Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, considered religion a collective neurosis that provided through its dogmas and rituals an illusory protection against human fragility. According to Freud, the personal religious "new rosis" of an individual was sustained by an infantile attachment to a caring parental figure. A mature adult needed to accept the risks of being alive without having to cling to a protective godhead. For years, analysts followed Freud's dictums without challenging their scientific value. In the past three decades, theoretical changes in psychoanalysis, in particular the introduction of object relations theory, have made it possible to have psychoanalytic theories about religious beliefs that are based on the developmental and dynamic factors that contribute to the formation of the mind and of personal belief. The changes in theory have some impact on the technical approach to the analytic understanding of religious experiences, but the essential analytic technique remains unchanged. Freud himself suggested the probable consequences of using his method:If the application of the psycho-analytic method makes it possible to find a new argument against religion, rant pis for religion; but defenders of religion will by the same right make use of psycho-analysis in order to give full value to the affective significance of religious doctrines.
Psychoanalysis recruits the power of the spoken word to modify the subject's relationship with his or her own unconscious psychic processes. It helps the analysand to reclaim for his or her words the psychic integrity that was lost or never achieved due to the power of defensive dissociation and repression. The psychoanalytic dialogue and the working through mediated by it lead to the elaboration of self-narratives and interpretive understandings, which contribute to the transformation of the subject's self-experience. Such transformation is conditioned by earlier integration of experiences of satisfaction in the context of bodily dialogues and speech with primary objects.
Patients' metaphors in analysis may allow access to ineffable experiences. This is understandable, since the mind is a bodily mind, and language is a fully embodied function of this mind. That is, both are dependent for their existence upon the physical body. The ontogenic accumulation of perceived sensory impressions and affective processes far exceeds what can be put into words. Research in cognitive psychology suggests that the active mind functions in such a manner that later perceptions are organized by means of earlier ones. However, since the mind can know only its own representations, it inhabits two ever unknown realms: the external world itself, and the domain of internal unconscious processes that sustain the mind's functions. As a result, the world and the self we know are constructed by the mediation of our bodies. In language also, the active mode by which we perceive, process, and feel makes our understanding of words dependent on previous experience. The fact that the limbic system is activated immediately in the moment of processing experience means that all modalities of representation include an affective valuation. This inevitable processing of information through the mediation of affectively valued bodily perceptions gives the metaphorical function-the human capacity to organize experience and life in metaphoric ways-the ability to create linguistic metaphors that can capture and express otherwise inexpressible psychic experiences. This manner of understanding metaphor has implications for psychoanalytic technique.
When psychoanalysis came into existence in 19th-century Germanspeaking Austria, the structure of European society was dominated by nationalism, the power of the state, and the strong presence of the Catholic and Protestant Churches regulating the life of believers. Modern science had imposed its standards and required that all knowledge conform to them. The new disciplines of archaeology, philology, and linguistics offered fascinating novel views about human life in other times and places. Socially, the nuclear family depended on the father's earning and ruling power, and women were relegated to the roles of spouse and mother under the care of the male head of household. Freud's psychoanalysis understood religion as the relationship to the monotheistic God of the culture, a Father figure. According to Freud, the child's resolution of the Oedipus complex brought about the exaltation of the paternal imago into a protective God. He deemed such a maneuver universal and saw those who clung to religious beliefs as immature individuals in need of divine protection against the uncertainty of life. Mature psychoanalysts and analyzed people were to live only on the sustenance offered by knowledge of themselves and acceptance of unavoidable frustrations. Their god was to be Logos, "human reason" and not a purported divinity in the sky.
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