Psychology of Religion

Ludwig Feuerbach

Believed humans invented God because they feel helpless in an alien world and need to invent God to comfort them.

Feuerbach believed that there were three attributes that make up human nature ? reason, will and love. These attributes are then projected onto an image of God, where reason becomes infinite knowledge ? omniscience, will becomes infinite will ? omnipotence, and love becomes infinite love ? omnibenevolence (or the belief that ?God is love?).

Feuerbach also thought that there were two stages to human development:

1. Human dependence on nature, which leads to polytheism and the desire for needs to be satisfied.
2. Human dependence on one another in civilized society. This leads to monotheism and the search for spirituality.

He believed that with social progress, religion would disappear. Religion alienates people from their own nature by projecting all that is good in humans onto God and leaving humans with all the negative aspects of human nature. This is psychologically damaging since it forces people to deny the best part of them selves and not realise their potential:

?God and man are extremes: God is the absolutely positive, the essence of all realities, while man is the negative, the essence of all nothingness.?

His beliefs may be summed up here:

?What man is in need of he makes his God? and ?what man wishes to be he makes his God?

Criticisms of Feuerbach

1. Religion has not disappeared as predicted.
2. His theory does not necessarily lead to atheism since he was an atheist already.
3. Just because something is in your imagination does not mean that it does not exist. For example, just because a ?perfect? partner exists in my imagination, does not mean that they do not exist in real life.
4. Just because we can talk about God in human terms does not mean that he is a human product. How else should we describe his characteristics? We do not have knowledge of an nature apart from our own.
5. Just because humans wish or ?need? to believe in God does not mean that he is imaginary. Perhaps we were programmed by God to be this way?

Sigmund Freud

Freud believed that the unconscious holds the key to our physical and mental health, that memories deep down can be responsible for real physical symptoms. He thought that the unconscious shows itself through jokes and slips of the tongue. He said that ?a dream is a [disguised] fulfilment of a [suppressed or repressed] wish.?

Freud thought that the mind was structured into three parts:

The ego ? the conscience itself, the everyday personality.

The id ? the unconscious itself including repressed desires and wishes and memories.

The superego ? the standard of morality of the society in which the person lives, imposed from outside.

Freud thought that humans were driven by two instincts ? love and death. Both of these are present in the Oedipus Complex which he came to understand after the death of his father. In Greek mythology, Oedipus was a character who unknowingly killed his father and married his mother. He believed that male children are at first attached to their mothers and see their fathers as rivals for their mothers love. Feelings of fear and jealousy of a boy toward his father are mixed with the sense of guilt because the child has some feeling of love towards the father.

Because of his early experience, the boy?s sexual feelings are repressed until puberty. A man?s goal in life is to detach himself from his mother, to reconcile himself with his father and to find someone to love who is not identical to his mother. Everyone must aim to do his but most never do.

Freud applied psychoanalysis to many other areas including religion. He was an atheist who considered religion to be ?wish fulfilment?, that humans wish for in an alien world ? justice in an unjust society, an afterlife and knowledge of how the world began.

He thought religion was a ?universal obsessional neurosis?. This illness stems from the unconscious mind and incompletely repressed traumatic memories and invariably stems from sexual trauma. Thus, religion is an illusion stemming from sexual difficulties.

Carl Gustav Jung

Jung worked alongside Freud but came to different conclusions. He believed that there was a personal unconscious and a collective unconscious.

• The personal unconscious contains repressed desires, memories and wishes of the individual (similar to Freud?s id).

• The collective unconscious is the whole of human memory from which myth and religion arise. All humans share the collective unconscious and are connected with it in some way.

Jung divided the personality into archetypes. Jung believed that dreams are creative symbols which have a meaning. This meaning tells us something about the past or future, it is not merely sexual as it was for Freud. The archetypes are:

The Anima ? Mysterious female aspect of male psyche. She is creative and destructive and is the mermaid or demon in mythology. She creates mood swings in men and can be projected onto real women to make them more mysterious and attractive. She is the source of poetry and death.

The Wise Man ? He can appear as a hero, king, saviour or medicine man. Merlin in the story of King Arthur is a good example. People say ?I?ll sleep on it? showing their belief that wisdom comes mysteriously and unconsciously.

The Shadow ? The dark, primitive, animal side of human nature e.g. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Jung said we must learn to live with this side to live a healthy life.

The Child ? a symbol of wholeness existing both in this world and the next. In order to live a full life, a person has to live connected to the conscious and unconscious aspects of themselves. Joining these two into a whole is called ?the self?.

Society forces us to repress certain aspects of our personality pushing them deep into our unconscious. Each person is forced to adopt a mask to face the outside world. Jung called this the ?persona?.

Jung disagreed with Freud that religion was a neurotic illness caused by sexual trauma. Instead, he said that religion is a natural process stemming from the archetypes in the unconscious mind. He said religion performs the function of harmonising the psyche and as such it is beneficial. The removal of religion would lead to psychological problems.