WK2: FREUD’S PSYCHOLOGICAL CHALLENGE TO RELIGION: THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX
Psychologists don’t necessarily say that God doesn’t exist but that religious belief can be
explained without requiring God – that we can explain religion in terms of our own minds.
Freud’s theory is that:
Religion is an illusion based on human wishes.
Wish Fulfilment: the human mind creates beliefs and images to satisfy it’s most basic longings
and desires.
Religion is such an ‘illusion’ – it answers the inner needs of a person.
The reason humans have created religion is to over come inner psychological conflict.
Religion is a neurotic illness that comes from the unconscious mind. It results from incompletely
repressed traumatic memories and is sexual in nature.
Basically, when we’re babies we are used to having all our mother’s attention e.g. breast feeding.
But as we get older we get less and less attention. It seems that the mother’s affections are spent
towards the father. Deep down we consider the father to be a rival. We develop a deep jealousy
and hatred towards our father, which is mixed with the fear and respect we previously felt towards
him when we were young. This is the ‘Oedipus Complex’.
The Oedipus Complex refers to the old Greek myth of a boy who kills his father and marries his
mother.
Freud links this to religion by looking at how religion developed over history. First with animism
(where primal hordes would worship an idol of an animal, yet also sacrifice the revered animal on
special occasions) and then with religion, for example, the Communion feast (where Christians
eat the ‘body of Christ’ and drink the ‘blood of Christ’).
Two things are important for Freud’s theory to work:
1. That religion is the universal obsessional neurosis of mankind (that it applies to everyone)
2. That religion results from sexual guilt.
Obviously the idea of incest with one’s mother was taboo even back then and so two other
reasons why the mind created the illusion of religion was:
1. To overcome the conflict between our natural urges and civilisation (it’s taboo so we need a
way of expressing our inner sexual conflict)
2. Religion helps us to overcome our fear of the natural forces of the world (God as the father
who protects us)
Freud doesn’t provide logical proof against religion and he admitted that God could exist
objectively anyway. BUT he pointed out that beliefs based on basic psychological needs are
false.
Since he believed religion was an obsessional neurosis and that such kinds of neurosis are never
grounded in fact, in the absence of any other evidence for religion we can conclude that religion is
false.
He also said that religion should be rejected because it is not beneficial to humanity (we don’t
benefit from it).