Religion is Back
Why did the 20th century remove religion?
We have been deceived.
Sigmund Freud, the father of modern psychology, has also been called “one of the great atheists of the contemporary culture.”[1] Freud's views impacted psychotherapy, psychiatry, literature, religion, philosophy, and art. Pamela Thurschwell [2] calls the twentieth century the Freudian century, adding “whatever the twenty-first century chooses to believe about the workings of the human mind, it will be, on some level, indebted to Freud.”
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Freud’s legacy remains intact as far as human psychology is concerned. Many of his theories are incorporated into modern therapies. Whether one agrees with Freud or not, it is an “incontrovertible fact,” notes Marsha Hewitt, that he has decisively shaped and influenced the way we think about, amongst other things, religion[3]. His views on religion have generated enormous debates and controversies. He believed that religion is a psychological disorder. Therefore, it could be cured away by employing the methods of psychoanalysis. His psychoanalytical account of religion as a “universal obsessional neurosis” has been particularly influential mainly because of his importance as the founder and shaper of psychoanalysis and his unique account of the unconscious psychological dynamics at work in religion. To unpack Freud’s take on religion is to unpack Freud’s understanding neurosis and its unconscious underpinnings as it relates to religion.
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Freud committed suicide in 1939 by a lethal dose of morphine, his influence continued to spread as the field of psychology evolved. By the time of his death, there were dozens of psychoanalytic societies throughout the world
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​n a nutshell, Freud’s take on religion is this: it is an evolutionary phenomenon, and that now, with the rise of modern science, it is inevitable that religion must fade away. But more than just being an evolutionary phenomenon, Freud also said that religion was first and foremost a mental illness, an “illusion” that might have helped the survival of the human species for a time, but that is now threatening human progress. The future of this “illusion,” therefore, was its extinction.
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t was of paramount importance for Freud (his whole psychological system depended upon it) that sex should supplant religion as the foremost driving force in human affairs. This conquest of religion, he thought, would not be possible so long as the Judeo-Christian restraints on sexual freedom prevailed.
[1] Ricoeur, Paul, and David Pellauer. On psychoanalysis. Cambridge: Polity, 2012. Pg. 147
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[2] Thurschwell, Pamela. Sigmund Freud. Londres: Routledege, 2000. Pg. 1
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​Source: Freud on Religion; in the beginning was the murder
"The Second Coming of Sigmund Freudhttps://parallaxisview.wordpress.com/2018/03/14/freud-on-religion-in-the-beginning-was-the-murder/
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How did we get it back?
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H. Newton Malony, professor emeritus of psychology, Fuller Seminary explains:
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A bit of history is crucial: Although religion was integral to the early development of American psychology, it became taboo for much of the first half of the twentieth century due to the rise of psychoanalysis and behaviorism.3 Both movements saw religion as a cultural regression to be superseded by science—not to be accorded a legitimate place in the personality structures of healthy individuals. Where religion was observed, it was evidence of regression or superstition.
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Two events at mid-century challenged this exclusion of religion from the purview of normal psychology: Walter Houston Clark and Gordon Allport published books on the psychology of religion,4 and the Catholic Psychological Association (CPA) was organized. This new association held annual meetings just before the conventions of the American Psychological Association (APA) for many years during the 1950s and 1960s. The CPA expanded its membership to non-Catholics in the early 1970s and changed its name to Psychologists Interested in Religious Issues (PIRI). PIRI gained enough support to become division 36 of the American Psychological Association by 1976. I was the initial presenter on division 36’s first APA program.5 (PIRI later changed its name to The Psychology of Religion in 1992.)
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Since this reentry of religion into mainline American psychology in the early 1970s, much progress has been made. The APA now includes “religion” alongside gender, ethnicity, age, and culture among those characteristics to which psychologists should attend in their work.6 Further, the APA has published a number of volumes dealing with religion and psychology.7 The inclusion of a diagnostic code referring to religious and spiritual problems in the DSM-IV-R is but the latest indication that such issues are no longer on the list of taboo topics for the mental health professions.
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The opinion of religion as pathological has now been discarded by most mental health professionals.
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Source: Theology, News & Notes, Winter 2006, “Psychology and Spirituality.”
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