Sigmund Freud
(1856-1939)
Although no longer considered at the forefront of theoretical developments in the field of psychology, Sigmund Freud nonetheless remains important as the father of psychoanalysis. Along with the work of Karl Marx and Emile Durkheim, his research on the interactions between individual and group has contributed to a field today known as social theory. Born in 1856 in Freiberg, Moravia (today a region in the Czech Republic), his family later moved to Vienna, the city where he would spend the rest of his life. Trained as a medical doctor with an interest in neurology, he was forced to abandon the medical profession when his method of treating patients by means of hypnosis was deemed unscientific by his colleagues. Wanting to develop a more scientific approach to the study of the mind, he applied principles from the natural sciences, especially physics, yet he concluded that the complexities of the mind required more sophisticated and comprehensive explanations. To develop such theories, he studied, among other things, his patients' reports of their dreams. Freud theorized that human minds not only have a conscious component but also an unconscious aspect, the content of which manifests itself when the conscious mind is not in control, such as in dreams, fantasies, and most importantly, in neuroses (that is, abnormal behaviors such as those classified as obsessive compulsive disorders or uncontrollable fears of such things as water or public places). His psychoanalytic theory names the individual components of the human psyche as: the id (Latin for "it" meaning the unconscious and uncontrollable primal instincts), the superego (Latin for "I above" meaning those influences from the outside world imposed upon human personality from birth), and the ego (Latin for "I" meaning the mediator between the superego and the id). For Freud, the inevitable competition between what he termed the pleasure principle (embodied by the id's drive for self-gratification) and the reality principle (embodied by the superego's self-policing activities) was the primary cause of neuroses in the human psyche. Society, with its rules and laws, was one of the main sources of censure; repression of the pleasure principle/id--which he deemed to be instinctual, primal, and the source of uncontrollable though natural urges and desires--was therefore the basis of social life. Because all humans are both biological individuals with natural needs and desires as well as actors in society, Freud concluded that each human needed to engage in repression and thus possessed some form of neurosis.
Major Works
The Interpretation of Dreams (1900)
"Obsessive Acts and Religious Practice" (1907)
Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Psychic Lives of Savages
and Neurotics (1912-13)
The Future of an Illusion (1927)
Civilization and its Discontents (1930)
Quotation
"In view of these resemblances and analogies one might venture to regard
the obsessional neurosis as a pathological counterpart to the formation
of a religion, to describe this neurosis as a private religious system,
and religion as a universal obsessional neurosis. The essential resemblance
would lie in the fundamental renunciation of the satisfaction of inherent
instincts, and the chief difference in the nature of these instincts,
which in the neurosis are exclusively sexual, but in religion are of egoistic
origin."
- from Sigmund Freud, Obsessive Acts and Religious Practice (1907)
Select Web Resources on Freud
Freud
Museum in Vienna
Internet
Encyclopedia of Religion of Philosophy entry on Freud
Secondary Literature on Freud and Religion
Brian Morris, Anthropological Studies of Religion: An Introduction.
Chapter 4. Cambridge University Press, 1987.
Walter H. Capps, Religious Studies: The Making of a Discipline.
pp. 41-43. Augsberg Fortress Press, 1995.
Daniel Pals, Seven Theories of Religion. Chapter 2. Oxford University
Press, 1996.
Michael Palmer, Freud and Jung on Religion. Routledge, 1997.
Lindsay Jones (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd edition.
vol. 5, pp. 3215-3218. Macmillan Reference USA, 2005.