Introduction to ‘God and the Unconscious’

We have spoken in the subtitle of this Conference of the New Dialogue between psychotherapy and religion. In a sense, we could have put that in an even larger context: the new dialogue between Science and Religion or, even larger yet, the new awareness of the social construction of facts and meanings. I shall introduce the Conference by speaking briefly about this wider context.

We can't read the classic texts of psychoanalysis now, including Freud's own writings on religion, without being aware how very much Freud belonged to the time of his formative years, the latter part of the nineteenth century. (He was 44 in 1900.) Freud's confidence in materialistic science, and his cheerful certainty that he personally had no need of what he called the fairytales of religion, are expressions of the Zeitgeist as much as they are anything personal to Freud himself. Indeed, there is something disappointingly shallow about much of Freud's account of religion. He didn't see, as his slightly older contemporary, Nietzsche, had seen, that the loss of religion, ‘the death of God’, as Nietzsche put it, would be a moral and social calamity, with literally incalculable consequences.

To appreciate the importance of events on this scale, we have to train ourselves to think in terms of several generations. Freud enjoyed calling himself a ‘godless Jew’, but he was the son of a religious Jew, and all his life he was in intense internal dialogue with his father. (Even at the age of 80, in the touching little paper entitled ‘A disturbance of memory on the Acropolis’ (Freud 1936), we see how vividly his father was still present to him.) The values of the godless psychoanalysis Freud created are in many ways strikingly similar to the values of traditional Judaism. And the internal worlds of ancestors are not tuned out after a single generation, as we become increasingly aware from working, for example, with descendants of Holocaust survivors.

‘God and the Unconscious’ took place at the Healing and