Freud's Understanding and Applying it to a Freudian Evaluation of Menominee Medicine Bundle

Freud's Understanding and Applying it to a Freudian Evaluation of Menominee Medicine Bundle

Sigmund Freud gives a psychological interpretation to Eliades analysis. I am going to explain Freuds understanding and apply it in a Fraudian evaluation of the "Menominee Medicine Bundle."

Freud says, religions say that sacred realities are the divine beings who dwell in some other useable realm. He states that these ideas are illusions, mere wishes. "Religious ideas are given out as teachings, are not precipitates of experience or end results of thinking: they are illusions, fulfilments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind"(pg.38). He says that religion is an illusion, and it's the origin of the physical human mind. He says that sacred reality is a reality as we wish it were because there is no evidence to prove it. "Illusion itself sets no store by verification"(pg.40). People believe in gods (divine beings), because they need to believe that he will reconcile us to cruelty of fate and forgive us for our sins. Freud says that people gave the name God to some abstraction, which they created themselves not realizing that he is a metaphysical shadow. Since there is no prove that Gods really exist, to Freud they are a mere fabrications brought on by humans wishful thinking.

Religion manifests in our midst by our parents. These illusions are "ready made." They are handed down to us from generations. We accept these ready-made ideas because these wishes speak of what is most important to us and what we're most afraid of, for example death. "Death itself is not extinction, is not a return to inorganic lifelessness, but the beginning of a new kind of existence which lies on the path of development to something higher"(pg.23). He states that religious ideas satisfy everything we are most terrified by. In reality we project human

qualities on the forces of nature, because we are afraid and powerless against the superior forces of nature. "If men are thought that there is no almighty and all just God, no divine world order and no future life, they will feel exempt from all obligation to obey the precepts of civilization"(pg.44). He is trying to say that because we are so weak and powerless we cannot control the superior forces of nature. There will be chaos without it.

Freud is trying to change our reality by saying that religion keeps us ignorant. It is constantly reinforcing us how powerless we are.