Freud and 'wishful thinking'

http://gncurtis.home.texas.net/wishthnk.html

from http://www.biblicaldefense.org/Research_Center/Apologetics/Psychological_Apologetics/mansthirst_for_god.htm

Though both atheists and Christians alike recognize the universal thirst for God, atheists deny that God actually does exist. Instead, they speculate as to why so many people believe that He does exist. An example of this kind of speculation is found in the thought of Sigmund Freud.

Freud was convinced that God did not exist. But if atheism is true, then why do so many people believe in God? Freud tried to answer this question. Freud suggested that primitive man felt extremely threatened by nature (due to storms, floods, earthquakes, diseases, and ultimately death). 11 Man had no control over nature. He was totally helpless in this regard. Primitive man was completely at the mercy of nature. There was nowhere man could turn for help. Freud theorized that primitive men therefore decided to personalize nature. In this way, man could attempt to plead with or appease nature. Imagining nature to be a personal being enabled man to offer sacrifices to nature in hope that nature would be kind to him in return.

Freud's speculation did not stop there. He also promoted another theory of early human society. He assumed that originally mankind banded together in small groups. These clans consisted of a male, his several wives, and their offspring. Freud believed that, early in life, male children desired to have sex with their mothers. They therefore became extremely jealous of their father. Though they loved their father since he was their protector, they began to hate him due to their jealousy. Eventually, they banded together and murdered their father. After the murder, they ate the flesh of their father in a ritual meal. Soon, the male children were overcome with feelings of guilt. As a result, they deified the father image and began offering sacrifices to him as a god.

Freud taught that God is nothing but a product of man's imagination. God did not create man. Instead, man created God. Man personalized nature due to his fear of nature. The guilt he felt for murdering his father also caused him to project the father image onto this personalized nature. In this way, reasoned Freud, the belief in the Father-God was originated by man's wishful thinking.

This highly speculative theory does not do justice to mankind's universal thirst for God. This theory appears to be "wishful thinking" on the part of Freud. Whatever the case, Freud's proposed explanation deserves a response.

However, specific differences between Lacan and Buddhism still remain, because savoir in Lacanian psychoanalysis refers to the Real of the sexual drive. For Freud religion was the illness contracted by the repression of sexuality, and the cure resided in a rational or romantic understanding and apprehension of sexuality. This was the reverse of the traditional view wherein desire was the illness and the repression of desire the cure. For psychoanalysis the way out-the other shore or nirvana-is found within desire or within what Buddhism calls Samsara. Precisely because religion represses desire and sexuality, Freud also finds concealed Samsara within Nirvana or wish fulfillment or wishful thinking within religion. But the reverse may also be true: because psychoanalysis represses Nirvana or Buddhism, Nirvana can be found implicit within psychoanalysis and the subjective position of the analyst.

Nirvana within desire is neither the deadly pursuit of an impossible sexual jouissance (as in perversion) nor a purely rational or romantic interest in sexuality. From both a Mahayana Buddhism and a Lacanian perspective, desire can be interpreted as the emptiness or lack-of-being. Such desire longs not only for objects of being, whether secular or religious, but also for desire itself as the core emptiness of being. Moreover, to address the impurity of the sacred and go beyond not only the wine of the object of desire but also the wine of religion (the attachment to purity and to detachment), Zen Buddhism emphasizes that desire and emptiness must be returned to the ordinariness of form and the esthetics of everyday life. The jouissance of being and of the body is both recovered and established on the basis of Nirvana as emptiness and the emptiness of Nirvana. When desire is returned to the void, out of the void or emptiness returns the esthetics of form and the laws of form.

Freudian psychoanalysis provides grounds for a pragmatic criticism of both popular argument from religious experience and "Will to Believe" type arguments. That Freud holds such illusory belief to be destructive is made clear in his New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis.

Freud there rejects the use of non-scientific methods such as "intuition and divination," since they are wish-fulfillments. Science, Freud cautions us, leads us to be wary of emotional demands and wishes. Though such wishes may function in the production of (science's rivals) art, religion and philosophy, Freud claims, "it would be illegitimate and highly inexpedient to allow these demands to be transferred to the sphere of knowledge." To let wishful demands dictate that knowledge Freud holds evidence alone has the right to indicate would lead us down a path to insanity which would preclude us from finding the truths that are there to find. It would "lay open the paths which lead to psychosis . . . and would withdraw valuable . . . energy from endeavors which are directed towards reality . . . ."[16]

The Future of an Illusion (1927) interpreted all religious beliefs as illusions or wishful thinking based on childhood dependency