RELIGION AND PSYCHOLOGY• Psychology is the study of the mind.• The God of classical Theism is the Creator of the

World. The psychological study of religion leads to a different conclusion- God is a construct of the human mind.

• Psychologists ask not, “Does God exist?” but “Why are people religious?”

• Religious belief can be explained without requiring God.

• BUT this is not to say that psychologists are asserting God cannot exist.

Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872)• A German philosopher suggested that the

idea of God was a `psychological projection'.

• He said that God is a projection from humankind. Instead of God making humankind it is vice versa.

• Feuerbach's greatest book was `The Essence of Christianity' (1841). In it he shows that for him humankind was the basis and starting point of all philosophy. He considered that: `man was the measure of all things'.

Ludwig Feuerbach• He saw that religion was a fundamental expression

of human's deepest wishes and feelings, suggesting that `religion is a dream of the human mind'. For Feuerbach the secret of theology was in anthropology. In other words he considered that by studying God a person could find out more about a human being. So in Feuerbach's thought the Human is in fact God. The consequence of this idea is: There is no possibility of the supernatural, only the natural exists. AND religion is sociological, cultural and psychological. There is no room for the mystical or miraculous.

Ludwig Feuerbach• Feuerbach considered that human

nature had three attributes: Reason, Will and Love. These had been projected into an image of God.

• With social progress Feuerbach believed that religion would disappear. He was critical that God devalued humans, in that good things were attributed to God and not humans.

• Feuerbach's work has been influential in the modern arguments against the existence of God.

Ludwig Feuerbach

• However, it is important to state that religion has not died out as the world has progressed.

• Perhaps he has not made a convincing argument that humans have created God, for if we had, surely we would have made God more approachable and more willing to answer our needs.

• Feuerbach was an atheist, does this mean that atheism is his own projection. Is it not as much as a fantasy as believing in a god?

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)The Father of Modern Psychology

• He held a very negative view towards belief in God and religion.

• Freud saw religion as an expression of some deeper human problem which needed to be 'cured'.

• At its simplest level, Freud's argument is that religion is an illusion (he doesn't mean mistaken belief, but rather, a belief derived from human wishes).

• It is created by the mind to help us overcome: inner psychological conflict, stress which stems from the structure of society and fear of the dangers of the natural world.

Freud’s Psychology• Freud studied brain disorders, but as time

went by started to look more closely at the workings of the human mind. Freud realised that there was a link between illness and depression, but his two great discoveries were:

The unconscious and the Oedipus complex.• Through these two ideas Freud believed that

he had come to a deep understanding of the structure of the human mind and the workings of human sexuality.

• Freud considered that neurotic symptoms were caused by deeply buried memories, and later believed that they were a result of emotional shocks in childhood. The patient has forgotten or repressed the shock, but its results often surfaced in obsessive habits or bodily symptoms.

• Through psychoanalysis these traumas could be found and dealt with. He considered that the unconscious showed itself in-jokes, errors, in slips of the tongue, but most especially in dreams. To Freud a dream was a kind of code. If you can crack the code, you can find out what the problem is and set about solving it. Dreams therefore, were residuals of the day mixed with repressed wishes.

The Unconscious• Freud believed that the

human mind was made up of:

• The ego, the conscious self; the obvious, everyday personality.

• The id, the unconscious self; repressed desires and memories.

• The superego, the standard or morality of society forced onto a person from the outside, by which a person lives.

• Freud considered that the ego emerges out of the id as the personality of a person develops.

• Through his case studies Freud suggested that childhood traumas be often sexual in nature, believing that infantile sex operated at a much earlier age than was considered possible. Sexuality, for Freud, is basic to the personality and meant affection, love and sensuality in the widest sense. Freud called this sex drive the `libido'.

THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX

• Oedipus was a character in a Greek play, who falls in love with his mother and kills his father.

• Freud believed boys became attached to their mothers, and sees their father as a rival (he also looked at the Electra complex for girls). This caused tension, and Freud believed that a man's goals were to detach himself from his mother, to reconcile himself to his mother, and to find someone identical to his mother to love.

The Primal Horde

• The Oedipus Complex also explains the rise of Religion in ancient man.

• Freud based his work on naturalists and anthropologists. He had the idea that in primitive society there were hordes.

• Dominant males have first pick of the breeding females, they lead the group.

• The junior males become resentful. There atttitude is ambivalent –jealous yet respectful.

• Eventually they kill him.

• After his death, they idolise the father figure setting him up as a totem.

• The horde’s guilt is transferred onto the totem.

• This stage is animism.• This is the first stage

in religion.

• To illustrate Freud refers to the mass.

• The slaughter of God is recreated, and the representatives of the horde eat the symbolic body. In this way guilty feelings are dealt with.

Jung’s Theory of Religion

• Carl Gustav Jung (1875—1961) spent part of his life working alongside Freud. Yet although Jung was at first influenced by Freud, this did not prevent him from pursuing his own ideas. These ultimately led him to reject many of Freud’s conclusions, and especially those concerning religion. Although he accepted that religion was a psychological phenomenon, he objected to Freud’s negative conclusions

Jung replaced Freud’s conclusions with the following observations:

• • religion is a natural process that stems from the archetypes within the unconscious mind

• • it performs the function of harmonising the psyche

• • as such, it is a beneficial phenomenon

• • the removal of religion would lead to psychological problems

Jung’s Concept of Neuroses and the Libido

• Jung’s work with patients suffering from schizophrenia led him to reject Freud’s view that neuroses were caused by repressed sexuality; it had no obvious sexual component.

• He was also unconvinced by Freud’s view that the suckling of a baby was a sexual act.

• From these observations, he concluded that religion, as another neurosis, in no way depended upon a sexual trauma. He also concluded that the libido, as the cause of neuroses that affect the whole personality, was something more complicated than a mere sexual drive.

The Unconscious and the Collective Unconscious

• Jung noted how people who were dreaming, or suffering from psychic disorders, were often preoccupied with similar ideas and images. The schizophrenic Miss Miller, for example, had a dream in which her desire for God was compared with a desire for light. Jung noted how this parallel between God and light can be found in countless religious traditions.

• The Aztec preoccupation with the Sun and the Christian view of Jesus as ‘Light of the World’ are two examples. To account for the similarities in mental images, Jung postulated a further division of the unconscious mind, into the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious.

THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS• The collective

unconscious is the oldest part of the mind. It contains the blueprints for a whole range of ideas and images.

• Therefore, the fantasy of Miss Miller and the likeness drawn by religions between light and the deity are all derived from this collective unconscious; for each one of us is born with the tendency to conceive these images.

• One effect of this tendency is that similar images will be produced in dreams. We shall see that Jung believed that the God concept is one of these primordial images.

• The collective unconscious means, therefore, that many of our ideas about God will be shared with other people.

ARCHETYPES• Jung gave the technical name archetype

to the part of the psyche that creates these images.

• Jung was not saying that the experiences of our ancestors are somehow handed down to us in the form of a set of mental pictures with which we are born.

• He was saying that the mind contains structures which, when combined with the knowledge gained through our experiences, construct uniform images.

ARCHETYPES PT II• Two of Jung’s archetypes are the persona and

the shadow. The persona is the tendency to put up a front to cover our true natures, for the benefit of society. The shadow denotes the disposition to portray the darker sides of our characters. In dreams, the persona may manifest itself in images of ourselves trapped inside a heavy coat of armour, or appearing at a party in a disguise. The shadow, on the other hand, may reveal itself in the form of personifications of evil; for example, Satan, monsters or even a mother-in-law!

ARCHETYPES In

STAR WARS

God as an Archetype • Concerning religion, Jung’s central

claim was that our images of God are themselves archetypal. In other words, each of us is born with the tendency to generate religious images of gods, angels and other religious phenomena. The same principles apply here as with the other archetypes. That is, the actual images that we have of God are picked up through our own experiences in the world. The disposition to generate them is, however, innate.

Individuation and Religion

• Jung argued that the balance of the libido and the ensuing mental health of the individual are governed by an innate process that he terms individuation.

• By this, Jung meant that it results in a psychically balanced personality, through the integration of the various archetypes into the conscious personality.

How does individuation relate to Religion?

• First, individuation as an innate process is one which is governed by the archetype known as the self. More precisely, the self is the innate disposition to become whole. We have already seen that, upon Jung’s understanding of religious experience, any process or attitude that is governed by archetypes may be termed religious. Upon this basis, individuation is a religious process.

Jung’s Conclusion as to the Existence of God

“We simply do not know the ultimate derivationof the archetype any more than we know the origin of the psyche. The competence of psychology as an empirical science only goes so far as to establish, on the basis of comparative research, whether for instance the imprint found in the psyche can or cannot be termed a ‘God-image’. Nothing positive or negative has thus been asserted about the possible existence of any God.”C. C. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, 1944