Материал: The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion by John Hinnells
Chapter 11
Psychology of religion
Dan Merkur
The psychology of religion studies the phenomena of religion in so far as they may be understood psychologically. Religions and their denominations differ regarding the extent of the psychologizing that they each embrace, tolerate, and reject. For many religious devotees, psychological understanding is inherently antagonistic to religion because it ascribes to the human mind what those devotees credit to more-than-human agencies. They view the psychology of religion as a program that reduces religion to psychology. Other devotees are instead sympathetic to the psychology of religion. They value critical research as an irreplaceable means for the purification of religion from idolatry of the merely human.
Like psychology in general, the psychology of religion is an umbrella term for the findings of several, mutually exclusive schools of thought, each with its own research agenda and methodology. The major disciplinary affiliations include: the academic study of religion; academic psychology; psychoanalysis; analytic psychology; and transpersonal psychology. These several approaches to the psychological study of religion tend to be pursued in isolation from each other, as non-communicating and mutually disdainful subdisciplines. A useful way to comprehend both their strengths and their differences is to attend to the questions that they seek to answer. The overall project of each school of thought determines both what data it addresses and what methodologies it considers appropriate.
Psychology in the service of the history of religion
Psychologically oriented studies by historians of religion adhere to the methodological phenomenology of the history of religion in general. The manifest contents of religious experience are discussed, but no mention is ever made of the unconscious. The question of primary interest for this school of research has been whether psychology can explain otherwise inexplicable features of the historical record of the world’s many and diverse religions. The psychology of religion, so conceived, subserves the writing of the history of religion, addresses the religious past more frequently than the religious present, and has been minutely attentive to cross-cultural findings in world religions.
Rejecting theories of cultural evolution that contrasted ‘magic’ and ‘religion’, Rudolf Otto (1932) suggested that experiences of the holy or ‘numinous’ were the defining characteristics of religion. For Otto (1950 [1917]), the numinous was a sui generis category of human experience. The quality of numinosity is sometimes experienced as awe and urgency at the mystery and immanent majesty of the Wholly Other; it may alternatively be known as a fascination at an august and transcendent ‘Something More’. Otto’s student and
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colleague, Nathan Söderblom (1933), argued that experiences of the numinous explained the veneration of sacred books. The world’s Âscriptures are not held to be holy merely because of the ideas that they contain. Rather, the texts are sacred because their ideas concern living powers. Scriptures pertain to spirits, gods, or God that people encounter in personal religious experiences. When the numina cease to be experienced, interest in the books fails.
Many historians of religion pursued similar lines of inquiry with increasing detail. Söderblom’s student Ernst Arbman (1939) argued that myths are venerated because the gods that they portray are credited with invisible responsibility for the fortuitous events of everyday life. Should belief in providential miracles fail, however, the myths decline into folktales. Biblical scholars noted that some Israelite prophets were described in fashions consistent with physically active trance states. Other ancient prophets were clearly not in trances. Some biblical data pointed to hypnagogic states, which occur between waking and falling asleep. Other prophets may have experienced inspirations during dream-like states of deep trance. Attention was also called to the ecstatic, experiential side of classical Greek religion; and the distinctive features of shamanism were noted in a variety of contexts. Zoroaster, the prophet who reformed ancient Iranian religion, was alleged to have been a shaman; and the legend of the opening of Muhammad’s breast was treated as a folklore motif that described a shamanic initiation. The character of Vainamoinen in the Finnish national epic, The Kalevala, was identified as a shaman; and detailed studies were made of Siberian, Lapp, Native American, and other cultural variations of shamanism, past and present.
Underlying these psychologically oriented studies in the history of religion is the axiomatic assumption that most people are religious because they personally have religious experiences. Good and bad fortune may be attributed to demons, spirits, gods, God, karma, or what you will. Both conversions and subsequent encounters with numinous beings and numinous states of existence may proceed through dreams, visions, voices, or mystical unions. Notice needs also to be taken of occasional, highly emotionally charged rites. These orders of religious experience are, for those who have them, the very core of religion itself. In this approach to religion, people believe in myths, they subscribe to theologies, they engage in rites, precisely because they have religious experiences. For devotees, religious experiences confirm, prove, modify, extend – in short, motivate – the balance of what religion entails.
Two Swedish scholars who were trained by Söderblom formalized the axiomatic assumption with detailed psychological theories. Ernst Arbman argued that religious trance states, which he documented on a worldwide basis, varied in their contents in accord with the religious beliefs and expectations of the devotee. The religious belief complex was converted by the trance state from a series of ideas into a vivid, dream-like experience. Differences among visions, voices, automatic behavior, stigmata, solipsistic mystical unions, and all other trance phenomena, reflected differences in the pre-trance beliefs and expectations.
Hjalmar Sundén instead adapted the notion of a ‘social role’ from its original context in reference to interpersonal behavior as observed by social psychologists. The term had greater application in the study of religion, he maintained, than in explaining the roles of shaman, prophet, priest, lay person, mystic, and so forth. Sundén applied the concept to the apparent behavior of a greater-than-human personality, such as a spirit, angel, or God, as it manifests in a religious experience. Sundén proposed that people may learn a variety of roles that may manifest in the course of their religious experiences.
The theories of Arbman and Sundén both imply that religious experiences are learned behavior, whose differences are to be sought in the contents of the learning. It then follows that whether discussion is to be made of belief complexes or religious roles, analysis of the
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learned materials can be pursued competently by historians, without need for special training in psychology. This conclusion is a product of historians’ methods, however. Only when the psychology of religion is limited to the identification of patterns in historical religious data does psychological expertise become unnecessary.
Religion as group pathology
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), the founder of psychoanalysis, once privately remarked, ‘Mankind has always known that it possesses spirit: I had to show it that there are also instincts’. A few sentences later, he went on to reject the validity of religion. ‘Religion originates in the helplessness and anxiety of childhood and early manhood. It cannot be otherwise’. The apparent contradiction is to be explained by the special senses in which Freud referred to spirit and religion. For Freud, spirit (in German, Geist, which also means ‘intellect’) was an objectively existing intellectual power abroad in the cosmos that is responsible for life, reason, self-consciousness, and telepathy. Echoing Aristotle, Freud named ‘the psychological ideal, the primacy of the intellect’ and spoke of ‘the voice of the intellect’ as an intrapsychic manifestation of ‘our God Logos.’
Freud used the criterion of evidence as a basis for defining religion in a contrasting manner.
Critics persist in describing as ‘deeply religious’ anyone who admits to a sense of man’s insignificance or impotence in the face of the universe, although what constitutes the essence of the religious attitude is not this feeling but only the next step after it, the reaction to it which seeks a remedy for it. The man who goes no further, but humbly acquiesces in the small part which human beings play in the great world – such a man is, on the contrary, irreligious in the truest sense of the word.
For Freud, spirituality pertained to the reality of the universe, inclusive of belief in its scientific knowledge. Speculation beyond the limits of intellect involved unproven and unprovable beliefs that he called religious. Freud further defined religion in conformance with liberal nineteenth-century Christian and Jewish theologies, as a ‘system of doctrines and promises’ concerning ‘a careful Providence’ that is imagined ‘in the figure of an enormously exalted father’. Freud saw both magic and religion as misunderstandings of the nature of spirit that substituted infantile hopes and wishes for a scientifically valid appreciation. In likening magic and religion to childhood neuroses, he was both likening them to premodern beliefs such as astral myths and Ptolemy’s geocentric astronomy, and suggesting that they derived their contents from the same infantile fantasies that shape neuroses.
As a clinician who wrote very little of mental health but extensively of psychopathology, Freud mentioned spirit only in passing but discussed magic and religion at length. He regularly addressed the questions: What are magic and religion? And why do people engage in them? He expressed his basic view of religion in a dense paragraph in ‘Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood’ (1957 [1910]):
Psycho-analysis has made us familiar with the intimate connection between the fathercomplex and belief in God; it has shown us that a personal God is, psychologically, nothing other than an exalted father, and it brings us evidence every day of how young people lose their religious beliefs as soon as their father’s authority breaks down. Thus we recognize that the roots of the need for religion are in the parental complex; the
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almighty and just God, and kindly Nature, appear to us as grand sublimations of father and mother, or rather as revivals and restorations of the young child’s ideas of them. Biologically speaking, religiousness is to be traced to the small human child’s long- drawn-out helplessness and need of help; and when at a later date he perceives how truly forlorn and weak he is when confronted with the great forces of life, he feels his condition as he did in childhood, and attempts to deny his own despondency by a regressive revival of the forces which protected his infancy.
With very few changes, Freud maintained the same position for the remainder of his life. Religion functions primarily to offer consolation for human helplessness. The consolation is fictional. God is a fantasy that is based on infantile memories of father and mother and motivated by human helplessness.
In an essay entitled ‘Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices’ (1959 [1907]), Freud noted several parallels between personal rites that occur as symptoms of neurosis and the public rites of religions. He suggested that both arise as symbolic substitutes for unconscious guilt. In neurotic rites, the unconscious guilt is sexual; in religious rites, it is a response to egoism. Freud likely had in mind patients whose self-righteousness about ritual observances misdirected attention from ethical failings.
In Totem and Taboo (1958 [1913]), Freud expanded his argument to book length. He began by summarizing the anthropological evidence that incest is prohibited in aboriginal Australian cultures. Noting widespread practices of avoiding mothers-in-law, Freud suggested that extreme forms of avoidance had been added to a core prohibition of incest, in much the same irrational manner that obsessional neurotics multiply inhibitions. Because no one bothers to prohibit anything that is not desired, the two basic taboos of aboriginal Australian religions – not to kill the totem animal, and not to marry within the clan – indicated the content of the oldest and most powerful human desires. These desires are to kill the ancestral totem animal and to commit incest. Freud also connected guilt over the desire for patricide with the widespread belief in, fear of, and devotion toward ancestral spirits. In this way, Freud located the Oedipus complex – a boy’s unconscious wish to kill his father and have sex with his mother – at the core of totemism, which was widely regarded at the time as the most primitive form of religion worldwide. Freud further argued that Christianity presents a similar ambivalence. Its God, who is explicitly called Father, is both murdered in the gospel narrative and consumed ritually in the mass; and Christianity’s emphasis of virginity and celibacy can be seen as extreme forms of incest avoidance. The centrality of irrational Oedipal themes in both totemism and Christianity attested to the human origin and neurotic character of religion.
Freud maintained that magic was to be explained by the ‘omnipotence of thoughts’, a phenomenon that is found in obsessional neurosis in which thoughts are projected onto and substituted for reality. Magic is narcissistic in that it attributes supernatural power to the self, rather than to ancestral ghosts, totem spirits, and so forth. Because magic does not presuppose the existence of personal spirits, as religion does, Freud treated it as an older, pre-Oedipal stage in cultural evolution. Freud also demonstrated that the chief features of animism and magic occur normally in childhood; and he concluded with a speculative Âreconstruction of how the Oedipus complex may have evolved in the species.
In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1955 [1921]), Freud created a theoreticÂ
bridge between individual and group psychology. He suggested that group members share an ego ideal that consists of or is embodied by the group leader. The devotion to the leader
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provides cohesion to the group, despite the rivalry that is also inevitably present. To illustrate the processes of group psychology, Freud used the examples of an army and the Roman Catholic Church.
Freud’s next major statement on religion, The Future of an Illusion (1961 [1927]), added several new points. Civilization depends on coercion and the renunciation of instinct. Prohibitions are initially external and imposed on the individual, but are internalized during childhood as the superego. In addition to performing self-observation and conscience, the superego houses both personal and group ideals that are the basis for forming cultural units. Religious ideals promote civilization through their internalization in the superego.
The valuable socializing function of religion does not mitigate its fallacies, however. Religion anthropomorphizes nature. Religion asserts that external reality is subject to personal spirits and gods, on whom one may depend as one depended on one’s parents in childhood. The belief that nature is benign and parental is an illusion. The illusion can be neither verified nor falsified; its treatment as true proceeds out of the wish that it were so, rather than through logical necessity. The illusion is maintained at the cost of denying the corresponding reality. Freud deplored religion, ‘the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity’, for intimidating the intelligence in order to maintain its illusions.
Responding to The Future of an Illusion, Theodor Reik observed that religion is perhaps the single most difficult source of resistance to psychotherapeutic change. Psychonalysts are able to help many people with disturbances in love and work, but make little progress on topics that religious beliefs and practices oppose. Talk therapy is still less effective with religious fanaticism. In private conversation, Freud told Reik that the solution to the problem of religion would likely not prove clinical, but would instead depend on the promotion of psychoanalytic ideas through public education.
Beginning with Civilization and Its Discontents (1961 [1930]), Freud struggled to comprehend the clinical problem of religion. Where he had earlier written of the superego internalizing civilization, he now stated that the superego turns aggression against the self in the form of guilt that makes civilization possible. Art, religion, and other illusions flourish under the protection, as it were, of the superego. Religion compares badly with art, however, ‘since it imposes equally on everyone its own path to the acquisition of happiness and protection from suffering. Its technique consists in depressing the value of life and distorting the picture of the real world in a delusional manner – which presupposes an intimidation of the intelligence’. Freud now called religion a ‘mass-delusion’ – a Âmalignancy significantly greater than the merely fanciful error of an ‘illusion’.
Freud also acknowledged that religion has a third function, additional to consolation and socialization. Religion permits instinctual wishes to be ‘sublimated’ through their diversion to social valued and refined ends. Freud viewed religion as second only to art in promoting culture through transformations of sexuality and aggression into civilized behavior. At the same time, Freud suggested that the ‘oceanic feeling’ of mystical experience was not religious, but was connected with religion only secondarily.
In ‘Constructions in Analysis’ (1964 [1937]) Freud returned to his re-evaluation of religion as a delusion. He theorized that just as the fantasies of psychotics have delusional force because they distort underlying truths, so too the delusional quality of religions – their imperviousness to rational argument, and intractability to psychotherapy – must owe to their containing some manner of underlying truth. In Moses and Monotheism (1964 [1939]), Freud supposed this truth to be historical. The text’s rejection by modern Bible critics has been unequivocal; and its thesis that Moses was an Egyptian whose imposition on the Jews