Sigmund Freud Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words - 1

Sigmund Freud - Essay Example Freud compared religious practice with neurosis as it related to the unconscious forces of guilt through repetitive behavior. (Kessler, 2007, p.149)When discussing religious mysticism and the unity experience, Freud believed that the deep unconscious patterns of the womb experience and infancy were the basis of this manifestation in religion. (Kessler, 2007, p.148) Along with this, Freud viewed desire / satisfaction, feelings of security / insecurity, and the need to be accepted or loved as related to childhood patterns of family relationship. These also form the basis of the need for religion in the individual. Freud believed that the Oedipal complex was itself a universal pattern that was reflected in religious belief. He felt fundamentally that religion was an illusion, like a neurosis, and used historically for the repression of instincts. As human societies become more developed and educated, he believed, religion would increasingly be replaced by a rational and secular society where sin was redefined and guilt was not repressed. Thus, modern, cosmopolitan liberal culture and the sexual development of Western culture that has occurred since the 1920’s are an example of what Freud believed would occur when religious beliefs on the repression of basic instincts and desires were lifted by society through secularism. Carl Jung believed that Freud was too narrow in interpreting the Oedipal as universal and in basing all religious instincts on the unconscious behavior patterns of childhood. His work posited the â€Å"collective unconscious† and psychological archetypes that formed a type of deep human identity relationship with the universe and manifested through religious mythology and dream symbolism similarly. (Kessler, 2007, p.149) According to Jung, the way that the individual conceived the self and God or ultimate reality represented a gap that was to be bridged by the spiritual path or the process of self-realization. Thus, if the individual viewed the religious path as a means of self-expression of the Self’s highest values, it would be a valuable and healthy aspect of self-development, and not neurosis as Freud posited. Some claim that each psychologist’s writings reflected a cultural bias from their social position. Freud’s family was Jewish growing up in the pre-Nazi era in Austria (Vienna), while Jung was a Protestant German in the same period who relocated to Switzerland during the pre-war era. Jung was highly influenced by the German alchemical tradition, and he uses psychology as a basis to reformulate this religious philosophy into a theory of higher self-realization, while Freud’s own Oedipal complex may have been dominant and thus related to him as positing it as a cosmological principal. Similarly, Freud and Jung’s views on religions can be seen as describing their own highest Self and value systems, and based on their own understanding of the individual in relation to soc iety which is also projected subjectively into the theory. 3. A theodicy is a theological or religious justification for the existence or appearance of evil in the world. (Kessler, 2007, p.161) As Kessler states, this is the simplest definition, for on one hand evil can be defined in all manner of ways as intentional pain, suffering, violence, death, destruction, cruelty, etc. but a theodicy is generally used to reconcile these perceptions of reality with a conception of God that is pure, true, the sum of the good, and all-loving. The practical experience of an individual living in the world contradicts the ideal of a perfect, loving God generally unless it is mediated with a theodicy. The karma philosophy in Buddhism and Hinduism posits a