Freud and the Uncanny

I have been struggling with what to assign from Freud in my Psychology and Religion course. I could teach a whole semester just on him! I am likely settling on an essay entitled, "The Uncanny," although it is not usually the work chosen to represent Freud's view of religion. Freud's major ideas about the origins of religion are usually derived from The Future of an Illusion, Civilization and its Discontents and Moses and Monotheism. Based on those books, it is generally agreed that Freud saw worshipping God the Father as an outgrowth of the Oedipal conflict, and he judged it an immature and cowardly resolution. The most heroic way to encounter the frustrations of life--among them the ambivalence of sons toward their fathers--is to face them boldly and to do without illusions like a father in heaven whom one can appease. This idea, with its androcentric view of life being only one of multiple problems, is no longer taken to be the key to unlock all of life(to put it gently.)

What is left of Freud's basic contention is that life is full of pain and civilized life full of necessary repression and that religious ideas are compensation for those too weak to "take it like a man."(It should be pointed out that, in Freud's view, all religions are illusions but some are more illusory than others. In his last book, Moses and Monotheism, Freud argues that there is a great deal more to be admired in the Jewish version than the Christian.)

There is a huge literature dealing with all this and relating it back to sexism, antisemitism, heterosexism and how those three intermingle in fascinating ways.

Freud did also acknowledge a second source of religion , that of the "oceanic feeling"(Civilization and its Discontents, Chapter One) and a desire to return to that sensation of eternity. Freud agrees many people have such experiences and that they can provide the energy that is then channeled by religious institutions. Freud confesses(boasts?) that he could not discover that oceanic feeling in himself. Again, however, it is an immature move to indulge one's nostalgia for such such an early phase of ego-feeling.

The essay that I want to look at, "The Uncanny" is widely read by people interested in literature. It is as a contribution to aesthetics that Freud presents the work. He notes that people like to study what we find beautiful, but less often examine what we find uncanny, that is the english word for what in German Freud calls "unheimlich."

Since linguistics is so much a part of his argument, unheimlich is a better way to carry on the discussion. All of us know when we feel "spooked" --something makes us uncomfortable in a vaguely scary way---a weird coincidence, the sense that something that we thought dead is alive(or vice versa), ghosts, spirits, etc. Freud wants to analyse that feeling of the unheimlich by examining clinical evidence, literary evidence and linguistic evidence. I found the article challenging and exciting. I also learned that it would relate to two issues of great interest to the students--gender and Freud's Jewishness. Most important, it points to(but doesn't actually come out and state) a far more ambivalent(if not positive) attitude toward religion than is usually attributed to Freud. Obviously, I did not figure all this out myself! I was led to this essay by the work of Diane Jonte-Pace in a book entitled, Speaking the Unspeakable: Religion, Misogyny, and the Uncanny Mother in Freud's Cultural Texts. I also saw some interesting connections to evolutionary psychology and brain science(not made by Freud or by Jonte-Pace, but I think they are valid connections.) Anyone read the essay and want to comment?