Belief after Freud

Religious Faith through the Crucible of Psychoanalysis

Carlos Domínguez-Morano

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000161021
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

Belief after Freud confronts the psychoanalytic experience and the experience of faith. A purified vision of faith, so many times disfigured by infantile or neurotic dynamics, can emerge through the crucible of psychoanalysis. The work contributes to the dialogue between psychoanalysis and faith, based on the respective lived experiences, rather than from theoretical positions only. The book is divided into three parts:

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• PartI centres on Freud's position on religion. After an introductory chapter assessing Freud's present validity, the following chapters critically examine Freud's position and interpretation of religion.

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• PartII examines how people of faith experience psychoanalysis, including the role played by unconscious feelings of guilt, and the ideas of sin and salvation.

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• PartIII explores ideas of sexuality, power, and obedience, including the unconscious and pathological roots of the relation with money, and the sense of evangelical poverty.

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Now in its fifth edition in Spain, Belief after Freud has also been published in Argentina and Brazil. Many readers say the book has opened a new form of belief for them. The book has also been of great interest to non-believing psychologists.

PART I
THE FREUDIAN INTERPRETATION OF RELIGION

CHAPTER TWO

Religion and neurosis

The process analogy

The Freudian interpretation of religion, as already mentioned in the introduction, is based on two hermeneutical models, those of neurosis and dreams. In this first chapter on Freudian texts about religion, we are going to focus on the diverse relationships Freud establishes between religion and neurosis and on a whole series of consequences and problems stemming from these associations.

Early on in Freudian texts, religion is associated with the study of hysteria. Here, the splitting of consciousness, or dissociation, the basic phenomenon that opened the doors to psychoanalysis, exposed the process which Freud called perversion of will (Freud, 1892–1893, p. 123). In other words, an unconscious wish from the repressed that prevails over the subject’s conscious wishes and will. In this battle of wills, Freud views the religious experience as an element that clearly plays in favour of the conscious and repressive will. Religiousness is, thus, an important opponent to the subject’s world of wishes and instincts. In consequence, it frequently plays a decisive part in neurosis generation.

Repression, undertaken with the help of the religious experience, continually requires that help to maintain control over the repressed wish, which retains, however, its penchant for free expression. Since this first Freudian proposal, certain religion-inspired ravings and some extreme forms of devotion were considered clear symptomatic expressions of repressed instincts.¹ Yet, still, many important theoretical consequences entailed by these phenomena remained unresolved.

After the initial research into the field of hysteria, obsessional neurosis provided Freud with another fundamental area of investigation of the unconscious. It is within this second type of neurosis that Freud finds the main interpretative key to his whole subsequent analysis of religious beliefs. Unlike hysteria, obsessional neurosis offered him a type of language very similar to that of cultural phenomena. It seemed as if we were looking at a kind of “dialect” of cultural language (Freud, 1909d, p. 155).

In that observed similarity between obsessional neurosis and cultural formation, religious practice came to occupy an exemplary place. Actually, in Freud’s eyes, the rites of obsessional neurosis revealed a surprising analogy with those of religious practice.

Once this new relation between religion and obsessional neurosis is established, religious experience will no longer appear just to oppose unconscious drives, as in the Studies on Hysteria (1895d), but also serve as a disguised expression of the instinct itself and the guilt feelings associated with it. Indeed, in the obsessional symptom, religious behaviour presents a “compromise formation” trait, that is, a transaction or pact between the instinct on one hand and the prohibition of the instinct itself on the other; a pact, however, between instinct and prohibition that is hidden from the subject, making him unaware of its meaning.

In his essay “Obsessive actions and religious practices” (Freud, 1907b), his first important work on the subject of religion, Freud remarks on the parallels, not merely superficial, between obsessional and religious rites. Both seem to be motivated by intense guilt feelings, caused, in turn, by repressed unconscious wishes, against which both (the neurotic and the religious person) defend themselves by means of rites. The analogy in the expression is matched by an analogy in the origin of both behaviours: in both cases we find the repression of an instinct.

Later on, the threat that those repressed contents cause to the subject’s neurotic consciousness lead him to develop a whole series of defensive measures that, unfortunately, precisely trace the desire he wished to avoid. It is the symptom as “compromise-formation” between prohibition and desire.

In religious practice, Freud also finds the same transaction between prohibition and wish, between the repressive and repressed tendencies; as he tells us, all those actions officially forbidden by religion are frequently undertaken precisely in the name of religion.

Many things still remain unknown regarding this ambivalent and double tendency in religious experience but, from what we can glean so far, Freud dares to propose an eventually well-known formulation: from a psychoanalytical point of view, obsessional neurosis must be considered as an individual’s religion and religion as a universal obsessional neurosis (Freud, 1907b, pp. 126–127).

This is as far as the analogy between religion and neurosis is taken in the early writings. The difference established in those days (to disappear later) lies in the fact that the obsessional neurotic has repressed sexual contents, while, in religious behaviour, he guesses the repression of antisocial and selfish tendencies. The outline of the first theory on the instincts, with the ego opposing the sexual drives, can be seen through the differentiation Freud makes between obsessional neurotic repression and the religious man’s repression. The former is afraid of sexuality and his neurosis is born out of this fear; the latter fears his selfish, antisocial tendencies and his religiousness comes out of this fear. This differentiation will fail when, from 1914 on, a new instinctual life theory asserts that ego instincts are libidinal, too (Freud, 1914c). Going beyond analogy, an identity is established on the originating conflict of both obsessional and religious behaviour.

The identity of origin

The establishment of an identity in their origin for both neurosis and religion is made when, in Totem and Taboo (Freud, 1912–1913, pp. 156–157), the oedipal conflict is identified as the common source for both the neurotic conflict and culture and its great institutions. (I have focused on the general characteristics of Totem and Taboo, on its long and hazardous composition, and on the problems involved in its reading in a full chapter of El psicoanálisis freudiano de la religión, Domínguez-Morano, 1991, pp. 99–144.)

Totem and Taboo represents an essential step in the development of Freudian thought in general and, no doubt, is a key work in relation to the subject of religion. In this work, the so-called Oedipus complex goes beyond the purely psychopathological and becomes a fundamental anthropological category. It is no longer just about seeing the Oedipus complex as the core of a neurotic complex, but of building the very foundations of human and cultural behaviour upon its structure and dynamics. In this way, the oedipal situation becomes a basic universal structure.

From this new understanding of the oedipal issues, Freud thinks he has the key to establish an identity for the origin of the behaviour of the neurotic and the religious man. Both will be, in their diverse activity, perpetuating that oedipal structure without managing to avoid the predicaments of that infantile situation: the neurotic person experiencing the suffering which any individual neurosis entails, the religious man seeing his anxiety mitigated by belonging to a generalised cultural formation. His conflict is not an open wound, because it is placed in another register, the social and collective one, from which he tries to ease his difficult contact and relation with the real world (Freud, 1924f). However, the dynamics to which it responds are essentially the same.

How, then, is the oedipal situation perpetuated in religion? In Freud’s eyes, it immortalises a conflict with the father, elevated now to the status of God; a conflict in which emotional ambivalence, that is, simultaneous coexistence of love and hate, keeps playing a basic role.

According to the innovative Totem and Taboo hypothesis, the God of religion existed actually on earth as mortal flesh and was the object of a radical, we could even say deadly, conflict. The book’s originality came from a dramatic, mythical presentation and not as the result of a theoretical formulation.

On the basis of certain ethnic and anthropological theories of his time (specifically, the primitive horde hypothesis, such as Darwin and Atkinson described, and the Robertson Smith theory on the totemic meal celebration), Freud imagined a primordial drama in which a jealous and omnipotent father was murdered and devoured by his sons, who saw this action as their only way to access the women that their father kept exclusively for himself. That primal murder, that kind of original and originating sin, would be the basis of the great social institutions: ethics, law, and religion.

But that murder was, in a sense, a great failure, since the children knew that nobody could take the father’s place unless the crime be perpetually repeated. His place had to remain empty and it was precisely in this empty space left by the father where religion found its birthplace.

It was, indeed, from this hollow space that the dead father returned to existence, first as the clan’s totemic animal, and then in his transformation, through heroes, gods, and demons, to finally reach his complete resurrection as the single Judeo-Christian God, expressing more clearly than any other religion the primal father’s resurrection.

Better than any other religious manifestation, Christianity, with its original sin doctrine, would, indeed, bring to light that primal event, the father’s death. In necessitating the son’s death, it atones for the original sin against the father through dogmatic phantasy. But the eternal ambivalence which religious expression is known for results in the father being reborn and reasserting himself, by way of Christian dogma, in the resurrection and divine status of the dead son, who, in this way, impersonates anew the father (Freud, 1913c, p. 154, 1939a, pp. 87–90).

Judaism, however, saw the horde’s primal father reborn in the single god Aten, brought from Egypt by Moses, but did not come to admit to the father’s murder. The price of its refusal to confess to God’s murder has been paid, on the one hand, by being reduced to the condition of a fossil, and on the other hand, by persecution all throughout history (Freud, 1939a, p. 90).

In his Moses and Monotheism, published one year before his death, Freud dares to hypothesise on the origin of Judaism. For him, Moses was an Egyptian, a proselyte of Aten, who, at seeing the old polytheism restored, brings together a group of Semites to whom he transmits his faith. That Moses, however, will be murdered by his followers, who are unable to endure a religion so highly spiritualised as that Egyptian monotheism. A new Moses succeeds him, but this time with a new God, Yahweh, the Volcano God, a much more anthropomorphic divinity generating a rougher and more superstitious religion. Judaism is then explained (and the neurosis model as well) as a compromise between two opposed tendencies that, finally, through the “return of the repressed” process, end up restoring the primal tribe’s father back to life in the magnificent figure of the single God of the prophets.

In this way, Totem and Taboo illustrates a conflict in which the relationship with the father rests on a kind of “you or me”, all-or-nothing ultimatum, with the father’s death being the only solution to make possible the son’s own existence. But the perpetual emotional ambivalence prevents the son’s freedom, since the guilt feeling (due to the loving pole in the relationship) binds him longingly forever to the dead father. That father, admired and hated at the same time, is now reborn and regains an unimaginable power. Only in this way can the son believe he can fill the dreadful void left by that dead father.

However, if guilt brings the father back to life, if love and nostalgia for his presence cause his constant reappearance, then hate, expressed as radical incompatibility, forcefully reappears at the very heart of religion. Unable to express himself openly and directly in front of the father who is magnified by divinity, he does it in the masked ways that religion itself provides. So, time and time again, the great originating father dies, sacrificed in dogma and in religious rites and celebrations, repeating the original crime in an everlasting chain. In the end, we see that emotional ambivalence is always ready to flare up as this everlasting death–resurrection of the originating father.

Thus, the “return of the repressed” (Wiederkehr des Verdrängten), which is Freud’s key explanation for the understanding of religions, enables a perennial repetition of the primary ambivalence, never resolved, towards the father.

The theoretical difficulties, which Freud had to confront as he assigned the value of a real event to the oedipal drama, are important and we shall have to address them in our critical evaluation. The psychic transmission of the consequences of that primal crime resulted in notable stumbling blocks (so much like those found by theologians in explaining the transmission of original sin …). Freud tried to circumvent them with the help of certain hypotheses with a biology bent, such as the “inheritance of acquired characteristics”.

In any case, Totem and Taboo establishes a key piece in the Freudian interpretation of religious fact, in its essential relation with the Oedipus complex and in its analogy with neurosis. Religion, like neurosis, offers “solutions” to perpetuate in the phantasy dimension the fight between the son and the father. Paradoxically, on the other hand, this is a fight that satisfies the desire to live forever sheltered by the father’s protection. This second dimension of religion is best analysed by the application of the dream model to the interpretation of religious fact.

The double father figure: God and the devil

In the oedipal structure that religion maintains, God and the devil appear as two disguised representations of the father. Their roots are hidden beneath two poles of emotional ambivalence, positive and negative.

In the essay about Leonardo da Vinci, we find the first clear association Freud establishes between the father figure and God’s image, with its roots in the “father complex” (Freud, 1910c, p. 123). Soon after, the analysis of the paranoia delirium made in the “Schreber case” highlights again, through the psychotic break, the father’s function and his extreme exaltation to divinity (Freud, 1911c).

The clinical cases dedicated to the analysis of obsessional neurosis, such as the “Rat Man” and the “Wolf Man” (Freud, 1909d, 1918b), highlighted the intensity of the emotional ambivalence towards the father, which, in both cases, provided in God’s image a more bearable outlet for the subject.

Freud’s research into neurosis led him to the unequivocal conclusion of the close association between the specific conflict with the father and its relation to the divine. This was demonstrated by case studies such as that of Christoph Heitzmann (Freud, 1923d), Dostoyevsky (Freud, 1928b), and of a young American physician in “A religi ous experience” (Freud, 1928a). God is a substitution for, and an exaltation of, the father (ein Vatersatz ein erhöhter Vater) that only the religious cultural formation has been able to generate. In contrast, to Freud, the philosophers’ pompous theoretical constructions on God seem to be ridiculous surrogates or cheap pastiches (Freud, 1927c, p. 32). Only through the pressure of guilt, born of emotional ambivalence and from the nostalgia for the father it breeds, can this father’s exaltation be acquired. It creates, in this way, especially in Judeo-Christianity, the whole dimension that the primal father figure had for the son.

As Freud evolves his ideas and integrates these thoughts on religion, the question is posed: how could a father acquire such grandiosity from a limited human being? Time and time again, Freud comes back to the subject, always revealing, however, a deep dissatisfaction with the results obtained. So it is with the “Schreber” case study in 1911 (Freud, 1911c, pp. 55–57), continues with Totem and Taboo (Freud, 1912–1913, pp. 149–151) in 1913, and culminates in Moses and Monotheism in 1939 (Freud, 1939a, pp. 83–84).

Freud never looked for the solution in proper psychoanalytical terms, but resorted to not always consistent material from the history of religions. He revealed once again the inadequate evolutionist background in which he formed the question, but we shall revisit this later on.

The oedipal emotional ambivalence shown in the analysis of neurosis also opens the door to the interpretation of another religious figure somehow parallel to God. Satan, who, in the first Freudian writings, appears as a symbol of repressed meanings, is progressively acquiring a distinctive profile by association with the father. In this way, he is going to be revealed as the other face of the paternal.

It is, perhaps, in the “Wolf Man” case study where we can best see the progress, via the love–hate ambivalence towards the father, to the transfiguration from God to demon (Freud, 1918b, pp. 69–70; Urtubey, 1983). But best of all is “A seventeenth-century demonological neurosis” (Freud, 1923d), where Freud, in a more precise way, analyses the association between the bad father model and Satan’s figure through the case of the painter, Christoph Heitzmann. If love and nostalgia for the father build up God’s figure, hate and fear of him give birth to the devil. Thus, the Oedipus complex, neurosis’s fundamental node, also becomes the fundame...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• About the Author
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I: The Freudian Interpretation of Religion
• Part II: The Response of Faith
• Part III: Sex, Power, and Money
• Epilogue
• References
• Index