Freud's Converts by Clifford Vicki;

Author:Clifford, Vicki;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

Freud did all manner of things to evade being allied with the supernatural. Freud’s medical background deluded his followers and himself into seeing psychoanalysis as a science as opposed to the illusion which it was. The illusion which Freud claimed religion was is a closer ally to his own creation than he could see or was willing to acknowledge. His need to be at the forefront of his profession meant his rejecting religion and other allied subjects, otherwise risk being regarded as the dubious scientist which he had become: or worse as supernatural. Freud’s psychoanalysis was not to be associated with the unexplainable, such as theology. And it has taken the likes of Symington, Phillips, Bollas and Coltart a long time since Freud’s death to begin to explore their relationship with religion in a way which is more than superficial.

Freud’s awareness of people’s suffering and his determination that psychoanalysis was a way of alleviating this was of course an opportunity for him to usurp what had traditionally been the task of the church. He was aware that suffering was often caused by persecution and that religion had played a large part in this persecution. It is clear from Freud’s work that he felt that evil was a human predisposition and not something unexplainable. It is what humans do as a result of their personal histories. He was not prepared to write it off as something beyond our control. He was fearful of the unaccountability which claiming that something belongs to the supernatural, would create.

Whilst Phillips hypothesizes on Freud’s discomfort with the supernatural he like Freud, freely draws upon the language of the supernatural or religion when other language fails. For example, in a passage describing an experience of Marcel Proust he states:

secular epiphanies like this reveal the past but one’s personal history is an elusive God165.

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