It is Freud's birthday today! He gave those of us in the field of psychology many enduring gifts including the connection of our dreams to the Unconscious, the identification of multiple psychological defense mechanisms and the concept of countertransference. Below is an excerpt from the literature review on Freud in my doctoral dissertation:
In The
Future of an Illusion, Freud (1856 – 1939 CE) describes religion as an
illusion. He differentiates between an illusion and an error, by noting that what is characteristic of illusions is the
move towards human wish fulfillment. He adds, however, that, "illusions
need not necessarily be false." (1964, p. 39)
One might ask whether there is a correlation between an illusion, a weltanschauung and an imaginal space,
especially for the kind of Dar al-Islam envisioned by Caliphal
Islamists.
Fethi Benslama, a contemporary Tunisian
psychoanalyst who teaches at the University of Paris, discusses the unconscious
and stealth nature of Islamism and suggests that the Islamists are haunted by,
what he refers to as, “the torment of origins” in Psychoanalysis and the Challenge of Islam, as translated from the French by Robert Bononno: “Its proponents
gradually succeeded in attracting the masses through a promise that did not
hold any expectations for the future but, rather, incorporated a regression to
some distant past, when time was an identical repetition of what had already
taken place during Islam’s foundation” (2009, pp. 9-10). The language of al-Fatiha and the project of Monotheism
is similarly an invocation of the past, and a focus on the Hereafter. The use
of the temporal and spatial past tense, and the vision for a non-terrestrial
future, in contrast to the present moment of worship and supplication, needs to
receive serious examination. The
significance of Freud’s examination of illusion is that it captures the essence
of the longing for a recapitulation of the Golden Age of Islam and a myopic vision
of Paradise, which drives those engaged in or celebrating global martyrdom
operations.
Freud traces the origins
of religion to totemism. For Freud, the individual is essentially an
enemy of society and has instinctual urges that must be restrained to help
society function, because human nature is anti-social, rebellious, and
has high sexual and destructive tendencies. The equivalent notion in Islam to
these instinctual urges is the nafs ammara,
the tyrannical self, about which more will be expounded later in this chapter,
within the context of Sufi psychology. So destructive is human nature, Freud
claims that "it is only through
the influence of individuals who can set an example and whom masses recognize
as their leaders that they can be induced to perform the work and undergo the
renunciations on which the existence of civilization
depends." (1964, p. 8) How
these individuals acquire such qualities of leadership and values is not
explained in this text, but Freud clearly sees the need for exemplars and
models. Freud comes to terms with the enduring impact of leadership in his
final work, Moses and Monotheism. He even
proposes that a “great man influences his contemporaries through his
personality and through the idea for which he stands” (1967, p. 139). It is
unclear how Freud would rationalize the fact that the personality of such a
leader can be, and historically has been, inspired, not just by an idea of God,
but by an encounter with the numinous manifestation of the Divine. Freud instead
argues that religion develops as the emphasis on acquisition of physical objects
and the satisfaction of instinctual drives (sex, wealth, glory, happiness,
immortality) moves from the material to the mental. As compensation for good
behaviors, religion promises a reward. For Freud, there is nothing intrinsic in
human nature that would inspire individuals to act with nobility. Nevertheless,
Freud does recognize the role for leadership, and al-Fatiha refers to the role of the religious leadership of humankind
to set the civilizing example that is called for, even if it, too, may only be a
shared human wish by many.
Religion is rooted in the Oedipus complex,
and represents man's helplessness in the world, having to face death and the
forces of nature. Freud views God as an infantile longing for a father. In his
words "The gods retain the threefold task: they must exorcize the terrors
of nature, they must reconcile men to the cruelty of Fate, particularly as it
is shown in death, and they must compensate them for the sufferings and
privations which a civilized life in common has imposed on them" (1964, p.
19). Islam’s loss of the Prophet as the father and its central authority figure
caused much confusion and disruption for the umma, as noted earlier. The
root word for umma is umm, which means Mother. It is the umma, without a father, which is now left to provide the maternal
nurturing and nourishment to all those who have been orphaned by the Prophet’s
departure. But the umma is, and has always
been, in disarray and fragmented. The very unity of the umma, which represents the One Soul from which all humanity continues
to be born, is in doubt.
Freud’s 1929 essay on Civilization and Its Discontents is a penetrating summary of the
views on culture from a psychoanalytic perspective. As an atheist, Freud could
not have accepted or fully grasped the civilizing mission of religion but he
did not fail to see it as a human mission: “I was led to the idea that
civilization was a special process which mankind undergoes, and I am still
under the influence of that idea. I may now add that civilization is a process
in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals,
and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity,
the unity of mankind. Why this has to happen, we do not know; the work of Eros
is precisely this” (1961, pp. 81-82). But it is clearly also the mission of
pan-Islamism to unite humanity, although it is founded on a distorted
aggressive interpretation of the original message of Islam, which strove for a
Pax Islamica in service to Eros. The Eros in Islamism is perverted to a form of
religious supremacy.
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