Behold and beware the analogy, for it is at once a writer’s best friend and worst enemy. When used correctly, the analogy is a beautiful and simplistic method of illustrating or highlighting the truths in a complex or abstract system. When misused, it becomes the epitome of folly; one would rather have used bad data than to employ. Bad data can be replaced, excused by poor method, or revised. Bad analogies are, like diamonds, forever. Sigmund Freud made extensive use of analogies to illustrate his theories based on his extensive data set.
Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis was based off countless interviews with neurotic patients. Foucault’s explanation of mental illness aside, the theory psychoanalysis posited three basic levels of the mind, the id, the ego, and the superego. Humans have animal desires that are located in the id. The primal desires for meals, maiming, and mating reside in the id. These desires were in conflict with the superego, or the mind’s perception of society’s values and set of acceptable behaviors. The mind’s mediator between these two is the poor, miserable ego. Its task is to make sense of the two conflicting sets of desires. Sometimes the conflicts go unresolved; these are then repressed, or sent down from the conscious, through the pre-conscious, and into the unconscious. From the unconscious, these repressions affect the person’s life, but go unrealized by the person.
For Freud, religion was the result of one such repression. Without going into the details, Freud thought that belief in God was the result of an unconscious conflict between wanting a father’s protection and death. The development of humanity mirrored the development of a human. Because of this, humanity goes through the same stages as a human does through as it develops. Since religion originated in the past as way to cope with the “original crime of humanity,” the killing of the alpha male, it therefore belongs to a childish state of humanity. Now that humanity is all grown up, it should quickly rid itself of this childish neurosis.
As many have stated, including Pals, Freud’s theory of religion suffers from three major problems. First, there is no historical support for his theory. For instance, Freud’s imagined history of the development of Judaism is in complete contradiction with what is known about the development of Judaism. Secondly, Freud is improperly reasoning from analogy. Analogies only work if they explain similar systems. They cannot be used to deduce attributes of a system from attributes of a different system in lieu of evidence. There is no warrant for both systems to match up in every detail; otherwise, they would be the same system. It is the necessarily existing differences between the two systems that strip deductive analogies of their potency. Lastly, Freud’s theory assumes only accommodates monotheistic religions. Assuming that his theory was correct, it would only explain the origin and, as a consequent, only foretell the extinction of monotheistic religions. Nowhere in The Future of an Illusion does Freud deal with how other religions came into existence nor accounts for the development of religions separate from monotheism.
However, one need not stop with just three complaints. Even if his analogy is correct, there are still problems. This notion of humanity as now, and back in Freud’s time, mature itself begs a question. One could just as easily say that humanity was in its adolescence and closer to a know-it-all teenager than a mature person. As such, perhaps it is not yet time for humankind to get rid of religion. Again, as does Tylor and Frazer, Freud overlooks the good done in the name of religion. Finally, Freud blatantly commits genetic fallacy. He assumes that flawed origins invalidate the present status of something. The historical origin of an idea has nothing to do with its truth-value. Interestingly enough, common critiques of Freud employ the same error. In realizing that his psychoanalysis lacks empirical data, it is assumed that the theory of religion that evolved out of this theory must also be false. It could be that despite flawed origins, Freud got it right.
Lastly, and most importantly, religious people would deny that their religion both originates and functions different from how Freud says it does. Any theory that reduces a person or group’s religion into something that the practitioner(s) do not recognize does not do the study of religion justice.