Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) saw religion as an illusion. By illusion Freud means a belief that people want very much to be true. Unlike Tylor and Frazer, Freud attempted to explain why religion persists in spite of the lack of evidence for its tenets. Freud asserted that religion is a largely unconscious neurotic response to repression. By repression Freud meant that civilized society demands that we cannot fulfill all our desires immediately, but that they have to be repressed. Rational arguments to a person holding a religious conviction will not change the neurotic response of a person. This is in contrast to Tylor and Frazer who saw religion as a rational and conscious, though primitive and mistaken, attempt to explain the natural world.
Freud not only tries to explain the origin and persistence of faith in individuals but in his 1913 book Totem and Taboo he even developed a speculative story about how all monotheist religions originated and developed. In the book he asserted that monotheistic religions grew out of a homicide in a clan of a father by his sons. This incident was subconsciously remembered in human societies.
In his 1939 book Moses and Monotheism Freud proposed that Moses' monotheism derived from Akhenaten. This view is not supported by biblical accounts and differs from scholarly theories.
Freud's view on religion was embedded in his larger theory of psychoanalysis which has been criticized as unscientific. Apart from theorizing, Freud's theories were developed by studying patients who were left free to talk while lying on a sofa. Though Freud's attempt to the historical origins of religions have not been accepted, his generalized view that all religions originate from unfulfilled psychological needs are still seen as offering a credible explanation in some cases.
Read more about this topic: Theories Of Religion
Famous quotes by sigmund freud:
“The psychoanalysis of individual human beings, however, teaches us with quite special insistence that the god of each of them is formed in the likeness of his father, that his personal relation to God depends on his relation to his father in the flesh and oscillates and changes along with that relation, and that at bottom God is nothing other than an exalted father.”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)
“Opposition is not necessarily enmity; it is merely misused and made an occasion for enmity.”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)
“I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador—an adventurer, if you want it translated—with all the curiosity, daring, and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort.”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)
“The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)
“Incidentally, why was it that none of all the pious ever discovered psycho-analysis? Why did it have to wait for a completely godless Jew?”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)