Psychoanalysis and Religion

Acknowledging the layers of the mind below the level of overt consciousness can lead to very divergent accounts of religious belief. One response—taken by Freud himself—argues that religious belief should be abandoned as unavoidably contaminated by unconscious motivations (e.g. an infantile longing for security) that distort our rational judgement. By contrast, Jung maintains that religious thinking is shaped by unconscious structures (the ‘archetypes’), which can play a vital role in the development of an integrated human personality. This chapter examines these contrasting psychoanalytic interpretations of religion, and then explores more recent accounts of the workings of the human psyche and how they affect the status of religious belief. A concluding section discusses some general implications of all this for the epistemology of religious belief and the way in which philosophy of religion should be conducted.

Queer Structures of Religious Feeling: What Time Is Now?

This essay asks what psychoanalysis and religion might have to say to each other in view of Freud’s secular aspirations and queer theory’s temporal turn. Both queer temporality and psychoanalysis offer resources for understanding the multiple ways time coats, codes, and disciplines the body in secular modernity. This is so even though psychoanalysis is one of these disciplines. Nevertheless, the times of psychoanalysis are multiple. On the one hand, psychoanalysis quite frequently lays down a teleology in which the individual subject matures along a set pathway. On the other hand, this developmental imperative is at profound odds with psychoanalysis’s capacity to make room for the co-existence of past and present in ways that confound secular time’s forward march. This latter recognition—co-temporality—may even lay down routes for the cultivation of “counter-codes” (Foucault’s term), ways of living and experiencing and telling time out of sync with the linear logics of what José Muñoz has called “straight time.”

The Arabic Freud

In 1945, psychologist Yusuf Murad introduced an Arabic term borrowed from the medieval Sufi philosopher and mystic Ibn ʿArabi—al-la-shuʿur—as a translation for Sigmund Freud's concept of the unconscious. By the late 1950s, Freud's Interpretation of Dreams had been translated into Arabic for an eager Egyptian public. This book challenges the notion of a strict divide between psychoanalysis and Islam by tracing how postwar thinkers in Egypt blended psychoanalytic theories with concepts from classical Islamic thought in a creative encounter of ethical engagement. The book provides an in-depth examination of psychoanalysis in Egypt and reveals how a new science of psychology—or “science of the soul,” as it came to be called—was inextricably linked to Islam and mysticism. It explores how Freudian ideas of the unconscious were crucial to the formation of modern discourses of subjectivity in areas as diverse as psychology, Islamic philosophy, and the law. Founding figures of Egyptian psychoanalysis, the book shows, debated the temporality of the psyche, mystical states, the sexual drive, and the Oedipus complex, while offering startling insights into the nature of psychic life, ethics, and eros. The book invites us to rethink the relationship between psychoanalysis and religion in the modern era. Mapping the points of intersection between Islamic discourses and psychoanalytic thought, it illustrates how the Arabic Freud, like psychoanalysis itself, was elaborated across the space of human difference.