Chapter 5
Psychodynamic and Relational Approaches
Two years before William James published his classic Varieties of Religious Expe-
rience, a relatively unknown doctor named Sigmund Freud authored his first great
work, The Interpretation of Dreams, ushering in the new field of psychodynamic
psychology. Ten years later, Freud published Totem and Taboo, his first major
work that attempted an analysis of religion. In the following years, the work of
Freud and other psychodynamic theorists would provide a rich—and sometime
contentious— platform for a religion-psychology dialogue.
Psychodynamic theories focus on cognitive, emotional, and relational
dynamics within the individual, especially mental processes that are unconscious
and outside of awareness. In particular, psychodynamic approaches focus on one
or more of three different types of processes: (1) drives or instinctual processes
that motivate behavior, (2) structures or internal patterns that provide
organization for the per- sonality, and (3) relations between the self and external
or internal objects. Each of these types of processes has provided a basis for a
psychological perspective on reli- gion. In this chapter, we will consider Freud’s
drive-oriented approach to religion, the theory of Erik Erikson that has important
structural features, and the object- relational theories of Harry Guntrip and David
Winnicott. We will also consider the unique contributions of the psychodynamic
theorist Carl Jung.
5.1 Sigmund Freud: Master of Suspicion
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) was no friend to religion from the beginning of his
career. Along with personal experiences that alienated him from Christianity, he
was an admirer of some of the most important opponents to traditional religion
such as Ludwig Feuerbach and Friedrich Nietzsche. His mentor Ernst Brücke was
Vienna’s most ardent positivist and a reductive materialist (Gay, 1998, pp. 12–34;
Ramzy, 1977). Freud was thus influenced by Comtean positivism, which acted to
constrain his choices in the development of psychoanalysis so that spiritual issues
were neglected or reduced to material processes (Domenjo, 2000; Grotstein,
1992). Positivism carried with it a view of history that placed religion as a
primitive phenomenon destined to be replaced by science, an idea that Freud
elaborated in his work (see Section 2.3) (Fig. 5.1).
J.M. Nelson, Psychology, Religion, and Spirituality,
143
DOI 10.1007/978-0-387-87573-6_0, @ Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2009
,14 5 Psychodynamic and Relational Approaches
Fig. 5.1 Sigmund Freud.
One of the most influential
figures of the 20th century,
Freud had generally negative
views on religion, although
many theologians appreciated
aspects of his work. Photo
courtesy of Mary Evans
Picture Library
Freud’s initial outline for his vision is contained in the manuscript Project for a
Scientific Psychology (1953). In this work, Freud developed the idea that the
psyche could be entirely described using material processes that operated in the
mechanis- tic fashion of 19th-century physics. The activity of the human psyche
was simply “neuronal motion” (1953, p. 310). This material basis of his theory
continued to be a principle in his later work, even if it was not explicitly
articulated (Mackay, 1989, p. 222). Along with positivist and materialist ideas
Freud also adopted the doctrine of recapitulation, the idea that the stages of
development in human evolu- tion, including psychological and cultural evolution,
are repeated in the stages of development of each human being.
5.1.1 Basic Concepts
Freud thought that all behavior was motivated by instinctual drives, particularly
forces related to sexuality and aggression. He thought these drives were primarily
active at the unconscious level of the personality, completely outside our
awareness but able to govern our behavior. These drives govern the id or
instinctual part of the psyche, which along with the superego or conscience and
the ego or executive function make up the three main structures of the personality.
The drives express themselves in different ways depending on the person’s stage
of development. For instance, Freud thought that around age 4 or 5 the sexual
drive sets up an uncon- scious attraction between boys and their mother, leading
to competition with the
, 5.1 Sigmund Freud: Master of 1
father and unconscious fantasies of murder. He termed this the Oedipus complex.
Many of these urges are culturally inappropriate and threatening, so the ego
utilizes defense mechanisms to try to express them in more socially approved
ways. For instance, during projection the ego attributes unacceptable unconscious
feelings like anger to other people or things.
5.1.2 Views on Religion
Freud developed positions on the cultural origins of religion, as well as its genesis
in the individual (Watts & Williams, 1988, p. 24). He had a long-standing interest
in culture and in Totem and Taboo (1950) offered a psychoanalytic explanation for
the totem, a special sacred object of devotion found in many societies that serves
as a guardian spirit or helper. Totems are the focus of a number of prohibitions or
restrictions for a group, and Freud argued that these prohibitions were the original
source of many human moral ideas, such as the Kantian categorical imperative and
incest taboos (see Section 2.2.3). While totems are usually animals or other natural
objects, Freud believed that sometime in the distant human past there existed a
“primal father” who served as a totem for a group but was murdered by them. He
thought that the root form of every religion was a longing for this father and that
religious ceremonies of atonement or celebration are recapitulations of the ancient
murder. God is simply a replacement for the totem animal and father, although
Freud did not know the source of this new idea. The assumption behind his idea is
that there must exist a collective mind that retains a sense of guilt over the original
murder, as well as progress made in human evolution. He thought that this collec-
tive mind developed by an unconscious reading of other people through their reac-
tions. In essence, Freud argued that “God” is a projection of these human figures,
a view that has some parallels in Epicurean philosophy (Long, 1986).
In the 1920s, Freud wrote about his concerns for the future of civilization and
its ability to make continued material progress. In The Future of an Illusion
(1961b) he built a case for the elimination of religion that has many similarities
with Comte’s Law of Three Stages. Freud argued that a key role of civilization is
to combat and tame nature, which he viewed as a cold cruel destroyer that we
must defend against. Our feelings of helplessness in the world are similar to our
childhood feelings that our parents—especially the father—help us to combat. The
value of religious ideas is that they offer a similar kind of protection and are thus
really a form of a longing for a pro- tective father. However, these traditional beliefs
are not to be accepted because of their contradictions and lack of confirmation.
Instead, human reasoning—Logos—can be our god, and we must turn to science
as the only way can know about reality outside of ourselves. Religion retards the
intellectual development of the individual, and it is ineffective as it has not made
us happy. Instead, science should replace it. Freud believed that such antireligious
ideas should be kept away from the masses but that eventually a turning away from
religion is bound to occur. It will be difficult for those brought up with religion, but
for others “sensibly brought up” the prospects may be
, 14 5 Psychodynamic and Relational Approaches
better. While we must admit our “insignificance in the machinery of the universe”
we can leave behind infantile attachment to a good God and move to confront the
hostile world using our own resources, hopefully with the increased power that
science will provide and a state of resigned endurance for things that cannot be
changed (1961b,
p. 63). Freud’s thought here echoed that of Feuerbach (1957), who had argued the
God is just a representation of a purified human nature and that reason needs to be
applied to religion to destroy illusions that deprive us of power. Erik Fromm also
held similar views, as he believed that God is really a human creation and a
representation of our potential (Cooper 2006, p. 117).
Freud’s theory of religion did not address the issue of religious experience.
Soon after the publication of The Future of an Illusion, the French writer Romain
Rolland sent Freud a letter asking about an unbounded, “oceanic feeling” that
occurs in many people and is used as a source of energy in many religions. Freud
responded to this by saying that he could not discover such a feeling in himself but
that he presumed it was a regression to an early undifferentiated state of ego-
feeling and narcissism that later became connected with religion. Thus, he
minimized or denied the possibility of a state of pure consciousness or nonsensory
and nonintellectual experience of reality (Leavy, 1995, p. 349). He rejected the
idea that this could be a source for religion, thinking that nothing could be
stronger than the sense of help- lessness sustained by the fear of superior powers
(1961a, pp. 11–21).
5.1.3 Impact and Evaluation
As might be expected, Freud’s ideas on religion met with some critical response
from theologians. Albert Outler sardonically remarked, “If religious faith reflects
an infantile regression, so [Freud’s] naturalistic faith looks a good deal like the
ado- lescent rejection of the father…” (Outler, 1954, p. 252). Freud’s view of
ethics as simply a regret for primal murder or other unacceptable desires
challenged deeply held beliefs of many Christian groups, who believed that moral
laws were univer- sal imperatives of divine origin (MacIntyre & Ricoeur, 1969;
Pannenberg, 1983, pp. 19–20). However, other religious writers, particularly
liberal Protestants, had more sympathy for Freud’s work. These writers recognized
that religion could have illusion connected with it and found that Freud’s work
provided some useful ways of understanding this. They also appreciated the fact
that psychodynamic theory con- tains a relational component that can be useful in
the analysis of religious experience and development (Lietaer & Corveleyn, 1995;
Jonte-Pace, 1999; Homans, 1970, pp. 14–15, 1968b). Niebuhr (1957, pp. 260–
270) liked Freud’s realistic view of the limits of reason, and pessimism is certainly
the dominant tone in much of Freud’s work (Burns-Smith, 1999). However,
Niebuhr rejected Freud’s naturalism as being unable to deal with the issues of
transcendent freedom and historical context in their creative and destructive
possibilities. Maritain (1957) argued that the problem with Freud was not his
psychology but his metaphysical assumptions and rationalism that turned useful
insights into reductionistic, hardened positions of limited validity.
Psychodynamic and Relational Approaches
Two years before William James published his classic Varieties of Religious Expe-
rience, a relatively unknown doctor named Sigmund Freud authored his first great
work, The Interpretation of Dreams, ushering in the new field of psychodynamic
psychology. Ten years later, Freud published Totem and Taboo, his first major
work that attempted an analysis of religion. In the following years, the work of
Freud and other psychodynamic theorists would provide a rich—and sometime
contentious— platform for a religion-psychology dialogue.
Psychodynamic theories focus on cognitive, emotional, and relational
dynamics within the individual, especially mental processes that are unconscious
and outside of awareness. In particular, psychodynamic approaches focus on one
or more of three different types of processes: (1) drives or instinctual processes
that motivate behavior, (2) structures or internal patterns that provide
organization for the per- sonality, and (3) relations between the self and external
or internal objects. Each of these types of processes has provided a basis for a
psychological perspective on reli- gion. In this chapter, we will consider Freud’s
drive-oriented approach to religion, the theory of Erik Erikson that has important
structural features, and the object- relational theories of Harry Guntrip and David
Winnicott. We will also consider the unique contributions of the psychodynamic
theorist Carl Jung.
5.1 Sigmund Freud: Master of Suspicion
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) was no friend to religion from the beginning of his
career. Along with personal experiences that alienated him from Christianity, he
was an admirer of some of the most important opponents to traditional religion
such as Ludwig Feuerbach and Friedrich Nietzsche. His mentor Ernst Brücke was
Vienna’s most ardent positivist and a reductive materialist (Gay, 1998, pp. 12–34;
Ramzy, 1977). Freud was thus influenced by Comtean positivism, which acted to
constrain his choices in the development of psychoanalysis so that spiritual issues
were neglected or reduced to material processes (Domenjo, 2000; Grotstein,
1992). Positivism carried with it a view of history that placed religion as a
primitive phenomenon destined to be replaced by science, an idea that Freud
elaborated in his work (see Section 2.3) (Fig. 5.1).
J.M. Nelson, Psychology, Religion, and Spirituality,
143
DOI 10.1007/978-0-387-87573-6_0, @ Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2009
,14 5 Psychodynamic and Relational Approaches
Fig. 5.1 Sigmund Freud.
One of the most influential
figures of the 20th century,
Freud had generally negative
views on religion, although
many theologians appreciated
aspects of his work. Photo
courtesy of Mary Evans
Picture Library
Freud’s initial outline for his vision is contained in the manuscript Project for a
Scientific Psychology (1953). In this work, Freud developed the idea that the
psyche could be entirely described using material processes that operated in the
mechanis- tic fashion of 19th-century physics. The activity of the human psyche
was simply “neuronal motion” (1953, p. 310). This material basis of his theory
continued to be a principle in his later work, even if it was not explicitly
articulated (Mackay, 1989, p. 222). Along with positivist and materialist ideas
Freud also adopted the doctrine of recapitulation, the idea that the stages of
development in human evolu- tion, including psychological and cultural evolution,
are repeated in the stages of development of each human being.
5.1.1 Basic Concepts
Freud thought that all behavior was motivated by instinctual drives, particularly
forces related to sexuality and aggression. He thought these drives were primarily
active at the unconscious level of the personality, completely outside our
awareness but able to govern our behavior. These drives govern the id or
instinctual part of the psyche, which along with the superego or conscience and
the ego or executive function make up the three main structures of the personality.
The drives express themselves in different ways depending on the person’s stage
of development. For instance, Freud thought that around age 4 or 5 the sexual
drive sets up an uncon- scious attraction between boys and their mother, leading
to competition with the
, 5.1 Sigmund Freud: Master of 1
father and unconscious fantasies of murder. He termed this the Oedipus complex.
Many of these urges are culturally inappropriate and threatening, so the ego
utilizes defense mechanisms to try to express them in more socially approved
ways. For instance, during projection the ego attributes unacceptable unconscious
feelings like anger to other people or things.
5.1.2 Views on Religion
Freud developed positions on the cultural origins of religion, as well as its genesis
in the individual (Watts & Williams, 1988, p. 24). He had a long-standing interest
in culture and in Totem and Taboo (1950) offered a psychoanalytic explanation for
the totem, a special sacred object of devotion found in many societies that serves
as a guardian spirit or helper. Totems are the focus of a number of prohibitions or
restrictions for a group, and Freud argued that these prohibitions were the original
source of many human moral ideas, such as the Kantian categorical imperative and
incest taboos (see Section 2.2.3). While totems are usually animals or other natural
objects, Freud believed that sometime in the distant human past there existed a
“primal father” who served as a totem for a group but was murdered by them. He
thought that the root form of every religion was a longing for this father and that
religious ceremonies of atonement or celebration are recapitulations of the ancient
murder. God is simply a replacement for the totem animal and father, although
Freud did not know the source of this new idea. The assumption behind his idea is
that there must exist a collective mind that retains a sense of guilt over the original
murder, as well as progress made in human evolution. He thought that this collec-
tive mind developed by an unconscious reading of other people through their reac-
tions. In essence, Freud argued that “God” is a projection of these human figures,
a view that has some parallels in Epicurean philosophy (Long, 1986).
In the 1920s, Freud wrote about his concerns for the future of civilization and
its ability to make continued material progress. In The Future of an Illusion
(1961b) he built a case for the elimination of religion that has many similarities
with Comte’s Law of Three Stages. Freud argued that a key role of civilization is
to combat and tame nature, which he viewed as a cold cruel destroyer that we
must defend against. Our feelings of helplessness in the world are similar to our
childhood feelings that our parents—especially the father—help us to combat. The
value of religious ideas is that they offer a similar kind of protection and are thus
really a form of a longing for a pro- tective father. However, these traditional beliefs
are not to be accepted because of their contradictions and lack of confirmation.
Instead, human reasoning—Logos—can be our god, and we must turn to science
as the only way can know about reality outside of ourselves. Religion retards the
intellectual development of the individual, and it is ineffective as it has not made
us happy. Instead, science should replace it. Freud believed that such antireligious
ideas should be kept away from the masses but that eventually a turning away from
religion is bound to occur. It will be difficult for those brought up with religion, but
for others “sensibly brought up” the prospects may be
, 14 5 Psychodynamic and Relational Approaches
better. While we must admit our “insignificance in the machinery of the universe”
we can leave behind infantile attachment to a good God and move to confront the
hostile world using our own resources, hopefully with the increased power that
science will provide and a state of resigned endurance for things that cannot be
changed (1961b,
p. 63). Freud’s thought here echoed that of Feuerbach (1957), who had argued the
God is just a representation of a purified human nature and that reason needs to be
applied to religion to destroy illusions that deprive us of power. Erik Fromm also
held similar views, as he believed that God is really a human creation and a
representation of our potential (Cooper 2006, p. 117).
Freud’s theory of religion did not address the issue of religious experience.
Soon after the publication of The Future of an Illusion, the French writer Romain
Rolland sent Freud a letter asking about an unbounded, “oceanic feeling” that
occurs in many people and is used as a source of energy in many religions. Freud
responded to this by saying that he could not discover such a feeling in himself but
that he presumed it was a regression to an early undifferentiated state of ego-
feeling and narcissism that later became connected with religion. Thus, he
minimized or denied the possibility of a state of pure consciousness or nonsensory
and nonintellectual experience of reality (Leavy, 1995, p. 349). He rejected the
idea that this could be a source for religion, thinking that nothing could be
stronger than the sense of help- lessness sustained by the fear of superior powers
(1961a, pp. 11–21).
5.1.3 Impact and Evaluation
As might be expected, Freud’s ideas on religion met with some critical response
from theologians. Albert Outler sardonically remarked, “If religious faith reflects
an infantile regression, so [Freud’s] naturalistic faith looks a good deal like the
ado- lescent rejection of the father…” (Outler, 1954, p. 252). Freud’s view of
ethics as simply a regret for primal murder or other unacceptable desires
challenged deeply held beliefs of many Christian groups, who believed that moral
laws were univer- sal imperatives of divine origin (MacIntyre & Ricoeur, 1969;
Pannenberg, 1983, pp. 19–20). However, other religious writers, particularly
liberal Protestants, had more sympathy for Freud’s work. These writers recognized
that religion could have illusion connected with it and found that Freud’s work
provided some useful ways of understanding this. They also appreciated the fact
that psychodynamic theory con- tains a relational component that can be useful in
the analysis of religious experience and development (Lietaer & Corveleyn, 1995;
Jonte-Pace, 1999; Homans, 1970, pp. 14–15, 1968b). Niebuhr (1957, pp. 260–
270) liked Freud’s realistic view of the limits of reason, and pessimism is certainly
the dominant tone in much of Freud’s work (Burns-Smith, 1999). However,
Niebuhr rejected Freud’s naturalism as being unable to deal with the issues of
transcendent freedom and historical context in their creative and destructive
possibilities. Maritain (1957) argued that the problem with Freud was not his
psychology but his metaphysical assumptions and rationalism that turned useful
insights into reductionistic, hardened positions of limited validity.
