Question

Freud insisted that religious beliefs be seen as psychological fantasies that make us feel safe.  Jung refused to reduce religious experience to childhood fantasies. With whom do you tend to agree. Provide two reasons why you are in agreement more with Freud or Jung.

Answer 1

I agree more with Jung as his ideas make more sense to me:

He believed there is a religious instinct in all human beings – an inherent striving towards a relationship with someone or something that transcends human power (a higher force or being); which i have always believed. I believe there is a higher force guiding us and us being part of him always strive for that power.

The discovery of the self through the process of INDIVIDUATION leads naturally to Jung’s attitude to the notion of God. Jung believed that only by recognising some higher authority than the ego, could a person detach themselves sufficiently from sexuality, the will to power and all the other compulsions of the world. Without a God, a person will make a God out of something else – sex, power or reason itself. Jung writes ‘the soul must contain in itself the faculty of relation to God, i.e. a correspondence, otherwise a connection could never come about. The correspondence is, in psychological terms, the archetype of a God-image.’