Religions Reviewed

In The Future of an Illusion, Freud suggests as a germinal postulate of religion, “Life in this world…signifies a perfecting of man’s nature. It is probably the spiritual part of man, the soul….” The Greek for soul is psyche. Psychoanalysis, which set itself the task of diagnosing and treating the psyche (and not merely the conscious mind, nor the organic brain as such), seems to be a phenomenon in some measure tailor-made to supplement, supplant, or substitute for religion. Freud presented a clear claim that religion is a mass neurosis, not only in The Future of an Illusion, but also in his later work Moses and Monotheism.  To the extent that one sees the collective problem of religious ‘delusion’ as analogous to obsessional neurosis in the individual, one might take psychoanalysis, the custodian of techniques to address the latter, as a point of departure to cope with the former. And while he does not make light of the difficulty in coming to do without traditional religions, Freud insists on the desirability and even “fatal inevitability” of such “growth” in the human condition.

Freud himself occupies a status in the psychoanalytic tradition that merits the adjective ‘prophetic’. In both The Future of an Illusion and Moses and Monotheism, he reflects on his paternal concern for the psychoanalytic movement in the light of possible conflicts that might arise from his provocative writings on religion. In the latter work, he insinuates a comparison of himself to Moses as a “great man” and founder of a tradition. The psychoanalytic tradition claims a redemptive capability for individuals; as Michael Argyle represents it, “psychoanalysts believed that psychoanalysis could lead people away from neurotic conditions to freedom and independence.” Freud also claims that the monotheistic impulse was repressed by the earliest generations of Jews after Moses, only gradually returning after a period of latency. In a similar pattern, it seems that later developments of the psychoanalytic tradition permitted the religious impulse to surface.

     The psychoanalytic movement has a conservative element that maintains the secularist pretensions established by the professed “unbeliever” Freud and his early co-workers. But like venerable religious traditions, it has also endured the accretion of new doctrines, and the divergence of varying schools in a sectarian fashion. Perhaps the earliest and most overtly religious of these was that of the man whom Freud had first selected, according to Peter Gay, as his “successor who would carry the psychoanalytic dispensation to future generations,” Carl Jung.  Jung’s religious ideas were hardly the stuff of conventional Christianity. To say as Argyle does that Jung’s final book Answer to Job “is not popular with theologians” is something of a droll understatement of its heterodoxy, although the book’s first American publication was by the Pastoral Psychology Book Club in 1956. In contrast with Freud though, Jung, who confessed himself as a firm believer in God, if not a subscriber to a religious institution, was much more overt about his role as a quasi-religious figure. His Memories, Dreams, Reflections reads more like an autohagiography than a memoir, replete with accounts and interpretations of his portentous visionary experiences, which he calls “my personal myth.”  

     Some New Age and neopagan groups have adopted Jung’s collective unconscious with its archetypes as piece of metaphysical doctrine, or even integral to their theologies, and as Argyle notes, some of Jung’s ideas have been taken up by religious professionals for techniques of “spiritual guidance.” Argyle also points out that Jung was an influence on Mircea Eliade and other scholars of religion. Much of this influence on Eliade, as well as other major figures like Gershom Scholem and Henry Corbin, resulted from their participation in the “Eranos” circle that Jung organized. Jung even seems to have gone so far as to write religious scripture, in the form of his neo-Gnostic Seven Sermons to the Dead. Richard Noll has written two books in which he takes the evaluation of the religious dimension of Jung’s work to an extreme: The Jung Cult and The Aryan Christ.
 

Tomorrow, Part II…