Freud's ideas about sexuality were disturbing in his day, but are well-worn and familiar today. His ideas about religion experienced the reverse fate: Widely accepted by his early followers, they now seem inadequate, and, for those analysts who embrace religion or spirituality, they remain disturbing.
For Freud, religion arose in the first place to defend against childhood experiences of helplessness. All religions are “mass delusions” (SE 21:18), based on wishful thinking. Religious beliefs are always expressions of the infantile in mental life. Freud most famously compared religious ritual with obsessive neurotic behavior. After discussing Moses and Monotheism, I will review some of the recent attempts to rethink these concepts, pointing to what I think remains valuable. While, for example, his analysis of ritual was much too narrow, many of his basic insights remain compelling.
It is easy to dismiss Freud on religion because his writings on this topic are quite puzzling, especially the “historical novel,” Moses and Monotheism. Freud posited, even insisted on, the historical accuracy of his reconstruction of ancient history long after he had abandoned, for example, the idea that reports of childhood seduction were accurate. The killing of the primal father by the horde had actually taken place, and was then subsequently reenacted in the killing of Moses, an Egyptian bureaucrat who introduced Jews to the failed monotheistic ideas of Pharaoh Akhenaton in an attempt to preserve that legacy. This is surely the weakest of Freud's writings since the narrative it recounts is not true. Yet, Robert Paul masterfully cuts through this knot, solving the dilemma by pointing to the Torah story (1996). Alfred Kroeber reviewed Moses and Monotheism as, to use Freud's term, a Just So story (1952:306). Paul replies: Yes, it is a myth and we can tell you exactly where it comes from. That is, the mythic story Freud describes comes from the Torah story itself, which influenced Freud in ways he did not appear to be fully conscious of. Thus Paul saves Freud from himself, placing the story of Moses and the horde in the category of myth, where it belongs. We are free then to analyze the unconscious power that myth has in shaping society, including the persuasive example of the unconscious power of myth even on Freud himself.
This unraveling of the relationship between Freud's life story as a Jew and his theories is much more convincing than numerous other attempts to explain his stance on religion based on, for example, a problematic relationship with his mother or some other specific aspect of his early childhood experiences (Zilboorg 1958).
Once the historical claims have been rethought, much work remains. Many early analytic studies of Freud followed in his mythic search for the origins of religion so are of only historical interest to us now. On top of this, as Jonathan Lear has forcefully argued in his recent introduction to Freud, Freud's position on religion is lacking a firm philosophical grounding (2005). This problem is not unique to Freud's work on religion, since, as Lear himself notes, central philosophical questions such as whether the unconscious has propositional philosophical content are actively being debated. But it is another sign of the inadequacy of Freud's schema.
Some early followers of Freud rejected his critical attitude towards religion but it is primarily in the past few decades that major revisions have gained currency. Many analysts have been drawn to Winnicott's notion of a transitional object to “undercut Freud's rigid dualism between the objective and subjective” (Jones 1991:38). God or, some type of spirituality, functions as a transitional object. This object fuses illusion and reality, to some extent bracketing questions about a god/spirit's existence. The attractiveness of this position depends on an analyst's willingness to equate a god/spirit with other more concrete transitional objects. So, too, object relations theory is used to posit a god/spirit as a necessary object, without which a person would have no integrated self or morals.
Both of these approaches depend on an outdated notion of “homo religiosus,” the necessarily religious person. The picture of religion presupposed is a very domesticated version, created primarily by the individual him/herself and devoid of connection to major religious institutions and structures (Blass 2004).
Naomi Janowitz, Ph.D., is a professor and director of religious studies at the University of California-Davis and an advanced candidate at the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute.
This mode of analysis, while it does succeed in locating some overlap between religious and non-religious use of objects, tells us very little, on the one hand, about the social basis for beliefs in gods, spirits, or supernatural beings, so central to definitions of religion, or, on the other, about transitional objects.
Some analysts argue that religion should not be expected to be true in the sense that science is, for example, and if religious institutions sometimes embrace poor science, these mistakes are only social problems that can easily be discarded. Once these social facts are discarded, then religion remains as a personal sense of awe, wonder, or spiritual longing. These definitions of religion are in part apologetic since religion is inextricable from a set of shared cultural practices. This point is so central to the argumentation of Freud's critics today it bears further investigation.
Much as miracles were once thought to legitimize religious truth claims, today the equivalent is the truth-value that individual religious experiences are argued to represent (often labeled as “spirituality” or “mysticism”). It is no surprise that Sudhir Kakar, whose studies make the strongest case for this type of position, asks why Freud would find creativity in the artist but not in the mystic. The emerging scholarly analysis of mysticism recognizes the extent to which a mystical experience is completely determined by the social/cultural expectations of the person who has it (Kakar 1991).1
Scholars of religion would today be hesitant to use the term “mysticism” to the extent that it includes, just as the term “miracle” does, an evaluation that the experience is based on a factual encounter, and thus is both privileged over other types of religious events and not subject to analysis (Proudfoot 1985). The content of the mystical encounter is determined by the social norms that produce it, not by any reality “out there” that the person engages with. Ironically it is exactly on this topic, the role of internal fantasy in shaping experiences, where Freud's insights are of such great value. His caution anticipates by a century the emerging scholarly consensus about exactly what religious experiences are evidence of.
Much more convincing are critics of Freud who point to the diverse roles that religious rituals fill. This point was raised by early critics of Freud and not given its due. The simple comparison between religious ritual and obsessional neurosis greatly oversimplifies rituals' range and power. Rituals do much of the work of culture such as marrying people, conferring status, and instantiating cosmologies. Religious rituals in particular are often the cultural settings in which cultural beliefs are presented, clarified, challenged, and acted out.
Freud's stance on circumcision, for example, reflects a very narrow notion of the purpose and function of initiation ceremonies, insisting that they were connected to castration anxiety and the Oedipal complex. He wrote, “Circumcision is the symbolic substitute for castration, a punishment which the primeval father dealt his sons long ago out of the fullness of his power” (SE 23:122).
The failings of this theory were vigorously pointed out by Bruno Bettelheim in Symbolic Wounds (1954), though his analysis had little impact in psychoanalytic circles, which have clung to the castration theory of initiation. Bettelheim observed that Margaret Mead, among many anthropologists, saw initiation rites as male attempts to take over female functions. Males are ambivalent towards their mothers and envy both the female sexual organs and their function. This “vagina envy” has attracted much less attention then penis envy, but may be central to rites constructed by men. Thus we find rites that induce male “menstruation” and many other rites that may less explicitly express envy over female ability to give birth and nurse.
One example of this type of rite is sacrifice. In her powerful studies of sacrifice traditions, Nancy Jay (1992) has explicated exactly how unconscious envy of females is acted out via both myths and rites of animal sacrifice. Women are forbidden to participate in these rites, which function socially and psychically to remake their sons into children of their fathers and male gods, displacing the human mothers. At the same time sacrificial rituals can result in powerful, sacred food produced by men, again a denial of the primordial dependence on the mother (Janowitz, forthcoming).
Freud's comparison between obsessive-compulsive behavior and ritual does not begin to plumb these depths, even while it may be compelling in some instances. Bettelheim also argued that rituals can have more useful roles, such as permitting people to explore identifications, relaxing social demands, and aiding in ego integration. Imagine if Freud had drawn on rituals of disenchantment, found primarily in oral religious traditions. Hopi boys, for example, are told as part of their initiation that the kachinas dancing at the rituals are not gods but in fact their fathers and uncles dressed up. However, they are instructed not to tell the secret to the women and children.
Loewald astutely commented “‘repetitions’ have been stressed more in psychoanalytic writings than repetition as a normal phenomenon” (1980:97). He explains that “the passive reproduction of experience does present the opportunity for arriving at re-creative repetition, depending on a variety of internal and external conditions…. Transference repetitions in analysis as a vehicle of the therapeutic
process are an example of this” (1980:91). In the “creative repetitions” the patient is able to work through what is remembered, arriving at a “moment of generating new organization” (1980:94).
The question then becomes: How is it that cultural events which are highly structured and performed repeatedly are able to have such social and personal efficacy? The answer anthropologists have given, which offers rich ground for revising Freud's thought on religion, is the inherently dual-aspectedness of rituals: Their transformational dimension is inseparable from their “hyper-structure” (Parmentier 1984). That is, in order to be socially effective, each ritual must be recognizable as an instance of a larger type of ritual based on a prior successful model (a human marriage copying a divine union or a legal ruling copying a precedent) in order to be recognizable and effective. Psychic change can be viewed as an intriguing sub-category of this process, where the patient must own up to her role in creating external reality through her own transformations (transferences) instead of simply being a passive person encountering “reality.”
At every step we can reject specific details of Freud's analysis of religion, but still leave his basic approach to the role of religion in culture intact. Some aspects of collective religious ritual are illuminated by comparison with the fantasies and defenses of obsessional individuals. Myths can be studied as collective dreams.
At the same time, Freud's conceit that he had anticipated and deflected all possible attempts to rework his analysis of religion is absurd. Certainly the idea that psychoanalysis will replace religion seems today like a plot for a Woody Allen movie and not an idea that needs to be taken seriously. Given the fact that in our generation a single person, acting on religious fantasies, now has power to inflict tremendous harm on humanity, it becomes all the more urgent for us to do better than Freud did in this area.
Katz 1984 is the classic statement of this position.