The Psychoanalytic Tradition as Religion, Part I

Published: July 24, 2008, 11:11 am

In The Future of an Illusion, Freud suggests as a germinal postulate of religion, Life in this world signifies a perfecting of man's nature. It is probably the spiritual part of man, the soul . The Greek for soul is psyche. Psychoanalysis, which set itself the task of diagnosing and treating the psyche (and not merely the conscious mind, nor the organic brain as such), seems to be a phenomenon in some measure tailor-made to supplement, supplant, or substitute for religion. Freud presented a clear claim that religion is a mass neurosis, not only in The Future of an Illusion, but also in his later work Moses and Monotheism. To the extent that one sees the collective problem of religious delusion' as analogous to obsessional neurosis in the individual, one might take psychoanalysis, the custodian of techniques to address the latter, as a point of departure to cope with the former. And while he does not make light of the difficulty in coming to do

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