Religion and the State of Psychology in the early 20th Century
In the early 20th Century, the academic study of psychology had not yet
completely amalgamated into what it is today. Many of the early psychologists
struggled to tear the discipline away from philosophy and into the realm of
science. I present the major proto-theories of the psychology of religion. These
views still persist today to various degrees. While Sigmund Freud's hard
atheistic view of religion lingers in the lexicons of popular culture, Carl
Jung's idea of the collective unconscious is completely extinct both inside and
out of academia. William James' view endures mainly in the personal
philosophies of psychologists and is no longer mentioned in modern journals of psychology.
Psychology in the early 20th century did deal with religion, but in
a cautious and often criticized manner. Many philosopher-psychologists saw no
way to quantify religion, and felt it not a valid subject for psychology, and in
fact the scientist-psychologists of the era saw it pretty much the same way.
Still, the following vanguards of psychology saw fit to take aim at religion,
and did so with much commitment.
Sigmund Freud and the Birth of Religion
In his book Totem and Taboo, Freud launches a
historical investigation of religion, from which he concludes how religion
first came about in an early human tribal society. Freud exposes an original
familial clan consisting of a father, his many wives, and his many sons. The
father did not allow any of his sons to have sexual relationships with his
wives, and Freud proposes this frustration drove the sons to one day kill the
father. Due to the sons’ original desire to identify with the father’s sexual
wealth, as well as, or perhaps resulting in a primitive belief of anthropophagic
acquirement of an enemy’s power, the sons then ate the father in a communal
manner.
Elsewhere in his work, Freud proposes that adoration and abhorrence occur
simultaneously in a close relationship. This ambivalence towards their father,
Freud claims, drove the sons into guilt while positive feelings for their father
come forth from their unconscious at equal magnitude to their once feelings of
hatred for him. Moreover, the sons are now individual threats to each other,
just as they were once threats to the father. In order to prevent a cycle of
murder and remorse, Freud explains the sons enacted an exogenous pact
to only marry women from outside the clan.
Freud supposes he uncovered the birth of proto-religion with the sons’
transference of worship from the idea of the slain father to an animal. The sons
treated this totem animal with respect by not hunting it, although one day per
year they would kill and ritualistically eat the animal as they had done so with
the father. As time progressed, the sons began to re-associate this totem animal
with a more general concept of the universe. Eventually, this totem religion
grew into religion as it still exists today, with the modern concept of God
originating in the model of a totem animal, which in turn originated from an
original tribal father.
Freud believed humanity is moving through three stages of
development: Tribal, Religious, Scientific. He believed society would
eventually cast off the unnecessary and unfounded ideals of religion in trade
for the exactitudes and truth offered by the scientific method.
The Psychoanalytical Origins of Religion
Freud’s follow-up to Totem, The Future of an Illusion, lays out an
analytical explanation for an individual’s belief in God. He claims civilization
and its rules are a group survival tool to protect the group and its individuals
against the state of nature. In a state of nature, individuals have no limits on
their unconscious desires and people would kill or enslave each other. Freud
points out humanity cannot survive in this fashion, and so it creates a civilization
of rules and limitations to preserve itself. This restriction of possible
actions causes frustration in an individual due to prohibition of desires. Freud
claims this frustration results in the individual’s wish to
undermine civilization, however doing so would counter his basic will for
survival.
Since the individual, just like his societal group, wish to be protected from
this state of nature, the individual anthropomorphizes nature
in order to associate with it as if it were a human. The person treats this
illusion as a father, and respects it accordingly and wishes to please it in
order to ensure protection from it. Freud poses that religion is popular among
adults, who no longer live under the protection of an actual father, because
they require a new form of fulfillment for their wish to be protected from the
ravages of nature. He points out that in this way, religion seeks to protect the
imbalance of the self’s insignificance in relation to vastness of nature by
giving importance to the self.
Carl Jung and the Benefits of Religion
Unlike Sigmund Freud, who believed religion to be an illusory wish
fulfillment for the weak minded, Carl Jung advocated religion as an
indispensable part of an individual’s psychological development. Jung viewed the
mind as having three components: the ego, the personal unconscious, and the
collective unconscious. Freud’s vision of the mind did not include a
collective unconscious. Instead, Freud proposed a moral super-ego, which grew to
become the mind’s administrator according to a learned sense of morality. Jung
believed the self-actualizing properties of Freud’s super ego pre-exist in the
mind as a collective unconscious which is to be discovered through introspection
as opposed to learned from experience.
Psychological development ends with complete self individuation which
requires of the unconscious mind to find a balance between the many paradoxes it
faces. To Jung, the individual struggles with contradictory beliefs and
emotions. Self individuation occurs when the unconscious mind learns to
reconcile for these paradoxes by perceiving them on a higher level of
understanding, a level where the unconscious comes to understand these apparent
personality contradictions as in fact concurrent harmonies. Jung explains that
this collection of contradictions exists in the individual’s personal
unconscious. The individual must learn to analyze this repository of seemingly
inconsistent thoughts using the introspective power found in another part of the
mind’s unconscious: the collective unconscious.
Jung argues the collective unconscious is consistent across our
species. The individual uses various archetypes, or reoccurring
patterns of thought, as guides for channeling the power of the collective
unconscious. And since we all share an identical collective unconscious, Jung
champions a shared method for harnessing the self-realizing power of this part
of the mind as a constructive and healthy way to conquer the personal
unconscious’ many deceptive schisms. This shared method for self individuation,
Jung claims, is religion. Although not himself Catholic, Jung became partial
to Catholicism because he believed its rich mythology offers all of the
archetypical tools necessary for an individual to probe his or her personal
unconscious.
William James and the Value of Religion
In order to reach the most fundamental understanding of the general term of
“religion,” William James admittedly focused his induction on the individual’s
religious experiences rather than on the organizational aspects of religion. He
claims this technique proper since personal religion is central to larger
societal religious themes. After all, James explains, today’s major religions
began with claims of a personal mysticism, such as the organizations formed
around the lives of Jesus Christ, Buddha, and Mohammed.
James notes that no single religious emotion exists, as opposed to the more
concrete sensations such as fear and happiness. Instead, James sees religion in
the individual as separate mental objects that tap
these emotions as required. These objects, to James, are components of the
individual’s understanding of his or her relation to the divine. Such
relationships play themselves out in the individual as physical acts, moral
definition, or ritualistic behavior. James induces that these religious
experiences then arouse the more concrete personal emotions, completing the
connection from the visceral qualia of a religious event to the more abstract,
although necessarily real, personal relationship with the divine.
James's views on the value of religion remain persuasive even
today, as his famous lecture on The Varieties of Religious Experience has
remained part of the psychology and philosophy canon for over one hundred years.