An Aspect of Freud and Religion

So how is it that December 2010 is so important for many? I guess we can choose to focus on our failures, that is, what we have not achieved yet, in our lives. Does this mean that failure is good because it helps us to see what we have not quite done and learn how to do it even better? Now, why am I thinking in my head about relationship? I wonder if this is a common theme at this time of the year.

Now what has this all got to do with attending lectures on psychoanalysis down at the Freud Museum? I scratch my head as this story unfolds, so that I can understand it even better myself. Let me check my notebook. Like a dream unfolding, it reminds me of 2007 of a certain experience that I may have chosen to repress or forget as some kind of defence, so what I might not have achieved yet probably, is the letting go by the sounds of it. I must say, my therapeutic coaching sessions with Murielle M. and Helen E. recently have taken me beyond the door of procrastination in overcoming energy blocks much quicker with a heightened awareness of doing what I need to do to clear my head.

Putting all this talk of failure, procrastination and letting go to one side. Let’s talk about something a bit more interesting shall we, like Freud and certain aspects of his view of religion. I feel myself getting all excited as I go back over the past weeks to get my think tank on to remember the specific points of debate and discussion down at the Freud Museum. Moreover, we can move on from the case of Dora on his theory of dreams, hysteria (neurosis), and sexuality (1897), as an idea that he may have concluded with his work with Fleiss. It can well be appreciated how he thought that neurosis is primarily about ‘wishful impulses that are repressed’, the target being sexual wishful impulses, something that we might all be born with, as he and Fleiss agreed. Without going into too greater detail about his progressive theory, suggesting it to be 'infantile sexuality' and his arrival at the notion of the Oedipus Complex, which you can read for your enjoyment as I did in his book, Three Essays On The Theory of Sexuality (1905), I am quite interested on his views as it progressed to his investigation of  “obsessional neurosis”.

Having read the case of “The Rat Man”, where he starts to talk about religion, I can see Freud’s move away from symptoms just being merely physical and now being recognised as psychological in the way a person can keep going back to a problem by revisiting it frequently. Even more interestingly is the idea as he noted that obsessional neurosis is rooted in a conflict of love and hate – ambivalence, a term borrowed by Freud but coined by Blyler, a psychiatrist.

So what has this all got to do with adults, relationships and religion? Could it be the repression of hatred. In terms of an anxiety, I am wondering what a person’s current problem might have to do with an earlier phase of life. How does it really relate? Where do these impulses come from? As Freud postulates, could obsessional neurosis be a defence from an actual childhood scenes in some cases, whereby a person later becomes terrified of their own rage by exhibiting violent outbursts of a very powerful kind, whereby they sense that they could kill someone. Yet some may say, it’s only a phantasy that some people may have of people closest to them that they maintain out of fear, that is somehow linked to an unconscious guilt that the person may not even know about. I am quite curious of and find it quite imaginative how Freud links this idea of obsessional neurosis to the God of the Old Testament by his hypothesis of the punitive superego and how this in turn is all meant to adjust a person to reality! In my view reality is that as humans, we all suffer or experience unhappiness from time to time and it is not all down to religion, even though this notion is a full scale debate in its own right and might have been quite contextual to Freud’s time and even now.

Yet I do believe and appreciate Freud's findings, in adult obsessional neurosis, in there probably being a repressed hatred in the form of hidden rage linked to a significant “other”, that may find itself rooted in significant childhood relationships and later be projected into a current problem unconsciously.

Bibliography

James Strachey et al 2001. Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological works, Volume II (1893-1895), Studies on Hysteria by Joseph Breuer and Sigmund Freud: London, Vintage Books


James Strachey et al 2001. Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological works, Volume X (1909), Two Case Histories: ‘Little Hans’ and the ‘Rat Man’: London, Vintage Books