The cluster of associations relating to the multifaceted relationship between son and father Freud termed “the father complex” (1957, 144) and, as we shall see, viewed it as central to a correct understanding both of the developmental psychology of human beings and to many of the central and most important social phenomena in human life, including religious belief and practice. That resolution, which Freud saw as essential to the formation of sexuality, entails the repression of the drive away from the mother as libidinal object and the male child’s identification with the father. Of particular importance, he held, is the resolution of the Oedipus complex, which arises at the phallic stage, in which the male child forms a sexual attachment with the mother and comes to view the father as a hated and feared sexual rival.
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Symptomatically, these often present as compulsive and debilitating patterns of behavior-as in hysteria, repetitive ceremonial movements or an obsession with personal hygiene-which make a normal healthy life impossible, requiring psychotherapeutic intervention in the form of such techniques as dream analysis and free association. In infancy, such a progression entails a process whereby parental control involves the introduction to the child of behavioral prohibitions and limitations and necessitates the repression, displacement or sublimation of the libidinal drives.Ĭentral to this account is the idea that neuroses, which may include the formation of psychosomatic symptoms in the individual, arise essentially either out of external trauma or through a failure to effect a resolution of the internal conflict between libidinal urges and the key psychological control mechanisms.
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He thus saw the psychosexual development of every individual as consisting essentially of a movement through a series of conflicts which are resolved by the internalization, through the operation of the superego, of control mechanisms derived originally from an authoritative, usually parental, source. Moses and Monotheism: Interpretive ApproachesĪt the heart of Freud’s psychoanalysis is his theory of infantile sexuality, which represents individual psychological human development as a progression through a number of stages in which the libidinal drives are directed towards particular pleasure-release loci, from the oral to the anal to the phallic and, after a latency period, in maturity to the genital.The Primordial Religion: Polytheism or Monotheism?.The Moses Narrative: The Origins of Judaic Monotheism.The Orientation of Freud’s Approach to Religion.The article concludes with a review of some of the main critical responses which the Freudian account has elicited. This article charts the evolution of his views on religion from Totem and Taboo (1913), through The Future of an Illusion (1927) and Civilization and its Discontents (1930) to Moses and Monotheism (1939), focusing in particular on the parallels drawn by him between religious belief and neurosis, and on his account of the role which the father complex plays in the genesis of religious belief. Psychoanalytic therapy is an application of this conceptual schema, in which the interaction of the mind’s conscious and unconscious elements in individual cases is explored using the techniques of dream interpretation, free association and the analysis of resistance to identify repressed conflicts and bring them into the conscious mind.įreud’s thought on religion is, perhaps fittingly, rather complex and ambivalent: while there can be little doubt as to its roundly skeptical, and at times hostile, character, it is nonetheless clear that he had a firm grounding in Jewish religious thought and that the religious impulse held a life-long fascination for him. It focuses on the interaction between those elements, and includes such key concepts as infantile sexuality, repression, latency and transference. As a theory, psychoanalysis conceptualizes the mind as a system composed of three constituent elements: id, ego, and superego.
Freud was an Austrian neurologist and psychologist who is widely regarded as the father of psychoanalysis, which is both a psychological theory and therapeutic system. This article explores attempts by Sigmund Freud (1850-1939) to provide a naturalistic account of religion enhanced by insights and theoretical constructs derived from the discipline of psychoanalysis which he had pioneered.
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