FREUD AND GOD - PSYCHOBABBLE AND FAITH

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From A HISTORY OF GOD
The 4000-Year Quest of Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam
by Karen Armstrong
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Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) certainly regarded belief in God

as an illusion that mature men and women should lay aside.  The idea of God was not a lie but a device of the unconscious which needed to be decoded by psychology.  A personal God was nothing more than an exalted father-figure: desire for such a deity sprang from infantile yearnings for a powerful, protective father, for justice and fairness and for life to go on forever.  God is simply a projection of these desires, feared and worshipped by human beings out of an abiding sense of helplessness.  Religion belonged to the infancy of the human race; it had been a necessary stage in the transition from childhood to maturity.

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  It had promoted ethical values which were essential to society.  Now that humanity had come of age, however, it should be left behind.  Science, the new logos, could take God's place.  It could provide a new basis for morality, and help us to face our fears.  Freud was emphatic about his faith in science, which seemed almost religious in its intensity:  "No, our science is not an illusion!  An illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give we can get elsewhere."

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Not all psychoanalysts agreed with Freud's view of God.

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Alfred Adler (1870-1937) allowed that God was a projection

but believed that it had been helpful to humanity; it had been a brilliant and effective symbol of excellence. 

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C.G Jung's (1875-1961) God was similar to the God of the mystics, a psychological truth, subjectively experienced by each individual.  When asked by John Freeman in the famous Face to Face interview whether he believed in God, Jung replied emphatically:  "I do not have to believe.  I know!"  Jung's continued faith suggests that a subjective God, mysteriously identified with the ground of being in the depths of the self, can survive psychoanalytic science in a way that a more personal, anthropomorphic deity who can indeed encourage perpetual immaturity may not.

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Like many other Western people, Freud seemed unaware of this internalized, subjective God.  Nevertheless he made a valid and perceptive point when he insisted that it would be dangerous to attempt to abolish religion.  People must outgrow God in their own good time: to force them into atheism or secularism before they were ready could lead to an unhealthy denial and repression.  We have seen that iconoclasm can spring from a buried anxiety and projection of our own fears onto the "other."  Some of the atheists who wanted to abolish God certainly showed signs of strain.  Thus, despite his advocacy of a compassionate ethic, Schopenhauer could not cope with human beings and became a recluse who communicated only with his poodle, Atman.

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Nietzsche was a tender-hearted, lonely man, plagued by ill health, who was very different from his Superman.  Eventually, he went mad.

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He did not abandon God joyously, as the ecstasy of his prose might lead us to imagine.  In a poem delivered "after much trembling, quivering, and self-contortion," he makes Zarathustra plead with God to return:

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No!  come back,

With all your torments!

Oh come back

To the last of all solitaries!

All the streams of my tears

Run their course for you!

And the last flame of my heart -

It burns up to you!

Oh come back

My unknown God!  My pain!  my last - happiness.

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Like Hegel's, Nietzsche's theories were used by a later generation of Germans to justify the polices of National Socialism, a reminder that an atheistic ideology can lead to just as cruel a crusading ethic as the idea of "God."

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CARL JUNG ON GETTING OLD & THE ART OF LIFE

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In primitive tribes we observe that

the old people are almost always the guardians

of the mysteries and the laws, and it is in these

that the cultural heritage of the tribe is expressed.

How does the matter stand with us ?

Where is the wisdom of our old people -

where are their precious secrets and their visions?

For the most part our old people try to compete

with the young.  In the United States it is almost

an ideal for the father to be the brother of his sons,

and for the mother if possible to be the younger

sister of her daughter.

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I do not know how much of this confusion

comes as a reaction to an earlier exaggeration

of the dignity of age, and how much is to be

charged to false ideals.  These undoubtedly exist

and the goal of those who hold them lies behind,

and not in front.  Therefore they are always striving

to turn back.  We have to grant to these persons

that it is hard to see what other goal the second half

of life can offer than the well-known goal of the first.

Expansion of life, usefulness, efficiency, the cutting

of a figure in social life, the shrewd steering of

offspring into suitable marriages and good positions -

are not these purposes enough?
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Unfortunately this is not enough meaning or purpose

for many persons who see in the approach of old age

a mere diminution of life, and who look upon their

earlier ideals only as something faded and worn out.

Of course, if those persons had filled up the beaker

of life earlier and emptied it to the lees,

they would feel quite differently about
 everything now; had they kept nothing back,
 all that wanted to catch fire would have been
 consumed, and the quiet of old age would be

very welcome to them. 

  But we must not forget that only

a very few people are artists in life;

that the art of life is the most distinguished

and rarest of all the arts.
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Who ever succeeded in draining the whole cup

with grace?  So for many people all too much

unlived life remains over - sometimes potentialities

which they could never have lived with the
 best of wills; and so they approach the
 threshold of old age with unsatisfied claims
 which inevitably turn their glances backward.

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It is particularly fatal for such people to

look backward.  For them a prospect and a goal

in the future are indispensable.  This is why

all great religions hold the promise of a life

beyond; it makes it possible for mortal man to

live the second half of life with as much perseverance

and aim as the first.  For the man of today the

enlargement of life and its culmination are plausible

goals; but the idea of life after death seems to him

questionable or beyond belief.  And yet life's cessation,

that is, death, can only be accepted as a goal when

existence is so wretched that we are glad for it to end,

or when we are convinced that the sun strives to

its setting - "to illuminate distant races" - with

the same perseverance it showed in rising to its

zenith.  But to believe has become today such a

difficult art, that people, and particularly the

educated part of humanity, can hardly find their

way there.
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  They have become too accustomed to

the thought that, with regard to immortality and

such questions, there are many contradictory

opinions and no convincing proofs. 

Since "science" has become the catchword which

carries the weight of conviction in the contemporary

world, we ask for "scientific" proofs.

But educated people who can think know that

proof of this kind is out of the question.

We simply know nothing whatever about it.

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Carl Jung

MODERN MAN IN SEARCH OF A SOUL

1933

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 Matt's 12th casket....racing stripe version....

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