Question

What is the unconscious in Freudian psychology and what is its role in his views on religion? How do the Oedipus complex and infantile sexuality relate to Freud’s theory of religion? According to Pals, what does Freud mean when he says that religion and belief in deities are illusions? How do Freud’s basic ideas about religion compare with those of Durkheim? What do you find useful in Freud’s theory?

Answer 1

• In the psychological interpretation of Freud religion acts as a protective measure of a man against his unconscious drives that religious beliefs get allegorical form of satisfaction, so that the individual intrapsychic conflicts between conscious and unconscious lose their sharpness.
• Religion, Freud believed, was an expression of underlying psychological neuroses and distress. At various points in his writings, he suggested that religion was an attempt to control the Oedipal complex (as opposed to the Electra complex), a means of giving structure to social groups, wish fulfillment, an infantile delusion, and an attempt to control the outside world.
• Freud's psychoanalytic perspective viewed religion as the unconscious mind's need for wish fulfillment. Because people need to feel security and to absolve themselves of their own guilt, Freud believed that they choose to believe in God, who represents a powerful father-figure.
• Freud’s notion of the Oedipal conflict attempts to conceptualize the triangulation between the child’s desire for the mother (the real origin for the child) and the intervening father who also has a libidinal investment in the mother and thus becomes the figure which represents conflict and prohibition for the child.
• This conflict exemplifies a basic structure: the prohibition that creates the limit of the enjoyment of the mother represents the “reality principle”; it enlists reason and becomes the principle that regulates desire.
• Due to its origin in the individual history of the subject, this principle is always merged with the figure of the father, and to uphold it has been a major interest of the powers that represent civilization.
• All major Western religions glorify the submission to the father by creating a Father-God. In this way they mediate the acceptance of prohibition and of the reality principle. Their function is to bridge desire and the law.
• Durkheim and Freud believed understanding the rules of society was vital for human survival. Durkheim compares to Freud in some aspects to religion."Religion is something eminently social" (Pals 108). Durkheim feels that religion has been transmitted through years from birth.
• Religion, then, provides for an externalised object onto which collective emotion can be projected; this is ultimately reflexive because the externalisation at root represents the people themselves. As a result, to honour religious custom is indirectly to honour the group. This is why for Durkheim religious experience serves to strengthen group cohesion and bonding.
  
• Freud’s understanding of religion is somewhat pejorative. Freud drew a connection between psychological abnormality and religious practice, noting a resemblance between “what are called obsessive acts in neurotics and those religious observances by means of which the faithful give expression to their piety”. In turn, Freud perceived religion, like neurosis, as symptomatic of deep-seated psychological issues.
• This “neurosis”, according to psychoanalytic theory, comes about as a defence mechanism against feelings of helplessness which obtain in a dispassionate cosmos. Hence the need for a cosmic father figure, who, as a parent comforts the child, palliates the religious subject with conciliatory notions (about purpose, meaning, boundaries, rewards, and so on).
• This entire dynamic apparently stems from Oedipal anxieties, where “each person grows up with a sense of foreboding toward a father figure who is both feared and loved”; this, it follows, “becomes the basis for the cosmic father figure, who offers protection and salvation but in the meantime needs to be appeased by devotion and sacrifice”. In Freud’s mind, religion therefore constitutes a surrogate parent.
• On the surface, Freud and Durkheim proffer two seemingly quite different explanations for religion. Importantly, while these theories are not overtly complementary, nor are they mutually exclusive.
• Indeed, significant parallels may be drawn between each approach. For example, both both theorists argued that religion is an important factor in community cohesion;both agree that “religion is central to any cultural analysis”and, thus, both hold that “that the cognitive roots of religious belief are to be found in social experience”.
• For Durkheim, the real driving force behind religion is social cohesion; for Freud, the impetus is psychological assuagement. In either case, social unity and mental wellbeing obtain, only for slightly different conceptual reasons.
• Freud is concerned with psychological structures; Durkheim with sociological structures. Freud believes religion works to console believers from the ultimate anxiety of a meaningless cosmos. Durkheim believes religion provides for a canvas on which social phenomena can be externalised and then re-accommodated as an exogenous entity. Again, both modes of behaviour essentially work to the same purpose: instilling a sense of meaning in human life.