A Comparison of William James and Sigmund Freud

There is advantage in viewing something from the outside, and different advantage for viewing it from the inside. Each perspective fills in what is obscure to the other. When one or the other stance is overly privileged, one is as a matter of course liable to draw conclusions based on incomplete understanding of the something viewed. In the case of viewing religion through a psychological lens, William James, while ostensibly working from a scholarly, etic situation, undeniably bears a certain emic attitude. The psychological workings of religious experience which he endeavors to elucidate are something he himself takes part in, as may be guessed at from his language at times, and known by his personal dabbling in seance and hallucinogenics. Freud, on the other hand, lacks familiarity with and regard for the experiential element of religion which James focuses on, and thus Freud's understanding of the psychological phenomena he concludes are illusory is incomplete in a significant way. While certainly susceptible to critique, religion as a psychological entity - as both Freud and James treat it - cannot be dismissed as a wish-fulfilling illusion, despite being unable to be proved, and despite being, much of the time, quite absurd.

Freud's arguments against religion are quite formidable, however, and are not to be triflingly put aside. His speculations of the psychological process that originated religious ideas are very plausible (though perhaps more so for the Graeco-Roman and subsequent Abrahamic traditions' idea systems than for others'). Speculation though indeed it is, quite coherent is his delineation of the series of formations and transformations of primal and ancient Man's conception of the gods, from anthropomorphized natural forces who might be influenced by human entreaty, to reconcilers of the mortal sufferings of inexorable death and the privations of society, to the ultimate condensation of the gods into one God, the Father almighty. (Freud pp. 20 - 24) That Freud's quickly painted picture of these developments is a bit more cut-and-dry than the developments themselves would have been, he acknowledges (Freud pp. 24), and may be overlooked at present. The significant point is that Freud posits the origination of these conceptions, and religious ideas generally, in a societal need to alleviate the anxiety of facing the crushingly overwhelming forces of nature, the tension created by the necessary privation of society's members, and the emergence from ubiquitous human neurosis of the psychological forces which ultimately result in an illusory conception of gods.

James, of course, proclaims the personal religious experience as the point of origin. Further, he readily admits that the founding figures - cult founders, prophets, enlightened teachers, saints, and what have you - are frequently themselves quite neurotic. James speaks of them in contrast to "your ordinary religious believer, who follows the conventional observances of his country ... [whose] religion has been made for him by others" as "individuals for whom religion exists not as a dull habit, but as an acute fever rather." (James pp. 8 - 9) While it is precisely these ordinary believers that Freud is primarily concerned with, they are generally not the originators of religious ideas, but the receivers thereof. The neurosis Freud asserts as the source of such ideas could very well be what James speaks of as characteristic of feverish founders of those ideas. Far from giving a strong support to Freud's contention, however, James pulls the rug out from under the entire question: "In the end," he says, "it had to come to our empiricist criterion: By their fruits ye shall know them, not by their roots." (James pp. 24) That is, the origin of religious ideas itself is insufficient to judge the value thereof. This criterion of James' largely disarms Freud in that, psychoanalytically, it allows that religion may indeed be a good and healthy psychological phenomenon in many individuals, regardless of the possible (or probable) mental abnormality surrounding the original formulation of religious thought.

Freud's next objection is a common one: the skeptical dissatisfaction with the paucity of authentication, and indeed the impossibility of proving religious ideas through reason. "There is no appeal to a court above that of reason" he insists. "If the truth of religious doctrines is dependent on an inner experience which bears witness to that truth, what is one to do about the many people who do not have this rare experience?" (Freud pp. 35) James, in his seminal discussion of mysticism, concisely identifies the qualities of mystical experience which pose problems to Freud's reason: "The subject of [the mystical experience] immediately says that it defies expression, that no adequate report of its contents can be given in words. It follows from this that its quality must be directly experienced; it cannot be imparted or transferred to others." (James pp. 414) To those who have had the mystical experience, it bears the strongest witness to the truth of the religious idea:

As a matter of psychological fact, mystical states of a well-pronounced and emphatic sort are usually authoritative over those who have them. ... It is vain for rationalism to grumble about this. ... Our own more "rational" beliefs are based on evidence exactly similar in nature to that which mystics quote for theirs. Our senses, namely, have assured us of certain states of fact; but mystical experiences are as direct perceptions of fact for those who have them as any sensations ever were for us. (James pp. 462)

James does concede, however, that "No authority emanates from [mystics' individual experiences] which should make it a duty for those who stand outside of them to accept their revelations uncritically." (James pp. 460 - 461) The problem of why believers who have not the direct experience of the mystics should accept religious ideas seems to remain.

To pose such a problem, though, is to miss the point. It is precisely through being impossible to externally prove, and thus susceptible to doubt, that religious ideas function psychologically. Freud indeed hits the nail squarely on the head with his complaint: "[Credo quia absurdum] maintains that religious doctrines are outside the jurisdiction of reason - are above reason. Their truth must be felt inwardly" (Freud pp. 35). Just so; truly, there is no reasonable proof available, and the only authentication that can be obtained is that of the mystical experience. For those who have it, no other proof is necessary; but Freud is of course concerned with those who do not have such incontrovertible evidence beyond reason.

Seeking to apply his scientific reason to the question of justification for the general masses' holding to religious ideas despite their being impossible to prove, Freud is obliged to conclude that "they are illusions, fulfilments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind. The secret of their strength lies in the strength of those wishes." (Freud pp. 38) He goes on, "we call a belief an illusion when a wish-fulfilment is a prominent factor in its motivation, and in doing so we disregard its relations to reality, just as the illusion itself sets no store by verification." (Freud pp. 40) People without the direct proof of mystical experience believe because they want what is believed to be true.

While James says nothing directly about wish-fulfillment per se, in his conclusions he notes "a certain uniform deliverance in which religions all appear to meet." This bipartite core of religious psychology consists of an "uneasiness" and a solution thereto. "The uneasiness, reduced to its simplest terms, is a sense that there is something wrong about us as we naturally stand" and "The solution is a sense that we are saved from the wrongness by making proper connection with the higher powers." (James pp. 552, italics his) To employ a more technical and scientifically acceptable term, we might replace "higher powers" with "subconscious self," which James uses a few paragraphs later (pp. 555). To accommodate Freud's perspective, the uneasiness the religious person experiences may be identified as the very anxiety in the face of nature and tension from societal privations mentioned above. "Proper connection with the higher powers," that is, the subconscious self, James asserts is the real work done by the believer's prayer, a transaction of sorts between the conscious and unconscious parts of him.

The religious phenomenon studied as an inner fact, and apart from ecclesiastical or theological complications, has shown itself to consist everywhere, and at all its stages, in the consciousness which individuals have of an intercourse between themselves and higher powers with which they feel themselves to be related. This intercourse is realized at the time as being both active and mutual. ... if nothing be really transacted while it lasts ... then prayer, taken in this wide meaning of a sense that something is transacting, is of course a feeling of what is illusory, and religion must on the whole be classed, not simply as containing elements of delusion ... but as being rooted in delusion altogether ... The genuineness of religion is thus indissolubly bound up with the question whether the prayerful consciousness be or be not deceitful. The conviction that something is genuinely transacted in this consciousness is the very core of living religion. (James pp. 507)

Here, then, is the crux of the problem. Freud's conclusion that religion is illusory wish-fulfillment proceeds from his conviction that religious ideas must be erroneous since they cannot satisfy the demands of scientific reason to prove themselves. James, on the other hand, here shows that the strength of religious belief, its remarkable endurance, continually springs from the believer being convinced, even if they have not the powerful authentication of mystical insight, that their belief describes an actual relationship, which in psychological terms is that between the conscious and subconscious. While this stance of James' may seem to recapitulate Freud's assertion of willful self-delusion, it must be kept in mind that when religion delineates this relationship and transaction, in whatever terms, and the psychological effect - the human fruit - is the balancing of conscious and subconscious resulting in righting the wrongness, assuaging the uneasiness, religion as a psychological entity is functioning for the health of the individual.

Science has not been able to fulfill this role, as Freud anticipated it would as time went on. Of course, his caveat that the replacement of religion with reason could be gradual, spanning centuries, conveniently renders us presently unable to discount it by noting it has yet to happen. Nonetheless, one may speculate that science cannot replace religion because it is unable to perform the same psychological function as completely as religion does. That is, science offers reasonable answers to reasonable questions, and in so doing is limited to the reasonable. For some, scientific understanding of psychology, framed in clearly evidenced, reasonable terms may lay to rest their inborn uneasiness. Yet, the questions religion purports to answer are not always reasonable questions, and such questions often require absurd answers, which as a matter of course, science will not yield.