You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This book asserts approvingly that ‘psychoanalysis is … a mature natural religion’ (p. 197). This is a provocative statement, because many analysts since Freud have viewed religion as a collective illusion, and have sought to keep at bay any apparent taint of spirituality, dogmatism, or mysticism in their practice (though it is also, by the same token, a common charge against psychoanalysis that it is itself a cult-like religion grounded in the personal mythology of a founder more prophet than scientist).
Symington’s argument rests on a crucial distinction he makes between what he calls ‘primitive’ and ‘mature’ religion. For him, primitive religion is based on the sole value of survival, whether of the group or of the individual, and includes most of what many people think of as religion: ritual, myth, sacrifice, external symbolism and a belief in supernatural beings. These phenomena, as Symington sees it, are irrational illusions called forth by selfinterested wishes for help or protection. Primitive religion is supposed to have begun when proto-humans first buried their dead, arid persists to this day in most of the world, including within the great historical world religions.
The latter were founded in what is known as the ‘Axial Age’, beginning about five centuries BC, when a number of spiritual masters in various civilisations took the revolutionary step of preaching ‘mature religion’. This, for Symington, is an inner spirituality requiring a disciplining of one’s inner intentions, so that one comes to will the good rather than the pleasurable, abjure ‘primitive’ superstitions and practices serving the survival instinct, and adopt a morality based on the recognition of the freedom and reality of others as well as on the acceptance of the overriding responsibility to seek others’ benefit. In Symington’s view, Zoroaster, the Hebrew prophets, Jesus, Buddha and the authors of the Upanishads expressed such mature religious views, but the traditions that followed them