Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) saw religion as an illusion. By illusion Freud means a belief that people want very much to be true. Unlike Tylor and Frazer, Freud attempted to explain why religion persists in spite of the lack of evidence for its tenets. Freud asserted that religion is a largely unconscious neurotic response to repression. By repression Freud meant that civilized society demands that we cannot fulfill all our desires immediately, but that they have to be repressed. Rational arguments to a person holding a religious conviction will not change the neurotic response of a person. This is in contrast to Tylor and Frazer who saw religion as a rational and conscious, though primitive and mistaken, attempt to explain the natural world.
Freud not only tries to explain the origin and persistence of faith in individuals but in his 1913 book Totem and Taboo he even developed a speculative story about how all monotheist religions originated and developed. In the book he asserted that monotheistic religions grew out of a homicide in a clan of a father by his sons. This incident was subconsciously remembered in human societies.
In his 1939 book Moses and Monotheism Freud proposed that Moses' monotheism derived from Akhenaten. This view is not supported by biblical accounts and differs from scholarly theories.
Freud's view on religion was embedded in his larger theory of psychoanalysis which has been criticized as unscientific. Apart from theorizing, Freud's theories were developed by studying patients who were left free to talk while lying on a sofa. Though Freud's attempt to the historical origins of religions have not been accepted, his generalized view that all religions originate from unfulfilled psychological needs are still seen as offering a credible explanation in some cases.
Read more about this topic: Theories Of Religion
Famous quotes by sigmund freud:
“The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?’”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)
“Human life in common is only made possible when a majority comes together which is stronger than any separate individual and which remains united against all separate individuals. The power of this community is then set up as ‘right’ in opposition to the power of the individual, which is condemned as ‘brute force.’”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)
“The act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety.”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)
“Civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind. Why this has to happen, we do not know; the work of Eros is precisely this.”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)
“We believe that civilization has been created under the pressure of the exigencies of life at the cost of satisfaction of the instincts.”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)