Freud and Religion
Repression is the forced storage into the unconscious of experiences that are so severe you don't have emotions towards them. Everything you experience or want to experience stays with you in your unconscious mind. Bad experiences are pushed down into the unconscious instead of naturally falling down, becoming repressed. A good example of repression, according to Freud, is the repression of the Oedipus complex; we push those feelings down into the unconscious mind. Eventually the repressed thoughts and feelings will come out as aggression and may cause neurosis.Neurosis is caused by continually repressing thoughts and feelings. By not being able to fulfill your sexual drives and killing drives, you push them down into the unconscious. These basic drives want to be fulfilled by the id and can cause neurosis if they aren't. Freud goes on to say that everybody is neurotic to some degree, because we all hold some repressed thoughts and feelings, including the desires of the Oedipus complex and the desire to kill; nobody is completely normal. Freud also says that the only way to cure repression is through psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis will take the repressed memory from the unconscious and move it to the conscious mind.
Freud goes on to show the evolution of these basic religious beliefs and how they develop and evolve into gods and the religions we have today. Psychoanalysis is, according to Freud, a rational method of finding out the contents of the unconscious and explaining what purpose it serves. He looks at two things from early religion: animal totems and taboos. The ego, Latin for I, is defined as your reality principle. Freud makes the statement that you always have the want of sexual pleasure from birth on. It is a fiction that we have come to believe as being true. This helps bring the repressed thought into the conscious by making you aware of it, naturally. Eventually they realize their difference and lose the thought. It is who you are and your choosing center between the id and the superego. Thirdly, from thirty-six months to around six years in age, you go through the phallic stage, or penis stage. Religion offers this security through the promise of afterlife or salvation, so that we don't worry about what will happen if we lose. The threefold division of the human personality is made up of the id, ego, and superego. The superego, Latin for I above, is a collection of outside influences that start from birth. Freud goes on to say that your stages never disappear; they overlap one another. They can tell more about somebody than anything else.
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