The Future of an Illusion by Freud
In his book The Future of An Illusion, Freud (1928) struggled to create a theory that
would distinguish morality from religion so that people would still be able to know right
from wrong even if they did not believe in a God. According to Freud, humans belonged
to civilization to control nature and to regulate human relations. However, Freud claimed
that humans have often paid a great price for civilization; this price, he believed, was
neurosis. Consequently, humans began to look for some kind of compensation to confront
the neurosis. Freud's theory maintained that religion often evolved as this compensation.
Freud suggested that religion and ethics, to this point, have acted to maintain civilization.
However, Freud also proposed that humans were helpless before the forces of nature and
thus "needed" something to protect them. Thus, he concluded that religion has sprung out
of helplessness and therefore was unhealthy to the individual. Based on this theory of
religion, Freud proposed the need to consider a way to sustain morality apart from
religion.
As is generally known, the central Freudian criticism of belief in God is that such a belief is
untrustworthy because of its psychological origin. That is, God is a projection of our own
intense, unconscious desires; He is a wish fulfillment derived from childish needs for
protection and security. Since these wishes are largely unconscious, any denial of such an
interpretation is to be given little credence. It should be noted that in developing this kind
of critique, Freud has raised the ad hominem argument to one of wide influence. It is in
The Future of an Illusion (1927, 1961) that Freud makes his position clearest:
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... thinking.
With both religion and science, it is not that the source determines the value of an idea - a
great idea can have a nonrational source, and a poor idea can have a rational source. What
is key is just how much influence that source continues to hold over the idea in question.
Scientists can and do come across revolutionary ideas intuitively, but their intuition and
wishful thinking are supposed to remain disciplined. Ideas are supposed to be open to
rational critique, demonstration and verification. Convictions, no matter how strong, must
be capable of being refined, modified and even abandoned if necessary. Scientific thinking
can thus be differentiated from religious thinking, since religion rarely if ever allows for
such an atmosphere to hold sway.
Works Cited
Freud, S. (1927/1961). The future of an illusion. New York: Norton.
Similar to Marx, Freud believes humans simply make up the idea of God in explanation to things science could not disprove. Humans take relationships from our Earthly fathers and compare it to our Heavenly father. According to Freud, “Religion is an attempt to master the sensory world in which we are situated by means of the wishful world which we have developed within us as a result of biological and psychological necessities.” (H/R,p.26) Science can neither prove or disprove religion. Freud chooses to believe science and claims religion is only comforting and hopeful thinking to our purpose after
Many aspects of our lives, including culture and religion, are fabricated on the basis of conjectures. Although these facts may remain unproven, little harm is inflicted from the possibility of misinformation. Contrarily, in the case of science, the smallest error can lead to severely misguided results and an inability to reach a solution. Dora An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria by Sigmund Freud exemplifies this situation, as Freud reveals an incomplete analysis relying on a slew of unjustified conjectures. During Dora’s time of treatment, Freud consistently ignores her denials and impresses his frequently outlandish theories on her, which ultimately leads to her early termination of treatment. Freud fails to cure Dora due to his flawed diagnosis upon unsupported conjectures and his embodiment of the patriarchal authoritativeness that lead to her hysteria.
Both Lewis and Freud agreed that the question of god’s existence and our response must be asked. Though each man had drastically different worldviews and answers, they each sought to learn and understand the other’s worldview. Nicholi points out that Lewis may have had an advantage in the understanding of the unbeliever’s worldview due to the fact that until the age of 30, he claimed to be “even more certain of his atheism than was Freud” (2002, Pg. 81). In his adult life, Freud had no dramatic change of worldview from believer to unbeliever like Lewis had. This fact may give Lewis a slight upper hand in the understanding of the unbeliever’s worldview; however, Freud was still one of the greatest minds of his times and his work proves a strong (though negative) understanding of the believer’s worldview.
Westen, D. (1998). The scientific legacy of Sigmund Freud: toward a psychodynamically informed psychological science. Psychological Bulletin, 124(3), 333.
Tony Crisp Discussion Forum: Sigmund Freud Copyright © 1999-2010 Tony Crisp | All rights reserved
In the midst of his already successful career, Sigmund Freud decided to finally dedicate a book of his to religion, referring to the subject as a phenomena faced by the scientific community. This new work, Totem and Taboo, blew society off its feet, ultimately expanding the reaches of debates and intellectual studies. From the beginning, Freud argues that there exists a parallel between the archaic man and the contemporary compulsive. Both these types of people, he argues, exhibit neurotic behavior, and so the parallel between the two is sound. Freud argues that we should be able to determine the cause of religion the same way we determine the cause of neurosis. He believes, since all neuroses stem from childhood experiences, that the origins of this compulsive behavior we call religion should also be attributed to some childhood experiences of the human race, too. Freudian thought has been dominant since he became well known. In Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, religion becomes entirely evident as a major part of the novel, but the role it specifically plays is what we should question. Therefore, I argue that Freud’s approach to an inborn sense of religion and the role it plays exists in The Last of the Mohicans, in that the role religion plays in the wilderness manifests itself in the form of an untouchable truth, an innate sense of being, and most importantly, something that cannot and should not be tampered with.
In the first two chapter of the book, Freud explores a possible source of religious feeling. He describes an “oceanic feeling of wholeness, limitlessness, and eternity.” Freud himself is unable to experience such a feeling, but notes that there do indeed...
For generations mankind has tried to answer the question about their purpose here on earth and tried to explain human behavior. In their written works, Freud and Nietzsche develop independent hypotheses about the evolution of civilization from its beginning, and similarly assess the unintentional effects caused by society on an individual’s life.
Freud, Sigmund. New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. Ed. James Strachey. Trans. James Strachey. Standard. Vol. 22. London: Hogarth Press, 1964.
Freud originally attempted to explain the workings of the mind in terms of physiology and neurology ...(but)... quite early on in his treatment of patients with neurological disorders, Freud realised that symptoms which had no organic or bodily basis could imitate the real thing and that they were as real for the patient as if they had been neurologically caused. So he began to search for psychological explanations of these symptoms and ways of treating them.
Sigmund Freud believed that he “occupies a special place in the history of psychoanalysis and marks a turning point, it was with it that analysis took the step from being a psychotherapeutic procedure to being in depth-psychology” (Jones). Psychoanalysis is a theory or therapy to decode the puzzle of neurotic disorders like hysteria. During the therapy sessions, the patients would talk about their dreams. Freud would analyze not only the manifest content (what the dreamer remembers) of the dreams, but the disguise that caused the repressions of the idea. During our dreams, the decision making part of personality’s defenses are lowered allowing some of the repressed material to become more aware in a distorted form. He distinguished between
which Sigmund Freud asserted in the early twentieth century that the human psyche consisted of
The methods he used to obtain his information and data raised questions by other scientists. His research on children was lacking, as was his use of empirical studies, his research was male-dominated and also lacked universality. The theory of the id, ego and superego develops from birth into childhood therefore the use of case studies on adults and the lack of empirical study does not seem feasible enough to have developed this theory. First of all there is no guarantee that the memories of these adults on their childhood would be accurate, there was not any factual, re-testable data so it lacked reliability and validity secondly each case and person’s experience is different and therefore cannot be use to determine the development of an entire population. Freud’s theory was further biased due to him overlooking social and environmental aspects, which prevent universality; he was a European man who researched other upper middle class Europeans whose everyday living and circumstances differed greatly from others in
and the truth will set you free.” (John 8:32) Freud’s perspective in this theory is very
Psychoanalysis had its beginning with the discovery that a person in complete physical health could experience an illness with physical symptoms that stemmed from things trapped in the subconscious known as hysteria. Charcot, a French neurologist tried to liberate the mind through hypnosis. A Viennese physician, Josef Breuer, carried this purging further with a process based on his patient, Anna O., revealing her thoughts and feelings to him. Sigmund Freud took Breuer’s method and made generalizations that grew into conceptualizations and eventually into the theories of psychoanalysis. Freud would listen to his patients, and then use these thoughts to interpret what was happening in the unconscious part of their mind. This was explained as bringing the unconscious to consciousness so it could be dealt with through therapy. Breuer and Freud’s successes with this method led to the foundational publication of Studies in Hysteria in 1895. Freud continued his practice of theory until it became the system of psychology known as psychoanalysis, a system that is the single most influential theory of psychotherapy in our time. A brief look into psychoanalysis is seen through the foundations of Freud’s theory.