Welcome to the headless professor video
series.
This one is about Freud's
psychoanalytic theory and how it
interprets
religious phenomena. Freud's system of
psychoanalysis
attempted to reduce human behavior
to sexual and aggressive drives.
Now, no form of
human activity or thought was
immune to analysis
by Freud's system. He tried  to explain
everything from fairytales,
to jokes, to slips of the tongue.
Freud viewed the human mind as three different levels:
CONSCIOUS, things that we are aware of,
PRECONSCIOUS
things that we can be come aware of and
voluntarily bring them into consciousness, and
UNCONSCIOUS, things that are beyond our normal
waking consciousness and we cannot
voluntarily
bring these thoughts into mind.
So, the thoughts that are unconscious
would be memories and wishes
that have been REPRESSED. The reason that these memories have been repressed
is because
they deal with our aggressive drive, THANATOS,
or the sexual drive, LIBIDO.
Now, these unconscious forces
existed in a structural region of the
mind
called the ID. Now,  the way to remember id
Look at the spelling, the I and the D and
think of it
as if it stood for INTERNAL DRIVES.
This region of the mind is the very
first
to exist in the young child. Freud viewed
the young child
just as a seat of these uncontrolled,
internal drives.
What happens over the next few
years
of life, ages 1 to 3, is the growth of a CONSCIENCE.
something that makes the child
feel guilt and provides the kind of
internal control.
That conscience Freud called the SUPEREGO.
and it really was an internalization
of the parents telling the child,
NO, NO. Notice that the superego is over here on the
left side of the diagram, close to
the aggressive drive of THANATOS.
That's because Freud thought
the superego got its energy from
this aggressive drive. It internalized
the force of aggression and actually
turned aggression
against itself, against the  id, in order
to control
the drives of the id.
The last part of the mind to develop in Freud's model
was the EGO, the sense of the individual
self,
the part of the self that actually had
the responsibility
of dealing with the external world.
Ideally, Freud thought that the
healthy individual would develop a
strong and stable ego capable of
balancing the competing demands of the
id for immediate expression of the sexual  and aggressive drives,
and the superego that
sought to repress the sexual and
aggressive drives.
Now, the ego also wants to control the
sexual and aggressive drives, but will do
so in a more
calm manner, and one that is
less neurotic. When Freud
viewed human societies and the
development of civilization
he thought that it paralleled the development of the individual.
So think of ancient humans,
so-called primitive man, as being driven
by
his id, according to Freud, and then what
permitted
tribal culture to exist was
the development of a superego. Various kinds of
taboos that would prevent sexual and aggressive
tendencies from working out. It is in
this context
that Freud viewed religion.
Freud thought that religion was merely a form of the internalized superego
designed to control be aggression and
sex of the id. Freud's hope for the future
was that just as the ego
replaced the task of the superego in the developing individual,
so in the developing civiliization
we would have religion be replaced
by science, and of course when Freud talked about science he thought
his own system of psychoanalysis
was scientific. In other words, in the
future we're not going to need religion
to help us control our sexual and
aggressive drives
will be psychoanalyzed and be healthy
like that.
Therefore, if we look at Freud's view
of the future, he thought that
mankind would outgrow the need for
religion.
Religion was not much better than an
infantile
neurosis, a very primitive and only
partially effective way
of controlling sex and aggression,
a technique that mankind would
eventually
outgrow
