took the course we so often see them follow in human affairs to this day. What the father prevented the sons now prohibit, a type of deferred obedience. They revoked their deed by forbidding the killing of the totem, the substitute for their father. They renounced its fruits by resigning their claim to the women who had now been set free. They created out of their filial sense of guilt the two fundamental taboos of totemism, which for that very reason corresponds to the two repressed wishes of the Oedipus complex.
The point Freud is making is that the dictates of the father return in a disguised form in the totemic taboos. Memory has enhanced the power of the father because of the guilt felt at the murder of the father.
Freud wants to use these same principles to explain the development of religion. The memory of primeval murder, together with the ambivalent tender and hostile impulses toward the father associated therewith, has been repressed, and that like all repressed material, it is constantly seeking expression. However, to maintain the repression, this expression must be disguised. The first step is the replacement of the totem animal with a personal deity that still has the form of an animal, and then transforms itself by myth. It represents the father as a personal deity, and Freud suggests that this development was abetted by the fact that in the course of time the bitterness against the father abated and his image became a more ideal one, even an unattainable ideal. However, the hostility had not disappeared. The practice of sacrificing divine kings, gods in human form, grew up in forms. This side of the picture was also reflected mythically in widespread stories of the divine son who committed incest with the mother in defiance of the divine father, only first to be killed by an animal and then resurrected amid joy and celebration.
In monotheism, the primeval father is most fully restored in all his grandeur. The worship of the one and only father-deity who has unlimited power is the theme of monotheism. Freud explains the fact that the Jews entered this stage because Moses was an Egyptian who tried to impose monotheism on the Jews and was murdered by them for his pains. The murder of this godlike figure formed such a close parallel with the primeval murder that the Jews were sensitized for a more complete return of the repressed material, gradually accepting the doctrines of their great leader. However, such ethical monotheism was unstable. It tries to achieve a reconciliation with the father without taking into account the guilt of the sons, and as a result it cannot deal with the hostile tendencies and the guilt accruing from it. It offers them no expression. The remedy in Christianity begins with original sin and proclaims the Son of God has suffered death to atone for that sin. The attribution of innocence to the Son is part of the disguise, according to Freud. However, though the Son dies, he rises again and occupies the center of attention and worship so that the hostility to the father is triumphant after all.
Pannenberg explains the description of God as father in Israel as having a relationship to the patriarchal constitution of the Israelite family. It had its locus in the position of the father as the head of the clan and the care for clan members that this involved. The aspect of fatherly care is a notion that the Old Testament takes over in the divine fatherly concern for Israel. The sexual definition of the role of the father plays no part. A mark of the faith of Israel from the outset is that of the God who elected the patriarchs, the God of the exodus and Sinai, has no female partner. To bring sexual differentiation into the understanding of God would mean polytheism, a notion ruled out in Israel. By fictitiously assuming that Moses was murdered, Freud tried to relate the religious history of Israel to the thesis that an Oedipus complex is common in individuals. He explained the fact that the God of Israel is nonsexual as an expression of repression. Such an imaginative description of the religious history of Israel is without any serious basis. Sexual tensions within the family are not the basis of the portrayal of God that we find in the Old Testament.[19]
I now invite you on a journey with other authors, mostly psychotherapists. They have expanded and deepened work on neurotic conditions. They have had a different way of looking at sex and the unconscious. They have a different way of valuing religion. We can be grateful that students of Freud perceived the weakness of his position regarding religion.
Carl Jung offers the opinion that he over-emphasizes the pathological aspect of life and interpreting humanity too exclusively in the light of human defects. He thinks that The Future of an Illusion is an example in that Freud fails to understand the religious experience. Jung prefers to look at humanity in the light of what in individuals is health and sound, and to free the sick from that point of view that colors every page Freud has written. His point is that the psychology of Freud is not that of the healthy mind. He thinks that modern people in particular need to rediscover the life of the spirit and experience it anew ourselves. In this way, we can break the spell that binds us to the cycle of biological events. He thinks that religious rites of initiation encourage such advances in spiritual life. Such rites of initiation have taught spiritual rebirth. Yet, humanity keeps forgetting the role of divine re-creation and transformation. One can drive the spirit out of the door. However, when we have done so the salt of life grows flat. It loses its savor. We have proof that the spirit always renews its strength in the fact that the central teaching of the ancient initiations is handed on from one generation to the next.[20] In fact, Jung thinks that an issue for the truly modern people is that they have become fully conscious of the present. They have become solitary. They have become unhistorical in the deepest sense, alienating themselves from the tradition that has shaped them. He describes this as the Promethean sin, and in this sense, modern people live in sin. The danger that consciousness of the present may bring is the illusion that we are the culmination of the history of humanity, the fulfillment and the end-product of countless centuries. Although Jung does not make the direction connection, one could argue that Freud lives with this illusion of the truly modern person. In any case, Jung will stress that we are also the disappointment of the hopes and expectations of the ages. He thinks that modern people need to become humble. The shock of modern people is that they have fallen into profound uncertainty. He values the modern approach of basing psychology on experience and not upon articles of faith or the postulates of any philosophical system. He values the emphasis on respect for diversity within the modern experience. He also thinks that modern skepticism has chilled enthusiasm for reform. [This is no longer true within the progressive movement.] He criticizes the modern experience of religion as trying on a number of religions and convictions as if they were Sunday attire, only to lay them aside again like worn-out clothes. He seems to value spiritual movements that we would call New Age as expressions of the spiritual quest. Modern people abhor dogmatic postulates taken on faith. He acknowledges that our calling is to dethrone the idolized values of our conscious world. He thinks the Western world is in a precarious situation. The danger is greater the more we blind ourselves to the merciless truth with illusions about our beauty of soul.[21] In another observation, he says that for people over 35 whom he has seen in his office, the problem in the last resort was that of not finding a religious outlook on life. His observation is that side by side with the decline of religious life, the neuroses grow noticeably more frequent. He has noticed that modern people have an aversion for traditional opinions and inherited truths. He goes so far as to say that Freudian psychoanalysis has its limit in the task of making conscious the shadow-side and the evil within us. It simply brings into action the civil war that was latent, and lets it go at that. Patients must deal with it as best as they can. He has overlooked the fact that humanity has never been able to fight the powers of darkness, that is, the powers of the unconscious, alone. Humanity needs the spiritual help that its particular religion holds out. Psychotherapy and clergy must face similar issues in the lives individuals. In psychotherapy, the hope is that from the psychic depths from which destructive forces come will also come rescuing and healing forces. His experience had been that at the culmination of the illness, the individual converted destructive powers into healing forces. For him, certain archetypes come to independent life and serve as spiritual guides for the personality, supplanting the inadequate ego. The religion person will say that guidance has come from God. He even wants to view the therapist and the clergy as somewhat on the same team in terms of bringing healing into the lives of people.[22]
Otto Rank is interested in the realization principle. He sees this principle in the gradual and continuously changing realization of the unreal and the reverse process of making the real unreal that parallels it, in the evolution of the idea God. He sees it in the projection of the most real principle of all, the will, in the unreal concept of God, to the personification of the counter-wll in the father principle, and of positive willing in the love principle. His point is that such realization principle finds its denial in the moralistic parent ideology of Freud.[23]
Karen Horney will identify the neurotic process as a form of human growth, but that moves against healthy human growth.[24] Human energy needs to direct itself into the realization of one’s potential. Of course, differences in temperament, faculties, and propensities, as well as the conditions of early life, will dictate the form of this realization. One may become softer or harder, more cautious or more trusting, more or less self-reliant, more contemplative or more outgoing. Yet, due to inner stress, a neurotic becomes alienated from one’s real self. One develops a rigid system of inner dictates that strives toward an idealized image of oneself and satisfy pride. She sees the fundamental problem of morality and religious obligation is to attain perfection. The developing of this inner rigid system cramps human spontaneity. The danger here is that inherent in human evolution are forces that urge people to realize their given potentialities. One strives toward self-realization, and the set of values evolves from such striving. We do not need the inner strait jacket to rid us of primitive instincts, as Freud would have us think, because we need to outgrow our destructive forces. Self-knowledge is the means of liberating the forces of spontaneous growth. Believing this process of self-realization and growth is the drive of evolution, she will value spontaneity as the process of realization of the real self. (p. 13-16) Her concern is the basic anxiety one develops early in life of isolation and helplessness in a world potentially hostile. In response, human beings develop the neurotic drive toward self-idealization, which entails a general self-glorification, giving individuals the much-needed feeling of significance and superiority. Energy directed toward actualizing the idealized is wasted energy. The neurosis is the need for perfection that drives one toward external success and self-deception. It can lead to vindictive triumph over others. Of course, the neurosis reveals itself in the compulsive nature of this drive toward perfection, because it leads to self-destruction. The neurotic claim is entitlement to special attention, consideration, and deference on the part of others. Important elements in life are to come to the neurotic person without making adequate efforts to have them. The implied belief of the neurotic is that because I am something special, I am entitled.(17-54) For example, love will entitle one to everything from another. I am helpless, and this puts a claim on you if you love me. The claim of justice is a deceptive one. I have been good, so God or life owes me a good life. It can make other people responsible for any adversity that overtakes them. It can lead to vindictiveness. The maintenance of such a neurosis requires the assertion of the claim. It leads to a mixture of envy and insensibility toward others. It will lead to a general feeling of uncertainty about rights. Others are responsible for the trouble I am in. I am entitled to repair. Repair of oneself has lost interest because the individual has lost constructive interest in his or her life. One loses the energy to do something about one’s own life and leaves such improvement to others. (p. 54-60) The inner drive of the neurotic is the tyranny of the should, in terms of what one should be able to do, be, feel, or know. These inner compulsions suggest that nothing should be impossible to oneself. At this point, she criticizes Freud for thinking that these inner dictates are morality in general. In reality, such inner dictates show the lack of moral seriousness of genuine ideals. A point she will regularly make is that the internal condemnation one experiences for failing to actualize the idealized self leads one to experience criticism from others as overwhelming. The idealized self becomes a phantom one pursues and a measuring rod for the real self. This will lead to self-hate and self-contempt. She will distinguish the self as actual, both healthy and neurotic, idealized, and real. Her goal in therapy is to self-actualization of the real self. She refers to the neurotic move toward others as clinging to others out of the self-effacing need for live, to the neurotic move against others as the rebel and the need for mastery of life, and the movement away from others as withdrawal and the need for resignation and freedom. The path of psychotherapy is an old path. Its aim is self-orientation through self-knowledge. In the neurotic, one needs to bring disillusionment into the neurotic drive toward perfection.
What Horney (Chapter 15) has done is move away from the theory of instincts supplied by Freud, largely viewing neurosis in the context of human relations. Neurosis is a disturbance in the relation to self and to others. She thinks that because Freud constantly brought one back to infantile processes he failed to see the significance of the expansive drive of the neurotic. He also rightly perceived the importance of the death instinct, which for Horney is the intense drive toward self-destruction. Tillich will add that the death instinct is an attempt to escape the pain of the never satisfied libido. The death instinct, or the drive for death, is discontent with human creativity or the drive for life. He advises theologians to reflect deeply on Freud as a way of understanding human estrangement.[25] In a discussion of the ambiguities of life, he will refer to the life instinct as one that senses its creativity while at the same time senses its exhaustibility. The drive for death is a dimly felt recognition that life must end. One might long for the sensation of the pain and burden of continuing creativity.[26] One might say that the death instinct is a form of anticipation, as we anticipate our eventual death in many self-destructive acts throughout our lives. Horney also sees some similarity with Freud and the superego on the one hand and the tyranny of the should in her analysis. Yet, their meaning is quite different. Further, Freud saw clearly the self-destruct drive but not the neurotic drive toward self-glorification, the process of abandoning the real self for an ideal one. She also viewed Freud as having a pessimistic outlook on human nature, doomed to dissatisfaction. Human beings, for Freud, cannot live out in a satisfactory way instinctual drives without wrecking oneself and civilization. She thinks of her views as largely optimistic in that they lead one to face the human tragedy contained in the wasted energy of neurosis. From the perspective of moral or spiritual values, the history of humanity shows an alive and untiring striving toward greater knowledge about self and the world, deeper religious experiences, greater spiritual powers, greater moral courage, greater achievements, and better ways of living. Intellect and imagination lead humanity to visualize things not yet existing. Humanity reaches beyond what it is or can do at any given time. Humanity has limits that the neurotic pressure to reach toward the ultimate and the infinite would deny. Humanity does not have the capacity to reach the ultimate or infinite. Such a drive is the basis of self-idealization and flight from the potential the self actually possesses.
Rollo May begins with an analysis of our schizoid world, by which he means that his transitional age (1960s) is out of touch, avoiding close relationships, and the inability to feel. The schizoid person is cold, aloof, superior, and detached. He thinks of it as a general tendency of his age due to the technological nature of culture. Eric Fromm will charge capitalism as a means of alienating people from self, others, and nature. We have big appetites, including an appetite for large breasts, and remain eternally disappointed. As he sees it, the principles underlying capitalism and love contradict each other.[27] Such an analysis has a hollow ring to it, grasping at straws for the socialist. In any case, May admits that some cultures may push such personalities toward creativity, but his transitional age pushes them to become increasingly detached and mechanical. He looks at such problems as prophetic, pointing to issues that remain unresolved. As he sees it, then, the fact that love and will have become problems for this transitional age is significant. His age will focus on love as the resolution to the predicaments of love so much that their self-esteem depends on it. People cling to each other and persuade themselves that what they feel is love. Love has become elusive if not an outright illusion. The sexual form of love, biologically inescapable, has become a test and burden rather than salvation. Will has become a problem that he sees as people to go to therapists to find substitutes for their lost will. They want the unconscious to direct the lost will. Such problems as love and will reveal both the immediate situation of the sickness and the archetypal qualities and characteristics that constitute the human being. Art and neurosis have a predictive function because they live and speak from the unconscious. The neurotic lives out consciously what the masses of people are able to keep unconscious for the time being. He sees some of these issues arising from the sexual issues of the patients of Freud, the hostility discovered by Karen Horney, the problem of anxiety in W. H. Auden, Camus, and Kafka, and discussions of the problem of identity in Erick Erikson and Allen Wheelis. He sees the growth of apathy, which is withdrawal from the world, while love and will, both of which have become problems, are ways of moving toward the world. He thinks of apathy as similar to Freud’s “death instinct” in that both gradually let go of involvement until one finds that life itself has gone by. Apathy will lead to a suspension of commitment, leading to emptiness and less able to survive. For that reason, he wants to discover a new basis for the love and will that have been the chief casualties of this transitional age. In part one he discusses love. He refers to his transitional time as having much more sex and so little meaning. While the Victorian person wanted love without sex, the person of his age wants sex without love. The focus on sex is an attempt to overcome solitariness, escape emptiness, and fight the tendency to apathy. He thinks that we will not free our capacity for love without making sex more than a biological drive by experiencing the attraction of eros, whether sexual or not. The issues of his age with sex result from separation of sex from eros. Sex may release biological tensions, but eros is the experiencing of the personal intentions and meaning of the act. He refers to sex and death as the mysterium trmendum of humanity, related to creation and destruction. He also thinks we must pay attention to the daemon (any natural function that has the power to take over the whole person, such as sex, eros, anger, and power over others) within us, releasing the positive only as we recognize the self-destructive power within. He admits (130-1) that his fellow liberals failed to recognize the daimonic in the rise of Hitler. He recalls believing so strongly in peace and world community that he could not see Hitler as the destructive daimonic reality he represented. Human beings just could not be that cruel in the civilized 20th century. The accounts in the paper had to be wrong. He admitted that liberals let their convictions limit their perceptions. They had no place for the daimonic. We believed that the world must somehow fit our convictions. They ruled out the daimonic dimension from their perception. Not to recognize the daimonic itself turns out to be daimonic. It makes us accomplices on the side of the destructive possession. He wants to pay attention to the daimonic because it can guide us if we keep it in proper measure, while we need to be aware of its destructive power. In part two, May discusses the will. He defines will as the capacity to organize one’s self so that movement takes place in a certain direction or goal. He acknowledges that Freud weakened the will, which may have been a need in the Victorian age, but in the age May occupies, the will needs re-discovery. His concern is that his age lacks a sense of personal responsibility. Thus, to protest looks like an exercise of will, but it remains half-developed, for it depends on that against which it protests. Others tacitly remain a victim of the enemy, giving the enemy the power of decision. Blaming the enemy or adversary is another way to say that the other has freedom to choose and act, but the victim does not. The victim can only react. The victim hands over power to the adversary. He values the discussion by William James on the will, but he wants to move a different direction. He focuses on intentionality, especially as developed by Hussserl and Heidegger. Care for something beyond oneself, it must mean something to one. It carries with it a sense of commitment. Thus, to will something involves the possibility of knowing it. He points favorably to Paul Ricoeur and Paul Tillich in these matters as well, the latter bring vitality and courage into the notion of intentionality. Intentionality requires us to take a stand, thereby assuming a degree of freedom. May will want us to bring love and will together. He will do so with the notion of care and intentionality. Care is a state in which something does matter. Care is the opposite of apathy. Care is the source of eros, tenderness, and love. Depending on Heidegger at this point, he says that will involves the whole person. When we do not care, we lose our being. Care is way back to being. If I care about being, I will shepherd it with some attention to its welfare. Our temporality, the finite quality of our lives, makes care possible. Care is the source of conscience, for conscience shows itself in care. Tillich would call this the ultimate concern that calls us forth to live, love, and make choices. The threat of apathy, that nothing matters, has its antidote in the notion of care. In our psychological age, feeling is a legitimate way of relating to the world. Feeling commits one to an object and an action toward the object. Love and will are forms of a communion of consciousness, ways of affecting others and our world. Eric Fromm has many of the same concerns. Love is an art that requires attention in order to develop it. It will not occur naturally. Love will help us escape the prison of our aloneness. He has the concern for the reduction of love to sex. He also emphasizes love as active in its giving of oneself in a way that implies certain other basic elements, such as care (active concern for the life and growth of the other), responsibility, respect, and knowledge (of the other, especially in the union of male and female).[28] As an art, he says, it requires discipline (not in following an external rule but from within), concentration (living fully in the present), patience, and especially supreme concern (devoting one’s whole life to it). The primary battle is in overcoming one’s own narcissism. This art will require humility, objectivity, and reason. It depends on the capacity to grow in our relationship toward the world and self in a way that moves well beyond the fixation on father and mother. A necessary condition for this adventure is faith, it requires courage, the ability to take a risk. To love is to commit oneself without guarantee. Love is an act of faith. Whoever is of little of faith is also of little love. [29] Milton Mayeroff adds patience (enabling growth in one’s own time and way), honesty, trust, humility (always more to learn), hope (that enlarges the present), and courage (to go into the unknown).[30]
M. Scott Peck refers to the difference between a neurotic disorder and a character disorder. He refers to a saying that neurotics make themselves while those with character disorders make everyone else miserable is largely accurate. Apparently, traditional psychotherapy has a difficult time handling the notion of a character order. They are disorders of responsibility. The neurotic assumes too much responsibility. They assume they are fault in a conflict. Speech patterns will include ought, should, and should not. It suggests a self-image as inferior, falling short of the mark and making the wrong choices. The therapist will find such persons relatively easy to work with. They assume responsibilities for their difficulties. They see themselves as having problems. The person with a character disorder does not assume enough responsibility. They assume that the world is at fault. The language of such a person suggests can’t, could not, have to, had to, demonstrating a self-image of a being one who has no power of choice. External forces direct them. Character disordered people are difficult, if not impossible, because they do not see themselves as the source of their problems. The world needs to change. They fail to recognize the necessity for self-examination. Peck thinks many people can bounce between these disorders, based upon the situation. He thinks all of us have one of these disorders to some degree. The reason is that the problem of distinguishing what we are and what we are not responsible for in this life is one of the greatest problems of human existence.[31]
Peck is after, as the subtitle of his book says, a new psychology of love, traditional values, and spiritual growth. He thinks we need to develop the disciplines of delaying gratification, properly accepting responsibility, dedication to reality, and learning balance. He also thinks we need to develop love, understood as encouraging the spiritual growth of self and the other. This will mean avoiding the misconceptions of romantic love, dependency, self-sacrifice, and the idea of love as a feeling. As he sees it, love is the work of attention to the other, which moves against our tendency toward slothfulness, and the risk of loss, which moves against fear. Love will require courage in that you risk independence, commitment, and confrontation (the exercise of power with humility). He then wants to bring the type of growth is suggesting together with religion. His view of religion is that results from our growth in discipline and love, combined with life experience. He rejects a narrow notion of religion. He thinks therapists need to pay attention to the way patients view the world. He thinks of this view as their religious perspective. To develop a realistic religion or worldview, one that conforms to the reality of the cosmos and our role in it, we must constantly revise and extend our understanding to include new knowledge of the larger world. We must constantly enlarge our frame of reference. We cannot accept a hand-me-down worldview from our parents. It will always have its limits that our life experience will enlarge. He refers to the religion of science, which will often be what challenges the worldview of the parent. He thinks science has developed a form of tunnel vision, throwing the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak. He sees the need for science and religion to join forces. In a final discussion of grace, he finds it amazing, not that people have difficulties in life, but they survive them as well as they do (237). He thinks of this as grace. He sees a place of convergence in synchronicity. The unconscious is a vast hidden source of wisdom. We are wiser than we know, if only we would listen. He refers to dreams, idle thoughts, and little behaviors throughout the day, as patterns that if we listen, we can learn. He looks at it as the implausible conjunction of events. He looks at spiritual growth as the evolution of the individual. Spiritual growth is work, for the force of entropy will act against the rise of spiritual maturity. His point is that original sin is laziness, the force against which we have to work in order to achieve spiritual maturity. He wants us to experience the grace of this growth along the difficult path of a loving God.
As William P. Alston sees it, one can construe the theory of Freud as regarding an individual’s tendency to accept belief in a supernatural personal deity as partly due to a tendency to project a childhood father-image existing in the unconscious. This projection normally follows on a regression set off by emotional difficulties of one sort or another and serving to alleviate unconscious conflicts and unconscious guilt. It seems that contrary to many psychoanalytic writers the conflicts and guilt so alleviated need not be restricted to the Oedipean situation. It does seem that only conflict between the super-ego and forbidden tendencies could be alleviated by this method. It would seem that the individual could interpret as due to transgressions against divine commands the unconscious guilt arising from any source.[32]
Ernest Becker thinks that Freud scorns Christianity. Human hunger for a God in heaven represents everything immature and selfish in humanity, especially as helpless, fearful, and greedy for protection and satisfaction. Freud seems to be one of the cynics of religion who view religion as a simple reflection of superstitious and selfish fear. In contrast, William James would teach us that religion is the outgrowth of genuine life-longing, a reaching out for fullness of meaning.[33]
Freud denigrates animal instinct into pure self-centered, narcissistic, and aggressive life. We can watch the discovery channel at almost any time, and see animals engaged in any number of social skills and nurturing responses to the herd. I am not quite so pessimistic about animal instinct. Humanity apart from culture would not only be a selfish brute, but would also be a nurturing and caring brute.
Otto Rank has an interesting and for me, difficult, discussion of religion under the themes of happiness and redemption. His realization principle is an attempt to focus on the creativity of the individual in shaping individual life and experience. He contrasts it with the reality principle of Freud, which he views as passive approach of acceptance of certain pessimistic assumptions concerning life. For the modern person, one finds fulfillment of these longings in momentary present life value for the individual. He focuses on the sexual experience, the emotional life of love, and the consciousness of the individual, as frustrated attempts to gain enduring happiness and therefore redemption. Applied to sexuality, the modern person wants more out of sex then the biological fulfillment need. One wants to use sex spiritually. The modern individual seeks emotional love (not just sex) experiences as attempts at self-redemption. The experience of pleasure and guilt afflicts consciousness. Happiness represents a peak of individualism and its pleasurable will affirmation through personal consciousness. Yet, the longing for salvation strives after the abrogation of individuality. The will is the driving force that seeks to make the feeling of happiness lasting and therefore redemptive. The individual wants freedom from the spirits that he has called up. The individual wants freedom from individual consciousness in the permanence or eternity symbols of religion. Yet, such redemption is also turning away from the temporary happiness in this life. His concern is that the therapeutic approach to salvation will not lead to either temporary happiness or lasting redemption. One finds happiness in life and experience, in the creation and acceptance of both without having to ask how, whither, what, and why. One finds happiness in reality and not in truth. One finds redemption in itself and from itself, and not in reality.[34]
In one sense, I think Freud exhibits some of the modern hubris in relation to human history. Early humanity is childhood. He does not discuss the possibility, but present cultures that are not modern are also in childhood stages of human development. African tribalism would be an example. Yet, every present experience of religion is a continuation of this childhood, a prolonging of adolescence, and inhibiting humanity from adopting an adult view of the world. In another sense, however, he may have a point. Individuals grow through various stages of human development. Each stage of human development remains part of us and has certain problems to solve, while the resolution of those problems allows us to move on to the next stage of maturity. The point Freud makes, I think, is that humanity needed the childlike experience of trust in the benevolent care of providence, as if humanity mattered to the universe. The fact that human beings are such temporal beings means that they can grow as civilizations in light of new knowledge, just as individuals grow in light of new knowledge. The experience of history, the recording of history, allows humanity to build upon the past, just as individuals build upon the past and learn through various stages of human development. At the adult stage, humanity is ready to accept the harsh reality that the universe is indifferent to humanity, that individual life is full of suffering, that humanity is weak, that it can rely only upon rationality to navigate through the difficulty of human life, and that death is nothing more than our movement toward our inanimate end. Adults can accept such realities that derive from scientific reflection upon human life.
One of the reasons that Freud can have a relatively positive view of the past and present in terms of religion is that he views religion as the fulfillment of a wish of humanity for protection from helplessness, from the sufferings of individual life, and from the fear of death. Religious ideas are nothing more than the human attempt to deal with these fears. They are human projections, but from a childish stage of human development. They represent the longing for a father who will protect and guide, long after the young adult has left the biological father behind. Yet, if modern life is the adult stage of human history, then educated people like Freud can definitely shed the childish belief that religion instills, and can even educate the masses to shed them through essays and lectures.
The identification of the natural causal factors in conversion and religious belief does not negate the possibility that God may work in the life of a person that way. In other words, one does not have to believe God works immediately on the mind or soul. God may choose to work through such natural processes.
However, to reduce belief in God in childhood wish-fulfillment is the weakness of Freud. His theory cannot handle what I think is an equally important reality, that individuals are pulled forward into new territory of life as they face the problems at each stage of their lives. He would argue that humanity is only in conversation with itself. The religious person would say that a divine will has entered into human life in the form of revelation, disclosing new territory that humanity could not explore on its own. Human behavior is as much shaped by hopes and dreams as it is by working out of repressions in childhood.
James Hillman is going to suggest that psychology actually needs to look at itself as something like the spiritual directors of the religious tradition. They are accompanying people in the healthy formation of soul. One develops soul in relationship to others. Spirit lifts, aiming for detachment and transcendence, while concern for soul immerses one in immanence. Just as the artist has an opus or work in mind, the psychologist has the opus of soul-making.[35] He directs us to Jung, who could write of five instincts, those of hunger, sexuality, the drive to activity, reflection, and creativity. Yet, Jung never developed this notion. We have a drive to be ourselves through a process of individuation. This drive is the creative instinct. Creativity impels devotion to one’s person in its becoming through a specific medium. It brings with it a sense of helplessness and increasing awareness of its numinous power. Thus, our relation to creativity fosters the religious attitude. The description of it often uses religious language.[36] Although Jung preferred terms like anima, psyche, and self, Hillman suggests that a psychology whose aim is soul-making strikes a different chord. Depth psychology leads eventually to the recognition of soul as the inward, downward factor in personality, the factor that gives depth. The soul awakens through love, even in many myths. Yet, Freud was wrong to sexualize this experience. The creative is an achievement of love, marked by imagination and beauty. The wounds of childhood are the wounds of love, such as abandonment. Love can recreate from within the wounds. What heals is our needs for each other. Therapy is love of soul. To meet you, I must risk myself as I am. It would be safer reflecting alone rather than confront you. Know yourself through reflection is not sufficient for a creative psychology. One needs to add reveal yourself, which is the same as the commandment to love, since we reveal ourselves most in our loving. Yet, love also blinds, so another person can help us see where love has blinded us. Love can torture us. In the process, love makes the soul.[37] All of this leads to his point that he distrusts the language of psychology, which does not fulfill the longing for nourishment of soul. Psychology insults the soul. The individual becomes ill because psychology is ill.[38] Psychology has an obligation to the soul, even while much of its philosophical and psychological history has forgotten it.[39] Psychology will need to transform its view of the female and male in order to bring healing of soul, which is the last essay of his book. The point in this context is that Hillman is another person who sees the limits of Freud, especially in the focus on sexuality and the role of the father. He also sees a limit in his abhorrence of religion. In fact, images from religion, such as soul and creativity, may well be a path toward healing.
Ana-Maria Rizzuto charged, in her 1979 book titled Birth of the Living God: A Psychoanalytic Study, that contemporary psychoanalysis had never been able to break free of Freud's prejudiced, reductionistic, vehemently negative account of religion.
She notes that the human being is an inherently imagining and projecting creature. In order to live in the world, we are constantly projecting images on our mental screens, images that are variously accurate or inaccurate representations of the world. For instance, the toddler has a fixation with a baby blanket. Whenever the child feels insecure, it grabs the blanket and feels better. Why? Surely the blanket is a reminder of the comforting presence of the parent. When he or she is holding the blanket, the toddler feels close to the parent. This feeling of closeness is a projection.
But it is not a lie. Rather, the child is busy projecting the comforting presence of the parent, through the object of the blanket. There really is a parent somewhere. There really is a connection between the child's projection of the parent and the parent, the child's feeling of security when holding the trusted blanket and a parent who makes the child secure.
Rizzuto notes how such a projection is absolutely essential to our self-definition. We are busy painting mental pictures of the world in order to live in the world. These mental pictures, though sometimes inadequate, though often limited by our imagination and our experiences, are nevertheless connected to the world.
As creatures, we are desperate to place ourselves in the world, to figure out where we have come from and where we are going. Reality and illusion are not contradictory terms. Freud, in naming a whole host of psychological realities as "ego," "superego," "libido," and so on, was busy forming "illusions" which proved to be very serviceable in mapping the human psyche. We can argue about whether or not his projections and illusions were helpful, but why should we call them "sick" in the way that Freud dismisses religion? We cannot be human without illusions. We are busy living by various illusions - science, fairytales, religion, whatever. As children, we play with toys and games. Later as college students, we learn to play with ideas and words and images, sounds and notions. All of this is our attempt to do business with the world, to find our way amid the sometimes confusing discord of stimuli.
One of the reasons science works for us is that it is such a successful illusion and projection. Science makes theories about the way the world is. It has ways of testing and confirming its theories. But even when its theories are not completely confirmed, they are helpful ways of construing the world. And even when the theories of science are confirmed, they are still theories, images of what is going on in the world.
Illusions are not false, not lies; rather, they are projections from the richness of human experience into our consciousness by which we organize and make sense out of experience. Those who make theories of the world are busy assembling information about the world in such a way as to enable the rest of us to live in the world with a little less anguish and confusion. This is not some kind of naive, sick endeavor, but our natural human attempt to live creatively in the world.
Maybe the reason Freud's thought is so abusive toward religion is that it sees perceptively that religion is a major competitor for the question of, "Who gets to name the world?"
Being religious, seen from this point of view, is a way of thinking about the world. German sociologist Max Webber said that the sacrifice of the intellect is the first thing that religion asks. But he was wrong. Being religious is being intellectual.
Faith is not a way of killing all thought, but a way of thinking which is more creative than what most of the world thinks when it is thinking.
Think of our tendency to project images upon the world not as arising from childish wishes, but from the natural human tendency to think about the world. Our imaginations therefore might be compared to a movie screen on which images are projected. When I say the world is a "rat race" that is an image. When I say that life is "a bowl of cherries," that is a projection. I am not being crazy to engage in such projection. My projection must be set next to experience and critiqued, but it ought not to be too easily dismissed.
We are individuals who live in a precarious relationship with the world. As users of language, we are busy building up in our mind intellectual constructs that enable us to move in the world.
But what if the world I live in is not only my projection, but also God's? Think about that. Christians claim that the God of Israel and the church, the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Mary, is more than a helpful metaphor. This God is a reality. It is typical of modern humanity to think that we are the only actors, the only speakers. It may be the modern, scientific form of an illusion.
[1] Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective (Edinburg: T & T Clark, 1985), 15.
[2] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 1, 154-5.
[3] Paul Ricoeur, Freud & Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), 252.
[4] The Art of Loving, New York: Harper & Row, 1956, 35-38.
[5] Systematic Theology, Volume 2, Chicago: University of Chicago Pr, 1957, 53-55.
[6] Love, Power, and Justice, London: Oxford University Pr., 1954, 29-39.
[7] Systematic Theology Volume 3, 211.
[8] Systematic Theology, Volume 2, 235.
[9] Anthropology in a Theological Perspective, 435.
[10] Anthropology in a Theological Perspective, 436.
[11] Beyond Psychology, New York: Dover Publications, INC, 1941, 274.
[12] Civilization and Its Discontents, 1930, Chapter 1.
[13] The Art of Loving, New York: Harper & Row, 1956, 90.
[14] Systematic Theology Volume 2, 53.
[15] Anthropology in Theological Perspective, 306.
[16] Beyond Psychology 274-6.
[17] The Myth of Analysis, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1960, 15.
[18] Anthropology in a Theological Perspective, 428-9.
[19] Systematic Theology Volume 1, 261.
[20] Freud and Jung – Contrasts, in Modern Man in Search of a Soul, 1933.
[21] Jung, “The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man,” The Modern Man in Search of a Soul, 1933.
[22] “Psychotherapists and the Clergy,” Modern Man in Search of a Soul, 1933.
[23] Truth and Reality, (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1929), 84-85.
[24] Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Toward Self-Realization, New York, W. W. Norton & Co., 1950.
[25] Systematic Theology, Volume 2, 54.
[26] Systematic Theology Volume 3, 56-7.
[27] The Art of Loving, New York: Harper & Row, 1956, 86-87.
[28] The Art of Loving, New York: Harper & Row, 1956, 20-38.
[29] The Art of Loving, New York: Harper & Row, 1956, 107-28.
[30] On Caring, New York: Harper & Row, 1971, 13-28.
[31] The Road Less Traveled, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978, 35-39.
[32] (“Psychoanalytic Theory and Theistic Belief,” Faith and the Philosophers, 1964, ed. By John Hick)
[33] Denial of Death (Simon & Schuster: New York, 1973), 153.
[34] Truth and Reality, 84-97.
[35] The Myth of Analysis, 20-30.
[36] Myth of Analysis, 31-40.
[37] Myth of Analysis, 41-107.
[38] Myth of Analysis, 120-3.
[39] Myth of Analysis, 205.