Gênese da religião segundo Freud

Abstract

The objective of this work is to approach the genesis of religion according to Sigmund Freud. In spite of being an atheist, he doesn t discuss the existence or not of god. He rather suggests according to the psychic apparatus he created, not the deep roots of religious feelings, but what man understands by religion as he himself says in Future of an Illusion. Hence Freud created a myth to explain the beginning of religion. There was an inaugural act, the death of a primitive father by his sons, which branches out religion and at the same time the first social law, the exogamy. Such inaugural moment gives a start to a chain of acts that will influence the social community. This work was conceived on Freudian ideas about the murderer of the father and rivalry among brother and sisters, as a constitutive cultural element. It is the collective Edipus, who forbids that which is most desired: the death one s father and the incest, which gives support to the individual Edipus with a historical reality. The law of the original father only becomes an Edipicus law, when death happens and makes the father to become a myth, represented then by the tote. By being mythic provokes reference and fear, establishing the paternity function which castrates and imposes law, making possible the origin of culture. The passage from brutal force to civilization gives birth to neurosis, thanks to Edipus who superimposes himself. Religion, as belonging to culture, is only possible thanks to that passage. So, religion and civilization are born from the same inaugural moment: the death of a father, the repression of such a desire, of a desire not accomplished and of a will of transgression of social rules. Ambivalent feelings sustain guilt and desire to redeem oneself. They are together with the nostalgia of the father the psychic determinants of religion.