Freud's speculations on religion and civilization
 

Totem and Taboo (1912-13)
 

Freud's explanation of totemism was supposed to show that psychoanalysis could answer questions about the phenomena of totemism, and religion in general, that no other approach could possibly answer:
 

Why does religion perpetuate the notion of the powerful, punishing father?
 

Why is incest not just a bad idea, but a horror?
 

Why is religious guilt a kind of blood-guilt? What was the crime?
 

Why must there be death to expiate our sins?
 

Why does totemism always involve a mixture of fear of, admiration for, and identification with the totem animal?
 

The missing psychoanalytic link: the analogy between totemism and childhood fears and obsessions concerning animals.
 

According to Freud, the child's mixture of envy, fear, guilt, admiration, and identification concerning animals can be understood simply through psychoanalysis:
 

All such feeling represent transference of feelings that are originally directed at the father.
 

These feelings are fundamentally Oedipal, concerning love for the mother, competition with the father combined with idealization and identification, and fear of castration.
 

The totemism of children is similar to that of "primitive" peoples, and probably has the same origin.
 

As the adult's neurotic obsessions are residues of early Oedipal conflicts, so the obsessions of modern society are residues of Oedipal conflicts from a more primitive time.
 

But what Oedipal conflict is at the root of totemism in general?
 

To understand this requires us to understand the origins of human social structures.
 

In approaching these questions, Freud ssumption: The earliest human societies were built around a single dominant man, his "harem" of wives, and their children. The father's power gave him exclusive right to the women, and the suns were forced to look elsewhere for mates.

(Freud's source: Darwin's hypothesis about the origins of primate societies.)
 

It is in these father-dominated societies that the original Oedipal conflicts arose.
 

The forms and symbols of totemism are kept alive by unconscious memories of this conflict.
 

But the conflict cannot be, as for the child, based merely on repressed Oedipal fantasy.
 

"Primitive" people, according to Freud, are not thinkers but act immediately on impulse- to think is to do. Therefore the original Oedipal conflict should have been caused by a real event, not a fantasy.
 

Freud's explanation: The original band of sons, angered by their father's jealousy and selfishness, rose up and killed him.
 

Immediately afterward they were tormented by guilt, out of which the entire basis for morality arose. This explains the ongoing ban against incest, and the requirement of exogamy.Questions the theory is supposed to answer:
 
 

"The Future of an Illusion" (1927):
 

What is the origin of religion?
 

What role does it play in civilization?
 

Is it successful in its role, or should it be replaced by something else?
 

What is civilization? The aggregate of ways in which human life "rises above" instinctive life, as lived by the animals.
 

The fundamental fact of civilization: On the one hand, it provides for an increasing degree of control over, and protection from, nature, for the satisfaction of human needs and desires. On the other hand, it is made possible only by coercive regulation of humans' instinctive life.
 

The fundamental problem of civilization: How to enforce the demands of civilization for the renunciation of instinct.
 

The social role of religion: To provide a "higher" motivation for sacrificing the instincts.
 

The psychoanalytic origin of religion:
 

1. Fear of the punishment of the father for wrongdoing is projected onto the external world, out of ignorance of the forces of nature
 

2. Remorse for the original Oedipal aggression against the father is retained as the psychological sense of sinfulness
 

3. Idealization of and identification with the father are projected onto an imaginary supernatural being.
 

All of these factors suggest that religion is an outgrowth of the development of the superego.
 

Why is religion by definition illusion? Because believing it satisfies a deep psychological need.
 

(The essence of illusion is not that it's false, but that it's believed independently of any objective grounds for finding it true or false, just because of the instinctive needs that it satisfies.
 

The maintenance of the sense of guilt and fear, along with repetitive religious practices, suggests a collective obsessional delusion.
 

Is a rational substitute for religion possible?
 

If religion is a kind of collective neurosis, then perhaps a kind of collective psychoanalysis can overcome it.
 

Perhaps the civilized restraints that are justified by religion could be motivated, instead, by rational considerations.
 

Civilization and Its Discontents (1929)
 

Civilization demands instinctive renunciation, therefore it provokes the bitter opposition of the great majority of humans.
 

Ways of reconciling ourselves to life and its restrictions:
 

Intoxication, sublimation, avoidance, etc.
 

For the majority of humans, however, the demands of civilization are too great, and they are hostile to it.
 

Marxism: Private property has created the hostility among people, which could therefore be eliminated by just socio-economic relations.
 

Freud: The hostility to civilized restraint in general, and aggression among individuals, predate private property in human history, and are clearly visible in the instinctive behavior of children and "primitive" people without property.

Civilization can only survive in one of two ways:
 

1. Find new and more effective ways of coercing people into conforming to its restraints
 

2. Relax the demands that civilization makes.
 

Instinctual demands of Eros: Libidinal drive that civilization tries to channel into acceptable (i.e., reproductive and family-oriented) outlets.
 

Instinctual demands of Thanatos (the "death-instinct"): aggressive and destructive impulses towards people, animals, and even things, which civilization tries to make use of, but which are necessarily at war with civilization in the long run.
 

Eros ("Love"): The impulse of joining substances together into more and more inclusive and cohesive units
 

Thanatos ("Death"): The impulse of breaking substance into its smallest fragments.
 

Freud was essentially forced to define these two instincts in this way by his theoretical apparatus, because it was difficult to trace the aggressive and destructive behavior of children to the Oedipal drive alone.
 

Freud on women in civilization:

We know that important patients in Freud's "formative years" were women who, he thought, suffered from trauma related to sexual assaults. But his replacement of the "seduction" theory by the Oedipus complex meant that he had to find some explanation of female sexuality.  His ideas of the initial "penis envy," followed by the desire for a replacement in the form of  a child, were supposed to explain how female desire is turned toward the father and toward males.

[He refers to the substitution "child for penis" as a "mathematical substitution," indicating the degree to which his deterministic view of the quantity of drives and affects permeated his thought.]

Given the basic difference between male and female development, Freud concludes that women naturally act as a hindrance to civilization, more attached to basic physical functions (especially concerned with reproduction) than to the abstract notions that are the essence of civilization.

Freud's explanation for this: Civilization, especially morality and instinctual renunciation in general, is an outgrowth of the superego. Because women don't experience the fear of castration, they don't go through the process of having to sublimate their Oedipal drives.

Therefore, they don't develop a superego to the extent that men do, and, moreover, they don't have to channel their Oedipal drives into the intellectual, artistic, and other activities characteristic of civilization. This would imply that they don't have as strong a moral sense as men, according to Freud.

[Thus, while he liked to think of himself as challenging traditional ideas about women, Freud was unfortunately not immune from seeing popular popular male prejudices seemingly confirmed by his theory.]