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Clara Venice's PHL100 Tutorial Weblog
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4 comments:
As mentioned in lecture, religion for Freud is "bankrupt", and is only there to assure us or give us hope which satisfies our "certain psychological needs". Freud relates relgion to a child's need for a father figure. For me, his account of relgion is not so much exhaustive, but not neccesarily in depth enough...The paragraph or two that he talks about religion (from what I have read so far)are pretty short. The reason why I don't think its an exhaustive account is because he dedicated that whole other book to it, so I'm sure you would have to read that before making any judgements about his account of religion.
According to Freud, we believe in God because we need hope and faith. The idea of God exists only to fufill our psychological needs. We create this fatherly figure in our minds to make ourselves feel better when we feel powerless. We need hope. We want to believe that someone is there to help us. I do not think his account of religion is exhuastive. He only introduced this topic in the first section and did not continue on it.
yeah, it's hard for an account so short to be exhaustive, but the idea seems like it comes pretty close to it providing freud is right about our scattered self and oedipus complex (which i understand is a fairly big if).
it seems as if religion does not only fulfill the 'father' role, but i think the psychological profile goes deeper than that. i haven't read freud's other stuff, but the idea of an afterlife in exchange for moral fidelity fits in well with what he said. the promise of everlasting life does a good job of eliminating one of humanities sources of discontent (our decaying bodies), while the required actions, moral fidelity, fits in well with the societal norms/cultural superego which are needed. religion appears as if it is a product of society, which acts as a sort of damage control to our traumas experienced on account of settlement.
I think Freud sees religion as something that would fill our psychological needs; that is, to take away dissatisfaction, anxiety we have as adults.
As talked in the lecture, Freud thinks that religion is like the projection of childhood psychodynamics; it is just like the relationships between a father and a child. For Freud, basically religion is an illusion made by human beings.
I don’t think this is an exhaustive account for what religion is. But I think Freud’s account at least explains what monotheism is like, for God is thought to be the father figure in monotheism. Also I agree that religion plays a role of filling out our psychological needs to get rid of anxiety in our lives and helplessness against the natural force. I think so because I have never seen a tradition that has no forms of religion; every tradition seems to have certain kinds of religion. Even thought there are religions in which people have faith to nature or their ancestors, they pray to get rid of their anxiety.
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