Psychoanalysis and Religion

All registrants will receive their link to join via ZOOM. Course material will be sent 1 day before the event. This course will take place over 2 days: 17 & 18 November 2022, from 13.30 – 17.00 each day (time includes a tea break). All attendees will also receive access to the recording, available to watch back for 1 month.

Freud is famous for portraying religion as a collective neurosis of mankind: religious beliefs give expression to wish-fulfilling illusions serving the immature emotional needs of the child living on within the adult, he argues. Such illusions – he sternly insists – should be cast aside and replaced by ideas corresponding to reality – namely, the materialistic world view that emerges gradually but inescapably from the cumulative process of scientific observation.

This is one side of Freud – expressing his self-image as an ‘Enlightenment philosophe’ (in Peter Gay’s accurate phrase). But there is another side to Freud – unfortunately less widely known – for in the later works he develops a subtle and complex theory of society, in which religion plays a much more positive – even vital – role. Seen from this perspective, religion may be regarded as necessary for our psychological well-being – even for the survival of human kind.

We will explore a range of psychoanalytic interpretations of religion, examining different views of its function and significance in the lives of human beings.

Schedule –

1st Session: We will engage with Freud’s subtle and insightful thoughts on the nature of religion – studying ‘Totem and Taboo’ (1913), ‘The Future of an Illusion’ (1920) and ‘Moses and Monotheism’ (1938).

2nd Session: We will examine Jung’s philosophical critique of Freud, and his view of religious experience as a manifestation of latent structures of the collective unconscious – structures modern people have become estranged from, but with which they need to re-connect to access the living symbols that help human beings find meaning and direction in their lives.

3rd Session: We will explore Julia Kristeva’s brilliant and profound post-Lacanian theorizing according to which religion performs a vital cultural function – a function whose atrophy in the contemporary West underlies the nihilism of modernity. We also will explore the implications of Donald Winnicott’s seminal notion of the intermediate area of experience and its role as the locus of art, religion and culture.

4th Session: Finally, we will explore the relationship between psychoanalysis and the religion so often seen as closest to it – Buddhism. In recent years the literature on Psychoanalysis and Buddhism has reached a new level of depth and sophistication and we will explore the latest thinking on the affinities between them, and the differences.

COURSE TUTOR

Keith Barrett BA PhD received his first degree in philosophy from Oxford University after having spent three years working as a nursing assistant in psychiatric hospitals. It was in this practical context that Keith first encountered existentialism and psychoanalysis. He then began postgraduate studies on both Freud and Heidegger, leading finally to a PhD from the Wellcome Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL for a dissertation on ‘Freud’s Self-Analysis’. Keith has been a philosophy teacher for over 20 years, and has been delivering courses at the Freud Museum for over a decade, where he has developed a series of introductory lectures on Freud, psychoanalysis after Freud, and the overlap of philosophy and psychoanalysis.