The past and future of an illusion

In my research into spiritual narcissism and religious trauma for my recent book Gaslighting for God: How to Save Yourself From Spiritual Narcissists, I've become acquainted with the latest research into somatic therapies that show significant potential in healing people from religious trauma.

In light of this research, I became intrigued when my publisher David Morris asked me to endorse his special edition of Sigmund Freud's The Future of an Illusion, where he penned an accessible introduction and annotations. To see what 21st-century spiritual seekers can learn from a century-old book, I sat down for an interview with Morris. Following are some of his reflections on his latest work. 

What's the value of Freud to 21st-century thinkers?

Freud helped us create an interpretive mindset. In dream interpretation, which he called manifest content, we try to understand what's going on underneath, called latent content. Also, Freud put forth the idea of the unconscious, which contains content we don’t realize is there, and the existence of the unconscious is still an idea that that we resist as a culture, resistance also being a Freudian term. 

Also, with so many therapies today, psychology is very much shaped by corporate interests, so many of our social problems become medicalized. Often these therapies treat a symptom, but it doesn't necessarily treat the cause of a trauma. 

Throughout history, we've even had different psychological illnesses that require us to ask these bigger, wider interpretive questions. The more interpretive, philosophical, theoretical psychologists and psychoanalysts like Freud talk about the self as a construct and that the human self changes over time. 

As a book publisher who also has a Ph.D in psychology and religion, I've studied this content for a long time. I found that most existing editions of The Future of an Illusion didn't offer readers a strong contemporary interpretation of this work. In this book, he acts like a court jester who called the United States "pious America" as he expounded on how this country is weird about religion. 

I think a lot about how Americans define religion, which is going to church and having a religious affiliation replete with beliefs and rituals like prayer. A psychoanalytic approach asks the question, why did we create religion? When you really look at religion you can see that it's highly socially constructed. What psychology can do is say human beings are sacred. We're meaning-making humans, who try to create patterns and shared symbols that bring us together in community. That's what we do best as Homo sapiens. Even though we live in a society where a Protestant white Jesus is the dominant symbol, what other shared symbols in our lives have the power to bring us together? 

How can we apply Freud to the current deconstruction movement?

For those who want to remove themselves from the usual arguments about how bad religions inform patriarchy, sexuality, racism, and classism, Freud gives the psychological view of why religion is the way it is. He's going to give you that psychological, interpretive way of looking at religion as opposed to logical arguments. 

Basically, Freud says that we put more of our own self-interest into religion than we think. We construct our gods more than we might think. They represent our deepest wishes. The secret of the power of religion is in the strength of those deep wishes. That gets us thinking about the unconscious and what our real motivations are behind our religious life.

Also, a lot of what I see in the religious publishing that's taking on the religious establishment today is trying to replace bad theology with good theology. Meanwhile, even mainstream centrist evangelicals have overwhelmingly voted for Donald Trump three times in a row and show no signs of stopping. How do you explain this among people who've studied the morals, ethics, and values that are communicated in this religion that they subscribe to which is very heavily belief and text-oriented? Why is it that humans can be college-educated and not see the logical disparity that's going on? I think a psychological approach helps us start that conversation about what is really going on. 

Even progressive settings still define religion as belief. That creates a hierarchy which puts men in the center of the conversation. But while some philosophical movements like the Emergent Church and Homebrewed Christianity are more male-dominated, there's also the rise of authors like Tia Levings, who are not dissecting beliefs but telling stories. 

Psychoanalysis talks about the interior life, zeroing in on our stories and looking at them as data that can see patterns. What are the things that keep repeating in our stories? What are the things that we're hiding? What are our omissions? By asking these questions, it helps us try to interpret our lives and see where we're going.

Also, so much of the American religious landscape is rooted in a Puritan colonial mindset, as well as an immigrant assimilation mindset. In sociologist Will Herberg's famous 1955 book Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology, he talked about how religion really took off in the United States because when immigrants came over, they had to pick one. They couldn't just be who they were in the old country. 

The challenge of a human psychological interpretation or understanding of religion is to define who we are going forward. There's a lot of folks across all faith traditions who are just not showing up anymore, as they're not interested. But who are we without an all-encompassing, evangelically defined religious worldview? What are the traditions that we belong to, and what are the new traditions that we can create? Here Freud offers up a roadmap that even a hundred years later can serve as a guide as we begin to explore these questions.