Fromm, Erich. Psychoanalysis and Religion, Colonial Press, Clinton, MA, 1950.
- I consider this book under the context of violence and tribalism, in the sense that the opportunity for fanaticism occurs where the individual (psychoanalysis) meets the group (religion). Self-consciousness brings the constant tension/dynamic of individual freedom in the throes of group belonging. Is there freedom in blindly following the group? Is there such thing as true individual freedom in a species of self-conscious, naturally social beings? Our interest here is when people become fanatic enough in their beliefs that they cannot comprehend the reality of the beliefs of others. ie, “democrats and republicans cannot work together anymore because they live in two different worlds..”
Ch 1. The Problem
(4) To some people return to religion is the answer, not as an act of faith but in order to escape an intolerable doubt; they make this decision not out of devotion but in search of security.
- the failure of nerve: cowarding away from the tension of doubt and critical thinking to immerse oneself in the faux-comfort-certainty of group-think-fanaticism (religion, politics, etc)
(5) In the last few generations, the rationalism of the Enlightenment has undergone drastic change. Drunk with a new material prosperity and success in mastering Nature…Man has ceased to believe that the power of reason can establish the validity of norms and ideas for human conduct.
- the drug of civilization
(7) Mental sickness cannot be understood apart from oral problems…The analyst is not a theologian or a philosopher, but is a physician of the soul, and he is concerned with the very same problems as philosophy and theology: the soul of man and its cure.
(9) I want to show that it is not true that we have to give up the concern for the soul if we do not accept the tenets of religion. The psychoanalyst is in a position to study the reality behind religion as well as behind nonreligious symbol systems.
Ch 2. Freud and Jung
(11) Being confronted with dangerous, uncontrollable, and un-understandable forces within and outside of himself, he remembers, as it were, and regresses to an experience he had as a child, when he felt protected by a father whom he thought to be of a superior wisdom and strength, and whose love and protection he could win by obeying his commands and avoiding transgressions of his prohibitions.
Thus, religion, according to Freud, is a repition of the experience of the child. Man copes with threatening forces in the same manner in which, as a child, he learned to cope with his own insecurity by relying on and admiring and fearing his father. Freud compares religion with the obsessional neuroses we find in children. And, according to him, religion is collective neuroses.
(12) Freud says religion is a danger because it tends to sanctify bad human institutions with which it has allied itself throughout its history; further, by teaching people to believe in an illusion and by prohibiting critical thinking religion is responsible for the impoverishment of intelligence.
(13) If the validity of ethical norms rests upon their being God’s commands, the future of ethics stands or falls with the belief in God.
- without a channel of beliefs, the mind would explode into infinity…loss of identity. Therefore, religion provides the tribal need for group identity.
(17) [For Jung], the essence of religious experience is the submission to powers higher than [or outside] ourselves. [Religious experience] seizes and controls the human subject which is always rather its victim than its creator.
Having defined religious experience as being seized by a power outside ourselves, Jung proceeds to interpret the concept of the unconscious as being a religious one. According to him, the unconscious cannot be merely a part of the individual mind but is a power beyond our control intruding upon our minds.
Ch 3. An Analysis of Some Types of Religious Experience
(21) Religion: any system of thought and action shared by a group which gives the individual a frame of orientation and an object of devotion.
(22) The study of man permits us to recognize that the need for a common system of orientation and for an object of devotion is deeply rooted in the condition of human existence.
(22) Self-awareness, reason, and imagination have disrupted the ‘harmony’ which characterizes animal existence. Their emergence has made man into an anomaly, into a freak of the universe. He is part of nature, subject to her physical laws and unable to change them, yet he transcends the rest of nature. He is set apart while being a part; he is homeless, yet chained to the home he shares with all creatures. Cast into this world at an accidental place and time, he is forced out of it, again accidently. Being aware of himself, he realizes his powerlessness and the limitations of his existence. He visualizes his own end: death. Never is he free from the dichotomy of his existence: he cannot rid himself of his mind, even he should want to; he cannot rid himself of his body as long as he is alive – and his body makes him want to be alive.
(23) Man is the only animal that be can bored, that can be discontented…He cannot go back to the prehuman state of harmony with nature; he must proceed to develop his reason until he becomes master of nature, and of himself.
- “develop his reason” OR acquiesce to group fanaticism
- “master of nature and himself” being a faux mastery, of course
(23) Having lost paradise, the unity with nature, he has become the eternal wanderer; he impelled to go forward and with everlasting effort to make the unknown known by filling in with answers the blank spaces of knowledge.
- “fill in the blank,” ie Malinowski. The self-awareness of limitations creates the craving for absoluteness / certainty, ie religion, nationalism, tribalism, fanaticism.
(25) Man is not free to choose between having or not having ‘ideals,’ but he is free to choose between different kinds of ideals, between being devoted to the worship of power and destruction and being devoted to reason and love. All men are ‘idealists’ and are striving for something beyond the attainment of physical satisfaction.
(27) It was Freud who saw the connection between neurosis and religion; but while he interpreted religion as a collective childhood neurosis of mankind, the statement can also be reversed. We can interpret neurosis as a private form of religion.
(31) Do we have totemism in our culture? We have a great deal – although the people suffering from it usually do not consider themselves in need of psychiatric help. A person whose exclusive devotion is to the state or his political party, whose only criterion of value and truth is the interest of state or party, for whom the flag is the symbol of his group is a holy object, has a religion of clan and totem worship, even though in his own eyes it is a perfectly rational system. If we want to understand how systems like fascism or Stalinism can possess millions of people, ready to sacrifice their integrity and reason to the principle, “my country, right or wrong,” we are forced to consider the totemistic, the religious quality of their orientation.
- the collectively neurotic culture (which has become so by leaving the original home of Nature) exhibits numerous forms of public ritual
- pollical totemism
(32) It is the feeling of isolation, of being shut out, which is the painful sting of every neurosis.
- both the cause and effect of neurosis: relieved by staying in the rut, the unthinking routine, of uncritical belief, mass worship of perceived power, regardless of its long term pathology.
(34) The definition of religion given in the Oxford Dictionary is a rather accurate definition of authoritarian religion. It reads “Religion is recognition on the part of man of some higher unseen power as having control of his destiny, and as being entitled to obedience, reverence, and worship.”
- Lakoff’s distinction between conservative “dominant father” model of the universe, vs liberal “empathic nurturing parent” model.
(35) Submission to a powerful authority is one of the avenues by which man escapes from his feeling of aloneness and limitation. In the act of surrender he loses his independence and integrity as an individual, but he gains the feeling of being protected by an awe-inspiring power of which he becomes a part.
(48) That early Christianity is humanistic and not authoritarian is evident from the spirit and text of all of Jesus’ teachings. Jesus’ precept that ‘the kingdom of God is within you’ is the simple and clear expression of non-authoritarian thinking. But only a few hundred years later, after Christianity had ceased to be the religion of the poor and humble peasants, artisans, and slaves, and had become the religion of those ruling the Roman Empire, the authoritarian trend in Christianity become dominant.
(50) When man has thus projected his own most valuable powers onto God, what of his relationship to his own powers? They have become separated from him and in this process he has become alienated from himself. Everything he has is now God’s and nothing is left in him. In worshipping God he tries to get in touch with that part of himself which he has lost through projection. After giving God all he has, he begs God to return to him some of what originally was his own.
(52) In societies ruled by a powerful minority which holds the masses in subjection, the individual will be so imbued with fear, so incapable of feeling strong or independent, that his religious experience will be authoritarian. Whether he worships a punishing, awesome God, or a similarly conceived leader makes little difference.
(53) The real fall of man is his alienation from himself, his submission to power, his turning against himself even though under the guise of his worship of God.
(53) To understand realistically and soberly how limited our power is is an essential part of wisdom and maturity; to worship it is masochistic and self-destructive. The one is humility, the other is self-humiliation.
(63) The human reality behind Calvin’s theological system and that of authoritarian political systems is very similar. Their spirit is one of submission to power and lack of love and respect for the individual.
Ch 4. The Pyschoanalyst as ‘Physician of the Soul.’
(79) Freud states that the Oedipus Complex is the core of every neurosis…This craving [for identity with mother and/or family power figures] is an expression of the profound and fundamental desire to remain a child attached to those protecting figures of whom the mother is the earliest and most influential.
(81) The attachment to parents is only one, though the most fundamental, form of [Oedipus Complex]. In the process of social evolution other attachments in part replace it. The tribe, the nation, the race, the state, the social class, political parties, and many other forms of institutions and organizations become home and family. Here are the roots of nationalism and racism, which in turn are symptoms of man’s inability to experience himself and others as free human beings.
(83) It would of course be a mistake to assume that the forgoing remarks imply that only those who are ‘neurotic’ have failed in this task of self-emancipation, while the average well-adjusted person has succeeded in it. On the contrary, the vast majority of people in our culture are well-adjusted because they have given up the battle for independence sooner and more radically than the neurotic person. They have accepted the judgment of the majority so completely that they have been spared the sharp pain of conflict which the neurotic person goes through.
- ie, “The Sane Society,” group insanity.
- “they have given up the battle,” ie they have submitted themselves to various forms of fanaticism, religious, political, cult of entertainment personalities, etc. But the neurotic person faces the freedom of individuality head on.
- “the sharp pain of conflict,” ie doing the critical thinking and emotional work of holding tension, holding opposites (see “Paradox and Equilibrium” essay on this site).
(85) It is the great tragedy of all great religions that they violate and pervert the very same principles of freedom as soon as they become mass organizations governed by a religious bureaucracy. The religious organization and the men who represent it take over to some extent the place of the family, tribe, and state. They keep men in bondage instead of leaving him free. It is no longer God who is worshipped, but the group that claims to speak in His name. This has happened in all religions.
(88) In authoritarian religion, sin is primarily disobedience to authority and only secondary a violation of ethical norms.
(94) “Rational thinking which is free from assumptions ends in mysticism,” Albert Schweitzer, Philosophy of Civilization.
Ch 5. Is Psychoanalysis a Threat to Religion?
(109) Just as the symbolic language which we find in dreams and myths is a particular form of expressing thoughts and feelings by images of sensory experience, the ritual is a symbolic expression of thoughts and feelings by actions.
- The Ritual of group Fanaticism
(118) It is not only pictures in stone and wood that are idols. Words can become idols, and machines can become idols; leaders, the state, power, and political groups may also serve. Science and the opinion of one’s neighbors can become idols, and God has become an idol for many.
- see Edward T Hall, Beyond Culture; Barfield, Saving the Appearances