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From A HISTORY OF GOD
The 4000-Year Quest of Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam
by Karen Armstrong
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Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) certainly regarded belief in God
The 4000-Year Quest of Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam
by Karen Armstrong
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Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) certainly regarded belief in God
as an illusion that mature men and women should lay aside. The idea of God was not a lie but a device of the unconscious which needed to be decoded by psychology. A personal God was nothing more than an exalted father-figure: desire for such a deity sprang from infantile yearnings for a powerful, protective father, for justice and fairness and for life to go on forever. God is simply a projection of these desires, feared and worshipped by human beings out of an abiding sense of helplessness. Religion belonged to the infancy of the human race; it had been a necessary stage in the transition from childhood to maturity.
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It had promoted ethical values which were essential to society. Now that humanity had come of age, however, it should be left behind. Science, the new logos, could take God's place. It could provide a new basis for morality, and help us to face our fears. Freud was emphatic about his faith in science, which seemed almost religious in its intensity: "No, our science is not an illusion! An illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give we can get elsewhere."
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Not all psychoanalysts agreed with Freud's view of God.
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Alfred Adler (1870-1937) allowed that God was a projection
but believed that it had been helpful to humanity; it had been a brilliant and effective symbol of excellence.
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C.G Jung's (1875-1961) God was similar to the God of the mystics, a psychological truth, subjectively experienced by each individual. When asked by John Freeman in the famous Face to Face interview whether he believed in God, Jung replied emphatically: "I do not have to believe. I know!" Jung's continued faith suggests that a subjective God, mysteriously identified with the ground of being in the depths of the self, can survive psychoanalytic science in a way that a more personal, anthropomorphic deity who can indeed encourage perpetual immaturity may not.
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Like many other Western people, Freud seemed unaware of this internalized, subjective God. Nevertheless he made a valid and perceptive point when he insisted that it would be dangerous to attempt to abolish religion. People must outgrow God in their own good time: to force them into atheism or secularism before they were ready could lead to an unhealthy denial and repression. We have seen that iconoclasm can spring from a buried anxiety and projection of our own fears onto the "other." Some of the atheists who wanted to abolish God certainly showed signs of strain. Thus, despite his advocacy of a compassionate ethic, Schopenhauer could not cope with human beings and became a recluse who communicated only with his poodle, Atman.
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Nietzsche was a tender-hearted, lonely man, plagued by ill health, who was very different from his Superman. Eventually, he went mad.
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He did not abandon God joyously, as the ecstasy of his prose might lead us to imagine. In a poem delivered "after much trembling, quivering, and self-contortion," he makes Zarathustra plead with God to return:
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No! come back,
With all your torments!
Oh come back
To the last of all solitaries!
All the streams of my tears
Run their course for you!
And the last flame of my heart -
It burns up to you!
Oh come back
My unknown God! My pain! my last - happiness.
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Like Hegel's, Nietzsche's theories were used by a later generation of Germans to justify the polices of National Socialism, a reminder that an atheistic ideology can lead to just as cruel a crusading ethic as the idea of "God."
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