Introducing Freud’s Fruit Cake Recipe: Psychoanalysis

Since their inception in Vienna, Freud’s theory and therapy have been noted for their similarities to a religion. Bertha Pappenheim, Freud’s first psychoanalytic patient, said that “psychoanalysis in the hands of the physician is what confession is in the hands of the Catholic priest.” Max Graf recalled: “There was an atmosphere of the foundation of a religion in that room. Freud himself was its new prophet who made the theretofore prevailing methods of psychological investigation appears superficial. Freud’s pupils—all inspired and convinced—were his apostles.”

When Freud excluded Alfred Adler who minimized the importance of sex, and thus deviated from Freudian theory, Graf observed: “Freud—as head of a church banished Adler; he ejected him from the official church. Within the space of a few years I lived through the whole development of a church history.”

At any rate his attitudes about Christianity reflected his complex hostility and attraction to a faith that meant something to him at a deeper personal level, at the level of his unconscious [P. Vitz, Sigmund Freud’s Christian Unconscious (Guilford, 1988)].

Vitz’s analysis of Freud’s understanding of religion also reveals some interesting weaknesses in the Freudian theory. The “projection of a father figure” understanding of religion makes sense if one presumes God is only an illusion. But if one begins with a presupposition that God actually exists, then psychoanalysis does just as well in explaining atheism. If God is a heavenly “father,” then according to Freud’s theory, unbelief in God must be attributable to the oedipal period of development. During this period the child feels infantile rage at his father for competing for the love of its mother. And if the child doesn’t resolve this rage at the father, even though it is unconscious, during the genital stage, the rage might be played out as atheism in adulthood. I certainly could not think of a better way to get back at a father figure than to simply not believe in him. One can only go so far in rejecting the earthly parent, but a deeper rage can be vented on God by denying His very existence. According to Freud’s theory, however, there is a better way to deal with these problems.

At the center of Freud’s attack on Christianity is his statement that unresolved oedipal issues become the foundation of one’s superego. This is like the paragraph above where the son tries to take over the role of the father. Now, contrast that with the Gospel of Jesus Christ, where you have the sacrificial love of the Son for the Father and how the obedient death of the Son brings ultimate redemption. This illustrates how the life of Jesus becomes a needed corrective for the issues of the “unredeemed self” caught in unresolved oedipal tensions. Jesus becomes the “anti-Oedipus” who finds life by doing his Father’s will instead of trying to destroy the Father. Thus all the fear and hatred of the Father are replaced by the transformation of the mind through conversion to Christianity. Freud’s “unredeemed self” can become the “redeemed self” in Christ.

Freud’s ideas were secularized and given a materialistic interpretation. Occult influence is seen in his adoption of hypnotism as a therapeutic tool, but not for healing. He used trance induction to [ferret] out haunting repressions from the subconscious. He assumed that ordinary states of mind were not the most reliable sources of truth.

Freud borrowed many concepts from the mystics and attached them to his own theories. Freud is best known today for his theories concerning the unconscious and dreams. Both of these concepts were well developed in European thought prior to 1880, Freud borrowed heavily from his predecessors. By the time Freud was a student in Vienna, Friedrich Nietzsche had written regularly about the unconscious. Freud also borrowed Nietzsche’s concept of the id. Sulloway remarked that virtually all of Freud’s ideas about dreams had been published by others prior to his writings. Dennis B. Klein, in Jewish Origins of the Psychoanalytic Movement, showed how profoundly Freud’s ideas were influenced by Jewish Talmudic traditions, while David Bakan, in Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Traditions, maintained that many of Freud’s ideas about sexuality were “startlingly close” to the mystical Judaism of the cabala.

Carl Jung, a disciple of Freud, had known paranormal experiences all his life and was an avid advocate of the alternative-reality tradition. He attributed one of his principle works, The Seven Sermons to the Dead, to automatic authorship—ghostwriting in the most literal sense. It was that dictation that gave Jung the basic framework for his work.

Jung had numerous points of contact with the occult. His “collective unconsciousness” echoes the mystical conception of the cosmos as mind. His idea that both good and evil are intrinsic to the self reflects the mystical notion that duality is intrinsic to the cosmos, which is ultimately one. Jung was also intent on giving his ideas a measure of scientific respectability. He was not, however, driven to provide everything with a materialistic explanation. As a result, Jung’s psychology, far more than Freud’s, represents a “restatement of the ideas at the core of occult tradition in terms accessible to those ill at ease with religious language” (Webb 1976, 387).

In the next segment we will begin a look at Eastern Religion and its influence on the emerging New Age Movement.