Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Chapter 1 Posing the problem
- Chapter 2 The intelligence of the artificial
- Chapter 3 Schema theory
- Chapter 4 Relating mind and brain
- Chapter 5 Freedom
- Chapter 6 Freud on psychology and religion
- Chapter 7 Schemas: from the individual to the social
- Chapter 8 Language, metaphor, and a new epistemology
- Chapter 9 Interpretation and reality
- Chapter 10 Religions as social schemas
- Chapter 11 The Great Schema
- Chapter 12 Secular schemas
- References
- Author index
- Subject index
Chapter 6 - Freud on psychology and religion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Chapter 1 Posing the problem
- Chapter 2 The intelligence of the artificial
- Chapter 3 Schema theory
- Chapter 4 Relating mind and brain
- Chapter 5 Freedom
- Chapter 6 Freud on psychology and religion
- Chapter 7 Schemas: from the individual to the social
- Chapter 8 Language, metaphor, and a new epistemology
- Chapter 9 Interpretation and reality
- Chapter 10 Religions as social schemas
- Chapter 11 The Great Schema
- Chapter 12 Secular schemas
- References
- Author index
- Subject index
Summary
To some people, Freud's psychoanalysis is a word therapy that has provided invaluable new tools for psychiatry; for others, it is a failed pseudoscience. Yet for many humanists and literary scholars, clinical or scientific criteria are simply beside the point: for them, Freud has supplied a language to chart the human mind, not just its conscious rationality but also the unconscious and repressed sources of the darkness in people's souls.
Freud was trained as a neurologist and also received an excellent nineteenth-century European education and read widely in the classics. Thus, when creating the metapsychology of psychoanalysis, he built on concepts rooted in scientific materialism yet shaped them in the light of the human, yet transcendent, dramas of Greek myth. His work took him from neurology to reaches of the human mind that, at that time, resisted neurological explanation. His studies of the individual mind were complemented by studies of society and religion, in which he saw these as expressions of the individual psyches of people coming together into groups. God was the projection of human fears and wishes, not a transcendent reality constitutive of human meaning.
We thus devote this chapter to a critique of the work of Freud.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Construction of Reality , pp. 105 - 126Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1986