[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on Freud and Religious Belief
The outlook of an Illusion views religion as one of the foremost institutional wish-fulfillments which enables men to tolerate the demands for instinctual renunciation which is the source of civilization. In the last analysis, the individual is "the enemy of culture," for culture demands that he renounce his individual search for instinctual gratification, and place the energies of the instincts in the service of the "higher," aim-inhibited goals of civilization.
The individual grudgingly renounces the Pleasure Principle, but this renunciation is never entirely successful. The repressed instincts remain the source of neurotic suffering and of anti-social acts which ultimately threaten the very existence of civilization, defending it against the assaults of its unwilling, adherents. Individuals are reconciled, at least temporarily, to the restrictions and renunciations required of them by civilization, by the promise of a better life to come and by the religious sanctions (taboos) which declare the social and moral order to be God-ordained. Freud argues that the ancient struggle between religion and science as to which more accurately describes the nature of reality must be decided in favor of science. What status in the psychic economy can then be assigned to the complicated interweaving of ideas, hopes, wishes, theories and judgments which we call religion? What Is Religion? (Arnold Ages (1994)
Freud was an uncompromising realist. He sought to live as entirely free of self-delusion as is possible in human life. The goal of Psychoanalysis in particular, as the most comprehensive scientific psychology, was the goal of science in general, what Freud terms the "Scientific Weltanschauung," the scientific world-view. A fuller discussion of this assertion occurs below. For the moment we may define the Scientific Weltanschauung as that philosophy whose search for truth is guided solely by objectively verifiable, empirical, experimental evidence; the philosophy which seeks a lawful, natural explanation for all phenomena..................
