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 4 of 17)
46. Troy; Hitler was not an atheist.
Ryan Anderson at 1:53PM on Aug 12th 2008
47. To What's in a name and the rest of you atheist/pagan fools. Your arguments, like your hearts, are circular. They always move outwards from your selves, go to the truth, rabidly reject it, and lead back to your selves (liars).
Liars look at truth and goodness and say, "no," preferring the darkness of night.
Tom B at 10:13PM on Aug 12th 2008
48.
Troy I have a question for you:
Was atheism the cause of Stalin committing crimes against humanity?
JefFlyingV at 1:59PM on Aug 12th 2008
49. Hows them homeworks???
Them homeworks actually help solidify my point.
As supported by some of your texts, Stalin and Hitler were naturally inclined to appease the masses, who were largely religious. To not take this approach would have been political suicide. On that note, I personally don't care what religious position these leaders "claimed" to hold. Rather, I care about how they actually ruled and what that reveals about their fundamental worldview. From this perspective, the issue of how they "justified" mass murder points to a materialistic and humanistic foundation.
Troy at 2:04PM on Aug 12th 2008
50. Was atheism the cause of Stalin committing crimes against humanity?
Nope. A particular belief doesn't make anybody do anything. Atheism wasn't the "cause" of Stalin's choices. It was his "rationale."
Troy at 2:15PM on Aug 12th 2008
51.
Troy I have a 2nd question for you:
Was christianity the cause of Vlad the Impaler committing crimes against humanity?
JefFlyingV at 2:16PM on Aug 12th 2008
52. Some of you have raised some good objections to my position, resulting in a good discussion, but other obligations are now calling me away.
Troy at 2:18PM on Aug 12th 2008
53. Troy I have a 2nd question for you:
Was christianity the cause of Vlad the Impaler committing crimes against humanity?
JetFlyingV, please see my previous post for an answer to this question as well. Okay, now I'm really out of here.
Troy at 2:20PM on Aug 12th 2008
54. Troy
You are muddying the waters. What you are saying is that no matter what a christian is incapable of doing wrong.
What you ignore is the personal viewpoint of the person doing the harm.
Your view of a persons actions is irrevelant. What matters is the personal belief of that particular person.
So I dont care what you think of what Hitlers religious beliefs are. You think he is an athiest so I counter that Hitler thought of himself as a man influenced by Christianity. Your view doesnt matter because you arent Hitler.
Hitler didnt commit mass murder. The only people Hitler personally killed were in WW1. Hitlers people, mainly Himmler and Goring came up with the idea of the final solution. They were the ones who gave the orders, albiet with Hitlers permission. They were all doing their part.
I will reiterate once more. Hitler believed much of christianity. So he isnt an athiest. I dont care what you think his actions meant. He believed.
You should really the one to do your homework.
MajorCack at 2:20PM on Aug 12th 2008
55. Sigmund Freud's grand delusion???????? DD you believe dead people come back to life and fly off into space and are hanging around out there somewhere waiting to fly back. Talk about a grand delusion......
Larry at 2:24PM on Aug 12th 2008
56. D'Souza says, "Even Christians recoil from the severe demands of their ethical code."
Yes, it must be hard to pretend to yourself that you are humble while you are so smug and supercilious.
But it's the BIBLE'S fault for giving you those great quotes, "The fool sayeth in his heart, there is no God!", isn't it?
Surely that also implies the opposite, if you DON'T say 'there is no God' then ipso facto presto chango abracadabra you CAN'T be a fool!
Here I, as an atheist, would have thought that it would be easy to convince a fool, therefore anyone haughtily claiming that you are a fool because you aren't easily swayed would be being smugly supercilious in opposition to their own ethics.
"Recall the church father Augustine, who kept putting off his conversion to Christianity, praying to God, "Make me chaste, O Lord, but not yet.""
Shit, Dinesh-baby! I wake up every single morning of every single day wondering how such a horny toad of a man could manage to 'keep it in his pants' long enough to consider such properly basic things as whether people could possibly live on the 'underside' of the Earth since they wouldn't be able to see the 'coming of Christ!'.
not-pboyfloyd at 2:35PM on Aug 12th 2008
57. Various theories fall by the wayside. Doctors used to put butter on burns and raw steak on black eyes and other bruises. Now, we put ice on burns and bruises.
But, that's not to say that Freud shouldn't be completely forgotten. He is still the father of modern psychology, and personally, I would rather discuss my problems with a professional, a clergyman, or even a close friend than take a pill to make be feel better mentally.
Of course, what would Freud say about Catholic priests who preached chastity outside of marriage while molesting little children. Obviously, the wanted to try something that they had been taught to abhor.
Kent at 3:13PM on Aug 12th 2008
58. You also misspelled "Oedipus" ...unless you intended for your entire post to be in Greek.
Troy at 1:23PM on Aug 12th
You mean it wasn't?
tmo at 3:14PM on Aug 12th 2008
59. Freud was a genius, even though he wasn't absolutely right about everything. His once-associate Karl Jung was even smarter. The main contribution that these two gave us is that some knowledge is inborn. It's called "instinct", and science still hasn't studied it properly.
Bob at 4:19PM on Aug 12th 2008
60.
Freud moved the mind into the realm of science.
JefFlyingV at 4:33PM on Aug 12th 2008