Psychological and sociological challenges to religion

Fast facts

• The psychological and sociological challenges are a posteriori arguments challenging religious belief
• Argues from psychology (relating to human psyche) and sociology (relating to society)
• Critics include most religious people
• Advocates include Sigmund Freud, Jean Charcot and Carl Jung
  

Welcome to the psychological and sociological challenges to religion 

The psychological and sociological challenges to religion are a little different to other theories we’ve looked at so far because they’re targeted at religion and not G/d. Instead of trying to work out whether G/d exists or not, psychologists attempt to discover what it is that makes humans religious. This makes a lot of sense since most, if not all, societies have (or had) a religious element to them.

The image to the right is of the the common world religions' symbols . From top-to-bottom, left-to-right: Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, Shintoist, Sikh, Baha'i, Jain.

What are the psychological and sociological challenges to religion? 

There’s no better summary than the one in Patrick J Clarke’s ‘Examining Philosophy and Ethics: Answers for A-Level’...

The advent of psychological studies created new possibilities for the understanding of religion. It also created new possibilities for its explanation. In the hands of Sigmund Freud, religion becomes reduced to a psychic mechanism by which the individual falls victim to illusory hopes and dreams that have no foundation in reality. Religion can therefore be dismissed as an infantile obsessional neurosis arising from childhood experiences. These experiences centre on neurotic fears connected with the father figure, who looms large in the life of the developing child. The result is preoccupation with an idealised cosmic father figure, who will guarantee protection from the fears and anxieties of an otherwise meaningless life. This is the essence of religion – an understandable, but ultimately illusionary, world of make-believe. (P. J. Clarke) [1]

What the Freud?!

We’re going to be considering the work of Sigmund Freud  (see right, licensing #2), so it’s probably wise that we learn a little about him...

• Born 1856, died aged 83 in 1939 of cancer of the jaw.
• Graduate of the University of Vienna.
• Surprisingly, he managed to take his attention away from his mother for long enough to marry and have six children!

Freud’s findings

Freud argues that religion is an illusion, or psychic mechanism, created by humans to comfort us. Yep, that’s right... he says that religion is all in our heads because we’re trying to soothe ourselves.

• Religion is an aid to overcome inner psychological conflict
• Religion helps us to overcome the conflict between our desires and society
• Religion is an illusion to overcome our fear of nature

'Mind map'

Before we delve any further, we’ll need to understand Freud’s work relating to the human mind, or psyche.

The Id

The Id is the seat of the unconscious mind, the part of the mind that controls all of our basic biological impulses. These impulses are everyday things like breathing and hunger, but are also potentially socially unacceptable things like self-preservation or the desire for sex.

The Super-Ego

The Super-Ego is in conflict with the Id as it ‘wants’ the complete opposite. Developing from birth, the Super-Ego is an internalisation of society and the socially accepted norms. It is the part of the mind that criticises and makes us feel guilty.

The Ego

Stuck in the middle, trying to make sense of it all is the Ego. It filters the impulses from the Id and the Super-Ego to ensure personal safety and social acceptance are maintained.

Karate for your mind: Ego self-defence

Not only does the Ego filter the desires of the Id and Super-Ego from other people by controlling our actions, but it also filters our own thoughts. Like those pushy mothers that go to extreme lengths to protect their children, the Ego employs several ‘defence mechanisms’ to protect us from ourselves. Denial, displacement, intellectualisation, fantasy, compensation, projection, rationalisation, reaction formation, regression, repression and sublimation are a few of the methods the Ego employs. Thankfully, we’ll just be focusing on Repression and sublimation.

Repress yourself!

All things lost lie under closing water
in that lake with the poor man’s daughter (G. Clarke) [2]

You should remember that poem from GCSE English Literature if you sat AQA Specification A before 2007. The poet, Gillian Clarke, struggles to remember an incident at ‘Cold Knap Lake’ where her mother saved a drowning girl. She remembers it for the most part, but wonders whether that’s really what happened or whether her memories have been diluted by what other people have told her or what her Ego has altered.

The first repressed memory is sexual

According to Freud, the body’s most basic drive is sex, or libido. In babies, the focus of the libido is the mouth and the desire to suckle from the mother’s breasts. As the child matures, the focus of the libido heads south and changes to the desire to reproduce.

You probably don’t remember your conception or being breastfed, but if we follow Freud’s logic those are our earliest memories. We don’t remember them because they’ve been repressed. This leads to hostile feelings towards the same-sex parent.

Oedipus complex

The Oedipus complex gets its name from the play 'Oedipus Rex' by Sophocles. You'll find an amusing contemporary take on this story below...

• Oedipus learns he may be adopted so sees an oracle for advice
• Murders his biological father, without knowing he’s his biological father
• Wins the hand of the queen at the time, who happens to be his biological mother but he is unaware
• Finds out about the mess he’s got himself embroiled into and stabs himself in the eyes

• The end.

Oedipus: illustrated edition

How does a Greek tragedy like that relate to Freud and the human psyche?

• The father has sex with his wife to conceive the son.
• When the son is born, the father no longer gets the sexual attention he was getting from the mother because the son is suckling at her nips.
• As the baby develops into a child, it no longer needs breastfeeding so the attention returns to the father once again.
• As the child develops into an adolescent, the libido no longer centres on the mouth but instead on the sexual organ. However, there is already a rival in the form of the father.

This shift in attention creates a tension between the father and the son sending the Ego into overdrive. The Id has feelings of jealousy and hatred, and ultimately wants the father dead. The Super-Ego is concerned about respect for the father. The Ego’s defence mode kicks in, pushing the conflict under the surface of the lake (repression) but it’s not enough. The mind struggles to keep the memories of the conflict under the water and, as a result, ends up channelling out these feelings as neurotic behaviour.

The pieces of Freud’s argument are locking into place nicely now. The last piece is an elaboration on the neurotic behaviour. For Freud, religion is the ‘universal obsessional neurosis of mankind’, thus religion is simply a response to struggles with repressed memories. Case closed, religion is a sham.

What about girls?

Girls don’t suffer the Oedipus complex since their sex organs are the same as their mothers. They do, however, suffer the Electra complex where they believe that they’ve been castrated. They get jealous of the father and fearful of the mother. It’s almost like a case of “well, if I can’t have it neither can you”.

But, I don’t like my mum in that way!

You’re not alone, my friend; that’s the reaction Freud got. To try to justify himself, he used the work of Charles Darwin who speculated that in early societies each group, or primal horde, would hold one male as the leader. He got all the girls, which made all of the other males jealous so they’d bump him off.

With him dead, the whole structure of society would be affected. There was no centre of society, as there was before, so idols or totems were created to take his place. Sacrifices and offerings could be made to the totem to starve off feelings of guilt and jealousy. If you’ve ever seen a totem, you’ll know that they’re a phallic symbol – Freud could have a field day!

Eventually, this evolved into religion as we have today. The totem took on a divine role, becoming ‘G/d the father’ and the gods of religion. Even today, Catholics still make a sacrifice in the Eucharist which they believe to be the actual body and blood (in substance, not appearance) of Jesus of Nazareth through the process of transubstantiation.

Religion to helps us settle the inner conflict between what we want and what society says we’re allowed to do

Phew! That’s a rather long subtitle, but the second reason for our supposed creation of religion is to help us get over the fact that we can’t do everything we’d like to do because of the laws of our land.

Example

By living in society we give up a few of our rights in order to receive protection and other benefits. The Oedipus complex is the desire to the kill the father, but we know that our society punishes murder. We give up our right to murder our father, and anyone else, in order to receive protection from murder by the local law authorities. Well, that’s the idea anyway.

Religion doubles up as another of the Ego’s self-defence mechanisms, sublimation. The libido’s focus is channelled into other activities almost in an attempt to distract it. Religion gives us a reason to submit to society, it give us the promise of a better life after as a reward for our good behaviour in this society. We find a father figure in religion and G/d, someone that punishes and rewards us like a child.

Religion as an illusion to help us accept certain facts of nature

We may have domesticated cats and dogs, but we can’t tame nature... we can’t control the weather and we can’t completely prevent death. Ultimately, we are helpless in the hands of Mother Earth and her cruel ways.

An “act of G/d” is a legal term for events outside of human control, such as sudden floods or other natural disasters, for which no one can be held responsible. Religion personifies G/d by making G/d the force that controls nature. By offering sacrifices and praying to G/d, we are able to gain some control over the elements.

Again, religion and G/d become a father figure by providing us protection from nature in the same way a father would protect his children.

“Oi, Freud... Ya mom!”

Did you know that Freud even tried to take humour away from us? It’s true! Apparently humour is another of the Ego’s defence mechanisms...

The source of all jokes, humour, wit and comedy is man's repressed instinctual nature, especially the instincts of sex and aggression. In civilisation, these emotions (and all their variations) can seldom be expressed directly. But they are permitted entry into consciousness in the distorted form of jokes and humour, whose true unconscious meaning is understood by all. Jokes allow a momentary suspension of the repressions which bind the emotions of forbidden sexuality and aggression, a discharge of the energy of the counter-cathexis (the process of investment of mental or emotional energy in a person, object or idea) which maintains the repressions, and the feeling of pleasure which accompanies this discharge.

Yeah, so we can’t even make fun of Freud for some of his bizarre ideas because that’s just further evidence of our love for our mother and hatred of our father! Here are a few other criticisms to consider...

Religion to overcome inner psychological conflict

• What about ‘test-tube babies’?
  Their conception was in a lab and so their earliest memory wouldn’t be conception.
• What about single parent families?
  There are a lot of cases where a mother is raising a son without a father figure, yet very few cases of sons doing things they shouldn’t be with their mums.
• What about gay children?
  Are they after their mum, too?

Religion to overcome authority in society

• Not all early religions were totem-based.
  In fact, Darwin merely speculated about the existence of the primal horde and there is no concrete evidence. It’s actually now been discredited by modern science.
• Darwin also put forward the theory of evolution.
  Meaning that at some point we were animals. There is no evidence in the animal kingdom of a father figure that is both respected and hated. Funny how Freud overlooked that.

Religion to overcome our fear of nature

• Freud tested on a small number of people.
  The bigger the test size, the more accurate the results. Since Freud tested on a relatively small number of people, his findings might not be totally trustworthy.

Final thoughts

Aristotle once said that “it is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it” and that’s definitely true for anyone studying Freud. While he may be the father of psychoanalysis, there are very few people who would actually accept his theories for obvious reasons. The criticisms do quash much of what he theorises and, ultimately, there are very few of us that actually want to accept that we love our mum’s in the way Freud suggests.

Pisp.co.uk

This article was written by Michael McGovern of the Pisp.co.uk team More content like this at Pisp.co.uk, a new website with tools and resources to deliver philosophy to the masses.

Licensing

1. Religious Symbols. Image public domain under EU law, from Wikipedia:
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Religious_syms.svg
2. Sigmund Freud, 1856-1939 2003665310. There are no known restrictions on publication, from Library of Congress:
   http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3b19621
3. His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI celebrating the Eucharist. Image Creative Commons Attribution, from Agência Brasil:
   http://www.agenciabrasil.gov.br/
   

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