All posts tagged father-figure

Freud and The Problem of God by Hans Küng (1979)

Hans Küng (1928 to 2021) was a Swiss Catholic priest, theologian, and author. These are notes on his 1979 book, ‘Freud and the Problem of God.’

1. The genesis of Freud’s atheism

For the German tradition, ‘theology has been dissolved in the nitric acid of the natural sciences’, so said the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach. Medicine and physiology were at the centre of German materialism, a movement which aimed to show that the activity of the mind was entirely the result of physiological changes in the brain.

Freud’s father, Jacob Freud, was an orthodox Jew who never converted to Christianity (unlike Marx’s father). Freud was taught Jewish doctrine by his mother and a schoolteacher. In his autobiography, Freud says that early Bible classes had ‘an enduring effect on the direction of my interest.’

Jacob and his first wife had two sons; by his third wife, Amalia, he had eight offspring! Freud was the eldest. A childhood aversion to his distant, forbidding father and the young beauty of his mother led to Freud’s recognition of the Oedipus Complex in himself.

Freud’s early religious experiences:

  1. The Catholic nanny who took Freud to Mass and explained Heaven and Hell to him. Freud used to come home and parody the arm-waving of the priests to his family’s amusement (laying the basis of his later paper Obsessive Actions and Religious Rituals)
  2. Antisemitism: from schooldays onwards Freud suffered persecution by antisemitic Catholics. A founding moment in his life was when, age 12, his father admitted to him how he had acquiesced in his hat being knocked into the mud by racist hoodlums.

When Freud entered university in 1873 there had just been a stock market crash and many in politics and the press explicitly blamed ‘the Jews’.

Freud entered university (aged 17) to study medicine with the aim of seeking answers to the riddles of life rather than merely curing people.

Student Freud fell under the influence of Ernst Brucke, head of the Institute of Physiology, a follower of Hermann von Helmholtz. Helmholtz was a genius who, aged 26, helped secure recognition for the First Law of Thermodynamics (the sum total of energy remains constant in an isolated system). Together with the law of Entropy (energy cannot be turned back into mass without some loss – the Second Law of Thermodynamics) these form the most fundamental of all laws of nature.

Helmholtz later went on to do pioneering work in eye-surgery, optics and physiology. A school grew around him committed to the positivist creed, confident that science would one day be able to explain all the activity in the universe, including all activities of the human mind, on the basis of purely physical and chemical laws.

Brucke was a founder-member of this school in Berlin. When Brucke came to Vienna to head up the Institute of Physiology, he brought this powerful materialistic ideology with him. Freud studied under Brucke for 6 years, years he later recalled as the happiest of his life.

Physicalist physiology got rid of the idealist philosophy of Nature and eliminated the vitalism of the Aristotelian and Scholastic tradition i.e. the belief that God created organisms with forms and purposes, higher goals and objectives of their own. No, said physicalist physiology: all life can be explained in terms of the purely causal, deterministic forces described by biochemistry.

Freud applied these metaphors to clinical psychological observation: he saw the psyche as a machine reacting to the increase and release of tension (the unpleasure-pleasure principle) as a result of the demands of internal instincts on the one hand and external stimuli on the other (the basic argument of An Outline of Psychoanalysis).

For Küng, Freud made the mistake of turning science – a method of investigation – into a worldview – an Idol, in the Baconian sense.

Freud set up his private practice in nervous diseases in 1886, aged 30, on Easter Sunday. His wife, Martha Bernays, came from an eminent orthodox Jewish family in Hamburg. Freud suppressed her religious practices ruthlessly (she later said nothing upset her so much in her life as Freud forbidding her to light the holy candles on the first Friday of their marriage).

They had three sons (Ernst, named after Brucke; Martin, named after Jean-Martin Charcot, the French pioneer of nervous diseases; and Oliver, named after Oliver Cromwell) and two daughters, Sophie and Anna (born in 1895).

In Küng’s opinion, Freud made two great breakthroughs:

a) A theory of the unconscious

Freud’s achievement was to differentiate between the Primary Process of the Unconscious, the vast majority of mental life – and the preconscious and conscious mind, very much the Secondary Process; and to devise a method for examining the workings of the Unconscious.

Freud’s theory that unacceptable wishes are repressed only to return as symptoms. These are expressed in free association so the patient comes to know himself to his depths. All this occurs through transference i.e. replaying the repressed feelings in the privileged arena of ‘the therapeutic alliance’.

Through transference the patient is led to a lasting restructuring of his mental processes, the abolition of morbid symptoms, and restored to the ability to love and work. Interpretation is also carried out on dreams and parapraxes.

b) A theory of libido

Freud’s theory of libido hugely widened the concept of sexuality, extending it far beyond the specifics of genital sexuality in the present, and extending it back in time to cover all of human existence from the earliest part of life i.e. the invention of the concept of childhood sexuality.

Doing this enabled explanations of almost all sexual activity, perversions, love, affection etc to be brought under the rubric of one theory, rather than simply being rejected as extrinsic to human nature, ‘degenerate’ or ‘immoral’, as previously.

The progression of Freud’s medical-scientific investigations can be summarised: cerebral physiology > psychopathology > depth psychology > theory of everything.

2. Freud on the origin and nature of religion

Freud’s critique of religion is twofold:

  1. he tries to explain away the history of religion
  2. he tries to undermine the psychological basis of religion

1. The history

There are two broad theological movements:

  • Degenerationist: pagan religions are distorted versions of the original pristine version of the True Religion clearly understood by Adam and Eve; then came the Fall, the Tower of Babel and it’s been downhill ever since.
  • Meliorist: religion is evolving into higher and purer spiritual forms from its early primitive, half-savage forms.

The 18th century Enlightenment philosophers were degenerationists. For them denominational religion was a distortion of the original clear light of Reason which God had given to Mankind, which had been distorted by popular custom and the inventions of priests.

The nineteenth century saw Enlightenment Nature-theism transmuted into a Science of Religion. Simultaneously, colonial discoveries and the improvement of philology and textual criticism, provided a number of tools for paring away the ‘nonsense’ which had accumulated around the pure creed. The high point of this tradition is the work of Ludwig Feuerbach, who sought to remove the superstitions and legends accumulated over time in order to get back to the original pure creed of Christ.

Darwin turned the theory of degeneration – religion starting from the divine heights – on its head. Evolution implied a struggle upwards of intellect and reason from the savage swamp. This prompted a revolution in the ‘Science of Religion’; instead of hypothesising about what the early and purest creed must have been, scholars now examined earliest religions to ‘get at the heart’ of belief.

It is as a result of this new model that specialists devised a developmental model of religions, speculating that all religions start with primitive animism – then proceed to pagan polytheism – and then evolve to an intellectual and spiritual climax in monotheism (with a possible pre-animistic stage of belief in a world-soul, or mana).

An ethnologist called W. Robertson Smith thought the key parameter was not spirits and gods but the development of ancient rites and rituals: totemism, always accompanied by systems of taboos (‘Thou shalt not kill the totem animal’, ‘Thou shalt not marry thy sister’ (exogamy) and so on). (Taboo is Polynesian for untouchable). Thus civilisations pass through a series of stages: Magic, Religion, Science. These kinds of theories were backed up by the tremendous encyclopedic systematisation of Sir James Frazer (whose masterwork, ‘The Golden Bough’, Freud was such a big fan of – see his own annotated copy included in the exhibition at the Freud Museum).

This was the background Freud drew on when writing Totem and Taboo (1912) – at the suggestion of Carl Jung (still in the Movement at the point).

In Totem and Taboo Freud tries to assimilate the underlying fear of incest expressed in so many taboos (i.e. primitive morality) with the developmental model of religions, and with the ubiquity of totemism based round a holy animal who is eaten in an annual festival. Freud tries to draw a parallel between the religious practice of ‘primitive’ man and the behaviour of modern, urban obsessional neurotics, and between the savage’s reverence for the totem animal, representing the Father, with the explicit rise of the Father to pre-eminence in monotheistic religions.

In explaining the rise of totem animals Freud points to the suggestive way that young children initially like animals but then develop fears of them as they unconsciously project their Oedipal feelings (feelings of rage and of reciprocal anger) onto them.

The classic example in Freud’s writings is the case study of Little Hans, who was petrified of horses. This irrational phobia analyses out into fear they will bite him; and soon enough it is discovered that the horses in fact stand for the father who Han is afraid will chop his penis off.

To revere a totem all the year round and then kill it and eat it in a festive meal is, for Freud, a beautiful demonstration of Oedipal ambivalence, love/hate, revere/kill.

For Freud the Oedipus Complex is at the centre of all religions. The difference with Christianity is that it is a Son-religion. We identify with the Son crucified to appease the guilt we all feel at the communal assassination of the primal Father. To identify with Christ is to be relieved of the guilt of the primal parricide which Freud posits as the basis of human society in Totem and Taboo. It is to become free, rather as the neurotic, after analysis, is freed from his irrational obsessions and becomes free and autonomous to work and love.

2. The essence

Religious belief is an illusion, the fulfilment of the oldest deepest wishes of Mankind, childish wishes for:

  • protection from an uncaring world
  • universal justice (recognition of our own deserts, punishment of those who have wronged us)
  • eternal life

Freud’s diachronic history of religion – comparing early religion with childhood stages of thought – is complemented by his synchronic analysis – comparing contemporary, modern religious belief and practice with the behaviour and motivation of neurotics.

Freud doesn’t really say this fulfilment of deep wishes makes religion wrong – only that all aspects of it can be explained away in other, more scientific terms. Now, he says, as we acquire more knowledge about its origins and nature, religion is gradually dying (just as their as neurosis disappears from a gradually enlightened patient).

By contrast with religion, which fosters and encourages illusions about reality, Freud sees Science as providing an education for reality, in order to abolish childish reliance on religion and rebuild morality and social institutions on a clearer, unillusioned understanding of human nature.

We must grow up, master our own resources for real life, concentrate on this earthly life, prepare to build the New Jerusalem here on earth.

3. Critiques of Freud

In his 1927 pamphlet, The Future of An Illusion, Freud said that attacking religion may do psychoanalysis harm and the book proceeded to do just that by rousing the wrath of churchmen and moralists against him and his movement.

So Freud tried to emphasise that psychoanalysis is a neutral scientific tool, like infinitesimal calculus, a specialised tool for examining the human psyche. It could equally well be used by the defenders of religion.

Eugene Bleuler

Eugene Bleuler was one of the first to take issue with Freud. Bleuler, head of the Bergholzli mental institute in Zurich, Jung’s boss and man who gave us the terms ‘depth psychology’, ‘schizophrenia’ and ‘ambivalence’ was an early convert to psychoanalysis, but he could not go the whole way with Freud.

He granted the discovery of the unconscious but asked, Is it right to consider it only negatively, as a reservoir of repressed wishes, of the dark side? Is it right to regard the psyche as a simple machine, a mechanism within which psychic forces trigger each other and energy is circulated as in a sophisticated steam engine? Is it right to see the human animal motivated only by sexuality (even in the special widened sense Freud gave the word)? Is it right to see the mind as entirely determined by events in the distant past and not as a creative, proactive organism capable of creating new meanings and goals?

Alfred Adler

In 1911 Adler published his Critique of the Freudian Sexual Theory of Mental Life and was expelled from the Psychoanalytic Movement as a result.

A convinced socialist and, later, friend of Trostsky, Adler believed in looking at the individual as a whole in relation to the social world and all his relations with it. The aim of therapy is to build up the individual’s integrity and wholeness. Neuroses start in inferiority (the inferiority complex) and maladjusted attempts to overcome it (“the Masculine Protest”). The patient must abandon these ‘egocentric’ positions and get involved with the group. Happiness is community-based (you can clearly see Adler’s socialist bias).

(Although he powerfully denied Adler’s views once he’d been booted out of the movement, Freud later accepted some of his ideas about aggression. Some critics say Freud’s 1922 revision of instinct-theory dividing instinct into two drives, Eros and the death drive, are indebted to Adler.)

Jung

In 1913 Jung left the Movement and refined his own theories into what became Analytic Psychology. Jung redefined the libido as undifferentiated psychic energy (effectively denying its sexual nature) and claimed that it produces four processes – thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition. Each of these is governed by a dialectic, thus:

  • thinking – the rational evaluation of right and wrong
  • feeling – you divide feelings into pleasurable and unpleasurable
  • sensation – you divide into external and internal stimuli
  • intuition – according as it is effective or ineffective

The individual is governed by two modes of approach to these four processes:

  • extravert – influenced by objective factors
  • introvert – influenced by external factors

The two modes apply to each of the four processes thus giving you eight character types. Whenever the one mode of each process dominates, the opposite mode rules the unconscious, and you have to get to grips with this dark side of the soul, ‘the shadow’.

The psyche is also defined by whether it is dominated by anima (female) or animus (male). Whichever dominates, you have to accept the opposite into your life. And you have to reconcile the ‘persona’, the face we make to meet the outside world, with the demands of the ego.

The aim of Jungian therapy is to bring all these facets of the personality into alignment into one integrated personality. (This brief account leaves out all Jung’s theories of the individual and the collective unconscious, archetypes, myths and symbols etc.)

For Adler, religion is the expression of the will-to-overcome humanity’s perceived inferiority in the face of implacable reality: religion works towards an ideal future perfection. For Adler, God is the perfection of a thoroughly human ideal of overcoming. Adler sees a place for religion in the perfect human society since it reflects a thoroughly human wish – but he doesn’t believe in it.

Jung blamed Freud’s thoroughgoing rejection of religion on his being a child of the late-Victorian rationalist materialist worldview (as described above). For Jung, religion is true insofar as it is believed. Jung wanted to remain a Christian but thought denominational Christianity was chaotic and confused and stood in need of further clarifying about the human soul: and this is what his depth psychology could provide.

Neither Jung nor Adler answer the big question set by Freud: Is religion nothing more than a fulfilment of mankind’s oldest deepest wishes?

Küng’s critique

Freud’s developmental history of religion (animism >pantheism > monotheism > science) is nowhere now taken seriously. All these belief systems exist in various places in the world but have nowhere been found to follow this pattern. Sometimes they’ve gone ‘backwards’. In many places aspects of the supposed different levels of development exist happily alongside each other. Nowhere is there proof of development from one stage to the next.

Nowadays Freud’s optimistic scientism has been replaced by a belief that science may have reached its limits in explaining the origins of the human mind. We even consider that primitive peoples know better than us how to live in sympathy with their environment and that – far from leading us to a utopia cleansed of irrationalism – there may be something inherently destructive in scientific enquiry.

In 1912, the same year as Totem and Taboo was published, Emile Durkheim, the founder of modern sociology, refuted Freud’s idea of primitive religions as slavishly superstitious, but said that they contained a hard core of reality, in laying down codes of practice which had their origins in relationships in primitive society, the clan.

Durkheim was followed by most modern anthropologists and sociologists in looking no further for meaning than the internal rules of each individual tribe and culture. (Compare the anthropological structuralism of Claude Levi-Strauss.)

Thus neither the degenerative or the evolutionary theory of religion can be proved or disproved. Modern ‘primitive’ peoples aren’t photographs of the early days of humanity, as Freud and his sources thought. They themselves are the result of immense histories and traditions, albeit unwritten.

(One modern theory to explain their lack of development is to assign a crucial role to writing; whoever learns to write can leave histories; histories can be compared with modern practice and so enable the beginnings of a rational critique of social practices.)

Today there is less historical speculation, less moral-drawing, more studying of patterns of culture in situ using the functionalist approach pioneered by Bronislaw Malinowski.

At the other end of the scale modern research shows that religion has always existed. 100,000 years ago Neanderthal Man made grave furnishings; 150,000 years ago Heidelberg Man apparently offered the first fruits to his gods. The question has become not to explain away the existence of religion but to understand that for primitive man everything was religious. The more modern challenge is to explain away the rise of the secular, the scientific worldview.

Even Freud’s facts are largely wrong: totemism is not found among the beginnings of religion; among hundreds of totemic tribes discovered and documented only four knew of a rite which even vaguely resembled killing and eating the father. For anthropologist Mircea Eliade, the triumph of Freud’s views for a while was due to fashion: he established a fashionable doctrine which explains nothing in history or the rest of the world but does help explain the western intellectual’s own sense of dissatisfaction with established religion but obscure sense of guilt at the prospect of overthrowing it.

Freud claimed that psychoanalysis was a neutral tool for the cure of souls, practicable by lay and pious alike.

All Freud’s actual arguments for atheism are old, taken from Feuerbach et al but given new impetus by being underpinned by this new method of exploring the psyche. For example, all ‘projection theories’ of God as fictional answer to suffering humanity’s wishes and fantasies stem back to Feuerbach.

But Feuerbach’s, Marx’s and Freud’s atheisms are hypotheses which have not been proved. Against the reality of experience they set theory; and in the end, for all the subtlety of their critique of the social, economic or psychological determinants of the formation of religious belief in individuals and societies, no conclusion can be drawn from their theories about the existence or non-existence of God.

All human believing, hoping, loving contain elements of projection. But its object need not therefore be merely a projection. (page 77)

From the psychological point of view, faith is always going to look like the projection of early father-figures but this does not mean that God does not exist. That’s to say, the mere existence of a wish for God does not throw doubt on the actual existence of God. Perhaps it’s true:

Perhaps this being of our longings and dreams does actually exist. (page 79)

Thus Freud’s atheism (which he professed long before the discovery of psychoanalysis) turns out to ‘a pure speculation, an unproved postulate, a dogmatic claim’, just as dogmatic as anything laid down by his hated Church.

Freud’s scientism

Nowadays it is Freud’s belief in the ability of science to tell us the truth about the world, and to tell us how to behave in the light of this truth, which seems dogmatic and irrational.

Oskar Pfister, prophetically enough, criticised Freud’s position as itself an illusion before the Second World War; and since the experience of National Socialism, communist totalitarianism and the forces unleashed by the Western development of atomic bombs, the promises of atheistic science have themselves come to look deeply compromised.

The nineteenth century positivistic tradition of science delivering a utopian future now seem ludicrous. (To be fair, Freud towards the end of his life became increasingly pessimistic about this). The ideology of total planning based on rational analyses of human nature and human needs now lies in ruins: we are resigned to living with our imperfections.

For many people it is godless technocratic progress which has become the monster from which we must free ourselves. Cannot religion in fact help here, by providing a morality, a synthesis with science to create a humanistic morality?

Or will society create a new space of total disillusion with both modes of thought, neither militantly atheist nor evangelistically believing – simply drifting from belief to belief in a vast supermarket of the soul?

Is psychoanalysis a Jewish science?

Yes, says Kung. Freud was a stern Jewish moralist in a long tradition of stern Jewish moralists. He taught that all decent human life, all civilisation, rests on the suppression of sexuality, instinct and childhood gratification.

Everywhere in Freud you sense the return of the repressed legalism of the Jewish tradition which he ostentatiously rejected. There is little talk of joy or pleasure in Freud (this is what the French brought to it in the ‘jouissance’ of Barthes et al, bringing actual sex into all Freud’s talk about sex).

No, Freud’s psychology is deeply indebted to the repressed heritage of ancient Mosaic legalism. And this helps explain his lifelong obsession with Moses and his embarrassing attempts to explain away, to master, to over-write the mystery of Moses and Monotheism in his last work.

4. Critique of the critique

From Freud onwards every sphere of human knowledge has had to take account of the vast new terrain of the unconscious which Freud uncovered, and its impact on our lives. What Feuerbach wanted to achieve by a ‘cleansed’ philosophy, what Marx wanted to achieve by a science of social relations, Freud wanted to achieve through depth-psychology: an emancipation, a revaluation of the humanity of Man.

Kung concedes Freud’s criticisms of the failings of denominational religion and agrees that psychoanalysis can help in counselling etc. Psychoanalysis can liberate us from neurotic guilt feelings and help the neurotic subject return to autonomy. But it can’t relieve us of the fact of sin.

It can eliminate illness but it cannot answer ultimate questions about meaning and meaninglessness, life and death. Its aim is to bring things into consciousness, not to forgive; it is healing not salvation.

Küng’s advice to therapists is to be more religious.

Küng’s advice to theologians is to take more account of depth psychology.

Freud thought all neuroses were the result of repressed sexuality. On the contrary, Jung thought all neuroses were the result of what used to be called religion; the lack in people’s lives of a system to give their lives meaning or purpose. Jung criticises psychoanalysis for thinking the ego can stand up to the ‘dark side’ of the soul without the help of some revealed superhuman agency. In Jungian analysis this actually becomes the therapist and the therapeutic alliance.

Erich Fromm in Psychoanalysis and Religion sees two kinds of therapist:

  • the adjustment advisers
  • the doctors of the soul, committed to the optimum development of the self

For Fromm psychoanalysis is adaptable to humanitarian religion. ‘Wonder, rapture, becoming one with the world,’ all these feelings are generated in analysis, in the proper acknowledgement of the power of the id and the assent to life with all its imperfections. Fromm is an assimilationist. There should be no enmity between psychoanalysis and religion.

One of Freud’s problems was that he concentrated on an Old Testament punitive, superego-led religion; he completely failed to understand the quality of rational assent to the New Dispensation. For example, Freud tends to see Jesus only in terms of a revision of Judaism – Jesus as the sacrifice of the Son to the Father which ends the thousand years of Jewish guilt. Despite railing against it all his life, Freud showed surprisingly little understanding Christianity and its new creed of Love, of salvation through Love. (This was Pfister’s complaint also).

In pre-War Vienna Victorian sexual repression led to sex, instincts and the id being at the centre of investigations of psychic life. But, Küng argues, since the middle of the twentieth century there has been a steady growth in indulgence of all these instincts. Nowadays (when he was writing, in the 1970s) Küng thought that our biggest problems were caused by the opposite of repression, but by the overindulgence of the instincts and all the addictions and moral anarchy they lead to.

Since repression is no longer the problem it was in Freud’s day (1880s to 1910s) modern psychology has become more ego-orientated: how to give people a meaning and purpose, existential questions. The problem nowadays is one of spiritual emptiness. Technology may be daily triumphing over every aspect of our existence but it cannot finally give that existence a meaning. Küng (like Pfister before him) argues for a rational religion to cure the ill, prevent regression, channel grief and fear, help control the unbridled pleasure principle and contribute to healthy individuation.

Very late in the day, in 1933, when Hitler took power, Freud and Einstein exchanged letters on how to prevent another war. Freud seems in this late exchange to have suddenly grasped the reason behind, and the need for, a socially approved creed of Love.

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The Question of a Weltanschauung by Sigmund Freud (1932)

Caveat

To avoid misunderstanding, I believe Freud is a figure of huge cultural and historical importance, and I sympathise with his project of trying to devise a completely secular psychology building on Darwinian premises. Many of his ideas about sexuality as a central motive force, about the role of the unconscious in every aspect of mental life, how repressing instinctual drives can lie behind certain types of mental illness, his development of the talking cure, these and numerous other concepts have become part of the culture and underlie the way many people live and think about themselves today.

However, I strongly disapprove of Freud’s gender stereotyping of men and women, his systematic sexism, his assumption of Western superiority over ‘primitive’ peoples, and many other axioms of his theory. Despite the revolutionary impact of his thought, Freud carried a lot of Victorian assumptions over into psychoanalysis. He left a huge and complicated legacy which needs to be examined and picked through with care. My aim in these reviews is not to endorse his opinions but to summarise his writings, adding my own thoughts and comments as they arise.

***

‘The Question of a Weltanschauung’ is the last in Freud’s 35 Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. It is a polemical defence of psychoanalysis seen as the vanguard of science, and an attack on established religion seen as the main obstacle in its way and which it must vanquish.

Weltanschauung is the German word for ‘worldview’. Many people ask Freud if psychoanalysis has a worldview of its own and this irritates him for 2 reasons: 1) psychoanalysis is a branch of psychology and thus shares the general scientific worldview, but 2) science itself can’t even be said to have a proper worldview because it is not complete.

A Weltanschauung is an intellectual construction which solves all the problems of our existence on the basis of one overriding hypothesis which leaves no question unanswered and in which everything that interests us finds its fixed place.
(Pelican Freud Library Volume 2, page 193)

A Weltanschauung, in Freud’s view, is a bad thing. It represents people’s wish to have the answers to everything, including the meaning of life. Science cannot provide this. Science proceeds by trial and error. Its theories are contingent, provisional upon verification. Therefore, science doesn’t have a Weltanschauung in the fullest sense.

Science is the merciless unblinking quest for Truth and:

Truth cannot be tolerant. It admits of no compromise or limitations. Research regards every sphere of human activity as belonging to it and must be relentlessly critical if any other power tries to take over part of it. (2:195)

There are three other worldviews which challenge science: art, philosophy and religion. Art is not a threat because everyone knows it doesn’t aspire to scientific truth. Philosophy is ludicrous because it is always having to change its theories as science discovers more truths about the world and the mind. So religion is the only real enemy to the scientific worldview and, in its bid for a complete explanation to everything, may lay claim to being the most thorough Weltanschauung devised by the human mind.

Why does religion exert such a powerful hold over the human mind?

  1. Religion offers an explanation of how the universe came into being and why we’re here, thus satisfying the human thirst for knowledge.
  2. Religion assures us of ultimate happiness and reward despite the tribulations of life, thus fulfilling the childish wish to be comforted.
  3. Religion lays down precepts for behaviour ie it enforces a morality.
  4. In a word: religion represents a childish wish-fulfilment, the longing for illusions to conceal the brutal realities of life.

How is it that a pseudo-scientific cosmogony, a system of punishment and reward, and an ethical system are always combined in religion?

Because religion is based on the Father, your father, as he appeared in all his magnificence and omnipotence to you when you were a small child. This Father is the reason you exist: he gave you life. He is the source of punishment and praise when you’ve behaved well or badly, even if you don’t quite understand why.

And he is the ultimate source of a steady stream of instruction on how to behave = morality. All the instructions of the Father, all the conditionality of having to behave well to be loved and rewarded, these are introjected by the child to form the superego or conscience, in the first few years of childhood. Later, in puberty, all these rules and conventions are projected outwards onto the Father-figure conveniently offered by organised religion from your earliest youth. Just as you’re making the stormy transition from adolescence to adulthood, society offers you an attractive, age-old and aesthetically pleasing system within which to sublimate many of your strongest drives.

(N.B. Freud said the child is highly sexual between 0 and 5 years of age, during which it undergoes a development through fixed stages: 0-1 oral, obsessed with the breast, pleasure and sustenance through the mouth; 1-3 anal, where you learn to enjoy controlling your bowels and their product, faeces; phallic, when you realise you have a little winkle and your sister doesn’t because Daddy has cut hers off for being naughty. This terrifying realisation results in the Castration Complex and this contributes to the grand resolution of childhood sexuality in the Oedipus Complex, a wish to overcome your father and take possession of your mother. The Oedipus Complex is duly overcome and the child lapses into the Latency Phase (6-11) when you largely forget the upsets and turmoil of the earlier years and become more socialised, introjecting the commands and morality of your parents into the superego. With the eruption of the hormones in puberty many unconscious fears and desires from the infant period are revived and largely dictate how you respond to the new sexual and social demands being made on you. It is at this stage that society holds out organised religion as a way of overcoming many of the problems which face you, notably the perceived weakness of your real father as against the ego-ideal you have set up in your mind; and the fear of loss of love as you move away from your parents. Those childhood feelings of awe and fear and abasement can now be projected onto a Big Daddy in the sky. The strong but confused and contradictory sexual drives which are awakened in adolescence can also be sublimated into adolescent infatuations with the suffering Christ. And this explains why so many adolescents undergo a religious infatuation before settling into the common light of day.)

Freud then recapitulates the argument of ‘Totem and Taboo’. Briefly, he sees societies and their religions as going through fixed developmental stages rather as the human child does. This parallel allows him to make many comparisons between infantile states and early religious beliefs. This parallelism also allows him to say that, just as neurotic, hysterical and obsessive behaviours are the result of a reversion to childhood experiences which exert an unconscious power over the adult – so, by extension, various religious beliefs or practices are reminiscent in appearance and actually identical in structure to mental illnesses.

(This insight first saw the light in Freud’s paper ‘Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices’ (1907) where he compares compulsive religious observance to the kind of obsessive behaviour often practiced by neurotics; for example, obsessively washing your hands or tapping every railing on the way to the Tube etc, and explains how failure to carry out these actions leads to guilt and self-punishment out of all proportion to their external value.)

To return to the analogy between the growing child and the growth of religion: the childish belief in the omnipotence of its thoughts in the child’s oral phase is paralleled in religious history by the development of animism, where the woods and streams are haunted by spirits. The child/primitive man’s tool for propitiating these spirits also relies on the ‘omnipotence of thoughts’ = Magic. Primitive man makes things happen by re-enacting them (performing a rain dance, painting pictures of a successful bison hunt on cave walls). Freud compares primitive ritual to the child’s gameplaying to overcome, to internalise events in the outside world beyond its control (see ‘Beyond The Pleasure Principle’).

Then, just as the child learns to talk and this new skill vastly expands its ability to control the coming and going of its parents, so the primitive mind develops language and is stunned by the effect of this huge leap forward. In religion the full plenitude of language is, again, projected onto God, of which our own language is a puny copy. Let there be light, says God, and there is light. Adam names the animals and knows them. Mastery of language brings to the child, and to the ‘primitive’, alike, a mystical sense of oneness with, and control of, the world. The myth of Babel is necessary to explain the transition from the childish power of language to its sadly limited capability in adult life.

Then comes totemism, where many of the fears of spirits have been concentrated onto the tribal totem, a feared and worshipped animal. The totem is also the nexus of complicated systems of morality based around kinship and marriage. In ‘Totem and Taboo’ Freud says these all boil down to barriers to incest which are powerfully close to the surface in the primitive mind. (In line with the Freudian principle that nothing is ever lost to the psyche, many relics of the age of animism survive to this day in the form of superstitions – black cats – or are incorporated into mainstream religious belief – the enduring belief in ‘dark forces’ and ‘the Evil Spirit’, Satan etc.)

How primitive it feels even to think about Satan, much more exciting than thinking about God – sending us back to a time of primal thrills and excitements and terrors.

For Freud, then, the investigations of the 19th century (and particularly the encyclopedic work of Sir James Frazer, ‘The Golden Bough’ with which ‘Totem and Taboo’ is saturated) show that religion has a natural history like any other human institution. Freud has contributed to this an explanation of how the fulfilments of the wishes of different parts of the developing mind were satisfied by different components in religion which drew them together in evermore sophisticated syntheses.

As to the present day, Freud’s view is that religion is starting to crumble before the investigations of science, of which psychoanalysis is at the cutting edge. Religion’s attraction in the modern world is the guarantee of an all-powerful God who looks after your destiny and rewards virtue. However:

It seems not to be the case that there is a power in the Universe which watches over the well-being of individuals with parental care and brings all their affairs to a happy ending. On the contrary the destinies of Mankind can be brought into harmony neither with the hypothesis of a Universal Benevolence nor with the partly contradictory one of a Universal Justice. Earthquakes, tidal waves, conflagrations, make no distinction between the virtuous and pious and the scoundrel or unbeliever. Even where what is in question is not inanimate Nature but where an individual’s fate depends on his relations to other people, it is by no means the rule that virtue is rewarded and that evil finds its punishment. Often enough, the violent, cunning or ruthless man seizes the envied good things of the world and the pious man goes away empty. Obscure, unfeeling and unloving powers determine men’s fate; the system of reward and punishments which religion ascribes to the government of the universe seems not to exist. (2:203)

The latest contribution to the critique of the religious Weltanschauung has been effected by psychoanalysis, by showing how religion originated from the helplessness of children and by tracing its contents to the survival into maturity of the wishes and needs of childhood. (2:203)

Religion is an attempt to master the sensory world in which we are situated by means of the wishful world which we have developed within us as a result of biological and psychological necessities. But religion cannot achieve this. Its doctrines bear the imprint of the times in which they arose, the ignorant trust of the childhood of humanity. Its consolations deserve no trust. Experience teaches us that the world is no nursery. The ethical demands on which religion lays stress need, rather, to be given another basis; for they are indispensable to human society and it is dangerous to link obedience to them with religious faith. (2:204)

Freud, then, does not set out to subvert conventional morality. On the contrary, he sees some form of morality as vital to civilised life and fears it will be eroded if it remains attached to crumbling religious belief. Freud calls for morality to be rebuilt on the more solid ground of science and a scientific understanding of what is best for human beings.

Religion may well reply to Freud’s attack, ‘What right have you to criticise or judge the noblest creation of the human spirit, inspired by the Divine Creator Himself?’ Freud:

We reply by saying that what is in question is not in the least the invasion of the field of religion by the scientific spirit, but on the contrary an invasion by religion of the sphere of scientific thought. Whatever may be the value and importance of religion, it has no right in any way to restrict thought. (2:206)

Here Freud clearly shows himself the heir to the spirit of the rational Enlightenment.

The prohibition against thought issued by religion to assist in its self-preservation is also far from being free from danger either for the individual or for human society. Analytic experience has taught us that a prohibition like this, even if it is originally limited to a specific field, tends to widen out and become the cause of severe inhibitions in the subject’s conduct of life. This result may be observed, too, in the female sex, following from their being forbidden to have anything to do with their sexuality even in thought. Biography is able to point to the damage done by all religious inhibition of thought in the life story of nearly all eminent individuals in the past. On the other hand intellect – or Reason – is among the powers which we may most expect to exercise a unifying influence on men – on men who are held together with such difficulty and whom it is therefore scarcely possible to rule… Our best hope for the future is that intellect – the scientific spirit, Reason – may in process of time establish a dictatorship in the mental life of man. The nature of reason is a guarantee that afterwards it will not fail to give man’s emotional impulses and what is determined by them the position they deserve. But the common compulsion exercised by such a dominance of reason will prove to be the strongest uniting bond among men and lead the way to further unions. Whatever, like religion’s prohibition against thought, opposes such a development, is a danger for the future of mankind. (2:208)

Here we get to the heart of Freud’s argument; religion is not only an irritating sign of immaturity and the childish wish to live in a world of illusions. It is positively dangerous insofar as it hinders the movement towards the triumph of reason. So what is this scientific spirit which Freud goes on about so much?

Scientific thinking does not differ in its nature from the normal activity of thought, which all of us, believers and unbelievers, employ in looking after our affairs in ordinary life. It has only developed certain features: it takes an interest in things even if they have no immediate, tangible use; it is concerned carefully to avoid individual factors and affective influences; it examines more strictly the trustworthiness of the sense-perceptions on which it bases its conclusions; it provides itself with new perceptions which cannot be obtained by everyday means and it isolates the determinants of these new experiences in experiments which are deliberately varied. Its endeavour is to arrive at correspondence with reality – that is to say, with what exists outside of us and, as experience has taught us, is decisive for the fulfilment or disappointment of our wishes. This correspondence with the real external world we call ‘truth’. It remains the aim of our scientific work even if we leave the practical value of that work out of account. (2:206)

Freud then turns to consider other Weltanshauungen of our times, the intellectual relativism generated by modern physics and the ‘new religion’ of Russian communism etc (cf his savage critique of Bolshevism in ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’).

Thoughts

This is Freud’s best single work outlining what science is, how psychoanalysis fits into it, the origins and growth of religion, and why religion presents a mortal threat to science’s attempts to build a better world. Indispensable even if, by the end, you come out disagreeing with most of his premises and conclusions.

Also, after reading Totem and Taboo, Future of An Illusion, Civilisation and its Discontents, Moses and Monotheism, with their relentless attacks on Christianity, not to mention the countless places in other essays where he suddenly starts attacking Christianity, the reasonably impartial reader can’t help being struck by the deep-seated and lifelong animosity Freud felt, thought and expressed against Christianity at every possible opportunity.

As Pfister’s writings make clear, it was perfectly possible to be a devout Christian and a thorough-going psychoanalyst as well. The more you read of it, the more antiquated and Victorian Freud’s anti-religious prejudice seems, the optimistic anti-Christian positivism of his student days in the 1880s carried over into the 1920s and 30s, and revived any time anyone reads one of these dusty old works.

It feels more than ever outdated in a world where a) religious belief is on the rise, across the Muslim world, the Hindu world, and in Christian Africa; and b) when a central premise of our times, in the multicultural West, is about fluidity of identities and allegiances. In the modern context Feud’s simplistic binary opposition of Science versus Religion seems almost 18th century, Voltairian, and his naive belief that rational science will lead us to some utopian future feels all the more dusty, dated and irrelevant.

Credit

The history of the translation of Freud’s many works into English forms a complicated subject in its own right. ‘The Question of a Weltanschauung’ was first translated into English by James Strachey in 1964 as part of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. My quotes are from the version included in volume 2 of the Pelican Freud Library, ‘New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis’, published in the 1973.

Related links

Freud and religion reading list

Freud reviews

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by Simon on July 7, 2023  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on July 7, 2023

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