Freud and Freudians on Religion: A Reader

Front Cover
Donald Capps
Yale University Press, Jan 1, 2001 - Religion - 357 pages
This book presents selections from Freud's writings on religion and from the work of five more recent contributors to the psychoanalytic study of religion: David Bakan, Erik H. Erikson, Heinz Kohut, Julia Kristeva, and D.W. Winnicott. It is the first collection of texts in the psychology of religion that is oriented more toward religious studies than toward the study of psychology.

In his introduction, Donald Capps points out that psychoanalysis resembles religions in the way in which its founding documents (Freud's own writings) have been closely read, have evoked interpretive battles, and have been reassessed and reapplied in response to changing social and cultural circumstances. He notes that just as Freud's writings on religion focus on the biblical text, the majority of the authors included here do likewise, showing how the Bible may be read psychoanalytically. Both Freud and his successors, says Capps, also reflect the high value that the Christian culture of the West has placed on painting and sculpture, revealing the importance of perception and imagination to the psychoanalytic study of religion. Capps highlights the ways in which all the Freudians work intertextually with Freud's writings, with the writings of other authors included in the book, and with other writings of their own.

From inside the book

Contents

Introduction
1
Sigmund Freud
9
Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices
17
From Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory
25
The Moses of Michelangelo
32
A SeventeenthCentury Demonological
40
From The Future of an Illusion
51
CHAPTER 6
58
The Galilean Sayings and the Sense of
193
Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena
211
Transitional Phenomena in Religion
220
The Use of an Object and Relating Through
226
Heinz Kohut
241
The Disorders of the Self and Their Treatment
249
Forms and Transformations of Narcissism
264
From The Restoration of the Self
273

From Moses and Monotheism
72
David Bakan
85
From The Duality of Human Existence
94
Sacrifice and the Book of
102
PART III
121
Reflections on Dr Borgs Life Cycle
129
From Young Man Luther
164
Ritualization in Everyday Life
178
Shared Visions
184
A Reexamination of Agoraphobia
283
On Courage
290
Julia Kristeva
305
Credo in Unum Deum
311
Might Not Universality Be Our
327
Reading the Bible
335
The Wheel of Smiles
345
193
353
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