INTRODUCTION
Sigmund Freud is one of the most
significant psychologists of the twentieth century. His discoveries in neurosis
led to his development of psychoanalysis. Freud viewed the whole human society
in a psychoanalytic lens, including religion. Religion has
been enormously influenced by the social sciences. These impacts are as a
result of the different explanations of religion by the social sciences that
deny the basic significance of religion. There are numerous ideas or theories
propounded as the psychological and sociological factors that are responsible
for religion.
However,
the father figure neurosis of Sigmund Freud is a theoretical fiction. A myth
created by Freud on the basis of scientific fiction. This fiction as created by
Freud was to account for the origin of religion and culture. This myth is found
in Freud’s work Totem and Taboo where
Freud attempts to show that belief in a god is primarily a derivative of the
childhood desire to be loved, protected, and provided for by one’s parents.
This desire survives into adulthood and is gratified by the parental substitute
of a powerful deity. In this work
Freud shows that the beginnings of religion, morals, society and art converge
in the Oedipus complex. Here Freud forges a myth of brothers who killed and
devoured their father in order to take his place and possess his powers.
However, they were struck by the gravity of the patricide they committed and in
amendment they made a deity of their father. However, this myth as evoked by
Freud was a scientific hypothesis that grounds the Oedipus complex. The term
Oedipus complex suggests a child’s anxiety and guilt for having patricidal and
incestuous wishes, and the consequences for having them.
BACKGROUNDS TO THE FATHER FIGURE
NEUROSIS: OEDIPUS COMPLEX
The
male child who is an exclusive subject matter of classic developmental
psychoanalysis has an attitude of uncertainty towards his father. For the sake
of love and protection, he is attached to the father, but his desires for the
sole attention and physical affection of his mother puts the father as an
obstacle in his imagination. Thus the childs affection for the father is
shadowed by feelings of jealousy and hatred. Psychoanalysis, according to Freud
reveals childhood fantasies of overthrowing and killing the father. However,
this infantile situation of the Oedipus complex precisely matches the
historical story which Freud describes in the primitive hordes of sons wishing
to depose their despotic father. Thus:
One powerful male leads a group
and keeps all the women for himself. Less powerful males, principally the
leader’s sons, are not content with this state of affairs and desire to have
power and sexual opportunity for themselves, opportunities which the leader
will not allow. One day this privation becomes intolerable; the sons band
together and kill the leader of the horde, their father. However, after the
murder they feel guilt; they were attached to the dominating father whom they
killed. To atone for this guilt they renounce the sexual objects they have won
and raise up the killed father as a god. The women and sisters they desired are
now seen as forbidden; to possess them would be to enjoy fruits of the terrible
patricide. The sons fear retribution from the totem god for such incestuous
action. The totem clan is thus established, regulating worship of the totemic
god derived from the father and fearing incest and its punishment so much that
extreme controls forcing exogamy may be enacted. The taboo on incest originates
simultaneously with the other great taboo, the prohibition of patricide. “The
dead father became stronger than the living one had been ... They revoked their
deed by forbidding the killing of the totem, the substitute for their father;
and they renounced its fruits by resigning their claim to the women who had now
been set free.”[1]
Freud’s
bleak appraisal of social and political solidarity was replicated in his
attitude toward religion. Although many accounts of Freud’s development have
discerned debts to one or another aspect of his Jewish background, his avowed
position was deeply irreligious. As noted in the account of Totem and Taboo,
he always attributed the belief in divinities ultimately to the displaced
worship of human ancestors.[2]
In
order to understand the father figure neurosis of Freud well, there is a need
to make an elaboration of his psychoanalytic concept of the Oedipus complex. The
term Oedipus
complex is a psychoanalytic concept used by Sigmund Freud to
designate a son’s feeling of love toward his mother and jealousy and hate
toward his father. From
this concept of Freud, two different identifications emerge; the superego urges
the ego to both be like the father and also not be like the father at the same
time. This Complex developed from Freud’s belief that male children are often
drawn to their mothers and take their fathers as rivals or competitors for their
mother’s love. With this mindset, child grows to fear the father; this results
to jealousy and resentment. However, the name Oedipus comes from the Greek myth
of Sophocles’ tragedy. Oedipus is a character who, unknowingly, killed his
father and married his mother.
THE
FATHER FIGURE NEUROSIS: FREUD ON RELIGION
Freud sees religion, particularly
god, as a promulgation of the father figure neurosis. From the psychoanalytic
view point, God is a father figure; the reflection of a child-like wish for a
powerful and protecting father, who also punishes. Thus, one’s feelings about
God revolve around a mixture of love and hate, fear and hostility, dependence
and independence, and forbidden sexual desire. God then becomes is a symbolic
substitute of the father missing in adult life. Freud believed that men desire
sex with all women. However, in the family, sexual desire must be repressed;
otherwise family and society could not exist. Fathers play a complex role in
the lives of their sons; he protects and disciplines, denying the sons sexual
access to females in the family. This combination of positive and negative
elements in the father-son relations causes men to both fear and love their
fathers.[3]
Freud wrote that God is a symbolic,
projected father figure. Since fathers judge and punish their children, denying
them instinct gratification, children become repressed and their true nature is
alienated. Freud goes on to say that repressed individuals find identification
with God. Thus they see God as the source of values. Hence they feel kinship
with God and wills to obey Him. Therefore the existence of God is desired in
people. This projection is to hep the people accept reality which is basically
tragic. We know we are going to die and we can’t face that fact without the
emotional crutch of a father figure who is all-powerful and immortal, and with
whom we feel a profound similarity. God is also a judge, the ultimate source
values and morality. God is the superego projected into a sacred realm, made
divine.[4]
In his myth, Freud constructs a
mythical description for the advent of the society. The mythical family has no
sexual rules before the dawn of civilization; the families were just ‘primitive
hordes’ without morality. However in the primal family, the father is
privileged to a sexual relationship with the women of the family, but forbids
that the sons should have same privilege. Thus the figure of the father is a
feared but also loved one, because he is a protector of the family, protection
them for predators. To the effect of the hatred and resentment to the father
figure, the brothers of the family, out of sexual desire, rebelled against the
father. They came together, overpowered and killed their father. This implied that
the obstacle to their gratifying their sexual desires was removed, but also
there was no figure to protect the family from predators. The sons were
remorseful for the patricide they committed, and thus religion developed as a projection
of a psychological complex resulting from unconscious memories of the killing
of the father of the ‘primal horde’ by the sons. However, in killing the
father, the sons gained themselves a privilege to sexual intercourse with their
sisters. The sons were so guilt stricken and fearful that there was no option
but for religion to emerge and resolve their complex feelings. The sons could
not bear living without the father, they had to fashion a supernatural father
who lives in another realm, not on this earth. As a sign of remorse too, they
renounced sexual desire for the females in the family. With this renunciation
the incest taboo emerged, giving rise to the society. Thus the brothers sort
sexual partners outside of the family and the females of the family were
forbidden as sexual objects. Freud believed that this was a plausible scenario
for the creation of society. He also argued that even if it is not historically
accurate, it is psychologically accurate. That is to say, the scenario is an
image of male motivation, repression, and participation in the moral order of
society.
Religion thus is the social
institution which teaches and reinforces the myth of morality through rituals.
Thus the primary object is to induce and maintain psychological repression,
thereby making the society possible. Without instinct repression, uniting men
into a single organized group wouldn’t be possible. The society demands that
men curbs their instinct of sex and aggression. Religion is the shared behavior
system which accomplishes this task through the psychological mechanism of
guilt and repression, not just suppression. Religion adjusts people to the
society through self-sacrifice of the instincts, and to death and suffering,
but at a high cost. The individual must surrender the intellect.[5]
Religion is wish fulfillment
according to Freud. It is a projection of the wishes of man in an empty,
hostile universe. Children are all educated in religion, and the lessons they
learn easily satisfy their neurotic needs. Yet, as one grows up, childhood needs
are no longer met as they used to be. Therefore, man created religion to
fulfill these childhood desires that man never outgrew.[6]
The
Freudian account begins with certain similarities between attributes of and
attitudes toward a personal deity, on the one hand, and the small child’s
conception of and mode of relating to his father, on the other. However, in
whatever is the case, the superior being is regarded as omnipotent, omniscient,
inscrutable, and providential, and in both cases the individual relates to the
superior being with utter dependence, awe, fear of punishment, and gratitude
for mercy and protection. The suggestion of these parallel, even not proven, is
that the original model for the conception of God is based on the infantile
conception of one’s parent, and the inclination to believe in personal deities
is traced back to the psychological remnants of infantile situation. According
to Freud, these remnants are mostly the result of oedipal conflicts.
Emerging from the Oedipus Complex,
the idea of God as a father fills the need of the desire for a father figure
who will protect, love, and provide for man. The notion of benevolent
providence comforts us when we cannot control or explain the powers of nature.[7]
Religion makes tolerable the helplessness
of man, built form the same infantile helplessness. Thus, Freud argues for the
position that much of religion developed out of childhood needs that are still
desired in adulthood.
Religion has multiple functions for man. It protects him
from the dangers of nature, fate, and the evils of society itself by comforting
him with reassuring notions of providence, immortality, and a heavenly father; man
feels safe with religion. Religion also provides a moral code for how to
behave. For example, with religion, man does not murder because God forbids it.
Without religion, man would not murder due to the fear of the threat of being
murdered himself. However, with a moral code, man does not need to think twice
before behaving a certain way, because as long as he is obeying God, he is in
the right. Freud argues that this way of thought robs man of the ability to
think for himself, then he concludes that religion is neurotic. Religion keep
man as a child, never allowing him to grow up, however for Freud, this is
unacceptable. He urges that childhood should be outgrown and that a stop should
be put to the illusory doctrines of religion.
Nevertheless, it is important to note that Freud understood
religion to be illusory on an individual and societal level. Freud believed that
religion is the “universal obsessional neurosis in humanity.”[8]The
origins of such a collective neurosis lie in the various taboos of primitive times.
Taboo means “set apart” or “marked off” as does the word “holy”. Therefore,
Freud associated something described as holy with something that was a taboo.
Religious rituals, where people set themselves apart from other things and
persons, are like obsessive, neurotic behaviors to Freud. Collective rituals
displayed the need to act upon one’s unconscious, neurotic desires with a group
of people in order to feel included and a part of society. One observation
Freud held in regard to ritual was that the ancestral slaying and eating of the
totem animal fulfilled the oedipal wish to kill and devour the father. A ritual
such as this was clearly wish fulfillment, as Freud believed all of religion
was, and in a collective manner, rituals could satisfy the wishes of many people
at once. Freud detailed his understanding of religion as an illusion in multiple
works, the most well-known being The Future of an Illusion.
EVALUATION
This section summarizes and
evaluates much of the story Freud proposes as an alternative to the Biblical
narrative. Freud is consistent in his emphasis on the father figure as a god in
the role of religion in people’s lives. Often times, Psychoanalytic
literatures are simply enumerations of similarities between religion and
compulsion neuroses. These include firm attachment to rituals without a
rational explanation of such attachment. However there are some correlation
between degree of unconscious oedipal conflict and firmness of religious
belief. Showing that a certain set of natural factors is one of the things that
can produce religious belief may well nullify certain ways of supporting the
beliefs, but it could hardly show that no adequate rational grounds could be
produced.
Freud’s
theory of religion is a negative evaluation of religion because the particular
causal factors to which Freud traced religion are associated with undesirable
patterns of organization. To regard religion as caused by these factors is to categorize
it with neurotic and infantile modes of behavior, and as such it is hardly
worthy of serious consideration. Similar to this is also the application that
psychoanalytic theory implies that religion is infantile and hence unworthy of
matured men. It is true that the way a religious man relates himself to God is
in many ways similar to the way a small child relates himself to a father, but
whether or not this is a mature, realistic mode of activity is wholly a
function of whether there really is such a God. If there is, then this is the
only reasonable stance to take. Hence, to condemn religion on these grounds is
to presuppose the falsity of its beliefs.
Thus,
there are many loopholes in any though pattern that tries to project a negative
evaluation of religion from a causal explanation of religion in psychological
or sociological terms. If a person does not feel that he has a firm basis for
his religious beliefs, then looking at religion in the light Freud presented it
would lead to lost in belief.[9]
CONCLUTION
Freud’s position can be summarized thus, all religious
behavior, from the foundations of belief to subtle ritual, is grounded in the
gratification of infantile desire which is grounded in the Oedipus complex. Hence,
the creation of the gods, and particularly the adoption of the gods by an
individual serves to gratify the residues of infantile desire left over from
the childhood experience of a loving, protecting, and providing father, coupled
with the need to propitiate this father.
Adult belief in God or the gods is a wish-fulfillment, a
compromise image formed to satisfy the conflict between desire for love and
protection and the realization that one is alone in the world and that one’s
parents are imperfect. However, whatever are the postulations and positions of
Freud, the reality of religion remains.
[1]
Christopher N. Chapman, Ph.D., Freud,
Religion, and Anxiety: How Freud’s
Critique of Religion Neglected His Advances in Psychoanalytic Theory,
Lulu.com, Morrisville, 2007, 30-31
[2]
"Freud, Sigmund." Encyclopædia
Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite.
Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, 2014.
[3]
Bruno Bettelheim, Freud and Man's Soul,
vintage, 1983, 3.
[4]
Ibid 3.
[5]
Ibid 4.
[6] Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, Liveright Publishing Co, New York, 1955,
42.
[7]
Ibid 53.
[8]
Ibid 43.
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