FUNDAMENTALISTS: NOTES ON A PERSONALITY ANALYSIS AND RELIGIOSITY AS
NEUROSIS
X
Monroe Stein, Ph.D.
Sigmund Freud, in his Future of an Illusion, regarded religion as "the
universal neurosis". He thereby implied that, if the neurotic substrate of
religious beliefs in supernaturalism and the ritual practice accompanying
them would ameliorated, the individual's need for religion could be expected
to reduce correspondingly, or even eliminated. An avowed atheist, Freud
devoted much attention through his writings, such as Moses and Monotheism to
the psychological and socio-historical sources of religion. Although an
atheist, he retained--as an integral part of his ego-identity throughout his
life-a tie with secular--cultural--humanistic dimensions of Jewish
ethnicity
The Viennese psychiatrist, Victor E. Frankl, unfortunately, but to his
ultimate personal enrichment due do to his self-transcending efforts to
rehabilitate himself, spent three years in the shadow of the gas chambers of
the Nazi death camps of Auschwitz and Dachau.Since then,
ne seems---among his other contributions --to have uncovered, although
seemingly still unbeknown to himself, significant emp~rical support for
Freud's conception of religion as a "universal neurosis"
That is to say, Frankl, as he noted in his The Unheard cry for
Meaning, when traveling through Mexico in 1975, came upon a Benedictine
monastery. He happened to discuss with the prior who ran the monastery the
issue of neurosis and freedom fr9m it, evidently including the question of
the acquisition of religiosity. He learned that the prior had insisted that
the monks in his monastery undergo a strictly Freudian ppychoanalysis, and
they did so. The outcome? Only 20 percent remained in the Monastery!. This
finding is supportive of Freud's conception and mine too, that by reducing
the neurotic conflicts and other 'hang-- ups" underlying religiosity, one
can be expected to evolve a more normal, rational life orientation.
In the bio-social development, mostly beginning in late infancy, as
the individual inevitably encounters frustrations, disappointments, and
delayed and unmet satisfaction of needs, both basic and higher, a capacity
for frustration-tolerance, the ability to make assessments leading to
problem solving, and the devising and execution of coping strategies are
required for competence in living. When encountering vicissitudes in the
course of living, the individual --since actual
merger with the nurturing, all-giving mother is no longer possible
tends to be drawn to substitute, as a vicarious parent figure, especially if
he or she is subjected to religious indoctrination, fiction of a supreme
being. In essence, the individual projects on the external world a
fantasized modification of his or her internalized parent figure image.
If indoctrination takes hold, the individual projects his or her
infantile wishes onto the posited supreme being, who typically rep with the
protagonist's prepackaged pap of arcane supernaturalism. Presence of the
pathopsyhological sources and the dynamics of a belief in a deity can be
demonstrated more clearly, because the exaggerated nature of severe abnormal
conditions highlights them, the religious delusions of many schizophrenics.
Intriguingly, thes delusions show matriarchal features, paralleling ancient
and contemporary mother religions.
In essence, the acquiring of religiosity is both prompted by and
enables the individual, otherwise seemingly mature in his or her
psychological functioning, to make experiencing the world a fantasy or
delusional reenactment, or both, of the dyadic infant and mother/father
relationship. In effect, Mickey Mouse-like "nursery" comic proportions, a
vestige of the naive, pre-scientific thinking, superstition, and ignorance
of humankind's primitive past appears. Religiosity may afford a noteworthy
degree of surcease; it is true from anxieties, frustrations, and insecurity
that dog one in the course of independent living. It does so, however, at
the cost of doing violence to the crown of humankinds evolutionary
achievement the phylogenic flowering of the supremacy of its intelligence,
its unsurpassed capacity for rationality, among the animal kingdom.
I would like to attempt now a more detailed, sharply focused
delineation of the neurotic substrate of religiosity. In the very early
postnatal development of the child, i.e., in infancy, there
experientially, a sense of no boundary, a unity between himself or
herself and the outer world, consisting principally, of course, of dyad of
infant and mother. In psychoanalytic terms, ego and non-eg are one, and if,
as usually occurs, the mother has a healthy, caring nurturing merging with
the child, there exists for the child an
experience of completeness, an overall contentment imbuing the self
and the surround. This experience of unity between self and the woman
around the child affords the infant a considerable sense of security -
a narcissistic unio mystica --a deep oral union with the universe Thus, the
ecstatic experience of religious conversion, of being
"reborn again," that persons afflicted with religiosity so often
stridently claim, can be better understood as solely a
pathopsychological phenomenon: the transitory reestablishment, thr
regression, of the original "oceanic feeling"--as Freud and Sandor Rado, an
American psychoanalyst, labeled it---that characterized t unity, the deep
passive dependence, that the infant experienced with the all giving mother.
The infant's experience of unity, along with the contentment it
affords, gradually disappears as the child, through maturation anc learning,
begins pari passu to meet with be intervals when the satisfaction of his or
her needs is delayed. The child then come t differentiate between self and
non-self, ego non ego.
The child's earlier, contented phase of development leaves an
important residuum of memory content that-- when difficulties in adaptive
functioning occur -- tends to become revived, and to which
the person longs, although perhaps unbeknown to himself or herself, t
regress, to re-experience. This longing, actual and potential, provide a
fertile intrapsychic soil for the inculcation by organized religion of the
wish fantasies of "the good Lord watching over" oneself, of
"taking care" of oneself.
To present this important insight, perhaps more sharply, Margaret S.
Mahler-- a Viennese-bred psychoanalyst -- noted in the Journal of the
American Psychoanalytic association in 1971
The entire life cycle constitutes a more or less successful process c
distancing from the introjection of the lost symbiotic mother, an eternal
longing for the actual or fantasized "ideal state of self," with the later
standing for a symbiotic fusion with the "all good symbiotic mother, who was
at one time part of the self in a blissful state of well being.
TOWARD A PERSONALITY ANALYSIS
In my analysis, based on observation, two of the more outstanding
features of the mental and personality functioning ---or, more apropos,
malfunctioning --of fundamentalists are (a) the certitude with which they
appear to hold and present their beliefs in the supernatural, and (b) their
inability to think in a critical, a analytic way about their religious
beliefs, most notably those concerning the supernatural realm. Indeed, these
two areas of pathopsychological functioning appear to afflict, to a greater
or lesser extent, all persons saddled with religiosity, but they are
particularly striking in fundamentalists.
The fundamentalist's certitude, by its strongly exaggerated nature,
can be better understood as a psychoneurotic symptom complex, a part of a
neurotic defensive formation, erected against unconscious doubt of
comparable, exaggerated degree with the certitude. Further, the substitution
of certitude for as Bertrand Russell noted in a philosophical sense,
ignorance is not permissible in science nor, for that matter, in any
rational thinking. It is a form of intellectual travesty of human
intelligence.
The panoply of neurotic defensive formation of fundamentalism account
in great measure for their limiting of their social contacts, as
Vlaardingerbroek points out, to their own circumscribed in-groups. They
thereby avoid the arousal in themselves of feelings of insecurity which
would otherwise be produced by encountering persons who hold, and would do
in do course express, contrary beliefs of a religious nature, thereby
endangering the fundamentalists' defenses against the powerful, underlying
doubt deep within themselves.
In the same vain, the gullibility of the fundamentalist in relation
for his or her religious dogma, which Vlaardingerbroek so aptly point out
too, is also part of the neurotic defensive formation against the presence
of unconscious doubt, a mode of bolstering the self erected "wall" within
their minds against strong, deep-lying uncertainty. By
the same token, the fundamentalist's self-righteous attitude reveals,
by its marked, exaggerate nature also, that it is part of the bulwark of the
neurotic defense formation, in this instance against underlyir. hostile,
self serving, greedy, and even anti-social tendencies, a
literal maelstrom of "sinfulness" beneath the surface of their
personalities. The sensitive, trained eye can often discern the presence of
the "sinful" propensities through the surface of their personalities; these
propensities are so close to overt expression.
In psychoanalytic terms, the most salient mechanism of defense in the
fundamentalist's array of neurotic defenses can be considered to be reaction
formation. This defense consists of the conversion into its opposite of
unconscious and partially preconscious thought, attitudes, and wishes, such
as hostile, asocial, and antisocial trends that are--as fundamentalists
would on a conscious level, regard them --repugnant, ie.,"sinful"
Characteristically, reaction formation is much less strong --- even
somewhat brittle, because it is not as basic, mostly due to its acquisition
at a later stage of personality development---than many of the other
mechanisms of defense, such as a repression. Thus, the fundamentalist's
neurotic defensive formation is subject to break down intermittently, such
as may be manifested in a extramarital sexual venture. In a similar vein
reaction formation may permit the partial expression, in sustained but
attenuated form as if through a screen, in manifest behavior of underlying,
morally unacceptable trends against which it is supposedly arrayed, such as
clandestine indulgence in pornography or the surreptitious diverting of
monies, contributed by the public for religious purposes, for ones greedy
use.
Thus, the fundamentalist in his or her own fa9ade of self
righteousness may, and commonly does, manifest only a thin, even translucent
disguise of his or her underlying "sinfulness," which the neurotic defensive
formation aims to hold in abeyance. In brief, then, the fundamentalist not
only possess s greater than average, troublesome degree of underlying
socially and morally unacceptable trends, but he or she holds these "sinful"
propensities in check only precariously.
When in argumentation centered on his religious belief system the
fundamentalist sees himself in danger of as Vlaardingerbroek phrases it
"being shown up"; he can be better understood as feeling threatened. by the
weakening --- in the psychoanalytic sense ---of one of the bulwarks in his
neurotic personality structure. This religious belief system~ pivotal in his
neurotic defenses, is prone -- under the pressure of likely imminent
weakening -- to give rise to a charge of anxiety, sparked by the feared
consequences of the possible surfacing into conscious awareness of his
unconscious doubt.
In the same vein, when engaging fundamentalists in serious discussion
challenging the validity of their religious beliefs, particularly concerning
supernatural phenomena and the literal interpretation of biblical myths,
they are virtually limited to countering the challenge, with emotionalism
and over righteousness, by reaffirming, in hackneyed phrases, their stock
beliefs. the fundamentalist appears unable, evidently, to rise above the
level of reaffirmation, even if one points out to him his dogged failure to
rise above this level.
The conclusion forces itself upon one that the religious
indoctrination to which fundamentalists, including religious zealots, both
expose themselves repeatedly and to which they are regularly subjected has
the insidious effect of preventing the development of the ability to think
critically about dogma they embrace or, if such ability has ever been
acquired, to be paralyzed in exercising it.
It is safe to infer then, as perhaps an original discovery in
religious psychotherapy, that the inculcation of "faith" by systematic
indoctrination involves pari passu the prevention of the development of the
capacity to adopt a critical attitude, to think analytically about the
"faith or, if such capacity has ever been acquired, to stifle it.
Unquestionably, the perpetration of such a defect on the
human mind is unconscionable and a tragic assault on the hard-one
liberal tradition of our Western civilization. Ironically, fundamentalists
regard this abortion or paralysis of such ratiocinative powers as virtuous,
and praiseworthy!
Still further, the fundamentalist also appears disposed, as an
expression of his neurotic personality structure, to use the in guerrilla
tactic of "cutting off," again and again, his opponent's efforts to voice
his thoughts. At the same time, the fundamentalist seems apt to augment such
frustrating harassment by loud talking and, even more maddening, snickering
at the points his opponent makes instead of replying thoughtfully to them.
(Gallows humor) that is to say, the fundamental repeatedly starts to talk in
the midst of his opponent's attempts to express his thoughts, thereby
"jamming" them. The fundamentalist can be expected to persist in doing so
even though his opponent confronts him, again and again, with the
obstructionist nature of the tactic, the feeling of insecurity that prompts
it, and its offending unsportsmanlike, and harassing nature. One gains the
impression that the fundamentalist, by hostilely persisting with stone faced
indifference, thereby reenacts in microcosm organized religion's long
history of adamant suppression of dissent as "heresy."
Edited by New10.
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