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Freud
(1856-1939)
Sex is a
fundamental motivation of humankind;
without it the species would cease to exist. It is
fundamental to selection of partners, which enables the
species to develop and evolve. It is also capable of
devastating harm – not just in the obvious cases (e.g. rape,
incest) but in sublimated sexual power, which influences
views and behaviour in all spheres of life. Sex is
therefore dangerous. It is identified with the earth, the
emotions, the body, and may therefore be seen as opposed to
the mind and higher aspirations. Any theory that takes sex
seriously is likely to be seen as threatening to traditional
religion.
On the other
hand, seeing sex in everything may be an unnatural
obsession. Joke about the man who is being examined by a
psychologist, who gets him to do a series of Rorschach
inkblot tests. Apply ink; fold paper; open to reveal
pattern – ask “What do you see?” Patient keeps saying
“Sex!” in the end the psychologist says ‘”You’re obsessed
with sex!” Patient says – “You’re only making me worse,
showing me all those dirty pictures!”
The question
is – Was Freud’s interest in sex a healthy, scientific one,
or an obsession? He had much to say about obsessions, as we
shall see in a moment. I leave you to judge.
Parenthood
is also fundamental – for it is the need for children to be
parented that sets the groundwork for the social
conditioning and self-awareness that are key to successful
adulthood. But like sex, parenting is problematic, and the
relationship between parents and children can be both heaven
and hell.
Freud’s work concerns both sex and parenthood. Whether that
makes him sexually obsessed, or merely realistic about human
life, is for you to judge.
Freud
initially developed
psychoanalysis as a technique for dealing with patients
who came to him suffering from hysteria. He explored the
unconscious mind and its relationship to the conscious.
Through the analysis of dreams and the free association of
thoughts, his patients were encouraged to express feelings
which had been locked away within the unconscious mind,
and which were therefore not
recognised by the patient,
although they produced patterns of behaviour which seemed
bizarre.
Freud
believed that each stage of life produced tensions. Those
which were not faced and resolved at the time could become
buried in the unconscious. Then, later in life, they came to
the surface again in the form of emotional or behavioural
problems. He was particularly interested in the ‘phallic’
stage of development, at which a small child develops an
attachment to the parent of the opposite sex, which he
described as the ‘Oedipus Complex’, from the story of
Oedipus Rex, who inadvertently (since he had been separated
from his parents at birth) kills his father and makes love
to his mother – and suffered horribly because of it. His
important early work is found in The Interpretation of
Dreams (1899), The Psychopathology of Everyday Life
(1904). Key to his work is that present psychological
problems are related to repressed sexual feelings in
childhood, and that they can be released through dream
analysis and psychoanalysis.
His critique of religion –
Freud
examined patients with compulsive tidying or washing
routines. These he ascribed to a sense of uncleanness that
had been instilled into them during their childhood. However
much the adult washes or tidies, he or she still feels
dirty. Freud called such conditions ‘obsessional neuroses’.
He believed that, once the patient could locate the origin
of their feelings of dirtiness, they would be free from
their neurosis.
When
he examined religion, Freud saw patterns in which people
confessed sins and went through elaborate rituals to ensure
that they were forgiven. In particular, he saw the
meticulous detail in which people followed religious rituals
as similar to the compulsive behaviour of his neurotic
patients. He therefore suggested that religion was a
‘universal obsessional neurosis’, motivated by unconscious
guilt.
[In
his early work, Freud examined the idea of the primal horde.
In this, young men in a tribe, frustrated by not being given
access to women by their dominant father, rise up and kill
him. This sets up guilt, which they later seek to overcome
by being obedient to a religious ‘father’ or God. This part
of his work is given little emphasis today, and is of
secondary importance to the main thrust of his work, which
is to see religion as essentially a projection of
unconscious need.]
Freud –
religion is based on a projected father figure and an
obsession with guilt. It is therefore infantile, neurotic
and irrational.
Why is it
that a child develops a sense of guilt, of duty or of
justice? Freud simply observed that it happens – and it led
him to develop his “ego, id, superego” division of self by
about 1923, and appears in Civilisation and its
Discontents. The basic drives and needs are expressed by
the id, and are repressed by the controlling ‘superego’, the
whole process should be under the ego, or rational balanced
individual self. Freud observes a process – and assumes
that, once it is observed, it comes under the domain of
science, rather than religion. But is that necessarily the
case? One might argue that there is, fundamental to human
nature, a sense of moral order, or individual failure to
live up to it, a sense of guilt when confronted with the
holy. (Remember that, in terms of religious experience,
there is the sense of personal unworthiness when confronted
by the holy – so Otto.) Perhaps what Freud is pointing to
is something that is rightly the starting point of religion
– something universal and inescapable.
I’m not
arguing that we can suddenly bring in God as an explanation
– but to point out that Freud’s use of this information
about developments in childhood etc do not simply negate
religion.
This
is crucial for understanding Freud on religion. He did not
so much ask ‘Are religious beliefs true?’ as ‘What part do
they play in human life?’ He sensed that he had found a
psychological reason why someone might become religious –
quite independent of whether or not the beliefs of that
religion were true.
Freud
describes religious ideas as: ‘illusions, fulfilments of the
oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind…
Those
who cling to them do so because of the comfort they bring,
God taking the place of a benevolent father, needed later in
life, where threats remain but an actual father is not there
to help:
‘… the terrifying impression of helplessness in
childhood aroused the need for protection – for
protection through love – which was provided by the
father; and the recognition that this helplessness last
throughout life made it necessary to cling to the
existence of a father, but this time a more powerful
one. Thus the benevolent rule of a divine Providence
allays our fear of the dangers of life…
Religion is thus an illusion, created out of our adult need
to find childhood comfort. But Freud is careful to define
what he means by an illusion:
‘An illusion is not the same thing as an error; nor is
it necessarily an error… What is characteristic of
illusions is that they are derived from human wishes…
Illusions need not necessarily be false – that is to
say, unrealisable or in contradiction to reality… Thus
we call a belief an illusion when a wish-fulfillment is
a prominent factor in its motivation, and in doing so we
disregard its relations to reality, just as the illusion
itself sets no store by verification.’
[from The Future of an Illusion, Penguin
translation, quoted in Faith and Reason, ed Paul
Helm]
Parents
provide sustenance (or should do); the small child cannot
live except with their help. They give rules. The child
therefore fears that, if he or she breaks the rules, the
result will be alienation from his or her parents and
therefore the threat of being cast off alone in a hostile
world.
In
The Future of an Illusion (1927) he set out religion’s
benefits and problems:
The
benefits:
-
the threatening and
impersonal forces of nature are tamed, by being seen as
under the control of a loving and providential God;
-
God provides the adult with
the sense of protection that a child seeks from a human
father;
-
that the believer can hope
to influence things that happen, by gaining God’s help;
-
there is a sense of dignity
from having a relationship with God;
-
that religions teachings
diminish the threat posed by death;
-
that religious offers an
explanation of otherwise inexplicable events.
The
problems:
-
that faith is actually an
illusion, based on what people would like to be true,
rather than what is actually true;
-
that religious rules and
regulations, believed to come from God, may go against
the personal needs and well-being
of individuals, thus hampering their personal growth.
Through
psychoanalysis, Freud took the view that one should probe
beneath the conscious mind and locate the childhood source
of those things which caused trauma later in life. His
assumption is that once something is confronted and its
origins shown, its power is diminished and one is free from
it.
He seems to
take the same view of religion – once its origin and power
were shown, people would have no need of it. They would grow
up, confront and come to terms with their deepest feelings,
their mortality and their sexuality, and therefore have no
need of religion.
But note
– psychology and religion are competing systems – both aim
at liberating a person, and making their life better and
more satisfying. Therefore what Freud is offering is an
alternative way of developing yourself. Either you take to
religion in times when you need comfort or challenge, or you
take to psychology. Naturally, each is going to regard the
other with some degree of suspicion
If religious
beliefs can be justified rationally, if they are based on a
realistic understanding of life, and on decisions and
commitments based on it, then that religion is healthy. On
the other hand, if we find that things are believed without
any basis in reason or evidence, there is a chance that they
are simply delusions – things we would like to believe to be
true, but for which we have no good reason to believe that
they are actually true.
Psychology
may show why a particular belief is accepted or rejected,
but it may not necessarily show whether it is true or false.
My reasons
for believing something are not the same as the thing I
believe. I may believe something for perfectly good reasons,
but I may be wrong. On the other hand, I may have an utterly
neurotic and unreasonable fear which actually proves to be
correct.
Just because
your motive for loving or hating something is buried in your
early childhood experiences, does not invalidate the fact
that you love or hate it.
So where
does this take us in assessing Freud and religion today?
There is
religion as liberation – where it seeks to enable people to
live to their fullest, to express themselves with integrity
and to follow a path of acceptance of others that we refer
to as ‘love’.
But there is
also religion as a fortress against fear of the unknown and
the self – those who turn away from understanding their own
feelings, and prefer to live under a stern acceptance of
religious ‘truths’ which are plainly attempts to support and
bolster a sense of self-worth.
e.g. you
either come to terms with the fact that your life is
relatively short, that one day you will have to die, and
therefore that you should regularly turn over in your mind
what you think is really worthwhile. If you died today, what
would your life be worth, of what would you be most happy
etc?
OR you
believe that you are saved, chosen, on the way to heaven.
That you do not have to come to terms with your own
mortality because you are going to live for ever, and you
know that fundamentally you are right. Comforting, yes. But
how does it relate you to others. And is it wish-fulfilment?
Religion can be life-enhancing and healthy – giving a
positive sense of who one is and what life is for. Or,
religion can be neurotic, an attempt to bolster up a false
sense of self-importance, wanting to belong to a chosen
elite, wanting to feel moral certainty and to criticise
others, wanting to live for ever and deny the reality of
change and death.
Whether you agree with him or not, at least Freud has opened
up that debate. Not just ‘is it true’ but ‘is it healthy?’
So was Freud
obsessed with sex?
Possible – but
probably no more than anyone else. And if he was, does that
invalidate what he says about religion. Probably not –
because his observations that led him to develop
psychoanalysis were hugely significant, in starting to get
to grips with a whole side of human life that had not been
examined in a scientific way. Of course, some (particularly
Karl Popper) thought that Freud was not true science,
because he did not allow his propositions to be falsified.
Perhaps Popper was right to say that Freud did not allow his
central ideas to be challenged. However, whether genuinely
scientific or not, they formed the basis of a whole new way
of understanding human beings and what motivated them. And
if we find that sex is fundamental to that motivation,
should we really be surprised?
Thus Freud
points to the dangers of religion – he does not prove its
fundamental beliefs to be wrong, but shows the role they
play in life, and suggests that they might be believed to be
true for personal reasons, rather than logical ones.
Freud thought a mature person should have no need of the
supposed comforts of religion.
MT
November 05
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