Note: to avoid misunderstanding, I believe Freud is a figure of huge cultural and historical importance, and I sympathise with his project of trying to devise a completely secular psychology building on Darwinian premises. Many of his ideas about sexuality as a central motive force, about the role of the unconscious in every aspect of mental life, how repressing instinctual drives can lie behind certain types of mental illness, his development of the talking cure, these and numerous other concepts have become part of the culture and underlie the way many people live and think about themselves today. However, I strongly disapprove of Freud’s gender stereotyping of men and women, his systematic sexism, his assumption of Western superiority over ‘primitive’ peoples, and so on. Despite the revolutionary impact of his thought, Freud carried a lot of Victorian assumptions over into his theory. He left a huge and complicated legacy which needs to be examined and picked through with care. My aim in these reviews is not to endorse his opinions but to summarise his writings, adding my own thoughts and comments as they arise.
***
‘The Question of a Weltanschauung’ is the last in Freud’s 35 Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. It is a polemical defence of psychoanalysis seen as the vanguard of science, and an attack on established religion seen as the main obstacle in its way and which it must vanquish.
Weltanschauung is the German word for ‘worldview’. Many people ask Freud if psychoanalysis has a worldview of its own and this irritates him for 2 reasons: 1) psychoanalysis is a branch of psychology and thus shares the general scientific worldview, but 2) science itself can’t even be said to have a proper worldview because it is not complete.
A Weltanschauung is an intellectual construction which solves all the problems of our existence on the basis of one overriding hypothesis which leaves no question unanswered and in which everything that interests us finds its fixed place.
(Pelican Freud Library Volume 2, page 193)
A Weltanschauung, in Freud’s view, is a bad thing. It represents people’s wish to have the answers to everything, including the meaning of life. Science cannot provide this. Science proceeds by trial and error. Its theories are contingent, provisional upon verification. Therefore, science doesn’t have a Weltanschauung in the fullest sense.
Science is the merciless unblinking quest for Truth and:
Truth cannot be tolerant. It admits of no compromise or limitations. Research regards every sphere of human activity as belonging to it and must be relentlessly critical if any other power tries to take over part of it. (2:195)
There are three other worldviews which challenge science: art, philosophy and religion. Art is not a threat because everyone knows it doesn’t aspire to scientific truth. Philosophy is ludicrous because it is always having to change its theories as science discovers more truths about the world and the mind. So religion is the only real enemy to the scientific worldview and, in its bid for a complete explanation to everything, may lay claim to being the most thorough Weltanschauung devised by the human mind.
Why does religion exert such a powerful hold over the human mind?
- Religion offers an explanation of how the universe came into being and why we’re here, thus satisfying the human thirst for knowledge.
- Religion assures us of ultimate happiness and reward despite the tribulations of life, thus fulfilling the childish wish to be comforted.
- Religion lays down precepts for behaviour ie it enforces a morality.
- In a word: religion represents a childish wish-fulfilment, the longing for illusions to conceal the brutal realities of life.
How is it that a pseudo-scientific cosmogony, a system of punishment and reward, and an ethical system are always combined in religion?
Because religion is based on the Father, your father, as he appeared in all his magnificence and omnipotence to you when you were a small child. This Father is the reason you exist: he gave you life. He is the source of punishment and praise when you’ve behaved well or badly, even if you don’t quite understand why.
And he is the ultimate source of a steady stream of instruction on how to behave = morality. All the instructions of the Father, all the conditionality of having to behave well to be loved and rewarded, these are introjected by the child to form the superego or conscience, in the first few years of childhood. Later, in puberty, all these rules and conventions are projected outwards onto the Father-figure conveniently offered by organised religion from your earliest youth. Just as you’re making the stormy transition from adolescence to adulthood, society offers you an attractive, age-old and aesthetically pleasing system within which to sublimate many of your strongest drives.
(N.B. Freud said the child is highly sexual between 0 and 5 years of age, during which it undergoes a development through fixed stages: 0-1 oral, obsessed with the breast, pleasure and sustenance through the mouth; 1-3 anal, where you learn to enjoy controlling your bowels and their product, faeces; phallic, when you realise you have a little winkle and your sister doesn’t because Daddy has cut hers off for being naughty. This terrifying realisation results in the Castration Complex and this contributes to the grand resolution of childhood sexuality in the Oedipus Complex, a wish to overcome your father and take possession of your mother. The Oedipus Complex is duly overcome and the child lapses into the Latency Phase (6-11) when you largely forget the upsets and turmoil of the earlier years and become more socialised, introjecting the commands and morality of your parents into the superego. With the eruption of the hormones in puberty many unconscious fears and desires from the infant period are revived and largely dictate how you respond to the new sexual and social demands being made on you. It is at this stage that society holds out organised religion as a way of overcoming many of the problems which face you, notably the perceived weakness of your real father as against the ego-ideal you have set up in your mind; and the fear of loss of love as you move away from your parents. Those childhood feelings of awe and fear and abasement can now be projected onto a Big Daddy in the sky. The strong but confused and contradictory sexual drives which are awakened in adolescence can also be sublimated into adolescent infatuations with the suffering Christ. And this explains why so many adolescents undergo a religious infatuation before settling into the common light of day.)
Freud then recapitulates the argument of ‘Totem and Taboo’. Briefly, he sees societies and their religions as going through fixed developmental stages rather as the human child does. This parallel allows him to make many comparisons between infantile states and early religious beliefs. This parallelism also allows him to say that, just as neurotic, hysterical and obsessive behaviours are the result of a reversion to childhood experiences which exert an unconscious power over the adult – so, by extension, various religious beliefs or practices are reminiscent in appearance and actually identical in structure to mental illnesses.
(This insight first saw the light in Freud’s paper ‘Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices’ (1907) where he compares compulsive religious observance to the kind of obsessive behaviour often practiced by neurotics; for example, obsessively washing your hands or tapping every railing on the way to the Tube etc, and explains how failure to carry out these actions leads to guilt and self-punishment out of all proportion to their external value.)
To return to the analogy between the growing child and the growth of religion: the childish belief in the omnipotence of its thoughts in the child’s oral phase is paralleled in religious history by the development of animism, where the woods and streams are haunted by spirits. The child/primitive man’s tool for propitiating these spirits also relies on the ‘omnipotence of thoughts’ = Magic. Primitive man makes things happen by re-enacting them (performing a rain dance, painting pictures of a successful bison hunt on cave walls). Freud compares primitive ritual to the child’s gameplaying to overcome, to internalise events in the outside world beyond its control (see ‘Beyond The Pleasure Principle’).
Then, just as the child learns to talk and this new skill vastly expands its ability to control the coming and going of its parents, so the primitive mind develops language and is stunned by the effect of this huge leap forward. In religion the full plenitude of language is, again, projected onto God, of which our own language is a puny copy. Let there be light, says God, and there is light. Adam names the animals and knows them. Mastery of language brings to the child, and to the ‘primitive’, alike, a mystical sense of oneness with, and control of, the world. The myth of Babel is necessary to explain the transition from the childish power of language to its sadly limited capability in adult life.
Then comes totemism, where many of the fears of spirits have been concentrated onto the tribal totem, a feared and worshipped animal. The totem is also the nexus of complicated systems of morality based around kinship and marriage. In ‘Totem and Taboo’ Freud says these all boil down to barriers to incest which are powerfully close to the surface in the primitive mind. (In line with the Freudian principle that nothing is ever lost to the psyche, many relics of the age of animism survive to this day in the form of superstitions – black cats – or are incorporated into mainstream religious belief – the enduring belief in ‘dark forces’ and ‘the Evil Spirit’, Satan etc.)
How primitive it feels even to think about Satan, much more exciting than thinking about God – sending us back to a time of primal thrills and excitements and terrors.
For Freud, then, the investigations of the 19th century (and particularly the encyclopedic work of Sir James Frazer, ‘The Golden Bough’ with which ‘Totem and Taboo’ is saturated) show that religion has a natural history like any other human institution. Freud has contributed to this an explanation of how the fulfilments of the wishes of different parts of the developing mind were satisfied by different components in religion which drew them together in evermore sophisticated syntheses.
As to the present day, Freud’s view religion is starting to crumble before the investigations of science, of which psychoanalysis is at the cutting edge. Religion’s attraction in the modern world is the guarantee of an all-powerful God who looks after your destiny and rewards virtue. However:
It seems not to be the case that there is a power in the Universe which watches over the well-being of individuals with parental care and brings all their affairs to a happy ending. On the contrary the destinies of Mankind can be brought into harmony neither with the hypothesis of a Universal Benevolence nor with the partly contradictory one of a Universal Justice. Earthquakes, tidal waves, conflagrations, make no distinction between the virtuous and pious and the scoundrel or unbeliever. Even where what is in question is not inanimate Nature but where an individual’s fate depends on his relations to other people, it is by no means the rule that virtue is rewarded and that evil finds its punishment. Often enough, the violent, cunning or ruthless man seizes the envied good things of the world and the pious man goes away empty. Obscure, unfeeling and unloving powers determine men’s fate; the system of reward and punishments which religion ascribes to the government of the universe seems not to exist. (2:203)
The latest contribution to the critique of the religious Weltanschauung has been effected by psychoanalysis, by showing how religion originated from the helplessness of children and by tracing its contents to the survival into maturity of the wishes and needs of childhood. (2:203)
Religion is an attempt to master the sensory world in which we are situated by means of the wishful world which we have developed within us as a result of biological and psychological necessities. But religion cannot achieve this. Its doctrines bear the imprint of the times in which they arose, the ignorant trust of the childhood of humanity. Its consolations deserve no trust. Experience teaches us that the world is no nursery. The ethical demands on which religion lays stress need, rather, to be given another basis; for they are indispensable to human society and it is dangerous to link obedience to them with religious faith. (2:204)
Freud, then, does not set out to subvert conventional morality. On the contrary, he sees some form of morality as vital to civilised life and fears it will be eroded if it remains attached to crumbling religious belief. Freud calls for morality to be rebuilt on the more solid ground of science and a scientific understanding of what is best for human beings.
Religion may well reply to Freud’s attack, ‘What right have you to criticise or judge the noblest creation of the human spirit, inspired by the Divine Creator Himself?’ Freud:
We reply by saying that what is in question is not in the least the invasion of the field of religion by the scientific spirit, but on the contrary an invasion by religion of the sphere of scientific thought. Whatever may be the value and importance of religion, it has no right in any way to restrict thought. (2:206)
Here Freud clearly shows himself the heir to the spirit of the rational Enlightenment.
The prohibition against thought issued by religion to assist in its self-preservation is also far from being free from danger either for the individual or for human society. Analytic experience has taught us that a prohibition like this, even if it is originally limited to a specific field, tends to widen out and become the cause of severe inhibitions in the subject’s conduct of life. This result may be observed, too, in the female sex, following from their being forbidden to have anything to do with their sexuality even in thought. Biography is able to point to the damage done by all religious inhibition of thought in the life story of nearly all eminent individuals in the past. On the other hand intellect – or Reason – is among the powers which we may most expect to exercise a unifying influence on men – on men who are held together with such difficulty and whom it is therefore scarcely possible to rule… Our best hope for the future is that intellect – the scientific spirit, Reason – may in process of time establish a dictatorship in the mental life of man. The nature of reason is a guarantee that afterwards it will not fail to give man’s emotional impulses and what is determined by them the position they deserve. But the common compulsion exercised by such a dominance of reason will prove to be the strongest uniting bond among men and lead the way to further unions. Whatever, like religion’s prohibition against thought, opposes such a development, is a danger for the future of mankind. (2:208)
Here we get to the heart of Freud’s argument; religion is not only an irritating sign of immaturity and the childish wish to live in a world of illusions. It is positively dangerous insofar as it hinders the movement towards the triumph of reason. So what is this scientific spirit which Freud goes on about so much?
Scientific thinking does not differ in its nature from the normal activity of thought, which all of us, believers and unbelievers, employ in looking after our affairs in ordinary life. It has only developed certain features: it takes an interest in things even if they have no immediate, tangible use; it is concerned carefully to avoid individual factors and affective influences; it examines more strictly the trustworthiness of the sense-perceptions on which it bases its conclusions; it provides itself with new perceptions which cannot be obtained by everyday means and it isolates the determinants of these new experiences in experiments which are deliberately varied. Its endeavour is to arrive at correspondence with reality – that is to say, with what exists outside of us and, as experience has taught us, is decisive for the fulfilment or disappointment of our wishes. This correspondence with the real external world we call ‘truth’. It remains the aim of our scientific work even if we leave the practical value of that work out of account. (2:206)
Freud then turns to consider other Weltanshauungen of our times, the intellectual relativism generated by modern physics and the ‘new religion’ of Russian communism etc (cf his savage critique of Bolshevism in ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’).
Thoughts
This is Freud’s best single work outlining what science is, how psychoanalysis fits into it, the origins and growth of religion, and why religion presents a mortal threat to science’s attempts to build a better world. Indispensable even if, by the end, you come out disagreeing with most of his premises and conclusions.
And, after reading Totem and Taboo, Future of An Illusion, Civilisation and its Discontents, Moses and Monotheism, with their relentless attacks on Christianity, not to mention the countless places in other essays where he suddenly starts attacking Christianity, the reasonably impartial reader can’t help being struck by the deep-seated and lifelong animosity Freud felt, thought and expressed against Christianity at every possible opportunity.
As Pfister’s writings make clear, it was perfectly possible to be a devout Christian and a thorough-going psychoanalyst as well. The more you read of it, the more antiquated and Victorian Freud’s anti-religious prejudice seems, the optimistic anti-Christian positivism of his student days in the 1880s, carried over into the 1920s and 30s, and revived any time anyone reads one of these dusty old works.
More than ever outdated in a world where a) religious belief is on the rise, across the Muslim world, the Hindu world, and in Christian Africa; and b) when a central premise of our times, in the multicultural West, is about fluidity of identities and allegiances. In the modern context Feud’s simplistic binary opposition of Science versus Religion seems almost 18th century, Voltairian, and his naive belief that rational science will lead us to some utopian future all the more dusty, dated and irrelevant.
Credit
The history of the translation of Freud’s many works into English forms a complicated subject in its own right. ‘The Question of a Weltanschauung’ was first translated into English by James Strachey in 1964 as part of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. My quotes are from the version included in volume 2 of the Pelican Freud Library, ‘New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis’, published in the 1973.
Related links
Freud and religion reading list
- Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905)
- Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices (1907)
- Totem and Taboo (1913)
- On Transience (1915)
- A Seventeenth Century Demonological Neurosis (1923)
- The Future of An Illusion (1927)
- Civilisation and Its Discontents (1930)
- Group Psychology (1930)
- Question of a Weltanschauung (1933)
- Moses and Monotheism (1939)
- Freud, A Life For Our Times by Peter Gay (1988)
Books & Boots 