Religion and Psychoanalysis

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

In the course, we will address the question as to whether religion is a constructive force or merely a fantasy. With Ricoeur, we will study how the people of the Middle East created an image of an all-powerful Being in order to deal with the experience of bad and evil. Ricoeur thereby shows the constructive function of religion. With the help of Freud’s psychoanalytic theories, we will study the claim that the images of the divine were similar to the symptoms of the mentally ill people. Hence, Freud called them fantasies. What do Ricoeur and Freud contribute to our understanding of religion?