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"Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices"

"Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices" is a 1907 article by Sigmund Freud exploring the analagous relationship and origins of compulsive neurotic behavior (colloquially called "ceremonials") and the rituals of religious persons. Freud maintains that the analagous actions between obsessed neurotics and religious observers is more than superficial. Where psychoanalysis has helped to uncover the origins of obsessive compulsive behavior, so to can psychoanalysis uncover the psychological processes of religious life.

Parallels between neurotic and religious behavior patterns: Both are full of symbolic meaning--they express unconscious motives and ideas. Both are usually performed without conscious awareness of the actions' true significance. Both manifest the unconscious negotiation taking place between fulfilling instinctual desires and the prohibitions of these desires. Both provide an outlet in which the instinctual desires are partially satiated (though not fully satisfied because of the substitute character of the actions replacing the original motive. Instinctual desires have been suppressed by prohibitions, thus anxiety is produced by the unconscious desire to act out these instincts while knowing the punitive consequences of doing so. Acting out these behaviors in a substitute form alleviates anxiety by providing an outlet for partial satiation of these desires.

A ceremonial provides an environment for otherwise prohibited actions to be manifested: “Again, a ceremonial represents the sum of the conditions subject to which something that is not yet absolutely forbidden is permitted, just as the Church’s marriage ceremony signifies for the believer a sanctioning of sexual enjoyment which would otherwise be sinful.”

The article is Freud's first explicit analysis of religion, which he would explore more fully in The Future of an Illusion (1927)

Freud concludes his article by briefly shifting psychoanalysis as a method interpreting individual cases to interpreting human society.

" A progressive renunciation of constitutional instincts, whose activation might afford the ego primary pleasure, appears to be one of the foundations of the development of human civilization. Some part of this instinctual repression is effected by its religions, in that they require the individual to sacrifice his instinctual pleasure to the Deity: ‘Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.’ In the development of the ancient religions one seems to discern that many things which mankind had renounced as ‘iniquities’ had been surrendered to the Deity and were still permitted in his name, so that the handing over to him of bad and socially harmful instincts was the means by which man freed himself from their domination."

From this point of view we may conclude, as did Freud in Future and Civilization, that religions function as an oppressive mechanism which seeks to control humanity's instinctual or animal natures. (source: http://www.magma.ca/~mfonda/freud09.html#901)

Criticisms: Reductive (religious practice reduced to an obsessional neurosis); Religion as a means of control.