Freud and religion Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Freud and religion - Research Paper Example in a religious pursuit and even for persons who are, the failure to find happiness leads to a number of methods whereby people seek to at least circumvent pain. Sooner or later, if at all, Freud believes people discover that love is the answer to their quest for happiness. When this fails, as it unfortunately does for too many, people try to control their social lives through a assortment of means and then ultimately come to recognize that unhappiness and guilt are pervasive and they again look for the answers they did not find in religion. This cycle of futile searches for happiness is addressed throughout Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontent. Freud proposes that the very underpinnings of civilization and systematic factions such as religions are found within the multifaceted development of a person. In his effort to clarify the ‘oceanic’ sensation of limitless bond felt with all of humanity illustrated by a friend of Freud’s, which possibly supplies the foundation of religious affiliation, he investigates the development of the ego as it transforms from the baby to the adult. According to Freud, the infantile ego makes understands little difference between what is external to the infant and what is external to it. By continually adjusting to its knowledge of what is internal as it starts to differentiate those characteristics of itself that are internal as opposed to those characteristics that are external entities, the person begins to reduce their field, developing a sense of what they are by defining what they are not. However, they may also maintain some feature of that greater association felt as an infant, thus explaining, plausibly, this ‘oceanic’ feeling of limitlessness and a connection with the universe (Freud, 1930: 19-22). While Freud cannot completely appreciate this sensation himself, he suggests that it is the infant’s want for security that leads them to identify this common feeling of the concept that an all-knowing and