Religions Reviewed

Another instance in which the further evolution of psychoanalysis led to religious manifestations is the work of Wilhelm Reich. Reich was a dedicated Marxist psychoanalyst whose initial work on “sex-economy” was very much in line with Freud’s remark, “that the two main points in the programme for the education of children to-day are retardation of sexual development and premature religious influence.” The younger Reich derided religion as “mysticism” and sought its origin in the perversion of sexual impulses. Later, however, after his alienation from Marxism and his development of a vital-force theory of “Orgonomy,” Reich saw fit to rehabilitate Christianity as a vehicle for his own ideas, and to identify Christ himself as his precursor. Ultimately, Reich became a martyr to his own cause, having been imprisoned in the
US for defying a court injunction regarding his research, and dying there of a heart attack in 1975.

For all that the religious character of psychoanalysis becomes more vivid in further developments of the tradition, its ingredients are already to hand in Freud’s work. The “care of souls” is the pastoral function in Christian religion, and equally a mission of psychoanalysis as a therapeutic institution, with its priestly class of analysts. Freud does not hold himself back from the pleasures of religiously-based rhetoric. For example, he writes that “the questions which religious doctrine finds it so easy to answer” … “might be called too sacred” to be addressed in a traditional, unquestioning manner. Taking a cue from the Dutch anti-colonialist Multatuli, Freud makes reference to “our God, Logos” slowly fulfilling the desires of mankind. And he sometimes shows a rather “religious” tendency (as he would perhaps describe it) to pick and choose among scientific theories for the sake of doctrinal coherence in psychoanalysis.

In one of his devil’s advocate passages in The Future of an Illusion, Freud remarks, “If you want to expel religion from our European civilization, you can only do it by means of another system of doctrines,” which would itself engender a functional religion, with all of the concomitant drawbacks. In replying to his own objection, Freud emphasizes the desired differences in his post-religious system: it is to be non-delusive and more capable of being corrected. It will be science, not religion. But Freudian psychoanalysis, for all of its scientific trappings, is already at some remove from the positivist territory of the physical sciences, as Argyle indicates by referencing it as a less “orthodox” form of psychology. It is no closer to, say, biology, than the monotheism of Moses was to the polytheistic religion of eastern Mediterranean antiquity. In effect, Freud’s proposal is that the superstitious religion of traditions focused on God should be replaced in the future with a scientific religion trained on the soul.