Freud and Jung on Religion

Michael Palmer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134754915
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Michael Palmer provides a detailed account of the theories of religion of both Freud and Jung and sets them side by side for the first time

In the first section of the text Dr Palmer analyses Freud's claim that religion is an obsessional neurosis - a psychological illness fuelled by sexual repression. The second section considers Jung's rejection of Freud's theory and his own assertion that it is the absence of religion, not its presence, which leads to neurosis.

Freud and Jung on Religion is suitable for general and specialist reader alike, as it assumes no prior knowledge of the theories of Freud or Jung and is an invaluable teaching text.

Part I
SIGMUND FREUD: PSYCHOANALYSIS AND RELIGION

Of my own flashes of inspiration—I am quite well again and correspondingly unproductive—I can confide only one. It has occurred to me that the ultimate basis of man’s need for religion is infantile helplessness, which is so much greater in man than in animals. After infancy he cannot conceive of a world without parents and makes for himself a just God and a kindly nature, the two worst anthropomorphic falsifications he could have imagined…

(Letter from Freud to Jung, 2 January 1910)

1
INTRODUCTION

A SHORT BIOGRAPHY

Sigmund Freud was born on 6 May 1856, in the Catholic town of Freiburg in Moravia, the eldest of eight children born to the wool merchant Jacob Freud and his second wife Amalia, both of whom were of Galician Jewish ancestry. In 1859 the family moved to Leipzig and then in 1860 to Vienna, where Freud was to remain until June 1938, when, following Hitler’s invasion of Austria, he fled to England. He died in London on 23 September 1939.

The young Freud was intellectually precocious and the focus of parental ambition, a gifted linguist and extremely assiduous. In 1873, aged 17, he enrolled as a medical student at the University but did not graduate as a doctor until 1881. Most of this period was spent doing research on the anatomy of the central nervous system in the laboratory of Ernst Brucke (1819–1892), a renowned Viennese physiologist, whom Freud much admired. Although reluctant to go into general practice, his engagement to Martha Bernays in 1882 forced him to seek a more adequate livelihood, and accordingly he gave up his position under Brucke and began work in the Vienna General Hospital. In 1885 he was appointed to a lectureship in neuropathology at the University, and, in the same year, won a travelling bursary to study with Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–1893), the most renowned neurologist of the day, at the famous hospital for nervous disorders, the Salpêtrière in Paris. At this time Charcot was engaged in his research to distinguish traumatic and hysterical paralyses from organic ones—a distinction established by his ability to induce non-organic paralyses through the use of hypnosis. It was these dramatic demonstrations, coupled with others witnessed by Freud at Nancy in 1889, that convinced him ‘of the possibility that there could be powerful mental processes which nevertheless remained hidden from the consciousness of men.’¹

On his return to Vienna in April of 1886 Freud set up private practice as a consultant in nervous diseases, and on 13 September his long-delayed marriage took place. There were to be six children, the last being Anna Freud, who was herself to become a distinguished psychoanalyst. Freud continued with his neuropathological work but became increasingly interested in the neuroses, and in the application of hypnotism in their treatment. This led him to re-establish links with Josef Breuer (1842–1925), a highly cultivated physiologist, whom Freud had first met in the late 1870s, and who, after Charcot, was to exert the most profound influence on him. Seven years earlier Breuer had used hypnosis with remarkable success on a twenty-one-year-old girl, Fräulein Anna O. (Bertha Pappenheim), who showed signs of acute psychological disturbance, the immediate cause of which was mental and physical exhaustion after nursing her father through a terminal illness. While treating her Breuer made an important discovery: that if, under hypnosis, the girl recalled the precise moment at which a particular symptom had arisen (e.g., a paralysis of the right side of her body, a nervous cough, an aversion to nourishment), and if this moment was recalled with the re-experience of the accompanying emotions, the symptoms disappeared. Breuer told Freud of this new method of treatment—which he named ‘catharsis’—but it was not until 1889 that Freud himself applied the technique on a highly hysterical woman, Frau Emmy von N. With Freud’s repeated confirmation of Breuer’s findings, the two men agreed on a joint publication, which first appeared in preliminary form in 1893, and then in the much-expanded Studies on Hysteria in 1895. The Breuer-Freud theory of hysteria may be summarized in their much-quoted ‘Hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences.’²

Although Freud was to modify both the procedure and theory set out in Studies on Hysteria—most notably in the increasing role he accorded to the role of sexuality in hysteria, which led to an estrangement from Breuer—the book is a landmark in the development of psychoanalysis; and James Strachey is correct in saying that ‘from this moment onwards—from 1895, perhaps—to the very end of his life, the whole of Freud’s intellectual existence revolved around this development, its far-reaching implications, and its theoretical and practical repercussions.’³ With this in mind the rest of Freud’s life, outwardly so uneventful, can be conveniently divided into three further periods:

1. the period of self-analysis, which extended from 1895–99;
2. the development of the system of psychology based on that self-analysis, which lasted until about 1914, and which included two books: The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and the Three Essays on Sexuality (1905);
3. the final and further elaboration and revision of the main theories, particularly in relation to a variety of cultural phenomena, most notably religion (1914–39).

There are three aspects of this short biography that need to be highlighted. Each is invariably mentioned by commentators, and each has some relevance to his theories on religion. These have to do with Freud’s religious background, his scientific background, and his own personality.

Freud’s religious background

In his magisterial life of Freud, Ernest Jones comments that:

He [Freud] grew up devoid of any belief in a God or Immortality, and does not appear to have felt the need of it. The emotional needs that usually manifest themselves in adolescence found expression, first in rather vague philosophical cogitations, and soon after, in an earnest adherence to the principles of science.⁴

This statement is supported by Freud himself in his most explicit reference to his religious background. In 1926, thanking the B’nai B’rith Lodge of Vienna for honouring him on his seventieth birthday, he writes: ‘…I was always an unbeliever, have been brought up without religion, but not without respect for the so-called “ethical” demands of human civilization.’⁵

These statements need to be qualified. I have already mentioned the fact that, on both sides of his family, Freud was of Jewish descent. His wife was also Jewish, coming from a family of distinguished orthodox scholars, and whose grandfather, Isaac Bernays, had been the renowned Chief Rabbi of Hamburg and an opponent of the Reform Movement.⁶ It was her family that insisted on a Jewish wedding, much to Freud’s disgust: he even toyed with the idea of converting to Protestantism to escape the ordeal. But although his writings and private correspondence generally confirm his own position as an atheist, this is not to say that he was indifferent to or even estranged from his own religious background. His father was a moderate Reform Jew, who diligently read both the Talmud and the Torah, and who saw to it that his son was instructed in the teachings of the faith. One of Freud’s teachers, Samuel Hammerschlag, who was to become a life-long friend, specialized in the ‘Israelite religion.’ Hammerschlag’s curriculum for 1868–69 has been published,⁷ and, not surprisingly, the figure of Moses dominates—an interest that Freud was to retain in his study of Michelangelo’s statue and in his book Moses and Monotheism (1939).⁸ But despite Freud’s formal instruction, the household as a whole ignored most of the Jewish feasts, and the festivals that were celebrated tended to be the traditional Christian ones, like Christmas and Easter. When Freud was a baby his parents even went so far as to employ a Catholic nanny, a Czech woman called Resi Wittek. Whenever Freud referred to her he called her ‘that prehistoric old woman,’ but he was clearly very fond of her, and she took him to church services and gave him ideas about heaven and hell. When Freud was about two and a half, the nanny was dismissed for theft. Much has been written of this event, and even Ernest Jones comments that ‘…perhaps her terrifying influence contributed to his later dislike of Christian beliefs and ceremonies’⁹ but we shall never know whether this was, as some have claimed, the central traumatic event that set in motion all Freud’s later antagonism towards religion, or whether his repudiation of religion can be inverted into some kind of unconscious longing for what he was rejecting.¹⁰

A more balanced view is, I think, that Freud’s atheism was largely intellectual and formal: he repudiates both the arguments of religion and its ritual observances. But this is not to say that he disavowed his own Jewish identity. He still saw himself as a man standing within a specific cultural tradition—what he calls ‘life-affirming Judaism,’¹¹—and this tradition required a firm adherence to family values, to the highest moral standards and a concern for social justice, and a great tenacity in the face of persecution—this last quality tempered by his own painful experiences of anti-Semitism in Vienna. But above all he valued Jewish independence of thought and intellectual courage, characteristics which he correctly ascribes to himself:

Nor is it perhaps entirely a matter of chance that the first advocate of psychoanalysis was a Jew. To profess belief in a new theory called for a certain degree of readiness to accept a position of solitary opposition…a position with which no one is more familiar than a Jew.¹²

Whether this means that psychoanalysis is a peculiarly ‘Jewish science’ is, however, a much more difficult question to answer, and one which I do not intend to go into here. Suffice to say, for Peter Gay, Freud’s Jewish identity has no particular relevance for the creation of psychoanalysis. Much more important is his scientific and positivist orientation: ‘In truth Freud could have developed his ideas in any city endowed with a first-rate medical school and an educated public large and affluent enough to furnish him with patients.’¹³ For others, like Yosef Yerushalmi, this interpretation is far too restrictive, and in effect throws a cordon sanitaire around psychoanalysis, ‘shielding it from any taint of historical or cultural conditioning.’¹⁴ Commentators remain divided on this question, and a useful account of the debate has been provided by Justin Miller.¹⁵

Freud’s scientific background

Gay’s point is nevertheless an important one. Does Freud’s intellectual independence stem from his own religious upbringing or does it in fact have far more to do with his general adherence to a specific scientific methodology? Certainly the relevance of Freud’s scientific background to his views on religion is much more clear-cut. All his life Freud was a rigid determinist. That is, he held to the view that all phenomena, including all human actions and choices, operate according to the principle of universal causation, namely, that every event has a cause. Speaking psychoanalytically, this can be translated as follows: that it is the unconscious which determines what the conscious impulse and action will be; that there is, as in the case of Anna O., a strict correlation between the original trauma as cause and the ensuing symptoms as effects—to the point indeed where the recollection of the one will produce the disappearance of the other. Freud’s adherence to determinism is often and correctly traced back to the influence of his teachers, and to the fact that he acquired his first scientific training among the medical materialists of the so-called ‘Helmholtz school of medicine,’ amongst whom were his own teacher Brücke and other physiologists like Émile du Bois-Reymond, Hermann Helmholtz and Carl Ludwig. Their aims were famously summarized in a letter written by Bois-Reymond in 1842: ‘Brücke and I pledged a solemn oath to put into power this truth: no other forces than the common physical-chemical ones are active within the organism.’¹⁶ Freud, of course, was to move far away from this attempt to reduce all phenomena to the explanatory categories of physics and chemistry; but at the same time he never departed from the assumptions underlying the programme, which were positivistic, deterministic and atheistic. Here Peter Gay is right when he remarks: ‘They [the medical materialists] did not make him into an atheist; they did not awaken his hostility to religion. But they gave him the best possible grounds for both.’¹⁷ It is therefore largely Freud’s perception of psychoanalysis as falling within the main determinist-scientific tradition—a tradition which included his own teachers and which he extended out to include even greater luminaries like Copernicus, Kepler, Newton and Darwin—that leads him to maintain that religion and science are fundamentally incompatible. Indeed, such is the antagonism that he sees between them that the following rule applies: anyone who considers himself a medical man and an empiricist has to be an atheist. This was not a choice for Freud but more a matter of logical consistency.

All this is clearly expressed in his important lecture ‘The Question of a Weltanschauung,’ which is included in his New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1933). Here Freud draws up the battle-lines between religion and science. A Weltanschauung, as he conceives it, is an ‘intellectual construction which solves all the problems of our existence uniformly on the basis of one overriding hypothesis;’¹⁸ and for an example of immense power and consistency we need look no further than religion. It provides its adherents with an account of the origin of the universe, it offers them protection and ultimate happiness through all the vicissitudes of life, and it directs their thoughts and actions through an ethical system of rewards and punishments. How does this compare with a scientific Weltanschauung? It compares in this crucial sense: science offers no overriding hypothesis, and indeed deliberately distances itself from the emotional demand to provide one. The motivation in science is thus much more restrictive: it asserts that there are no sources of knowledge other than those that proceed from verifiable observation and that no knowledge can be derived from such alternative sources as revelation, intuition or divination, all of which may be reckoned as the fulfilment of wishful impulses. Science, in other words, is content to investigate and to establish facts, and offers no hypotheses other than those that can be supported by critical observation of the natural processes:

it is concerned carefully to avoid individual factors and affective influences; it examines more strictly the trustworthiness of the sense-perceptions on which it bases its conclusions; it provides itself with new perceptions which cannot be obtained by everyday means and it isolates the determinants of these new experiences in experiments which are deliberately varied. Its endeavour is to arrive at correspondence with reality—that is to say, with what exists outside us and independently of us and, as experience has taught us, is decisive for the fulfilment or disappointment of our wishes. This correspondence with the real external world we call ‘truth’. It remains the aim of scientific work even if we leave the practical value of that work out of account.¹⁹

What, then, of psychoanalysis? Psychoanalysis, says Freud, ‘is quite unfit to construct a Weltanschauung of its own: it must accept the scientific one,’²⁰ and to that extent it must proceed on the basis of the same objective and verificational techniques, and display the same concern to achieve a correspondence between its conclusions and reality. However, its peculiar service to science lies in the extension of research into the mental field, in its investigation of the intellectual and emotional functions of man. And herein lies its specific antagonism to religion. Religion, as we have seen, depends on specific forms of knowledge, and through these it presents an overarching explanation of the nature and purpose of things. What psychoanalysis can do—and indeed, with its special insights into mental functioning, is in a unique position to do—is explain why the human mind should prefer this body of knowledge and this particular explanation above all others: in that way it can expose the particular motivations behind religious belief. What emerges is a set of ‘wishful impulses’ that unmask religion as something of purely human origin, explicable solely in terms of the natural human desire for protection and happiness. These impulses, Freud argues, originate from the helplessnes...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• DEDICATION
• FOREWORD
• Part I SIGMUND FREUD: PSYCHOANALYSIS AND RELIGION
• 1 INTRODUCTION
• 2 TOTEM AND TABOO
• 3 RELIGION AND ILLUSION
• 4 FORMS OF RELIGIOUS NEUROSIS
• 5 A CRITICAL APPRAISAL
• Part II CARL GUSTAV JUNG: ANALYTICAL PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION
• 6 INTRODUCTION
• 7 THE STRUCTURE OF THE PSYCHE
• 8 GOD AS ARCHETYPE OF THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS
• 9 GOD AND INDIVIDUATION
• 10 A CRITICAL APPRAISAL
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY