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As man develops his pattern of life in relation to the divinity of his God, we must now ask: who is man in the face of the rejected Son of Man who was raised up in the freedom of God? How does he develop his life in the field of force of the passion of the crucified God? ‘Christ is the end of the law,’ declares Paul (Rom. 10:4). What does that mean for the liberation of man?
If we attempt to draw out the consequences of the theology of the crucified God for anthropology, we cannot remain within the monologue of a theological anthropology, but have to enter into dialogue with other images of man. If we are attempting to track down the liberation of man and point to its traces, the first step is inevitably a dialogue with the anthropological science which is itself concerned with the therapy of sick men. Above all, this is a matter of the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud. Theological conversation with Freud has really got under way only in the last decades. A discussion of Freud’s criticism of religion is therefore important for a critical theology. Of course this dialogue is only an extract from the many-layered pattern of Christian anthropology today, open to the world as it must necessarily be. It can therefore lay no claim to completeness. But it did seem more important to present the consequences of the theology of the cross at one point than to keep to abstract generalizations.
Anyone who follows Paul in speaking of the freedom of the sons of God in faith in Christ must also seek out and present this freedom in specific psychological and political terms. He cannot restrict himself to making correct theological statements about what it must mean in the theological circle of true faith; he must present his remarks in a specific controversy with general psychological phenomena of religion, particular pathological phenomena and therapeutic attempts at freeing men from psychological compulsions. Otherwise the freedom of faith would be discussed only in the freedom of theological reflection, and not as a new liveliness in the twilight of repressions and obsessions. What is needed here is therefore a psychological hermeneutics of the word of the cross, the spirit of freedom and the history of God. Psychological hermeneutics is an interpretation and not a reduction. Like political hermeneutics, it is a translation of the theological language of liberation for a particular sphere and into a particular dimension of life. As human life is complex and is lived at the same time in a number of spheres and dimensions, a number of hermeneutical processes are necessary. There is no one hermeneutical key and no one hermeneutical key experience. The process of translation involves various fields of experience and practice. It has to be adapted to a variety of different relationships, circumstances and patterns of practice and language. This does not mean that theology is dissolved into psychology; rather, Christian language should show its particular character in this area of experience and practice. Otherwise it would be of no interest to psychology. Theologians who go over to psychology and give up theology are no longer partners in conversation. Unfortunately they often corrupt psychology with their repressed and unconscious theological expectations of the substitute. None of the ‘substance’ of faith is lost in a psychological hermeneutics of faith. Rather, it gains a new dimension of its incarnation and enters into the utter this-worldliness of life as it is lived and obstructed.
Christian theology thinks traditionally in terms of a dialectic of law and freedom. A psychological hermeneutics discovers points of correspondence between this theological dialectic and pathological phenomena and therapeutic processes. It therefore has to translate the theological dialectic on to the specific level of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy and reflect on it there. In so doing, it arrives at specific points, as at corrections and alterations, when it sees the man who is mentally ill in the situation of the crucified God and seeks his healing and his liberation in the free area opened up by this God. The theology of Paul and the Reformation speaks of the liberation of man by faith from the obsession of works. Psychological hermeneutics discovers a point of correspondence to this obsession in the obsessive ideas and actions of sick people and seeks how they may be freed for love and for unconstrained sympathy with life. In Rom. 7:7–11 Paul spoke of his imprisonment in the vicious circle of sin, the law and death: ‘Apart from the law sin lies dead. But when the commandment came, sin revived and I died; the very commandment which promised life proved to be death to me. For sin, finding opportunity in the commandment, deceived me and by it killed me.’ Sin and the law urge each other on and bring men to death. This is the diabolical strategy of evil: it takes the law, with which men fight against evil, into its regime and ensnares the man who obeys the law even more deeply in evil. He observes the law through fear of sin, but in so doing he only produces more and larger sins. He then takes up rigorous legalism, and this makes the evil even stronger. Even the best that he does serves evil. So this vicious circle of sin and the law results in man’s death. It becomes a syndrome of decay (E. Fromm). Though hardly anyone today believes in a personal devil, many people speak, in a variety of spheres of life, of vicious circles, of the vicious circles of poverty, of violence, of alienation, of industrial pollution, of the vicious circles of the black, the immigrant worker, the prisoner, the mentally ill. What does it mean? There are clearly systems of a psychological, social and political nature which have become fatal legalistic patterns. They are vicious circles in which even the best leads to what is worse. They are therefore inescapable and without hope. They are processes of negative feedback in which orientation on life shifts over to become orientation on death. From a medical point of view, death is such a vicious circle, which has a negative effect on the basic relationships between the breathing, the brain, the heart and the circulation of the blood. ‘This process leads to death only when the process of negative feedback can run its full course. But that means that any interruption of the vicious circle puts a check to dying.’
It is easy to recognize the structural analogy between the vicious circle of sin, the law and death of which Paul and many theologians after him, including Augustine and Luther, spoke, and the processes of negative feedback among the dying, the imprisoned, the exploited and the oppressed. But how can liberation from the vicious circle of sin and the law by faith be introduced into these limited psychological, social and political situations, and what points of correspondence are there? How can it be experienced and practised in these situations? Here the freedom of faith must be developed into freedom of experience and action, and where this is possible, it is involved in competition and co-operation with other therapies and movements of liberation. In what follows we shall use the analytical and illuminative concepts of the law, compulsion and the vicious circle for the psychological and political hermeneutics of the Christian situation before God, in order to find corresponding processes and perspectives for liberation. Faith in the resurrection becomes faith that raises up, wherever it transforms psychological and social systems, so that instead of being oriented on death they are oriented on life. The prayer of Jesus, ‘And deliver us from evil’, is experienced and put into practice where men are liberated from these vicious circles, where the will to life is restored, and man comes out of the rigor mortis of apathy and regains his life once more.
Sigmund Freud developed psychoanalysis in the therapy of sick individuals. But as time went on, he became more interested in the socio-psychological and cultural conditioning of illnesses. Although he was very careful in transferring the patterns of individual illnesses to society, he kept their determining conditions under constant investigation. This caution is less detectable in his followers like N. O. Brown, H. Marcuse and E. Fromm. Their analysis of society with the help of the patterns of individual illnesses often float off into the clouds of speculation and no longer have any therapeutic effect. Here is a limit to psychotherapy which must be observed if a non-verifiable metapsychology is to be avoided: the analysis often demonstrates the sickness of society by the example of the sick man, but therapy can only begin with the individual. This does not make it superfluous, as sick people cannot be comforted with the promise of a future healing of the whole of society. But therapy must be aware of this limit to its potentiality, in which psychological vicious circles are bound up with vicious circles in society and in politics. The transference of patterns of individual illnesses to society as a whole is no more meaningful than the transference of a critique of society to an individual case. The dimensions are different. They condition each other reciprocally in a complex way. They can only be reduced to one another in rare cases. As in most historical contexts, monocausal derivations are nonsense.
Freud never entered into serious discussion with the theology of the theologians of his time. His critique of religion is directed at ‘the external forms of religion’ and at ‘what the common man understands by religion’. He was interested in religious rules, rites and symbols and their psychological functions; that is, in religious forms at the point of intersection of the individual and of society. The religious experiences of his patients were limited to the Victorian religion of the Vienna of his time and to the bourgeois world of the nineteenth century. But his own religious problems extended beyond this to the ‘Mosaic religion’, as it was called at that time, of his family and of Judaism. So he was fascinated by the figure of Moses from tradition, in the form of Michelangelo’s statue in San Pietro in Vincoli, and at the level of his own inner feeling of guilt, which made him speak of the ‘murdered prophet’. He was increasingly more restrained towards the Christian religion, because he felt that he could not understand it. But Freud discovered pathological forms of private religion which occur among many men who have been influenced by Judaism and Christianity and indeed beyond that. His critique of religion was kindled by his interest in healing and liberation.
There are a number of different patterns in the conversation between psychotherapy and theology:
(a) Christian faith can identify itself with what Freud has criticized as ‘religion’ or ‘the caricature of a religion’. In that case he is regarded as the ‘worst enemy of religion’ after Marx, a position which he occasionally accorded himself. But a Christianity which identifies itself with religion as it is attacked and criticized in this way has surrendered its own critique of religion. The best apologetic course for an equivalent religious theology would be not to reject Freud as irreligious but to demonstrate in its critique of religion the very religious implicates which he himself criticized. If his theory is itself conditioned by religion, it does not lead to the dissolution of religion at the hands of reason, but represents a dislocation of the religious element. This form of apologetic counter-criticism, which seeks to demonstrate the repressions of religious thought to irreligious thought, has today evidently been taken over by positivism. It occurs only rarely in theology. Just as H. Albert and E. Topitsch accused the Frankfurt school and their ‘critical theory’ of ‘quasi-theological thought’—not without a degree of truth—so D. Wyss has remarked about Marx and Freud:
It cannot be coincidence that Marx and Freud were familiar with the genesis of the Old Testament … In both, the suppression of religion and its statements about a violent, mythical beginning and a Utopian end … seems to emerge again in the characteristic religious elements of mythical conceptions and stereotyped thought-patterns which cannot, however, be verified in scientific terms. It is a ‘return of what has been repressed’. Here the atheists Marx and Freud become the victims of their own repressions.
The criticism of religion finds difficulty in escaping the categorical drive of its subject-matter. Theologians who feel that they have to defend the Christian religion against Freud, and positivists who want to get rid of both religion and the criticism of religion, should, however, recognize that Freud did not identify religion with neurosis. He simply saw neurosis as a ‘caricature of religion’, in the same way as he called hysteria a caricature of art and paranoia a caricature of philosophy. It is therefore more appropriate to take up Freud’s criticism in a positive way, in order to free faith from the caricatures of its pathological doubles which appear in superstition.
(b) If it is to be Christian, Christian faith must constantly make a distinction between its own forms of religion and its particular nature, and do so in a self-critical way. In that case faith is not the same thing as religion, but often has the same relationship to bourgeois religion and private religion as Yahweh to the Baalim, as the crucified Christ to the ‘princes of this world’, as the living God to the idols of anxiety. In the service of this distinction, Christian theology can adopt Marx’s criticism of religion in order to detach the fellowship of Christ from the bourgeois-capitalist fetishism of gold and consumer goods, and can adopt Freud’s criticism of religion in order to detach liberating faith from the religious superstition of the heart. In that case this criticism of religion is taken up as aqua fortis in order to bring out the gold of true faith from the dross of religion which has been through the fires of criticism. This is the way in which Karl Barth distinguished between faith and religion at the time of dialectical theology: ‘Religion is unbelief, superstition and idolatry.’ P. Ricoeur, G. Crespy and R. de Pury follow him in this and use Freud as a bulldozer to clear the way for the gospel. The gospel and the criticism of religion combine to kill the ‘God’ whom men bring into the world. In fact this constellation of ‘faith against religion’ has a biblical predecessor in the prophetic criticism of religion, and above all in the Christian worship of the Christ who was crucified as a blasphemer. On the other side, Enlightenment criticism of idols from the time of Bacon has had its basis in the impact of the Old Testament prohibition against images. The prohibition against making images and likenesses, bowing down to them and worshipping them, is meant to protect the freedom of God and the freedom of his image in every man. This freedom is lost where the prejudices of tradition or the fixed ideas of ideology hold man’s understanding captive. It is lost where men worship their own works and bow themselves down to their own creatures, and where the objects that they have made gain power over them. The illumination of prejudices is therefore a liberation from the tutelage of tradition. The illumination of alienated conditions of work is liberation from the slavery that they impose. The illumination of psychological complexes, repressions and illusions corresponds to these movements towards freedom through iconoclasm.
(c) It is theologically legitimate to accept Freud’s criticism of religion as a negation of the negative in order to present a true positive, but a mere distinction between faith and its caricatures in public and private religion often leads to no more than the non-observance and repression of these religious phenomena. In order to overcome them it is necessary to have understood them. It is not enough to ascribe such neurotic phenomena of religion to the devil, while combating them by keeping close to Jesus. It is also necessary to discover why man is evidently so ‘incurably religious’ (as Berdyaev supposed) that he cannot exist without certain obsessive actions and ideas, without ‘something to which he can cling’, and still remain sane. In fact, obsessions protect some patients from psychosis and the loss of reality. There are psychological pattern formations which stylize positive and negative experiences. The narcissistic pattern formation offers both protection and danger, by accommodating the unavoidable positive and negative idealizations, which derive from the early phase and are primarily concrete, in a ‘world of symbols’, that is, in ideas in which we believe. This ambivalence of psychological formations should not be shattered in a senseless burst of iconoclasm. That would bring no healing to the patient; it would make the iconoclasm a fatal obsession.
An attempt to mediate between the elements of truth in the two patterns would suggest that it would first be meaningful to ‘accept Freud’s criticism of religion as an attempt to extend the human conditions of understanding to the dimensions of the unconscious, to adopt it and to understand his psychoanalysis as a “method of finding meaning” ’. But in that case we must ask how the man who is possessed by drives and illusions and has therefore become apathetic can be made free in the situation of the crucified God and develop his humanity. Freud’s criticism of religion should do more than help Christian faith to a better and more critical understanding of itself. His psychoanalysis must also show it the psychological barriers on which it can exercise its liberating power. The homo sympatheticus should be brought into the field of force of the pathos of God and the suffering of Christ, where pattern formations condemn man to a life of apathy.
About the year 1907, Freud became aware of the parallel between the obsessional actions of neurotics and the rituals of religious practice. The neurotic patient is inclined to submit himself to a private ritual in order to unburden himself of sorrow, pressure or anxiety. For him there are particular times which call for special observance. There are places and objects which provoke either anxiety or obsessional observance. There are special actions which must be performed again and again if the patient is not to fall into a state of panic anxiety. Granted, he is not aware of the significance of such actions, but he needs them to survive. Freud described this obsessional neurosis as the ‘caricature of a private religion’ and investigated the hidden significance of the obsessional actions in unconscious motivations. It emerged that psychological pattern formations like obsessional washing, obsessional needs for assurance and attention, certain phobias and the like help the patient to soothe and damp down an intolerable feeling of guilt for emotional impulses of a libidinous nature. From this parallel, Freud drew the conclusion that the psychological rituals evidently help the neurotic individual in the same way as public religion has contributed at various times to the general government of society and its members by solving the problem of guilt or, better, offering the possibility of survival in face of the fatal pressures of guilt-ridden anxiety. He further remarked that the disappearance of a public religion of a generally binding character had contributed to an increase in the number of neurotics and their caricature of a private religion. Religion no longer makes its former contribution as a public ritual and symbol, namely compelling the renunciation of socially shameful impulses by a universal feeling of guilt and at the same time providing the possibility of shedding the burden of guilty anxiety. But feelings of guilt and the drives that are suppressed by these feelings are still there, and the man who is tortured by both produces neurotic private religions in order to survive. However, he no longer finds the compensation of shedding his burden in rituals of expiation.
These parallels observed by Freud can be interpreted in a number of ways.
(a) The neurotic regulations are without conscious significance for those who are subject to them. But public religious actions have a symbolic significance. Only when those who believe in public religion cease to ask after the significance of religious actions and symbols, and no longer understand them, do unburdenings become alienations. The symbols then become idols and the rituals become obsessional actions. Religion then assumes the features of a universal compulsive neurosis. It then becomes a caricature of itself and produces sick men. The critical statement ‘religion is a universal obsessional neurosis’ is true in this case.
(b) Conversely, however, Freud believed that the motives which compel religious observances are mostly fundamentally unknown to participants and are represented by pretended theological motives. True, he notes that in religion there have always been and still are ‘occasional reforms’ which restore the original context of meaning, but mostly the opposite is the case, that the unconscious motives are dominant. Religion which has become ossified in ritual and alienated from its real meaning can then be regarded in accordance with the standard of individual patterns of illness as a ‘collective obsessional neurosis’, as a ‘neurosis of mankind’, and often as ‘mass hysteria’.
(c) Once public religion becomes a caricature of itself and can no longer contribute a meaningful restraint to impulses, it no longer brings man to maturity and no longer socializes him. It then acquires regressive functions. Freud long asked himself whether the universally widespread feeling of guilt and the anxiety of men were a basic datum of human existence or whether they had been evoked by religious education in childhood. In the second instance, religion would offer itself as a cure for the very illness which it had itself produced. He did not come to a final decision on this question. Nor can it be decided as long as the necessary verification cannot be produced by a religionless society which communicates psychological health on all sides. Both theses therefore remain primarily postulates, and can only be verified in terms of their therapeutic force. In negative terms, religion can eternalize the guilt of anxiety conditioned by history and society, but the thesis that religion has only a historical basis can also make men superficial and banal. However, that religion with its morality, its rituals and its symbols can find itself in the morass of regression is an important observation. In this function of religion Freud saw a ‘regressive renewal of the infantile powers of protection’ and came to the conclusion that in psychological terms the personal God is ‘no more than an exalted father’. Anyone who is religious spares himself from developing an individual neurosis, and therefore from a psychological perspective, religion is nothing but a ‘universal obsessional neurosis’.
In this connection, J. Scharfenberg has pointed to the inconsistency of modern society which, while declaring adult religion to be a ‘private matter’, at the same time tenaciously holds on to the religious education of children. The result is a schizophrenic consciousness: adult consciousness emancipates itself from children’s religion, but the latter continues to have an unconscious affect on it. This leads to infantile religious conceptions among adults, and in many people to an intellectual marathon struggle against them. By baptizing infants, the churches produce the very problems and aggressions which they come up against in adults. Religious conceptions do not mature with men, and maturity is often achieved in the repression of these childish beliefs.
The real problem in neurotic pattern formations and in the alienated religion of idols and ossified rituals seems to me to lie not in the various attempts at explanation and derivation, but in the effect of this religion on man. Where the anxiety of guilt is suppressed, no matter what the cause of it may be, and where men flee to rituals and idols in order to be rid of the burden of grief, the result is apathy, insensitivity, the fixation of life in obsessional repetitions. The law of repressions reduces the liveliness of a man. He cannot accept the particular experiences of the anxiety of guilt, and so he builds up defence systems in which he encloses himself and which increasingly constrict his psyche. With images he builds a wall between himself and his intolerable experiences. He builds up a system with obsessional ritual actions in which he thinks he is unassailable. In this way he wants to survive. However, this costs him the liveliness of his life. The psychological and religious pattern formations are quite ambivalent: they guarantee protection and relief from pressure and to this extent work for him, but they also work for the anxiety of guilt and strengthen its pressure, making anxiety omnipresent. Thus they function simultaneously both for the survival of the patient and for his death. This can be seen above all in the way in which the repression of intolerable grief makes the patient increasingly apathetic. He becomes incapable of sorrow, incapable of loving others; his interest in his surroundings diminishes, because it is directed only towards repulsing the threat against him. The neurotic system may be called a vicious circle: it is meant to protect life and yet it destroys it. Everything that the neurotic man does in accordance with the law of repressions only leads him deeper into his neurosis. Here the apathy that sets in is often an anticipation in spiritual death of his real death.
There are similar manifestations in the religion of anxiety. Men who have not found their freedom in the humanity of God but, for whatever reason, feel anxiety at this God and the freedom that is expected of them, cling to the law of repressions. They then expect eternal support from things which offer no support. They hope for the absolute from relative values and eternal joy from transitory happiness. Instead of resolving conflicts, they construct aggressive images of enmity and make their enemies into demons in order to kill them spiritually. But because man knows at heart that in so doing he is making excessive demands of things, other men and himself, his anxiety remains. He has to suppress this anxiety by keeping his idols, images of his enemies and laws alive through constant repetitions of the same confessional formulae and rituals. At this point his life becomes ossified. He loses his openness for new experiences and becomes apathetic. The man who has not yet arrived at his humanity, the immature man who refuses maturity because of oppressive childhood experiences—and, because the process of maturing can never be regarded as complete, in the end this means every man—always makes himself idols and values which for him become identical with his own self, because he makes his existence dependent on them. He therefore regards attacks on his highest values as attacks on himself and reacts with fatal aggressiveness. He makes idols, to which he enslaves himself and without which he cannot live at a certain stage of his development without inner collapse. He needs them for his spiritual equilibrium. These were once the gods of power, fertility and man’s own group: Moloch, Baal, Astarte, Amon and others. These today are the deities of fatherland, race, class, profit, consumption or anti-social attitudes. But these are also objects, laws and rites of the Christian religion, which are used in this way by individuals and certain groups and are consequently misused. If objects from man’s environment are divinized, they are made something which is said to exist independent of man, and are regarded as being more important and higher than he. These idolized realities are not there for his sake, but rather man is there to sustain these idols and laws. He sacrifices himself and others to them and is exploited and sacrificed by them.
There is no threat to man which arouses more hostility than to threaten his idols or those of his group. As long as a man identifies himself with such idols, he is not in a position to affirm himself as a free man while recognizing that the life of others may be different. He loves only what is like, and only acknowledges people who believe, think, love and do the things that he does. People like himself support him, and he needs this support to suppress his anxiety. People who differ from him disturb him, because they question his idols and laws and thus his world. So he loves only those who are like him, and hates other men. This is an important motive for xenophobia, antisemitism, racial hatred, the persecution of Communists and Christians and other manifestations of aggression. Love only for those who are like oneself is narcissistic. The religion of anxiety runs straight through all the public religions that we know. It also runs straight through the ideologies and institutions that we have. It is a widespread phenomenon.
The pattern formations of repression and the idols and laws of the religion of anxiety may not either suffer or die, since they have been erected against suffering and dying. They must be omnipotent and eternal, because they are meant to help impotent and mortal man and to relieve his anxiety. Anyone who damages the idols and laws, damages the holiest goods of those who worship them. But the crucified God renounces these privileges of an idol. He breaks the spell of the super-ego which men lay upon him because they need this self-protection. In humbling himself and becoming flesh, he does not accept the laws of this world, but takes up suffering, anxious man into his situation. In becoming weak, impotent, vulnerable and mortal, he frees man from the quest for powerful idols and protective compulsions and makes him ready to accept his humanity, his freedom and his mortality. In the situation of the human God the pattern formations of repressions become unnecessary. The limitations of apathy fall away. Man can open himself to suffering and to love. In sympatheia with the pathos of God he becomes open to what is other and new. The symbols which show him the situation of the human and crucified God give him protection as a result of which he can allow his own self-protection to fall. The hindrances of repression are not done away with through the ignorance of grief, anxiety and guilt. That would only be a further repression and would make man even more apathetic. They are done away with through sympathy and love, through the acceptance of what is otherwise unacceptable, through the ability to suffer, and through sensitiveness. When we speak positively here of suffering, we mean in general being affected by something else.
At a very early stage, Freud took up the historical-philosophical thesis of the Enlightenment that ontogenesis can be regarded as the repetition of phylogenesis. The development of the child repeats in analogous fashion the development of humanity, so that it is possible to make inferences from one genesis to the other. The past Beyond of the mythical conception of the world recurs in the present Beyond of the unconscious activity of the soul. Metaphysics and the psychology of the unconscious correspond with each other. Freud used this thesis—leaving aside whether it is tenable or not—to clarify two observations: (a) the infantile religion of the exalted father which leads to neurosis is accompanied by rebellion against this super-ego; (b) during a holiday in the Tirol he saw the crucifixes which are called ‘Lord Gods’ there. This Christian fusion of the Father and the crucified Christ seemed to Freud to rest on the religious need for the depotentiation of the Father. ‘Thus the Oedipus complex became the central problem of the “Lord Gods” of the Tirol for him.’
Freud applied the Oedipus complex as an interpretation of these events in the child’s soul and in religion. True, it derives from ancient tragedy and therefore hardly allows modern, optimistic therapeutic conclusions to be drawn, but it is a good interpretation of the ambivalence of spiritual and religious systems. The feelings which tie a child to its father are both positive and negative at the same time. The longing for the protection given by the father is bound up with anxiety at his superiority. The positive feelings lead to identification with the father and internalize his authority in the super-ego. The negative feelings, however, give this super-ego despotic features. Freud further drew conclusions from neurotic animal phobias in children to totemistic religions. Here an animal is regarded as sacred and yet is sacrificed once a year and solemnly eaten. Freud found that this totem animal is a substitionary offering for the father. It is worshipped and sacrificed so that the worshippers may acquire its power.
Following Darwin, Freud spoke of a powerful, prehistoric primal horde father. He prohibited his sons to possess their mother, that is, he castrated them and did not allow them to become potent. Even if the mother allowed it, the sons would become fathers only through the grace of the father. This is what makes the Oedipus situation so inextricable. Therefore the sons rise up against the father and kill him. But the recollection of this primal guilt remains, and so they attempt to incorporate the father into their expiatory cult. ‘Totem religion emerged from the sons’ awareness of guilt as an attempt to relieve this feeling and to reconcile the injured father through subsequent obedience … It makes it a duty to repeat the crime of parricide again and again in the sacrifice of the totem animal.’ Freud’s mythology at this point is remarkable. He later told his critics that it was ‘just a story’. Certainly he himself thought that it was impossible to derive ‘something so complicated as religion from a single origin’. Nevertheless, he allowed himself the generalization that all religions are fundamentally no more than attempts to solve the one problem which has arisen through feelings of guilt towards the primal Father. In Christianity he saw the sacrificial death of Christ as one such way of easing the primal feeling of guilt: ‘He went and offered up his life, and by doing so delivered the host of his brothers from original sin.’ Even the Christian eucharist is understood from a totemistic perspective as a ‘renewed abolition of the Father, a repetition of the deed that has to be expiated’.
Every child of a patriarchal society goes ontogenetically through the same conflicts. It has to go through an intensive phase of ambivalent feelings towards the authority of the father, and then becomes a father itself. If phylogenesis begins with a revolution of brothers against the primal father, ontogenetically this revolution become the permanent drive of history, since it repeats itself in the conflicts between generations and authorities at any period. This permanent revolution of history gives rise to the constantly repeated experience of parricide in the dream by which men unburden themselves of real conflicts, in other words, in religion. If this revolution is again transposed to reality, there arises an eternal return of the same thing. According to this epigenetic principle, sons turn into fathers and continue the Oedipal circle from generation to generation. Thus many critics have supposed that Freud had a cyclical and ahistoric view of history: ‘Running cyclically between rebellion, a feeling of guilt and renewed repression; ahistoric, as history is merely an environment for death.’ In fact, as his constant resort to the ancient symbols of tragedy shows, Freud did not have such confidence in progress as did the bourgeois nineteenth century. He stood under the impact of guilt which ‘must continue to bring forth evil’. He persevered in depicting man’s ‘innate tendency to evil, to aggression, to destruction and thus to gruesomeness’, even when he knew that the ‘dear little children’ were not pleased to hear what he said.
The model used by Freud for the father-son conflict and also for the ambivalent feelings in all theistic patriarchal religions derives from tragedy and has fatalistic features. Freud’s principles in the early period are called ‘Logos and Ananke’. He later said ‘Eros and Ananke’: ‘healing through love’, but through love on the ground of the reality of Ananke. One might ask why Freud did not use the biblical story of the Fall, which he knew, as a symbolic interpretation of primal guilt. It speaks in essentially differentiated terms of guilt as self-divinization, of a reprieve in the punishment, and only after that of the fratricide of Cain and of his reprieve. This is no expression of tragic fatalism, for the dominant factor here is not Ananke, but the pathos of God, which maintains an abiding interest in the humanity of man. It is therefore simultaneously a history of guilt and hope.
The interpretation of the anxiety of guilt by means of the Oedipus story in essentials makes parricide the law according to which we have advanced. Iconoclasm against the authority of the father thus easily becomes an obsessional action. Just as Ananke is dumb and blind and cannot be influenced, so the man subjected to her, with an obsession about excluding his father from his life if he is to come to himself, is correspondingly unfeeling. He must do expiation and gain reconciliation in dreams and ritual repetitions. ‘Healing through love’ presupposes both liberation from the authority of the father and liberation from parricide, its repetitions and expiations. But can one add love and Ananke? Must one not seek a love which breaks even through Ananke?
Christian faith does not find itself in the situation of a despotic divine paternal authority which is both desired as a protective force and hated as a divine privilege. It finds itself in the situation of the pathos of God and brotherhood with the crucified Christ. But at the same time it in fact lives in particular religions based on authority and atonement, whose Oedipal structure Freud has aptly analysed. It follows from this that Christian faith must first cleanse its churches from the idols and taboos, the conceptions of authority and atonement which derive from Oedipal religion, if it is to extend its free situation in the pathos of God. In particular, it must cleanse the symbol of the cross from the Oedipal motives which have been painted over it. It must set the obsessional authoritarian and legalistic structures of church practice in the situation of the human God, and thus show them to be superfluous. For the problem of guilt in particular, that means that it is necessary to break through the eternal compulsion to repeat guilt and expiation by the recognition that guilt has been overcome ‘once and for all’ by God on the cross and that the obsessions of guilt have been shattered ‘once and for all’, so that men are no longer subject to them and that there is no need to repeat expiation. Finally, it means that Christian faith can separate itself from those father religions which depend on the images of Jupiter, Caesar and other fathers of the fatherland or the family. In one respect Freud had a correct view of the crucified ‘Lord Gods’ of the Tirol when he interpreted them in his way. For the ‘Lord God’ was never the ‘Father God’. Matthias Claudius once said that when he prayed the Lord’s Prayer he always thought of his physical father. But the ‘Lord Gods’ in the Tirol compel one to think of the career of Jesus and what happened on the cross in connection with the Father of Jesus Christ. It is not the same father in the two places. The unknown Father of Jesus Christ has nothing to do with those idols of the father which lead to the Oedipus complex. The crucified Christ makes earthly fathers and earthly sons alike sons of God and brings them in community to the freedom which lies beyond the Oedipus complex. In origin Christianity is not a father-religion; if it is a religion at all it is a son-religion, namely a brotherly community in the situation of the human God, without privileges and without the rebellions that are necessary against them. The parricide and blasphemer is out for annihilation and therefore falls into apathy. He rebels against the restrictions laid down by the authority of the father, but his rebellion does not free him from being a mirror image of his adversary. In the Oedipus conflict he remains clamped to his opponent.
For Christian faith the crucified Christ stands between the slaughtered God and his apathetic, witless slaughterers. The conflict between guilt and anxiety, between guilty liberation and necessary reconciliation, between authority and annihilation, is transferred to God himself. God allows himself to be humiliated and crucified in the Son, in order to free the oppressors and the oppressed from oppression and to open up to them the situation of free, sympathetic humanity. Knowledge and acceptance of the new situation extends God’s freedom from the gods and antigods who produce the universal feeling of guilt and the need for compensation, right into the unconscious. Certainly the fathers and the parricides still dream in us. But if one can laugh at them, one need no longer repress them. They are still there, but they have lost their power. Freedom in faith can be described as a new spontaneity of the heart. But it only emerges when the emotions of anxiety and hate have been overcome and man emerges from his Oedipal situation.
In the course of his interpretation of dreams, Freud arrived at the view that the motive force of dreams was wish-fulfilment. Dreams are attempts ‘to overcome the world of the senses in which we are placed, by means of the world of our wishes’. Suppressed wishes and desires seek their fulfilment in dreams. He here arrived at a fundamental anthropological alternative: either men remain dependent on the pleasure principle and rooted in the prevalence of their wishes, or they mature into accepting the reality principle and come to terms with reality. The way to maturity is the way from the pleasure principle to the reality principle. It follows for an assessment of religion that religions cherish in their myths and utopias the ‘oldest, strongest, most urgent wishes of mankind’. ‘The secret of their strength is the strength of these wishes.’ The analogy between infantile and religious wishes is evident. Religion has grown out of man’s childish helplessness and need. Its content can be understood from the continuation of the wishes and needs of childhood into mature life. In the realm of religion all appears to be as we desire it. Anyone who adheres to this religious principle of illusion remains infantile, and through his refusal of reality tends towards neurosis. At this point Freud emphatically demands: ‘Man cannot remain a child for ever.’ Experience teaches us: ‘The world is no kindergarten.’ Therefore ‘education for reality’ is necessary. If a man is to live in this world, in the ‘common world’, he must inexorably give up the infantile dream world which has grown out of his desires. He must cease to interpret this world in terms of the world of his infantile wishes and desires.
Two conclusions follow from this for religion: religion must either renounce any interpretation of this world and transfer its kingdom to a quite other world or it must allow itself to come to terms with reality. In the second instance, the way from illusion to reality means withdrawing expectations from the Beyond of a dream world and concentrating all the powers that become free in this way on earthly life. This way would correspond to that of Feuerbach, and make men ‘students of this world’ instead of ‘candidates of the Beyond’, those who work instead of those who pray. Other-worldly religion would be transformed into this-worldly revolution. For Freud, however, no this-worldly utopia takes the place of the Beyond of wish-fulfilments. He knew well that on the way to the reality principle ‘not all dreams blossom’, and that almost all wither. To this degree there is still too much bad religion in revolutionary utopianism. For Freud, ‘wise resignation’ takes the place of religion and utopia. With this the mature man enters upon reality and accepts its conditions and limitations. ‘The plan of creation does not provide for man’s being happy.’ Furthermore, the ‘extraordinary progress of the natural sciences has not elevated the mass above the satisfaction of pleasure.’ This is also true of human life in today’s affluent society. Freud regarded even the progressive humanization of man and his relationships to be ‘most probably a utopian hope’. He was too conscious of the deep-seated gruesomeness of man to agree with the optimists of his time. Certainly, he too hoped that ‘all the energies which are now consumed in the production of neurotic symptoms in the service of a fantasy world isolated from reality … will help to strengthen the cry for those changes in our culture in which we can alone expect salvation for posterity.’ But this hope was not very great. Freud persisted, rather, in an attitude which might be called resigned boldness or bold resignation. For him there was only one religious attitude of transcendence which can exist alongside the principle of reality, and that is the humour or the wisdom of Koheleth.
If it is true that faith can learn something from psycho-analysis about its own pathological double and thus also learn something about itself, it must illuminate its own wishes and hopes. Conversely, if psycho-analysis seeks to learn something from the power of faith, it must work for the overcoming of the unsatisfactory resignation which Freud put in the place of infantile illusions.
A hope which has been consolidated as illusion need not necessarily contradict reality. Its only characteristic is its basis in human wishes. Wherever it speaks of salvation, religion in fact has to do with elementary human wishes and hopes. It therefore also has to do with those wishes which derive from the child’s primal trust and helplessness. But is it enough in attempting to achieve maturity for man, to move from the pleasure principle to the reality principle and to come to terms with unfulfilled hopes through wise resignation? Is not even wise resignation a renunciation of those hopes and therefore conditioned by their disappointment? Is man to show his maturity in being resigned and saturated, albeit not without humour, being content with reality as it is? Does not this resignation, for all its insight into reality and the limits to human happiness, easily become the Stoic attitude of apatheia? It no longer recalls any wishes and therefore no longer has hopes for the future. How can it show sympathy and openness for the wishes and the suffering of others?
‘Do not despise the dreams of your youth,’ says the Marquis of Posa in Schiller’s Don Carlos. Wishes and hopes can also mature with men. They can lose their infantile form of drives and their youthful enthusiasm without being given up. Freud interpreted almost exclusively the dreams of ill people and the dreams that made them ill. In them he found repressed childhood, unfulfilled drives, incomplete experiences, forgotten wounds and disappointments. Therefore he saw in the work of dreams the regression by means we return to the past that we have not mastered, in order to work at it again. In this context, the work of psychology in bringing to consciousness is the task of recalling the suppressed past. The unconscious contains that of which one is no longer aware. But in the adult culture at the end of the nineteenth century in which Freud lived, such a return to phases of childhood development was thought to be reprehensible, something that the mature man should avoid. Today we regard such temporary periods of regression as being not only useful but also enriching. They enable us to relive various aspects of life with which otherwise we would lose our relationship. They once again open up the present to the past and make the past present. Then man does not run the course of his life in a series of punctiliar presents which then disappear, but collects himself for the full presence of his past and present life. The surrender of the infantile phase and the overcoming of the pleasure principle can easily lead the mature man to apathy in respect of his youth. But that would not make him richer, but poorer.
Ernst Bloch has criticized Freud’s interpretation of dreams, related as it is to the past, and countered the resigned reality principle with a ‘beyond the reality principle’. Human wishes are not only born from an inner helplessness; they are also protentionally related to what is new. Their mode of time is the future, and not just the return of what is lost. Human dreams are concerned not only with regressive longing for the lost mother’s womb and for security, but at the same time with progressive longing for freedom and curiosity over what is to come. Wishes and hopes represent a certain open sympathy on the part of man for the future, if they do not harden into caricatures and fixed ideas of the future. With a certain degree of simplification, one might say that in dreams by night man mostly returns to the past. But there are also day-dreams, and Aristotle called hope the ‘dream of a waking man’. Dreams are ambivalent. What is articulated in them is not only that of which man is no longer aware but also that of which he is not yet aware, not only regressive but also utopian consciousness. Both affect each other reciprocally: recollection of early sorrow makes men dream beyond the present, and dreams of the future restore the memory of past happiness. If one were to analyse not only the dreams of neurotics at the nadirs of their illness but also the dreams of healthy people at the climactic experiences of their lives, one would probably come across this double presence of past and future.
Now Freud was concerned with overcoming the infantile pleasure principle with wise resignation over the constitution of the I, that is, with freedom. But it too is a utopia, though one which he thought was adequate to reality. Which reality? The basis of Freud’s sense of reality will have lain not only in his strict morality but also in his estimination of death and the death-wish in men. He did not discover a future that overcomes death, and he did not trust the symbols of religion against the anxiety of death and the death-wish.
If we add Bloch’s approach to Freud’s interpretation of dreams, then religion itself is more ambivalent than Freud thought. It retains the infantile wishes of man and at the same time keeps his life open to the future. It contains both regressive and progressive elements. Along with man’s memories, religion also preserves man’s hopes. Here one must learn to make as neat a distinction as possible, so as not to put aside the caricatured healthy element along with the caricatures.
(a) Dream regressions into the world of infantile wishes can make men neurotic if they are bound up with a refusal of reality. But they can also enrich the sense of present reality in that they bring to consciousness not only the man of the moment but the whole man with all his life history. There is no present identity of a man without continuity with his past. Only then is a man present with all the strata of his life, for his childhood is a part of his present form. In that case, the free, unconstrained and un-repressed presence of the pleasure principle and the world of wishes is part of an existence which also includes childhood in itself. What is appropriate here is not wise resignation but open revision of infantile wishes. If a man develops himself in the pathos of God towards sympatheia, and sympatheia means openness, then in the situation of the crucified God man can develop openness backwards. There is no merely present or future authority before which he must separate himself from himself or deny his childhood. ‘The infantile’ is not a morally derogatory category.
(b) Utopian protensions into the utopia of the future can likewise lead to a denial of reality when the denial of reality fixes itself on utopian pictures of the future rather than on unacceptable suffering in the present of a man’s own life or that of society. The incarnate hope of Christian belief must take care that its symbols are not used as idols and fetishes out of fear of suffering and refusal of the cross. Therefore it is necessary constantly to keep in mind the ground of human hope. It does not lie in disgust at and hate of the present, but in the situation of the crucified God, and is recognized by insight into the pathos of the loving and suffering God. The central symbol of Christian hope, the resurrection, is expressly related to the assumption of all human reality by God, including that reality which is spoilt by sin and condemned to death. It therefore represents a hope which is indissolubly coupled with the most intensive sense of reality. From this situation arises the freedom to abandon those apathetic pictures of the future with which past and present suffering is overplayed and compensated for, and in sympatheia to accept the suffering of God, in order to open oneself with the hopes of God to the future, and even to death. The fixated utopian is superstitious about the future. The apathic picture of the future makes him apathetic. In that case, day-dreaming in the field of force of God’s passion corresponds to a free and human converse with the future. It follows from this that the dreams of the future which reckon with God’s as yet unrealized possibilities do not contradict the reality principle and must not be destroyed by the transition to it. But the further the development of humanity goes in the situation of the pathos of God, and accepts the reality of suffering and death in love, the more even infantile wishes and dreams can mature with men. Enlightenment does not mean cynicism. Maturity does not mean becoming an experienced, resigned or even cynical realist who merely smiles sympathetically at youth, his own at that of others. The enlightenment of wishes and hopes leads to enlightened and conscious wishes and hopes, not to a farewell from them. The word ‘illusion’ indeed has bad connotations, but literally it means becoming involved with the future, entertaining its possibilities in order to find what is worth realizing; and in Christian terms it also means playing with the possibilities in the history of God and developing into them. Prayers can be merely wish-projections born out of a refusal of reality. But they can also enter into the divine life in the situation of the passion of God and recall God, think with him. In that case, the openness of prayer is an openness in the history of God for the future of God. God’s future is directed towards this openness in his history, for in theological terms it is the ‘sighing of the spirit’ which cries for fulfilment and consummation of the divine life in the world of the one who prays.
‘Do not despise the dreams of your youth,’ said Schiller. One would like to add: do not repress them and fix them in their infantile form, but work on them and with them and let them ripen with you! Openness to the future is conditioned by openness to the past. Constant faithfulness to hope is reciprocally bound up with faithfulness to the earth. Christian faith understands itself as faithfulness to hope as it is mindful of the resurrection of Christ, and as faithfulness to the earth as it is mindful of the cross of Christ. Because it leads man into this history of God, it frees him for an acceptance of human life which is capable of suffering and capable of love.
If man always develops his manhood in relationship to the Godhead of his God, this Godhead and consequently his manhood can take on very different appearances. Freud has shown how much the psychological pattern formations of repression, the Oedipus complex, narcissism and illusion correspond to religious systems and vice versa. These are two sides of the same coin. There are psychological and religious forms of straitened and hindered humanity, sick and on the way towards death. Their basic character seems to be apathy. There are situations of sick and oppressed humanity, and the element of sickness and oppression is expressed in these particular pattern formations which are meant to protect life from illness and oppression. If we understand Christian faith as the development of a humanity that is capable of suffering and love in the situation of the passion of God, it will not be affected by the criticism of religion made by psychoanalysis. And if it is not affected by this criticism because it does not spread apathy in what is always the same, but on the contrary makes human apathy superfluous and destroys it by virtue of the passion of God, it is a partner in the attempt to liberate man from the gods and laws of repression, self-love, parricide and illusion. To free sick man from his psychological vicious circles it offers not only the critical rationality and ego-support which are often summoned up against the psychological strategies of evil, but also the new spontaneous liveliness which that critical rationality needs as the atmosphere in which it can develop freely. As is well known, the logic of the instincts differs from the logic of the understanding and is not always influenced by it. Therefore the logic of the understanding needs a corresponding level of instinct and feeling on which it can develop freely. It needs a barrier against anxiety and the threat of death on the level of the feelings also, that is, a love of life which brings intelligence to the understanding and orients it. These are fundamental decisions of the interest which make possible rationality and lead to the human use of rationality. On the level of the feelings and instincts man ‘thinks’ in notions and symbols. As is already shown by language, rational thought is directed for its freedom towards notions and symbols which do not constrict and fixate it, but open up free space for it. Rightly understood, the Christian symbolism which represents the situation of man in the passion of God, which wakens his remembrance and keeps alive his hope, cannot be a superstitious, dogmatistic and pathological pattern formation. It does not liberate an apathetic rationality of domination, but sympathetic reason. ‘We know in so far as we love,’ said Augustine, and in so doing made love the enabling ground for knowledge. The Christian symbolism of the situation of man in the pathos of God leads to the loving and suffering knowledge of man. It can therefore only take up the iconoclasm that is critical of religion and the psychotherapeutic liberation of man from his vicious circles and develop its own prophetic criticism of idolatry in parallel to that.
Any therapy is directed towards health. But health is a norm which changes with history and is conditioned by society. If in today’s society health means ‘the capability to work and the capability for enjoyment’, as Freud could put it, and this concept of health even dominates psychotherapy, the Christian interpretation of the human situation must nevertheless also question the compulsive idolatry which the concepts of production and consumption introduce into this definition, and develop another form of humanity. Suffering in a superficial, activist, apathetic and therefore dehumanized society can be a sign of spiritual health. In this sense, we must agree with Freud’s remark, ‘As long as a man suffers, he can still achieve something.’