Testament, dunamis refers to God's power, represented in Jesus as the Christ. According to the gospel writers, Christ's ability to conquer the power (dunamis) of death originates from his being empowered by God.6
The second metaphor for repression derives from politics. Politicians must repress opponents w h o struggle against them, especially if those opponents gain the public's ear and rouse the masses. Freud says some- thing similar can occur within the psychic economy of h u m a n beings.
By 1920 Freud had developed a tripartite theory of the personality.
The first and oldest portion of the personality was the id (das Es), the source of instinctual forces. The second was the ego (das Ich), and the third the superego (das Uber-Ich). Ideally, the ego rules. But in m o - ments of chaos or instinctual upsurge, the id might gain control of the reins of self-governance. Or, at other moments, w h e n the ego per- ceives that it has failed to abide by the superego's demands, the su- perego might gain control and punish the ego severely, even driving it to death.7 Like any judicious ruler, then, the ego must organize its defense against the mobs that threaten it with anarchy and against internal threats as well. It does this by repressing ideas that emerge from the id and by repressing condemnations and threats that emanate from the superego.
The third metaphor for repression comes from literature and its sup- pression. In Freud's time military censors often blacked out large seg- ments of newspapers that gave accounts of maneuvers and battles. In the middle of a large printed page one might find, literally, a large black spot—the product of efficient censorship. W h e n Freud first announced the utility of the concept of repression, he did so in the context of his equally brilliant concept of "the censorship." This term figures promi- nently in the great theory sections of Freud's masterpiece, The Interpre- tation of Dreams.8 There, drawing upon yet other metaphors, Freud suggests that a censor operating within the dreamer's mind is responsi- ble for deleting from consciousness ideas that would bring discomfort (psychic pain).
actor that the entire event occurred out there, apart from anything that preceded the occult m o m e n t . O n e finds a similar set of approaches to religious experience. O n e group of psychologists views religious experi- ence as entirely the product of internal experience. A second group views religious experience as entirely the product of external forces (di- vine forces) impinging upon h u m a n beings. Freud belongs to the first group. M a n y traditional theologians and other religious experts belong to the second group. O u r central question has been, D o e s the concept of repression illuminate occult experience? O n e w a y to answer this ques- tion is to see if the concept of repression illuminates ordinary religious experience.
Freud used the repression theory to examine all religious experience.
I have suggested that the term repression has a dual parentage, partly from physiology and partly from psychology. T h e term is a brilliant solu- tion to technical issues in the psychology of neurotic conflicts because it links together somatic events, like a stomachache, with psychological causes, like one's competitor getting the job instead of oneself. Repres- sion links together, in other words, the two "realms" of experience with which Freud was most concerned: the somatic systems (the body) and the mental mechanism (the mind). With concepts like repression in his conceptual toolbox Freud could construct his revolutionary insights into the hidden meanings of physical symptoms and similar physiological events.
Freud did not stop there. H e also sought to explore the meaning and function of cultural artifacts using the same set of conceptual tools. W e find Freud writing voluminously not just on neurosis and psychosis, but on art, religion, and history as well. Freud's essays on the art of Leon- ardo da Vinci, on Moses, and on Feodor Dostoevski are as well k n o w n as his essays on dreams and symptoms. W h e n Freud examined religious experience, he employed his chief conceptual tool, the concept of re- pression.
In Freud's best-known essay on religion, The Future of an Illusion,9 he claims to show that religion is a grand illusion, based on h u m a n wish- fulfillment and the universal need to feel loved by divine parental p o w - ers that will safeguard us against the dangers of the world, especially death. Freud's lesser-known works on ritual, uncanny experience, and Moses contain far richer psychoanalytic accounts of religion.10 In these texts one sees that Freud took religious claims seriously. Indeed, as he says in a very late essay, his science, psychoanalysis, has only one great e n e m y and opponent: religion.11
Freud feels that religion is an opponent to psychoanalysis because re- ligion appears to cure the miseries that plague both ordinary folk and
neurotics. Miseries such as feelings of depression, worthlessness, bleak- ness, and similar states of psychic pain afflict the just and the unjust,
the neurotic and the normal. These miseries are all based on the frus- tration of infantile wishes for loving, unceasing protection from divine parents, immortality, preservation from harm, and so on. Religious teachings suggest that one might indirectly fulfill these wishes by carry- ing out certain actions and affirming certain beliefs. By fulfilling these wishes religion offers a way out of the psychic pain that otherwise seems our c o m m o n lot. Wishes that a neurotic person has repressed, for ex- ample, the wish for immortality, religion seems to grant and declare fulfilled. Religious teachings, according to Freud, are powerful and be- lievable because they reinstate to consciousness wishes and feelings that had been repressed. Religion gains prestige because it sanctions re- pressed yearnings. Religion seems to contradict the harsh dictates of an unfeeling natural world. Religion, in its Judeo-Christian form, says that the ultimate forces that rule our human world are personal ones, the will of a loving god.
Religious experiences, for example, visions of a deity that appears to be intimately involved with one's life, are often visions of a personal god. Freud explains religious experiences by using his concept of the return of the repressed and a variation, the return of surmounted be- liefs. The latter are beliefs one once entertained in childhood but seemed to outgrow. For example, in uncanny experiences like visita- tions by ghosts, it seems that ideas that one once entertained as a child but later repressed return and are justified by current events. Freud concludes that uncanny moments, and by extension religious experi- ences, have two sources. Repressed ideas, for example, incestuous wishes, may return to consciousness because they appear to be ful- filled. The heroes of many science-fiction stories, for example, go back in time to encounter their parents, w h o were then at the hero's present age. Such encounters raise the danger and excitement of an actual incestuous event, for n o w no age barrier separates child and parent. Other science-fiction stories and ghost stories place their heroes in circumstances in which magic pills, robots, or special fluids grant them powers that were once the stuff of childhood fantasy. The abilities to fly, be invisible, and see through people's clothing are all available in one form of fantasy or another.
These fantasies, long surmounted by adult experience and education, are pleasurable when presented in the proper atmosphere of a movie or novel. In this way surmounted fantasies have little of the danger and thrill linked to repressed fantasies. By definition, such wishes must re- main repressed; they cannot be owned directly. Yet the immense quan-
tity of affect associated with them—their "libidinal charge"—remains, therefore, repressed as well. Freud uses his central idea of repression to
make a brilliant analysis of the power of religious ideas: They gain their potency through their linkage to ideas long repressed yet to which are attached the most powerful currents of infantile life. As w e saw above, a key feature of Freud's theory is the axiom that all ideas have attached to them a quantity of force (or cathexis). W h e n dangerous ideas are repressed, that quantity of force remains attached to them and so un- available to the ego. W h e n those ideas are liberated, as may occur in primitive cultures that sanction certain forms of sexual license, there are also liberated intense emotional forces.