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.
Gideon Lev's article is an engaging summary history of psychoanalytic attitudes toward faith, highlighting significant differences between current psychoanalytic attitudes toward faith and those of the psychoanalytic tradition. By ‘faith’ Lev includes what is usually called ‘religion,’ i.e. the set of more or less institutionalized practices focusing on some understanding of the divine, ‘spirituality,’ i.e., a set of practices more attuned to personal development, irrespective of the question of the existence of the divine, and non-rational experiences we can broadly call ‘mysticism,’ such as occult phenomena. In other words, for Lev ‘faith’ denotes a broader, more generic term than religion, spirituality or mysticism and comprises each under its aegis.
Lev begins with a discussion of Freud's view of faith and religion. Interesting here is Lev's insistence that Freud's views are far more ambivalent than one might think at first glance. On the one hand, there is no doubt that Freud is an avid critic of religion: Freud is, from a theoretical standpoint, an atheist and treats religious practices in terms of various pathologies, ranging over pure projection to mass delusion to obsessional neurosis. Freud asserts that