The Effect of Replacing Religion with Psychoanalysis (article)

I was raised as a Catholic but was areligious by the time I started my professional training. To my surprise, during my analytic training and practice some religious themes from childhood reemerged in my mind; for instance, the Biblical passage that God will visit the sins of the fathers onto the third and fourth generation of descendants (Exodus 20:5). It had originally struck me as unfair, but I realized its psychological truth when contemplating the intergenerational transmission of trauma. After several experiences of this nature, I started to wonder if religion attempted to describe very long-term, sometimes intergenerational, adaptive patterns in mythical form. This seemed related to Erich Neumann’s idea that myths describe ego-development. Neil MacGregor supports a similar idea in A History of the World in 100 Objects (2010) by tracing correlations between the emergence of new deities and social challenges or advances in different cultures.

As a scientist in the rationalist tradition, Freud was predisposed to oppose religion. The Enlightenment idealized reason and devalued emotion and, with it, religion. Psychoanalysis was actually taking the first step to rebalance that dialectic, but it was tentative. The rationalist frame of reference biased psychoanalysis against recognizing that we are social before anything else, which is not only true for us but most other mammals. Carl Jung, who came from a more religious tradition, developed concepts more oriented to social interactions, such as the collective unconscious (which we can now explain with affective communication) and archetypes (which can be understood as social versions of gestalt principles). Jung saw a link between the unconscious and religion that Freud objected to, as discussed below.

For now, I want to point out that, concerning religion, Freud deviated from his method: his discussion of infantile sexuality masterfully describes the development from partial impulses and experiences into the integrated whole of adult sexuality. But when he discusses impulses for religion, Freud stays with accounts of defensive magical thinking to unite with a “supernatural” power. However, he uses that as an explanation for religion as a whole instead of as an immature expression. While he accepts the “social”/ developmental reality of sexuality, regarding religion Freud falls back on the more restrictive traditional “objective” reality. The gist of recent research on cognition (and awareness) has turned away

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from a focus of representation of “objective” reality as aid in decision-making, even with distorted representation. This perspective is much more congenial to psychodynamic theory, partially validating Freud. This article attempts to develop such an alternative understanding of religion in an evolutionary context.

It is interesting that Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) focuses on “oceanic feelings” as basic religious experience; a good call from a biological perspective, but he cannot entertain it reading him. The impression lingers of a profound fear of annihilation, unless his individualism is strongly protected: merging equals death. This interpretation presents Freud’s difficulty with this experience of general connectedness as a defense against femininity (based on Debora Tannen’s analysis of gender differences in her book You Are Wearing That? from 2006). It sees his difficulty as related to unresolved power issues: he describes femininity excessively in terms of passivity (which necessitates penis-envy) and overlooks women’s social constraints in the Victorian era. As a Jew, Freud was a member of a scapegoated minority, in a position not unlike the women of his time. Due to his phallic preoccupation, Freud misses the changes of human sexuality (compared to primates) to greater gender equality and relationship-building. He sees our need to form groups mostly in a negative light (mass psychology), consistent with his focus on individuality.

Freud sees the nature of man as originally asocial, only compelled to be social by need or fear, and misses the evolutionary trait of getting satisfaction from participating in a group, independently from the super-ego. In this way he misses an important component and support of the ego. This has contributed to the pessimistic nature of some of his theories, of which the “death instinct” is the ultimate expression. The “death instinct” clearly is a misnomer: all other instincts describe organized adaptive behavior. Given the inevitable tendency of any natural system to increase in entropy, an instinct for destruction is unnecessary. (Destructive behavior can be explained with fighting helplessness or revenge/fairness.) A more positive focus on larger groups might have alerted Freud to how intra-group aggression drives symbolization to protect the group from physical fights (Konrad Lorenz, King Solomon’s Ring, 1952), an evolutionary example of sublimation.

Freud’s dismissal of religion as “illusion” prevents him from appreciating its positive function: providing working models for relationships and community. According to Brett Stetha in Did

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Affluence Spur the Rise of Modern Religion? (2015), the major moral religions developed within a relatively short time span of each other in societies that were able to reliably provide ample energy for their citizens, probably as a way to manage excess fairly and thereby sustainably. In The Future of an Illusion (1927), Freud correctly identifies the awareness that nature is indifferent to our survival and is a chronic threat as well as a source of anxiety. However, he sees the solution (looking for protection from parents/ supernatural powers) in an excessively narrow, individualistic frame, and he misses the reassurance of experiencing membership in a group.

From the perspective of attachment theory, God becomes the ultimate relational symbol. This argument supports understanding the “oceanic feeling” of universal connectedness as a basic religious experience, which can help us through periods of actual isolation. It is noteworthy that the field of addiction treatment, which is trying to rehabilitate people with disastrous relationships, has had a long and significant involvement with (non-denominational) religion/spirituality as a component of recovery. People with mental illness/problematic relationships tend to be vulnerable to addiction, and for people with antisocial personality disorders, whose relationships are profoundly disturbed, addiction is one of the diagnostic symptoms. Until the development of object relations theory, psychoanalysis did not have a convincing way to address addictions.

Of course, Freud’s disparagement of religion did not negate the need to be in a community, and it therefore predisposed psychoanalytic schools to become substitute religions. The subject matter puts psychoanalysis close to a Weltanschauung or philosophy and therefore to religion, more so than other sciences whose subjects are further afield from us. In an attenuated form we can see a similar pattern in research about comparative benefits of different therapies; by and large, people benefit most from approaches that are compatible with their pre-existing Weltanschauung. Usually we are not aware of the deep affective undercurrents (and defensive significance) that these attitudes have for us.

Peter Fonagy’s developmental theories in Attachment Theory and Psychoanalysis (2001) illustrate the attachment work that forms the basis for our ideas about others and by extension about the world. He reports that his research indicates it is the role of the parent to conceive the pre-intentional infant’s potential as inten-

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tional and to interact with it accordingly, which fosters attachment and creates a beneficial self-fulfilling prophecy. In a similar way, religion allows us to see the world as a beneficial and organized place and act accordingly, creating culture. Biologically, our mammalian origins that help us start with a protected early development in the womb predispose us to that view, and it helps us with an extra shot of optimism that can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

John Ratey and Richard Manning’s work Go Wild (2013) discusses states of consciousness cultivated in hunting. Prime amongst them is being in the moment and having an openness to anything new, apart from preconceived notions. Interestingly, this mindset is the same that is cultivated in mindfulness meditation. (Hunters told me that hunting can be a religious experience for them. This makes sense because hunting involves immersion in an evolutionary system that vastly pre-dates us, using our inter-species empathic skills to succeed in the hunt.)

The translations of Yahweh as “I Am the One I Am” or “I Will Be What I Will Be” evoke the ultimate mindfulness, as does the concept of the Dao. (By comparison, Descartes’ famous “cogito, ergo sum” is a pale rationalistic reflection of mindfulness.) God is the symbol of life and religion, an expression of biophilia, both in Erich Fromm’s (The Heart of Man, 1964) and Edward O. Wilson’s (The Social Conquest of Earth, 2012) sense. By disavowing religion, Freud lost some access to important modes of consciousness. His discovery of transference could have led him directly to the importance of object relations and attachment, but he remained focused on instincts more than relationships, leaving psychoanalysis with an unresolved excess of narcissism, which contributed to its pessimism.

Freud has been criticized for giving up the seduction hypothesis for fear of social ostracism. I believe that his aversion to religion is also an expression of fear. In its basic approach, psychoanalysis is closer to dialectics (and with that, to Marx) than the dominant positivistic models of thought. Had Freud not turned away from religion, psychoanalysis might have become more of a social reform movement and consequently run even more against the social power elites. As Freud points out, most social reformers and religious leaders have been mistreated by the societies they wanted to reform. But as psychoanalysts we hope to not only be tolerated but even compensated for our work an ambitious goal.

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As psychohistorians, we are left with correcting the competitive image of nature, which leads to excessive power struggles, educating ourselves and others about the cooperative sides of evolution (without blindness to aggression), and thus fostering a more cooperative and sustainable future, a daunting task. This article has attempted to outline that at this point we have biological (the oldest possible form of psychohistory) evidence that social cooperation is an old and successful strategy for adaptation and survival, shared by all mammals and other “cognitive elites.”

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