Eduqas Freud & Jung A*-A summary notes

Eduqas
Philosophy

This page contains A*/A grade level summary revision notes for the Freud & Jung topic.

For AO1 you need to know:

Freud on religion as illusion, neurosis & wish fulfilment
Supporting evidence for Freud
Challenges to Freud
Jung on religion as necessary for personal growth
Supporting evidence for Jung
Challenges to Jung

For AO2 you need to be able to debate:

How far religious belief can be considered a neurosis
The adequacy of Freud’s explanation of religious belief
The extent to which Jung was more positive than Freud about the idea of God
The effectiveness of empirical approaches as critiques of Jungian views on religion

AO1 Freud & Jung

Freud

Religion as an illusion and/or neurosis. Collective neurosis.

Freud recognised the importance of religion to humanity and spent much of his life and work trying to understand why we are religious and what it is doing for us psychologically.
He ultimately argued that religion is unhelpful in allowing humans to develop a healthy psychological maturity, considering it to be an ‘infantile’ pursuit that prevented human beings from fulfilling their potential. Religion is an illusion and a neurosis.
Id – unconscious desires/drives/instincts
Ego – conscious decision making self – mediates the Id and the superego
Super ego – our mind’s memory of our society’s moral views conditioned into us during childhood.
If your Id wants something that your superego says you can’t have – e.g. you become conscious of being hungry but you are in class – then you might repress your Id’s desire for food.
Freud thinks some level of repression is essential for a society to function.
We can’t go around acting on our instinctual desires or society would fall apart.
Religion encourages people to control their instincts and Freud thinks religion was useful in the past because of that, and that’s why religion was invented – to perform that necessary social function.
However, Freud criticises religion for being overly repressive of the Id – repressing people too much – to an unnecessary and unhealthy degree.
Furthermore, the way that religion encourages repression is childish and unhealthy.
Obedience to an imaginary father-figure like God is a childish way to control ourselves.
Freud thinks we should grow up and rationally/consciously accept that repression is for the good of society – not to please some imaginary father figure.
Obsessional neurosis. Religion often involves rituals done obsessively that religious people feel guilty if they don’t do. E.g. prayer or washing.
Freud thought this was similar to people with OCD.
However Freud thought that religious obsessional neurosis behaviours have a meaning.
They give a sense of control over our instincts.
Obsessively performing a ritual or behaviour gives us a sense that we can impose control over ourselves, making us more secure about not giving into the temptation of our instincts in the future.
We failed to control ourselves in the past, so try to assert obsessive control over ourselves now to avoid the guilt-trauma we felt over our past misdeeds.
We desire the sense of security that comes from the feeling of self-control gained by imposing an obsessive behaviour pattern on ourselves, because we don’t like the feelings of guilt that come from the lack of control we exhibited when we sinned in the past.
Wish fulfilment and reaction against helplessness. People are afraid to die and afraid of the responsibilities of adult life.
Freud thinks people have invented the idea of an eternal father as wish fulfilment, because this allows us to pretend that death is not the end.
It also gives us a sense of being a child forever, which helps us deal with the difficulties of being an adult.
Primal horde. Freud promoted the idea of a collective human ‘memory’ in his primal horde theory. This idea (which he based around the work of Darwin) suggested that human ancestors, killed an alpha-male within the horde, out of jealousy for their exclusive sexual access to the females. This caused a severe reaction of guilt as this alpha-male had also been highly respected and feared amongst the horde.

The social order of the horde came under threat as men became rivals for possession of the women. They began to realise that there was wisdom in the old order they had destroyed.

They created a totem to take the place of the father they had killed, uniting the horde into a tribe.
Over time, the memory and idea of the father in the tribe’s culture grew to a divine level and the totem was worshipped as a God.
This explains why we are born with a sense of guilt. It is inherited from the memory of having killed the father or had a desire to. Freud thought this explained Holy Communion. Totemic rituals about eating (which represents fellowship) morphed into a Christian one.
Societies need order. Religion was created to enable social order. Religion is technically a way of worshiping social order.
Evidence which backs up Freud’s approach: the focus on social morality, community, family and coming together during festivals.
Oedipus complex. Freud used the Oedipus myth to reflect on the complex relationships between parents and children and how this affects a child’s mental development.
Issues around love, hate, jealousy, rivalry and dependence were recognised as having their root in the parent-child relationship and could result in intense emotional turmoil within the individual.
E.g. boys naturally feel a potentially destructive dependence on their mother and jealous rivalry towards their father.
However, religion developed to solve this issue.
Viewing God as father and as omnipotent, means God is really beyond our rivalry or jealousy because we can’t compete with God. This lets us ‘let go’ of our feelings of jealousy that we have associated with ‘father’. So that lets us submit to the ‘father’ – i.e., the social norms of our society – without resentfully trying to disobey them.

Supporting evidence for Freud:

Supporting evidence for Freud: redirection of guilt complexes.
A key idea of Freud’s was ‘sublimation’ – where we take an instinct that would go against society, or a feeling of guilt, and re-direct it to fit in with social norms.
E.g. someone might feel anger or a desire for violence, but turn that into healthy competing in a sport.
The obsessional neurosis is an example of trying to avoid guilt by asserting control over ourselves.
The guilt we feel over disobeying the social order (as in the primary horde scenario) is redirected and alleviated by worshipping a God – who represents social order.
There is evidence in modern psychology that justifies this view of human nature.
Supporting evidence: Instinctive desires from an evolutionary basis.
Evolution supports Freud’s concept of instinctive desires & the Id.
This is because animals do appear to have instincts that they are born with. It makes evolutionary sense for animals to be born with certain instincts that incline them to behaviours that fulfil evolutionary goals, e.g. surviving and reproducing.
These instincts were designed by evolution to guide our behaviour in a pre-social environment. So, they aren’t going to guide us well in an actual society, where our instincts will need controlling. This suggests Freud is right to some degree about his view of the mind.

Jung

Jung is much more positive about religion than Freud.
Freud essentially calls religion a mental illness (obsessional neurosis), but Jung thinks that it can actually be helpful for our mental development and health.

The Collective unconscious

Jung claimed that he discovered similar ideas, images and themes in his patient’s dreams whose origins could not be traced to their past experiences.
Often we dream about things we experience while awake in our life – but Jung claimed that some elements from people’s dreams did not come from their experience while awake.
Jung thought this meant we must all be born with a part of the mind in common, which he called the ‘collective unconscious’.
This generates and so is what explains the common themes in people’s dreams that don’t come from their waking experience.
Jung saw links between these themes found in dreams and mythical/religious themes.
He called these themes archetypes.

Archetypes

Archetypes are primordial images. They are part of the content of our collective unconscious. They are the basic themes and images that come into our mind from our collective unconscious.
Archetypes are like themes in a film. There’s the actual film itself, but then there are the underlying themes it has which it also shares with other films. E.g. star wars has a lot of unique elements as a story, but also contains general themes such as hero, bad father and elderly wise mentor.
Jung is saying that we are born with a set of themes about life already in our unconscious mind. They then shape the way we experience and live and affect how we understand others and ourselves.
Essentially, our lives are lived like stories and archetypes are the themes we are born with awareness of, that then inform and shape the way we understand the story of our lives. (e.g. ‘main character’ complex!)
This is why we have the idea of ‘story’ as a species. Even 20,00 years ago, tribal people would share stories that would inform and shape their lives.
Jung argues that religion provides stories which contain archetypal themes which thus help us to navigate life.

Individuation

In life we act a certain way to control how others think of us, and even how we think of ourselves. We only show a particular side of ourselves. Jung calls this the mask we wear.
However, this causes us to suppress certain parts of ourselves, the parts we don’t want to admit exist, which Jung calls the shadow.
Jung thinks this is not healthy. We need to accept who we are and not suppress part of ourselves.
Religious stories and the themes they contain are relatable – they contain themes from life. Including things that might be part of our shadow that we have suppressed.
So, understanding religious stories can help us to deal with and accept parts of ourselves that we suppress.
E.g. Cain and Abel story – God accepted Abel’s sacrifice but not Cains, driving Cain to anger and jealousy and then to ultimately kill Abel. The point of this story is to show that people do feel things like anger and jealousy due to the sacrifice of others working out for them better than they do for us. We need to accept it rather than repressing and bottling up those feelings until they drive us to sin.
Reading this story could help someone deal with feelings of anger/jealousy that they are repressing as their shadow.
Everyone has parts of themselves they don’t like and want to hide from the world. But Jung’s point is that’s not really dealing with it properly.
Individuation is the name for this process of self-realisation and self-acceptance.
Bringing elements of ourselves back from our shadow to present our true self to the world, not a mask – is called individuation.

Religion as helpful for personal growth

Jung thinks that our lives are kind of like stories that involve themes we pick up from our unconscious.

Religion contains stories with archetypal themes, and these stories can help us to develop our minds.
The details of religious stories are different in different religions, but they all contain similar themes about how to live life, be a moral person, be a part of a community, be a part of a family.
Jung is saying this is what religion really is about – providing stories that help us to live well.

Particular Archetypes

Archetypes are not created but discovered in the collective unconscious. They are limitless but some are very common. Archetypes cannot be known directly but they generate images/themes in the conscious mind. They frame our understanding of ourselves and our lives.
Examples of Archetypes:
mother, child, trickster, the flood (eschatological theme).
The persona (the mask we wear),
The shadow (the suppressed unconscious part of our personality),
Anima and animus (our inner attitudes that take on the characteristics of the opposite sex),
The self (midway between consciousness and the unconscious).

The God within.

Archetypes can be represented symbolically – e.g. the archetype of an old wise man represented by dumbledore or gandalf or yoda.
Religious images can also be interpreted as interwoven with archetypes. E.g., Mary with the mother archetype, baby Jesus with the child archetype. Religious themes about the apocalypse or world-changing events like the flood with eschatological archetypes.
Jung thinks that the ‘self’ archetype is symbolically represented in the same way as the God archetype.
This makes the ‘self’ the ‘God within us’
The self helps with individuation by producing ideas of wholeness – since individuation is about becoming whole.
E.g. mandalas are symbolic representations of the ‘self’ archetype – a symbol of wholeness regarding the spiritual journey of the self – an artistic image of patterns focused around a central point used in Buddhism to symbolise the journey of the self to enlightenment.
God is a perfected being, which is the type of ‘self’ we strive for. So God is a symbolic representation of the self’s ultimate ideal goal.
That being the case, the journey of individuation is a religious question, aiming to find the ‘God within’ – the ideal perfected state of being.
God is not an external being but an expression of the goal of individuation, the goal of being a self-realised person.
Individuation is the journey towards becoming a full individual. It is the quest to find the ‘God within’. It is a religious quest because it is through the religious images that the personality achieves its goal of integration. The religious images are merely images of the deeper self.

Supporting evidence for Jung

recognition of religion as source of comfort

Source of meaning / purpose
Source of guidance during times of difficulty.
Source of comfort regarding belief in positive forces, even if ultimately only in the mind.

promotion of positive personal and social mindsets

Religious stories being genuinely inspirational and motivating for people.
This justifies Jung’s account of them as archetypal and enabling of individuation.
Religious stories providing an ethical foundation for societies

AO2 Freud & Jung content

Freud’s empirical validity

Freud is not a proper scientist, he didn’t do any real experiments, he studied a small sample size of people who were not a good cross-section of society.
Because of this, Popper said Freud’s theories were ‘unfalsifiable’ and thus not real science. Freud’s theories do not make predictions which could be wrong, which is the hallmark of genuine science for Popper.

Counter

Paul Bloom is a contemporary psychologist. He accepts that many of Freud’s ideas are ‘off the wall’. The Oedipus complex is completely rejected by modern developmental psychologists and very few of Freud’s ideas about the causes of mental illness are still taken seriously.
But Bloom still thinks Freud has important and useful insights.
Contemporary research does suggest that Freud was right that we have little awareness about the unconscious origin of many of our emotions and desires.

Evaluation

Some of Freud’s ideas have some core validity.
For example, it makes sense that ancient society would worship a totem as a representation of social order. But it’s not credible to think all humans have an inherited memory of guilt, that’s unscientific.
It makes sense that a boy knows it needs its mother’s attention, and would be jealous of his father when taking that attention away. But it’s strange and unnecessary for Freud to sexualise that dynamic.
So Freud takes his ideas too far, but that doesn’t mean we should dismiss them altogether.
Even Popper admitted that he wasn’t saying there was nothing of value in Freud, just that Freud had not subjected his ideas to proper scientific scrutiny.
Contemporary psychologists like Piaget are more empirical and have justified some of Freud’s central contentions, such as that morality results from social conditioning.

Freud’s views on Christian ethics as infantile

Freud is a secularist who thinks that the religious mindset is similar to that of a child.
He says religion comes from the ‘ignorant childhood days of the human race’. Religion is thus the product of an ignorant and childish mind. Religion encourages people to not think for themselves and not question it, giving people a ‘weak intellect’.
Freud is especially critical of the psychology of religious morality which he dismisses as infantile. A child’s behaviour is managed by their parents, with their father traditionally being the disciplinarian one. Freud thinks a religious society functions similarly, in that people’s moral behaviour is controlled by fear of God ‘the father’, which functions to control adults in the same childish way that we control children. Freud thinks a better more psychologically harmonious state is possible for humans, which is that we encourage people to follow moral law for the good of society. Freud thinks people are capable of that level of autonomy and he argues it would actually increase the level of adherence to the laws, if they were accepted rationally, rather than out of a childish fearfulness.
If Freud is right, a society without religion like Christianity would be happier because people would follow laws due to reason, rather than unhappy motivations like fear and more people would follow the laws, resulting in a happier society.
There is evidence that Freud is right, because the most atheistic countries, like northern europe, have some of the lowest crime rates, whereas the countries with the worst crime rates are religious. This doesn’t prove Freud right since correlation is not causation, but it is still good evidence that Freud could be right.

Counter

However, Freud is criticised by Jung.
Jung argued that religion, contrary to being infantile, was actually instrumental in our growth and development into happy individuals.
Jung argued that we all repress parts of ourselves, which he called our ‘shadow’, but that to become fully developed people we need to acknowledge those sides we repressed and achieve self-realisation to become properly developed.
Jung thinks religion contains archetypal stories, meaning themes that are universal and which help us to make sense of the story of our own lives, and cease repressing parts of ourselves.
E.g. the Cain and Abel story is about the way that envy can lead us to do terrible things, even murder. So, this story can help people not to repress their envy, but to acknowledge and deal with it healthily.
So, religion can be good for us and enable happiness and avoid unhappiness.

Evaluation

Jung’s optimism about religion has proven more successful than Freud’s pessimism, because of the way modern culture struggles to maintain meaning and purpose in their life without religion.
Nietzsche & Bonhoeffer made this argument, pointing out that so much of human meaning and purpose revolved around God, that clearly when we stop believing in God, there will be a void left behind.
The purpose of life held out to people by modern secular society is essentially a superficial one, to buy things and achieve social status. This doesn’t really make people happy. Jung seems right that we need something like religion to help us navigate finding purpose and ultimately finding ourselves.
Thinkers like Freud believed religion would decline and soon cease. But, the fact that it is so enduring is empirical evidence that Jung was closer to the truth than Freud. Religion still does something for people that they need. Freud is wrong is his analysis of what he thought religion was.
So, Jung’s view that religion has positive elements seems more convincing.

Jung’s empirical validity

Lack of empirical evidence for Jungian concepts. Jung’s approach was not what we would now consider genuinely scientific. He didn’t do actual experiments. He based his theory of archetypes on his interpretation of the dreams of his patients. That’s not evidence.
Karl Popper said Freud’s theories were ‘unfalsifiable’, meaning not genuinely scientific because there’s no possible evidence that could prove them false, since they aren’t properly based on scientific experiment.
Popper’s point applies to Jung as well, whose theory also appears unfalsifiable.

Counter

However, when Popper made this critique, he also emphasised he wasn’t saying there was nothing of value in these theories, just that they needed to be subjected to proper scientific scrutiny and experiment.
So, even though Jung himself wasn’t scientific enough, we can still judge his theory by judging the evidence for and against it.
There is evidence for it. The cross-cultural similarities between myths is evidence for there being a universal innate psychological basis for them.
Furthermore, Jung would defend his approach as empirical in the ‘phenomenological’ tradition, which is focused on understanding the mind through interpreting subjective experience itself.

Evaluation

There is a problem with phenomenology which explains its lacking popularity in modern psychology. It ignores objective evidence, which is especially a problem when there is objective evidence against its claims.
There is objective evidence against Jung’s claims.
Jung drew attention to the similarities in myths – but he ignores significant differences. Societies which existed next to the sea had their myths affected by related imagery – whereas societies that were landlocked had different mythological imagery.
Even though people live in different parts of the world and have different cultural upbringing, they all have mothers, so the existence of the theme of motherhood in stories is unsurprising and does not justify Jung’s claim that it exists as an archetype in a collective unconscious.
So there is clear evidence that myths are socially influenced, rather than innate.
So, while Jung may have been right in his very general claims about religion being positive, his theory about the actual mechanism for that psychological benefit is not valid.

Jung & the limits of science

Modern science is very limited when it comes to understanding the mind through objective means such as neuroscience. The brain is simply too complicated for us to actually understand currently.
This justifies Jung’s more subjective approach. We have such a lack of perfectly scientific understanding of the brain that we are justified in turning to what might be less scientific but is still empirical.
Jung’s approach is still based on experience. His method of interpretation of subjective experience is similar to other disciplines, such as literature. We read and interpret books and their meaning. No one thinks that is science, but it’s still viewed as valid and informative.
So, Jung’s theories on religion aren’t scientific enough to be verified or falsified, but they were never meant to be empirical in that ‘hard’ scientific way.
So Jung would argue his approach is still informative, even if it might not be able to produce the same level of knowledge as the hard sciences.

Counter:

However, even if we take Jung’s theories at the empirical level he intended them, they still face issues.
Even at the level of interpretation, Gardener Murphy argues the evidence Jung brought to the table wasn’t even itself actually solid.
Jung saw that one mental phenomenon was somewhat similar to another, and jumped to the conclusion that they were equivalent. Jung did this with myths – leaping unjustifiably to conclusions about their similarities proving the existence of an archetype.

Evaluation

Jung is unsuccessful because he’s admitting that he isn’t as thoroughly empirical as hard sciences, but he’s trying to make claims that can’t be justified by his approach.
Interpretation of subjective experience might be useful for telling us about what experience is like, but Jung is going too far in thinking it can justify claims about the actual nature of the mind and its innate faculties.
If Jung wants to defend his approach as not thoroughly falsifiable science, then he has to accept that he’s limited in the kind of evidence he can provide and therefore the kind of claims he can make.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Jung’s claims about the mind require much better evidence than his method can provide.