Freudian Christianity

When a Christian does battle with Freud, it is no news. But a foray against Freud just published in the U.S. by British Clergyman Benjamin Gilbert Sanders, Christianity After Freud (Macmillan; $1.75), may raise some startled eyebrows among both psychoanalysts and Christians. For Author Sanders picks Freud's own weapons to defend Christianity.

Misery & Evil. Anglican Sanders believes that Freud was most vulnerable--and most mistaken--in his dogged atheism. Religion, according to the -late father of psychoanalysis, was "the universal obsessional neurosis"; the Jewish-Christian concept of God was merely a projection of the child's relationship to his father. Assuming Freud was wrong in this one respect, what, asks Sanders, is left of the Christian faith? His answer: everything.

Many of man's miseries, said Freud, are the result of pressure from his childhood repressions. Most of these, he held, center around the "Oedipus Complex," a boy's jealousy of his mother's love for his father and his desire to get the old man out of the way so that he can have her all to himself. The Freudian prescription: reduce the pressure from the unconscious by getting the patient to remember and understand what he was repressing. From the Christian viewpoint man's misery and evil are the result of Original Sin. The prescription: faith in Jesus Christ as Redeemer. The cures are obviously the same thing, says Sanders, "with Christ in the role of the Great Psychiatrist."

The psychoanalyst tries to rescue his patient from bondage to his unconscious by using the phenomenon called "transference," in which the analyst takes the place of the parent against which the patient's "sin" is directed. Sanders sees

Christ's crucifixion as the saving result of man's "transference" to Christ of his hostility to God.

Love & Hate. "Thus, in killing Jesus, man repeated symbolically upon Him the primal act of Adam's revolt against God, just as an individual transfers to an analyst his infantile feelings for his parents. But had Jesus been simply a man, like all other men, this act could not have had any therapeutic value; it is only because Jesus was Himself God, and is accepted as such by the Christian, that His death has any beneficial effect ...

"If we are correct . . . then the need for love towards Jesus may be regarded as a more positive form of the Transference. The sense of love for God, which was part of that communion with his Creator enjoyed by Adam before the Fall... is also transferred to the person of Christ... If, then, such a view is not mistaken ... we may perhaps be able more fully to understand why it was that the Saviour of mankind had to be both loved and hated by those to whom He came to reveal the true nature of God. Thus it was that the suffering servant of God was able to pass on to men the knowledge of God, which He Himself possessed, by His suffering."

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