The Psychological Approach to the Study of Religion
At the turn of the century, two colleagues formed a new science of psychoanalysis; these men were the Swiss Carl Jung, and the Viennese Sigmund Freud. Both of them wanted to advance a new framework, explaining the psyche behind human behavior. They wanted a system that put a relationship between the conscious and the unconscious at the same time.
An example of the unconscious is all the things about somebody that have not yet come into the consciousness yet. According to this theory, people’s minds are not machines that have complete thoughts of reasoning and feeling in the beginning, but we are beings who develop a consciousness during a lifetime. So it takes a while before we can start feeling all of those things.
The two colleagues later broke with each other because Freud’s view was too narrowly constructed. Jung believed that a broader view had to be constructed. Freud believed that the unconsciousness was the place where someone’s ego puts all the repressed past inside. In other words, the unconsciousness was like a basement where “traumas, unacceptable desires, and unresolved psychological knots of various kinds are s
tored but active.” Jung believed that the unconsciousness was bigger than that. He believed that the unconsciousness was more like a mansion with many separate rooms than a garbage bin. Jung saw the unconsciousness as the ego’s transformations and also future development. Freud believed that the ego needed to sort of grow out on its own in order to gain maturity, while Jung thought that rationality was not the end of the ego’s evolution, but that”wholeness” was also an important goal.
The second stage is the stage in which the autonomy is increasing. This stage corresponds with adolescence and the process of someone becoming an adult. At this stage, they are freed from a subordinate position and they recenter authority in themselves. These developments are shown through many rites of initiation, in which they let go of childhood ego-dependencies. Something that happens many times during this stage is the feeling of “killing” the old relationship with the mother, in which they identify with the father and sort of reject the mother.
At the last stage, once the consciousness has become independent, it has to meet its si
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