It can be called an attack on religion only in so far as any scientific investigation of religious belief presupposes disbelief. Neither in my private life nor in my writings have I ever made a secret of my being an out-and-out unbeliever. Anyone considering the book from this point-of-view will have to admit that it is only Jewry and not Christianity which has reason to feel offended by its conclusions. For only a few incidental remarks, which say nothing that hasn't been said before, allude to Christianity. At most one can quote the old adage: "Caught together, hanged together!" (Freud, 1960, p. 453)
Freud, as well as many of the psychologists who followed him, propagated the idea that psychology is a science, separate and distinct from other sciences and certainly from faith, as connectivity with faith was considered unscientific in the early days. The reasons for this placement of secular above faith are in many ways a simple demonstration of the fact that the argument of science is that with enough investigation, all truth can be discovered. The contrary nature of faith is that faith presupposes that there are and must remain truths that are unknown and unknowable and that these truths under gird the whole of the faith experience. The early psychologists and in Freud's case psychoanalysts were trying to claim was that even the inner most workings of an individual's mind was a discoverable set of truths. This was a fight that had been hard pressed as for many years prior to Freud the accepted idea of the impetus of mental illness and negative psychological drives was that they were direct responses to lapses in faith. Freud's generation of scientists, psychological and sociological were in a fight to remove faith from the picture, of human development. Just as medical doctors of the pat and present were seeking to prove to the faithful that disease was a biological process that was not directly linked to sin or evil. In an increadibly telling passage Freud equates the developemtn of releigion with a logical path of development that follows that of first mother connectivity, then father connectivity and then God as the ultimate father to connect with.
A what I now put forward, between the deeper and the manifest motivation, between the father complex and man's helplessness and need for protection.These connections are not difficult to find. They consist in the relation of the child's helplessness to the adult's continuation of it, so that, as was to be expected, the psycho-analytic motivation of the forming of religion turns out to be the infantile contribution to its manifest motivation. Let us imagine to ourselves the mental life of the small child. You remember the object-choice after the anaclitic type, which psycho-analysis talks about? The libido follows the paths of narcissistic needs, and attaches itself to the objects that ensure their satisfaction. So the mother, who satisfies hunger, becomes the first love-object, and certainly also the first protection against all the undefined and threatening dangers of the outer world; becomes, if we may so express it, the first protection against anxiety. In this function the mother is soon replaced by the stronger father, and this situation persists from now on over the whole of childhood. But the relation to the father is affected by a peculiar ambivalence. (Freud, 1928, p. 41)
Once the individual has moved on from the father attachment the next logical placement for such attachment, based on the psyche, according to Freud is the ultimate father, God. The logical progression is then an infantile desire for security that is logical to most humans, though obviously pointedly weak, as Freud writes it. The legacy of this drive, away from faith as a reasonable explanation for human developmental factor was a tendency of the research community to discredit, or at the very least ignore faith, until very recently as a value or phenomena worth studying.
Scientific truth is largely determined by authority and this has always been so. Today, any new idea must be supported by the weight of existing authorities and expressed in their language. The more radical the idea the more necessary it is to blunt its impact by emphasising its similarities with shared traditions. (Hanman, 2007, NP)
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