This course will be an overview of a development of the theological methods in relation to Korea’s cultural context. Completing the course, the learners can understand cultural influences on the dynamic development of Korean churches and indigenous theology; they can also gain an insight into their own image of God and theological imagination in their own cultural context.
Freud, a Theologian
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En provenance du cours de Yonsei University
Re-imaging God in Korean Context
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God as Father: Psychoanalytic Approaches to God-Image
The second module will discuss one’s formation of God-image as a Father with a comprehensive understanding of Freud’s psychoanalysis since many psychoanalytic theorists have argued that one’s early experience of parental relationship has an unavoidable, unconscious impact upon the formation of one’s own God-images.
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Soo-Young KwonProfessor
College of Theology
Freud is a curious scholar.
Hardly anybody would disagree that Freud was a great thinker
representing the 20th century and also that he was a weird genius.
Perhaps, many religious people may feel great aversion to Freud.
This is probably because of his proclamation that religion is
only a childhood neurosis or maybe because of his emphasis on human sexual instincts,
which is more than enough to stimulate discomfort in religious people.
To those who believe that Freud was obsessed with sexuality,
I would like to introduce another topic that
Freud had been interested in for a lifetime.
To our amazement, he is a scholar who wrestled with
the subject of religion until the very last moment of his life.
Do you know what Freud's last published book is?
He left Vienna at the end of his life during
Hitler's invasion and moved to London in 1938.
The last book he began writing in 1934 was concluded in London.
In 1939, Freud published his last book and died at the age of 83.
His last book was Moses and Monotheism.
In fact, Freud research interest in religion
began at the beginning of his career.
To understand his motives,
we have to go back to Freud's days in college.
Do you know what Freud's college major was?
Psychology?
No. He was a medical student.
Freud enrolled in the Vienna Medical School at the age of 17.
Yes, 17.
He must have been a genius.
Don't you think so? Freud wanted to be a researcher in medicine.
During his college years,
Freud worked hard for the Institute of Physiology at the University of Vienna
and developed a dream of becoming a professor of Physiology.
He was a promising candidate to become a medical professor.
Ernest Brücke, the director of
the Institute of Physiology took good care of young Freud.
He was a great mentor to Freud.
One day, Dr. Brücke called Freud and advised him,
"You are a strong candidate to become a Physiology professor,
but you cannot be a professor at the
University of Vienna because you are Jewish."
How would Freud have felt after receiving such advice from his admired mentor?
He had to give up his dream of becoming
a professor because of his own ethnic
background even though he had enough potential.
There was a clear discrimination against Jews in Austrian culture at the time,
just as there was a discrimination against Africans in the US back in 19th centuries.
But the mentor did not forget to offer affectionate advice.
Dr. Brücke added, "Freud,
you have great clinical abilities too.
You can become a good doctor,
so why don't you consider the option of leaving
as a practitioner rather than a professor?"
Guess what he did afterwards?
He accepted the advice and open a psychiatric practice without hesitation.
He started wrestling with
many neurotic patients in his own house in Vienna, day and night.
He really wanted to be the best therapist in Vienna.
Freud poured all his time and energy into taking
care of the neurotic patients who came to see him.
In particular, Freud who met many patients
suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder,
came to pay special attention to religious people.
Why religious people?
You have to look at Freud's holy works to find the answer.
One of the oldest works was a paper published in 1907,
entitled, 'Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices'.
In this short paper,
Freud stated that he felt a great awakening
at the fact that the obsessive behaviors of
his neurotic patients were very similar to
the sacred acts of religious people clinging to religious rituals.
In the paper, Freud presented the case of
the bad ceremonial he found among his neurotic patients.
Guess what a bad ceremonial is?
It's any kind of ritual that must be
completed before you go to bed in order to feel comfortable.
For example, for one of Freud's neurotic patients,
the chair must stand in a particular place beside the bath,
the cloak must lie upon it,
folded in a particular order,
the pillows must be arranged in such and such manner,
and the patient's own body must lie a precisely defined position and so on.
Only after all this, may the patients go to sleep.
Thus, in slight cases,
the ritual seems to be no more than an exaggeration of
an orderly procedure that is customary and justifiable.
But the special conscientiousness with which it is carried out and
the anxiety which follows upon its neglect stemmed the ritual as sacred act.
Freud stated that his patients suffering from
compulsion behaved as if they were dominated by a sense of guilt,
of which they knew nothing about the origin.
So, Freud called it an unconscious sense of guilt.
Freud argued, quote, "The sense of guilt
of obsessional neurotics finds its counterpart in
the protestations of pious people that they know that at heart they are
miserable sinners..." And the pious observances (such as prayers,
invocations, et cetera) with which such people preface every daily act,
and in especial every unusual undertaking,
seem to have the value of defensive or protective measures," end quote.
Think about the woman who was absent on the last day of
the holy morning prayer service in the example mentioned earlier.
How anxious and guilty was the woman?
As Freud pointed out, quote,
"A sense of guilt following upon continual temptation and
an expectant anxiety in the form of fear of divine punishment have,
after all, been familiar to us in the field of
religion longer than in that of neurosis," end quote.
Freud may have wanted to present a warning to
guilty religious people who imagine God as a fearful object,
as much as he would have liked
his obsessive patients to be free from the unconscious sense of guilt.
I, sometimes, jokingly make paradoxical claims.
I say, Freud who is considered to be one of
the most famous atheist may be considered a theological.
Remember, I quoted the Harvard theologian,
Gordon Kaufman's statement in the last module,
which was the claim that Theology is a human enterprise of imagining God.
While Kaufman was referring to a conscious level of human enterprise,
Freud went a step further and down with an unconscious level regarding imagining God.
You may feel reluctant to call Freud a theologian
because of the thought that he questioned the existence of God.
And yet, it is certain that Freud is the one who prove to
us how fear of God makes a distorted image of God.
I like to argue,
Freud is doing a very important analytic work in the quest for appropriateness
to imagination of God as a major task of contemporary theology.
Paul Ricoeur, a famous French
philosopher published a book entitled, Freud and Philosophy'.
Ricoeur suggested that religious believers are obligated
to converse with Freud about his 'hermeneutics of suspicion'.
Freud's 'hermeneutics of suspicion' may make
us question strong or maybe stubborn religious
beliefs that we're taking for granted.
If Freud was still alive,
how would he analyze the taken for granted religious ritual of
the pious woman who was devoted to holy morning prayers?
What made the woman so uneasy about the fact that she was absent for just a day?
How would you analyze her Christian belief then
inevitably accompanies the unconscious sense of guilt?
Do you think that her image of God is an appropriate one?
Well, I do believe that this kind of suspicion
is not completely useless for believers.
There is a group of people who believe that theology students
should learn from Freud at seminaries.
Kirk Bingaman, professor of pastoral care and
counseling at Fordham University, put it this way,
"Freud did not get everything right about religious faith;
but he still managed to get some things right."
Therefore, argues Paul Ricoeur,
that the believers is obligated to keep
religious faith and Freudian Theory in dialectical tension,
rather than simply embracing the totality of
one while rejecting the totality of the other.
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