Religion as a social construction and a wish-fulfi lling illusion Primitive man has no choice; he has no other way of thinking. It is nat- ural to him … to project his existence outwards into the world and to regard every event … he observes as the manifestation of beings who … are like himself. It is his only method of comprehension. And it is by no means self-evident; on the contrary it is a remarkable coincidence, if by thus indulging his natural disposition he succeeds in satisfying one of his greatest needs.
(Freud, 1927 , p. 21) Freud presented arguments from a number of perspectives – historical, anthropo- logical, genetic, epiphenomenological, 1 philosophical, and psychological – in sup- port of his objections to religion, the most oft-cited being that religion is a form of wishful thinking derived from infantile neurosis, at the heart of which are our feelings of helplessness and our longing for a loving and powerful father. He concluded that: “Religious doctrines have to be discarded … [because] nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the contradiction which religion off ers to both is all too palpable. Even purifi ed religious ideas cannot escape this fate”
(Freud, 1927 , p. 54). Freud maintained that religion is a social construction that was an inevitable but “delusionary” by-product of the collectivization and civiliza- tion of humans that served multiple purposes for rulers and followers alike. People, Freud argued ( 1930 ), “attempt to procure a certainty of happiness and protection against suff ering through a delusional remoulding of reality” which becomes, in eff ect, a “mass delusion” (p. 81). The fact that religion, this “delusional remoulding of reality”, takes so many diverse forms is evidence of social construction – that is,
“civilization creates these religious ideas” (Freud, 1930, p. 21); the appearance and
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expression of these religious ideas arise from and are contextually embedded in the social milieu in which they take form.
Social and cultural phenomena are powerful determinants of beliefs and behav- iours, even in biology. For example, menopause is viewed diff erently in diff erent cultures and these diff erences in the social construction of menopause aff ect the way in which menopause is experienced by women. In cultures in which older women are valued, such as Thailand, Guatemala, Mexico, Japan and Papua New Guinea, women rarely report menopausal symptoms (Lock, 1995 ). This is in stark contrast to women in Western society, where ageism is rife and where menopause is medicalized, that is, constructed as a disease needing treatment, and dreaded by women approaching this stage of their biological life cycle (Wilson, 1966 ).
Unsurprisingly, Western women report multiple symptoms not experienced (or at least not reported) in cultures that value older women. Freud ( 1926 ) expressed rather strong opinions regarding the menopause. Below is an example.
People have not been spoilt by successes in the therapy of the neuroses; the nerve-specialist has at least “taken a lot of trouble with them”. Indeed, there is not much that can be done; nature must help, or time. With women there is fi rst menstruation, then marriage, and later on the menopause. Finally, death is a real help.
(Freud, 1926, p. 232) Freud was critical of an anthropomorphic God, specifi cally as characterized in the Judeo-Christian religions – he did not consider other representations of God and was critical of those who did:
Where questions of religion are concerned, people are guilty of every pos- sible sort of dishonesty and intellectual misdemeanour. Philosophers stretch the meaning of words until they retain scarcely anything of their original sense. They give the name of “God” to some vague abstraction which they have created for themselves; having done so they can pose before all the world as deists, as believers in God, and they can even boast that they have recognized a higher, purer concept of God, notwithstanding that their God is now nothing more than an insubstantial shadow and no longer the mighty personality of religious doctrines . [My italics]
(Freud, 1927 , p. 32)
“However, [all these meanings of God] have arisen from the same need as have all the other achievements of civilization: from the necessity of defending oneself against the crushingly superior force of nature” (Freud, 1913a , p. 21). The unifying concept, which Freud described as the “root of every form of religion” (Freud, 1913a , p. 148) is the longing for the father and protection against unassailable forces.
Contrary to common opinion, Freud did not claim that his theory about belief in
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God disproved God’s existence. He conceded that even if he succeeded in dem- onstrating that belief in God fulfi lled humankind’s most primitive yearning, God might, nevertheless, exist.
It is worth noting that Freud’s anti-religious sentiments found fertile soil in the chaotic political scene that unfolded in the early twentieth century, in which the perpetrators of ethnocentrism, anti-Semitism, jingoistic nationalism and genocide were all claiming the religious and moral high ground. Signifi cantly, of the two taboos that were central to Freud’s understanding of totemism, one belongs to intrapsychic processes and the other to social motives:
The two taboos of totemism with which human morality has its beginning are not on a par psychologically. The fi rst of them, the law protecting the totem animal, is founded wholly on emotional motives: the father had actu- ally been eliminated, and in no real sense could the deed be undone. But the second rule, the prohibition of incest, has a powerful practical basis as well. Sexual desires do not unite men but divide them. Though the broth- ers had banded together in order to overcome their father, they were all one another’s rivals in regard to the women.
(Freud, 1913a , pp. 143–4) Because religion arose from human imagination – that is, man created God – it has evolved in many forms since the totemic practices of primitive cultures. The evolution of religion also had a cognitive dimension, demonstrated in the ani- mistic and artifi cialistic beliefs characteristic of the early cognitive development of young children (see Chapter 2 ). As man’s cognitive processes evolved, allow- ing some to think abstractly and dialectically, so too did some, but certainly not all, religious doctrines and argumentation about religion. Todd ( 2012 ) bemoans the primitive anthropomorphic god that Dawkins ( 2006 ) attempts to demolish, but presents counter-arguments about transpersonal, transcendent numinosity that few can understand.
Freud’s four works on religion, taken together, represent an elegant claim, but can we be satisfi ed with argumentation alone? Science depends on observation, the gathering of facts and the development of testable hypotheses. How can we test Freud’s assertions regarding the veracity of his theories of religion? Freud believed that advances in the scientifi c understanding of our universe off ered by scientists such as Copernicus, Kepler, Newton and Darwin constituted devastating blows to religious belief based on the cosmological argument. Other phenomena, such as the vast troves of myths, legends and fairy tales that all have the same under- lying thematic structure of the monumental struggle between good and evil, fought between humans and a range of supernatural beings with the ultimate triumph of good, suggest that man has a deep need to fi nd order and justice in life, which would otherwise appear capricious and without meaning. This is one reason that religion has taken root and strenuously resists all assaults on its validity.
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Freud believed that psychoanalysis infl icted the death blow to religion. Lest Freud appear too grandiose in this assertion, we should note that David Hume ( 1757 ) in The Natural History of Religion pre-empted Freud by 150 years in drawing the same conclusion that religion existed to provide a buff er against human mis- ery and the acceptance of the fi nality of death. Similarly, Ludwig Feuerbach ( 1841 ) in The Essence of Christianity apprehended the fundamental thesis of Freud’s the- ory – that God is a grandiose projection of man’s own nature, purifi ed and deifi ed, motivated by the insatiable longing to be cared for in the way in which an idealized father would care for his child. Freud’s contribution to these philosophical insights was to provide a psychology of religion grounded in the systematic introspective study of human nature.
There are two axiomatic themes transfusing Freud’s major works on religion which we will briefl y review here. The fi rst is that sons ‘kill’ their fathers, either in reality or symbolically; the second is that sons, and indeed all children, have a loving relationship with their fathers in infancy that they wish to replicate endlessly. The sequelae of these acts and experiences form the basis of religion. In Totem and Taboo , the sons killed the primal father; in Moses and Monotheism , the Jewish tribe killed its
‘father’, Moses, throwing the tribe into inconsolable guilt and remorse. Although both of these works represented a search for historical truth, Freud concluded that we have a predilection for accepting as true our deeply felt wishes, and hence our search for truth is fl awed, as, inevitably, will be the outcome of such a search.
Notwithstanding, Freud concluded that the ancestral father was later represented in the totem animal in subsequent generations, a representation that reinforced suc- cessive generations’ identifi cation with this father. The image (i.e., object represen- tation) of the primal father that expressed itself as the totem animal is inherited trans-generationally in latent form, becoming manifest through social and cultural changes to the environment, both internal (e.g., cognitive development) and exter- nal (e.g., migration, the appearance of a new leader). Freud ( 1939 ) contended that Moses’ idea of monotheism “signifi ed the revival of an experience in the primeval ages of the human family which had long vanished from man’s conscious memory”
(p. 129). The totem animal, at fi rst a surrogate of the father, morphed into ‘God’ at a later stage (Freud, 1913a ). This single God of Moses was easy to accept because Moses was felt to be the primal father incarnate, just as Jesus was accepted as God incarnate thousands of years later.
We have, of course, no way of verifying Freud’s theory. Hans Küng ( 1986 ) argued that although belief in God can be subjected to psychological analysis, this analysis can make no claim regarding the existence of God. The wish for God signals nei- ther God’s existence nor non-existence. Freud himself conceded that as history, his theory is open to criticism because it is not well grounded in historical fact.
How can we know whether primitive man conceived of the totem animal in the manner described by Freud? Was he capable of ambivalent feelings and were these responsible for the murder of the primal father? Was he capable of experiencing guilt? What is the actual mechanism of transmission of primal man’s representation of the primal father and their guilt and longing for the lost father to subsequent
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generations? Rizzuto ( 1979 ) has provided a scholarly evaluation of the complexities of Freud’s psychoanalytic theory related to the origins of religion, and I refer the interested reader there for a detailed discussion. Despite the shortcomings in Freud’s theories on religion, Rizzuto concluded that
Freud’s original formulation is essentially correct … [it] is one of his major contributions to the understanding of man – particularly of man as an object- related being, of man’s lifelong use of early imagos and object representations, his dependence on object relations and his religiosity as an object-related activity.
(Rizzuto, 1979, p. 28) Put simply, an individual’s conception of God is coloured by his cultural inherit- ance overlaid and mutated by personal experience, particularly the quality of the early caregiving environment. As Rizzuto ( 1979 ) summarized: “Freud insisted that God was nothing but the wishful emotional clinging to an exalted childhood father transformed into a supernatural being” (p. xix). It is noteworthy that the mother does not fi gure in Freud’s theory of religion. In each of his applications and exten- sions of this basic precept of his theory, it is the father alone who fi gures: for example, the Father God emerged from the leader of the primal horde and the totem object; the Father God was pre-eminent in the religion of Moses and in the advent of Christ (the second Moses); and in the origins of Haizmann’s and Schreber’s psychoses (Meissner, 2009 ).
Freud’s search was fi rmly directed towards understanding why people believe in God. He never explained why people do not believe in God, perhaps because he viewed non-belief as self-evident. He did make a passing reference to the issue that provides some clues: “a turning-away from religion is bound to occur with the fatal inevitability of a process of growth, and that we fi nd ourselves at this very juncture in the middle of that phase of development” (Freud, 1927 , p. 43). This is a fascinating question that awaits further elucidation. For example, what experiences in infancy presage non-belief? Could it be that some infants do not long for their fathers? Surely, at birth, all infants are equally helpless.
What special qualities do non-believers share that prevent them from joining in the mass delusion of religion? We cannot assert that only na ï ve, ill-educated, intellectually limited or culturally indoctrinated individuals succumb to such beliefs, as our earlier discussion of the scientist-believers demonstrated, nor can we assert that only children who have had primarily positive, or for that mat- ter negative, parenting experiences are candidates for faith. Securely attached individuals might believe in God because their image of God is an extension of a much-loved earthly father. Insecurely attached individuals might believe in God as a compensation for the poor parenting they received from their earthly fathers. Conversely, they might believe in a punishing God who replicates the authoritarian fathering that they received from their earthly fathers; or they might not believe in God at all, arguing that if God existed, He would have
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intervened to stop the torment infl icted upon helpless children by excessively punitive fathers.
Perhaps the answer lies in developmental experiences beyond infancy. Freud’s thesis regarding the splitting of the good and bad aspects of the actual father and the spiritual father may contain the kernel of an explanation as to why people do not believe in God. As they grow, children increasingly harbour resentment and hostility towards their parents which is at some point transposed onto a Deity. In this process, Freud believed that the image of a personal God that people derive from the image of the exalted father is also the same source upon which the image of Satan is formed (Freud, 1910 ). This father image, in turn, originated from two sources, according to Freud – the ancestral father of the primal horde and one’s actual father. This is not too diffi cult to grasp – fathers are neither all-good nor all- bad and off spring therefore react to the father with opposing sets of emotions: on the one hand, aff ection and submission, on the other, hostility and defi ance. This is why man’s perception of and relationship with God has always been ambiva- lent. At fi rst, God and Satan were one, just like the idealized human father, but both are eventually split – the ‘good’ father became God; the ‘bad’ father became Satan (Freud, 1923a ). This splitting relieves individuals from acknowledging and processing their rage towards either their actual father or God the Father – it is more comfortable to project these feelings into a being that is the subject of uni- versal and sanctioned hatred, thus splitting off those feelings that properly belong to one’s ‘real’ father. In so doing, one fails to reach a mature, integrated stance that permits acceptance of the ‘actual’ father as both good and bad, and in so doing to relinquish the idealized father (God) who is all good and the denigrated father (Satan) who is all bad.
Like children’s relationships with their real fathers, as they grow and develop, they increasingly resent paternal (‘divine’) authority and interference and perhaps entertain a wish that father (God) did not exist, thus allowing them freedom to behave as they want, or at least to make their own decisions about how to behave.
This phase occurs in adolescence with one’s real parents during the period of Sturm und Drang (i.e., the ‘storm and stress’ of adolescent rebellion against parental and other authority), a stage that is part of the natural process of separation and individuation that occurs throughout childhood (Erikson, 1959 ) which coincides with the time at which child believers in God begin to question and reject their faith. Children become increasingly independent of their parents and the infl u- ence of self-chosen models becomes ascendant. In this process of separation and individuation, letting go of parents may also signal a letting go of God, who is, after all, modelled on the image of the (fallen) ‘exalted father’. Some psychoana- lysts suppose that a psychoanalytic cure entails the relinquishing of belief in God because it signifi es a relinquishing of infantile fantasies/neuroses and an embrace of the harsh realities of human existence without experiencing them as crushing (Fenichel, 1938 ).
There has been a barrage of criticism from scholars within a range of other disciplines regarding what they argue to be Freud’s errors, generalizations and
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speculations. 2 This body of criticism is extensive and only a small sampling will be undertaken here. First, the criticism will be presented, followed by an attempted rebuttal, if I believe one to be justifi ed. For a more detailed discussion of some of these criticisms, see Palmer ( 1997 ).
1. Freud’s adoption of a primal horde theory, which states that the dominant male ‘possesses’ all the females and drives the young males, his competitors, out of the horde is not a universal social organization as claimed by Freud. Social primates exhibit wide variations in their social structures ranging from solitary members, mated pairs, isolated one-male groups and more-or-less democratic member collectives (Simonds, 1974 ; Zuckerman, 1932 ). Nonetheless, social structures can never be entirely ‘fl at’ – there will always emerge a more dom- inant individual or groups of individuals who will try to subjugate the major- ity. Communism was a failed experiment because of the irreconcilable clash between human nature and the concept of absolute equality in the collective.
2. Totemism is not a demonstrable foundation of religion. Frazer ( 1910b ) argued that because totems were not ‘worshipped’ they could not be deities. Although not universal, totems were a signifi cant part of many primitive cultures. The key point belongs to Durkheim – the group was deifi ed and ‘worshipped’
itself.
3. The universality of the presence of sexual aggression and sexual rivalry as the motivation for the murder of the primal father has not been demonstrated (Schmidt, 1931 ). I would argue that the sexual component of the rivalry is not essential for the theory to stand, just as I have argued elsewhere (Kenny, 2013 ) and below that Freud’s proposed Oedipus complex is not essential to psycho- analytic theory generally (Kenny, 2014 ). Consider the biblical sibling rivalries between Cain and Abel, Isaac and Ishmael and Joseph and his brothers. None of these murderous rivalries had a sexual origin.
4. The problematic status of the Oedipus complex. The anthropological counter- argument is that it is only possible, if indeed it exists at all, in a patriarchal and patrilineal society. A corollary in matriarchal and matrilineal societies has not been found. This is such an important issue, given its psychoanalytic roots, that I have dealt with it in a separate section, although my discussion will be psy- choanalytic, not anthropological (see below).
5. Freud’s so-called Lamarckian notion that psychological experiences may be trans-generationally transmitted, that is, a form of ‘psychic inheritance’, met with a great deal of early criticism, but is now fi nding support in the discipline of cultural neuroscience (Kitayama & Uskul, 2011 ). A cogent example is the secondary traumatization of the children of Holocaust survivors (Mendelsohn, 2006 ).
6. The anthropologist Bronislav Malinowski ( 1927 ) argued that if the killing of the father was the foundation of religion, it necessarily had to occur before culture, that is, in the ‘prehuman anthropoid family’. Its absence in animal and prehuman collectives is argued to be a death blow to Freud’s theory. This