Freud on Ritual: Reconstruction and Critique

METAPSYCHOLOGYAmong the many available discussions of Freud' «* psychology of religion one can find critical analyses of the cultural assumptions upon which he mounted his attacks on religion, of his particular application of psychoanalytic theory to religious 2 experience, and of the pseudoenergetics that dominate his writings and so obscure the actual (philosophic) hermeneutic which underlies them.While these studies have added to our understanding of Freud's texts, there is one aspect of his earliest works on religion in respect to which they require supplement.Each of these authors appears to accept the claim that in his earliest 4 published remarks on religion and psychopathology, Freud established or thought he established that the psychological mechanism responsible for the formation of obsessional-neurotic behavior was also responsible for the formation of apparently normal religious ritual acts.Their acceptance of this claim is understandable since Freud makes it abundantly clear that he himself believes ritual actions and obsessive behavior are essentially similar'phenomena; "...one might describe neurosis as individual religiosity and religion as a universal neurosis."Although one might argue that similar phenomena are not necessarily identical to one another, it is clear from this essay and his later works on religious thought and institutions that Freud very much believes that certain similarities which religious rituals bear to (neurotic) obsessive actions such as prayers, invocations, acts of contrition, etc., are manifestations of the workings of the same psychological mechanism: repression.Both orthodox and nonorthodox psychoanalysts support this reading of Freud's argument.In his description of the composition of the 1907 essay, Ernest Jones, Freud's chief biographer, summarizes its conclusions in a way that clearly indicates he believes Freud uncovered the repressive origins of religious ritual: "In obsessional neurosis the repressed impulses that have to be kept at bay are typically sexual ones; in religion