Sigmund Freud is no longer the revered figure he once was. A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education noted that Freud is no longer routinely assigned even in psychology curricula. In a way, Freud is following the downward path of that other great totem of the last couple of centuries, Karl Marx. It's hard to believe so many intelligent people spent their lives studying these two thinkers. Intellectuals, we have to conclude, are often fatally attracted to far-out theories that tease the mind but that bear little relation to what's actually going on in the world.
Marxism worked well in academic laboratories and only failed miserably when it was actually tried. Similarly for decades Freud spun out his elaborate theories, and they sounded so scientific and so modern and so avant garde. Depression? Well, that's because your sister abused you when you were four, and you have concealed from yourself the memory of it, but if you do hundreds of hours of therapy, you can excavate the source of your anxiety, and by coming to terms with it you can slowly overcome it. But today when you go to the doctor and are diagnosed with depression, he gives you a pill and you feel better. No need for most people to visit the therapist's couch.
Freud also argued that what we are secretly attracted to, we make into a taboo. Freud explained the "incest taboo" by saying that we secretly want to have sex with our mothers and our sisters, and so we repress those feelings and outlaw them. In Freud's words, "The strength of the incestuous wishes can be detected behind the prohibition against them."
The cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker pointed out the shortcoming of this theory. Pinker notes that by Freud's logic the fact that humans are averse to eating cow dung shows that we secretly want to eat it. Pinker's point is that there are sound evolutionary reasons both for avoiding cow dung and for avoiding incest. The former is unhealthy and attracts disease-carrying insects; the latter results in biological abnormalities. So natural selection produces humans who avoid both. Once again, Freudian fantasy is replaced with a much more plausible scientific alternative.
I've been reading Freud's The Future of an Illusion, where Freud makes the case that religion is a form of "wish fulfillment." Freud writes that for the individual "life is hard to bear," and beyond this there is "the painful riddle of death, against which no medicine has yet been found." And so to "make helplessness tolerable" man invents God and religion not because they are true but because we wish them to be true. " For Freud, one may say, Christianity is adult Disneyland. We forget that Freud is the author of this portrait of religion that is widely espoused in our time.
Well, let's examine this Freudian explanation in an entirely secular and rational way. Imagine a bunch of people who have gathered in a room because they want to avoid life's difficulties--sickness, suffering, death--by making up a religion that will make them feel better. I can entirely see how such a group would come up with the concept of heaven. Heaven is a place where there is no suffering and no death. Eternal bliss would surely fit into my wish-fulfillment scheme.
But I don't see why this group would come up with the concept of hell. (We are not talking about why priests might later use the concept to enforce doctrinal obedience or institutional loyalty. We are talking about why wish-fulfilling humans would invent the concept in the first place.) Hell is not only worse than sickness but also worse than death, because death is merely the end, while hell implies eternal separation from God.
I also don't see why seekers of wish-fulfillment would come up with Christian morality. Who needs the Ten Commandments or other such rules which make our lives more difficult by asserting a series of "Thou Shall Nots"? Even Christians recoil from the severe demands of their ethical code. Recall the church father Augustine, who kept putting off his conversion to Christianity, praying to God, "Make me chaste, O Lord, but not yet." In other words, a project of wish-fulfillment would seem to dictate a much more libertine social morality than the one we find in the Old and New Testaments.
Bottom line: Judaism and Christianity, not to mention the other great religions, hardly look like they are the product of mere wishful thinking. In fact, they posit a God and a moral universe that makes some fairly stern demands on humans. It's almost wishful to think that God does not exist, so that we can escape those demands. This is a point that does not seem to have occurred to poor Sigmund Freud.
Reader Comments ( Page 16 of 17)
226. You inspired me to promote myself.
MajorCack at 1:01PM on Aug 14th 2008
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And greed and egotism does the same for Dinesh
Saint Brian the Godless at 1:24PM on Aug 14th 2008
227. I am, have been, and always will be, Somber.
But regarding heavens, hells, and their respective cultures.
I have to ask you, Oneblood, do you have a shread of evidence for this primitive heaven model you've presented? Or for a heavenly evolution and diversification? Or is this simply your own mental invention that you've presented for our consideration? Your own wishful thinking?
While I recognize the intriguing possibilities, especially from a literary point of view (which I always do. I love the idea of a heaven where God is absent and Michael and Gabriel fight over who 'manages' heaven.) I have to defer to occams razor. Given the choice of heavens reflecting the cutural values of the people who invented them and some evolutionary afterlife that increasingly diversified I have to go with the simplest explaination with evidence. And also, not all religions have an afterlife. Buddhist Nirvana has one being one with all existance. Judaism believes after one dies one eventually becomes one with God, rather than continuing a parody of life in some happy state of existance.
Somber at 1:27PM on Aug 14th 2008
228. not-pboyfloyd at 1:15PM on Aug 14th 2008
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I haven't done any of that, but I did slay a dragon once in Zelda. And the image of my schwang appeared on the Little Mermaid movie jacket.
(You always schwing with your schwang, dontcha know)
Saint Brian the Godless at 1:30PM on Aug 14th 2008
229. Somber, you could change your name to melancholy, solemn, or dismal.....
MajorCack at 1:38PM on Aug 14th 2008
230. 223. This blog sounds like a styx album.
Saint Brian the Godless at 1:18PM on Aug 14th 2008
Well Brian, you did it again. So far the witty quip award goes to you. Unless Somber, Clif or notpboy catches up.
Buenas tardes charlitos. Hasta la proxima "blog."
oneblood at 2:03PM on Aug 14th 2008
231. SBG,
How DARE you say that about Styx!
It sounds like you fought the Level-1 Aquamentus, but quit the game before encountering Gleeok.
Mokele Mbembe at 2:15PM on Aug 14th 2008
232. Somber,
I think my proposition is no more speculative than anybody's (and I mean anybody) about the diversification of mankind from a single group (in your case primitive hominids, mine would be man).
From a theist or atheistic evolutionary standpoint I think we are all still putting together pieces of "man's" first diaspora.
It is logical, but not provable, to assume from the varied, culturally defined spirituality of humans across the globe that: one, most of us are assuming we came from basically one group; so two, those diverse religions could easily have been from a proto-religion or generally held belief in the supernatural (to explain whatever) that the original group (thousands, tens of thousands maybe) had.
Surely Somber, you see that this is a logical assumption. Realize, I didn't take the tack of arguing the validity of spirituality in a human's life or a presumed empiricism. Not at all, those are different topics. I hope that clears up what I was trying to say.
To reiterate, I am in know way calling what I say authoritative any more than any person can truly discover about ancient man's behavior in detail. But I do think I can speak for most theists in this regard, and given what ALL of us know for facts: the existence of religions, the diversification of mankind/intelligent hominids from one group, it is very logical to propose what I and other theists propose as to a singular proto-religion existing at that time.
oneblood at 2:20PM on Aug 14th 2008
233. Sorry Somber,
I am very tired. I hope that clears up my intent, even if there is more to discuss. Which I would love to pero ahora estoy muy cansado. Tengo que acostarme. Paz.
oneblood at 2:24PM on Aug 14th 2008
234. 231. Sorry Somber,
I am very tired. I hope that clears up my intent, even if there is more to discuss. Which I would love to pero ahora estoy muy cansado. Tengo que acostarme. Paz.
oneblood at 2:24PM on Aug 14th 2008
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Showoff.
Hasta la proxima ves, amigo. (Amiga?) Buenas noches, y quiero que duermes bien.
Saint Brian the Godless at 3:03PM on Aug 14th 2008
235. AOLSM8"C
Mokele Mbembe at 3:22PM on Aug 14th 2008
236. 233. AOLSM8"C
Mokele Mbembe at 3:22PM on Aug 14th 2008
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Nice.
Saint Brian the Godless at 3:40PM on Aug 14th 2008
237. Girl: "Forgive me father for I have sinned."
Priest: "What have you done my child?"
Girl: "I called a man a son of a bitch."
Priest: "Why did you call him a son of a bitch?"
Girl: "Because he touched my hand."
Priest: "Like this?" (as he touches her hand)
Girl: "Yes father."
Priest: "That's no reason to call a man a son of a bitch."
Girl: "Then he touched my breast."
Priest: "Like this?" (as he touched her breast)
Girl: "Yes father."
Priest: "That's no reason to call him a son of a bitch."
Girl: "Then he took off my clothes, father."
Priest: "Like this?" (as he takes off her clothes)
Girl: "Yes father."
Priest: "That's no reason to call him a son of a bitch."
Girl: "Then he stuck his you know what into my you know where."
Priest: "Like this?" (as he stuck his you know what into her you know where)
Girl: "YES FATHER, YES FATHER, YES FATHER!!!"
Priest: (after a few minutes): "That's no reason to call him a son of a bitch."
Girl: "But father he had AIDS!"
Priest: "THAT SON OF A BITCH!!!"
not-pboyfloyd at 3:01AM on Aug 15th 2008
238. A man goes to the confessional.
"Forgive me father, for I have sinned."
"What is your sin, my child?" The priest asks back.
"Well," the man starts, "I used some horrible language this week and I feel absolutely terrible."
"When did you do use this awful language?" said the priest.
"I was golfing and hit an incredible drive that looked like it was going to go over 250 yards, but it struck a phone line that was hanging over the fairway and fell straight down to the ground after going only about 100yards."
"Is that when you swore?"
"No, Father." Said the man. "After that, a squirrel ran out of the bushes and grabbed my ball in his mouth and began to run away."
"Is THAT when you swore?" asked the Father again.
"Well, no." said the man, "You see, as the squirrel was running, an eagle came down out of the sky, grabbed the squirrel in his talons and began to fly away!"
"Is THAT when you swore?" asked the amazed Priest.
"No, not yet." The man replied. "As the eagle carried the squirrel away in his claws, it flew towards the green. And as it passed over a bit of forest near the green, the squirrel dropped my ball."
"Did you swear THEN?" asked the now impatient Priest.
"No, because as the ball fell it struck a tree, bounced through some bushes, careened off a big rock, and rolled through a sand trap onto the green and stopped within six inches of the hole."
"Don't tell me, you missed the Fucking putt?" sighed the Priest.
mac at 12:07AM on Aug 16th 2008
239. I was just on the Young Turk's blog and Clif and Robert Okane were having a debate, and Okane went and google searched Clif's name, found out the actual, real name of his daughter, and tried to scare him with it!!! (And did, of course!)
The "good christian" thing to do, huh? What a fucking SCUMBAG!!!!
Saint Brian the Godless at 4:05PM on Aug 17th 2008
240. Looking back at the Young Turks blog, I see that an "anonymous" originally posted clif's daughter's name in the middle of another argument going on with Okane, so I retract what I said about Okane and now re-state it at "anonymous" except of course it's an anonymous name in the first place. It was reprehensible. But it apparently wasn't Okane, is my point, so I apologize. I typed too quickly.
Saint Brian the Godless at 7:15PM on Aug 17th 2008