God, Freud and Religion: The Origins of Faith, Fear and Fundamentalism

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Did God create man or did man create God? In this book, Dianna Kenny examines religious belief through a variety of perspectives – psychoanalytic, cognitive, neuropsychological, sociological, historical and psychiatric – to provide a coherent account of why people might believe in God. She argues that psychoanalytic theory provides a fertile and creative approach to the study of religion that attempts to integrate religious belief with our innate human nature and developmental histories that have unfolded in the context of our socialization and cultural experiences. Freud argued that religion is so compelling because it solves the problems of our existence. It explains the origin of the universe, offers solace and protection from evil, and provides a blueprint about how we should live our lives, with just rewards for the righteous and due punishments for sinners and transgressors. Science, on the other hand, offers no such explanations about the universe or the meaning of our lives and no comfort for the unanswered longings of the human race.

Is religion a form of wish-fulfilment, a collective delusion to which we cling as we try to fathom our place and purpose in the drama of cosmology? Can there be morality without faith? Are science and religion radically incompatible? What are the roots of fundamentalism and terror theology?

These are some of the questions addressed in God, Freud and Religion, a book that will be of interest to psychoanalysts, psychologists and psychotherapists, students of psychology, psychoanalysis, philosophy and theology and all those with an interest in religion and human behaviour.

Dianna Kenny is Professor of Psychology at the University of Sydney, Australia. She is the author of over 200 publications, including six books.

Zizek's Sigmund Freud Lecture: Theology, Negativity, and the Death-Drive

This video is cut from the DVD showing Zizek's Sigmund Freud Lecture at vienna's Burgtheater - May 6, 2015.

Rowan Williams located the root of religious experience into our (human)“capacity for perversity, addictions, self-sacrifice, self-destruction and a whole range of ‘rationally’ indefensible behaviors” – that is, the very dimension of irreducible self-sabotaging, of the “pursuit of unhappiness” –, [nbsp]and does this capacity not belong into the[nbsp]domain of the death-drive, of the weird overlapping between negativity and inertia that we encounter in a paradigmatic way in Hamlet? Hamlet doesn't kill Claudius when he sees him praying since if he were to do it at that moment, he would not strike at more than what is here, at that X that makes Claudius a king. This is also a problem – maybe even the problem - of revolutionaries: how not only to overturn power, but strike at what is more than mere power as a fact, and thus preventing that the ancient regime will return in a new guise? It is this uncertainty which propels Hamlet to procrastinate the act (of revenge), i.e., to use Hegel’s term, to tarry with the negative. Negativity is usually thought of as a dynamic entity consisting of struggles, cuts, and other modes of negation, but, as Andrew Cutrofello pointed out, what makes Hamlet a unique figure is that it stands for tarrying with the negative: Hamlet treats negativity itself as an expression of the melancholic inertia of being. Perhaps, then, the first move of what one can call “materialist theology” should be to discern this dimension of death-drive in divinity itself. (Slavoj Zizek)

See also

"You are allowed not to enjoy": Psychoanalysis today according to Zizek

Reading Žižek – Where to Start?

ZIZEK BOOKS

Paul's New Moment: Continental Philosophy and the Future of Christian Theology

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The rediscovery of the apostle Paul by atheistic or agnostic European philosophers is one of the most striking recent developments in philosophyand certainly one of keen interest to the church. These philosophers view Paul as having a revolutionary understanding of authority and politics.Bringing together Radical Orthodox theologian John Milbank, Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, and Creston Davis, who has been a student of both, this book reflects on Paul's new moment in secular philosophy. In a debate format, Žižek brings Marxist and postMarxist ideas into a discussion with Milbank about the influence of Paul. The book also includes a contribution from Catherine Pickstock.

Theology after Lacan: The Passion for the Real

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This groundbreaking volume highlights the contemporary relevance of Jacques Lacan (1901-1981), whose linguistic reworking of Freudian analysis radicalized both psychoanalysis and its approach to theology. Part I: Lacan, Religion, and Others explores the application of Lacan's thought to the phenomena of religion. Part II: Theology and the Other Lacan explores and develops theology in light of Lacan. In both cases, a central place is given to Lacan's exposition of the real, thereby reflecting the impact of his later work. Contributors include some of the most renowned readers and influential academics in their respective fields: Tina Beattie, Lorenzo Chiesa, Clayton Crockett, Creston Davis, Adrian Johnston, Katerina Kolozova, Thomas Lynch, Marcus Pound, Carl Raschke, Kenneth Reinhard, Mario D'Amato, Noelle Vahanian, and Slavoj Žižek. Topics traverse culture, art, philosophy, and politics, as well as providing critical exegesis of Lacan's most gnomic utterances on theology, including ""The Triumph of Religion."" ""This volume, Theology after Lacan, contains essays from some of the world's most recognized theology and cultural theorists implicated in contemporary psychoanalysis and rigorously advances the conversation about the intimate intersection that binds religion and psychoanalysis intriguingly together."" --Bracha L. Ettinger, author of The Matrixial Borderspace Creston Davis is a founder, co-director and professor of philosophy at the Global Center for Advanced Studies. He is also professor of philosophy at the European Graduate School and at the Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities. He is the co-author (with Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank) of Paul's New Moment, and (with Alain Badiou) the author of The Contradictions of America (forthcoming). He has just completed his novel, Ghostly Icons. Marcus Pound is Assistant Director of the Centre for Catholic Studies, Durham University, and lecturer in Catholic Theology. His is the author of Theology, Psychoanalysis, and Trauma, and Slavoj Žižek: A (Very) Critical Introduction. Clayton Crockett is Associate Professor and Director of Religious Studies at the University of Central Arkansas. His most recent book is Deleuze Beyond Badiou: Ontology, Multiplicity and Event.

A Materialism for the Masses: Saint Paul and the Philosophy of Undying Life

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Nietzsche and Freud saw Christianity as metaphysical escapism, with Nietzsche calling the religion a "Platonism for the masses" and faulting Paul the apostle for negating more immanent, material modes of thought and political solidarity. Integrating this debate with the philosophies of difference espoused by Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ward Blanton argues that genealogical interventions into the political economies of Western cultural memory do not go far enough in relation to the imagined founder of Christianity. Blanton challenges the idea of Paulinism as a pop Platonic worldview or form of social control. He unearths in Pauline legacies otherwise repressed resources for new materialist spiritualities and new forms of radical political solidarity, liberating "religion" from inherited interpretive assumptions so philosophical thought can manifest in risky, radical freedom.

God Is Unconscious: Psychoanalysis and Theology

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Sailing into New York Harbor, Sigmund Freud stood on the deck and gazed upon a statue that was meant to symbolize someone else's vague notion of freedom. The embryonic field of psychology--so very interested to hear this theory, which excavated the depths of the psyche--anticipated his arrival in America with lamentably eager fanfare. Whether out of hubris or prescience Freud could only whisper, ""They don't realize we are bringing them the plague."" It was a theory that undercut our creative justifications for every action and belief, and it suggested our anxious identities are charted by a big Other--one we cannot begin to comprehend. As psychoanalysis undergoes a resurgence of interest within religious studies, political theory, and cultural criticism, its innovative and peculiar claims remain difficult to grasp without any guide for the perplexed. In God Is Unconscious: Psychoanalysis and Theology, Tad DeLay explores the provocative teaching of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and its implications for Christianity. Partly an introductory exposition of Freud, Žižek, and Lacan, and partly an application of psychoanalysis to religion and politics, this book is organized as a theological meditation on an incendiary theory.

The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?

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What matters is not so much that Žižek is endorsing a demythologized, disenchanted Christianity without transcendence, as that he is offering in the end (despite what he sometimes claims) a heterodox version of Christian belief.
—John Milbank

To put it even more bluntly, my claim is that it is Milbank who is effectively guilty of heterodoxy, ultimately of a regression to paganism: in my atheism, I am more Christian than Milbank.
—Slavoj Žižek

In this corner, philosopher Slavoj Žižek, who represents the critical-materialist stance against religion's illusions; in the other corner, "radical orthodox" theologian John Milbank, an influential and provocative thinker who argues that theology is the only foundation upon which knowledge, politics, and ethics can stand. In The Monstrosity of Christ, Žižek and Milbank go head to head for three rounds, employing an impressive arsenal of moves to advance their positions and press their respective advantages. By the closing bell, they have proven themselves worthy adversaries--and have also shown that faith and reason are not simply and intractably opposed.

Žižek has long been interested in the emancipatory potential offered by Christian theology. And Milbank, seeing global capitalism as the new century's greatest ethical challenge, has pushed his own ontology in more political and materialist directions. Their debate in The Monstrosity of Christ concerns nothing less than the future of religion, secularity, and political hope in light of a monsterful event—God becoming human. For the first time since Žižek's turn toward theology, we have a true debate between an atheist and a theologian about the very meaning of theology, Christ, the Church, the Holy Ghost, universality, and the foundations of logic. The result goes far beyond the popularized atheist/theist point/counterpoint of recent books by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and others.

Žižek begins, and Milbank answers, countering dialectics with "paradox." The debate centers on the nature of and relation between paradox and parallax, between analogy and dialectics, between transcendent glory and liberation.