The Force of Monotheism. Psychoanalysis and Religions Thinking About Religion – After Freud Idea, Concept, Organization and De
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The Force of Monotheism. Psychoanalysis and Religions Thinking About Religion – After Freud Idea, Concept, Organization and Design Inge Scholz-Strasser (Chairwoman, Sigmund Freud Foundation) Wolfgang Müller-Funk (University Vienna) Felix de Mendelssohn (Sigmund Freud University) The title represents the two axes upon which the symposium is to be based: the newly awakened discussion of religion, and Freud’s critical ideas on the subject of religion. When we put Freud’s monotheism in the foreground, then we are following a trail in his thinking. The psychoanalytic “lawgiver” and the Jewish Nomothet stand in a tense relationship to one another, but also in a relationship of analogy. Even if the line of delineation between psychoanalysis and the West’s Judeo-Christian heritage is meticulously drawn, it cannot be denied that Freud’s psychoanalysis, rooted in the skeptical tradition of the Enlightenment, is very distant from any sort of heterogeneous polytheism. Despite the occasional postmodern conjuring of a polytheistic mythology, which allegedly would be more tolerant on account of its diversity, no return of polytheism in religion is visible. The power of religion represents itself in ONE principle and it continues to be based in the singular. Since the Enlightenment and the critique of religion it initiated, an end of religion has seemed to represent a highly probable historical development. Exposed as deception, decried as an opium, dismissed as inadequate and outdated knowledge, religion has come to occupy an uncertain position. From this perspective it stands for the opposite of a consciousness that understands itself as enlightened. In this pattern of thinking, those who continue to have religion are easily seen as being inferior, backward, peripheral, uneducated, poor and maybe even female. This contemptuous attitude is reflected in the title of the Freud writing “The Future of an Illusion”, even though a skeptical alternative is thinkable: that illusion has a future, because the human being is not able to live without illusions. The widely vaunted, and also widely rejected, return of religion does not, however, mean a Renaissance of traditional piety, rather the development of fully new forms of religion, which are unmistakably individualistic and psychologically founded. One could also say that the greatest danger for the churches does not emanate from the corrosive power of atheism, rather from the colorful mixture of religions on offer, which generally do not have a church and do not have a single god. Or it is a form of religion that, as fundamentalism shows, puts less emphasis on religiosity than on the granite of a traditional order, which is to serve as a means of protection from the irritations and challenges of modernism. Religion is, as the English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead has shown, not a simple, rather a complex, composite phenomenon. Whitehead differentiated among four elements: ritual, dogma, myth and feeling. One could quite plausibly claim that today these four elements have gone their own separate ways, so to say, and are often found in isolated areas of the modernist world: heart- felt belief for example, mysticism, seems to be especially resistant to the critique of the Enlightenment. It makes no claims that can be refuted, being based solely on the evidence and experience of the lone individual. Just as little as myths have rituals disappeared. Dogma, perhaps, the codified form of religion, seems to have become a little antiquated. Religiosity without God and dogma is booming, but as fundamentalism in all of the most important world religions has shown, dogma is also exerting an increasing attraction: there is a widespread desire to solidify the ground under one’s feet, to retain and restore older notions of order. Here one needs laws that cannot be contradicted. Thus thinking about religion (“after” Freud” in a global context) is to be the subject of an international symposium. The ambiguity of the title highlights two at least partially contradictory thrusts of the project: a critique of religion in the Freudian sense is confronted by a bundle of later religio-philosophical concepts and lines of thinking that cannot ignore Freud, but that also point beyond his ideas or even contradict them. Representation, critique and deconstruction of Freudian thinking with regard to religion stand at the center of a symposium that seeks to be transdisciplinary (religio-philosophic, psychological, cultural and aesthetic) but that avoids focusing on two issues: the theological discussion and the debate surrounding religion and politics. Both of them are justified and have their place, but in this symposium attention will be focused on a critical examination of the major monotheistic religions, and of psychoanalysis as well. .