Ambivalence or Melancholia: The Ontogenesis of Religious Sentiment

Abstract

The psychoanalytic explanation of religious sentiment is genetic, meaning that it probes the psychological processes behind the formation of such sentiment. Freud ascribed the genesis of religious sentiment to human infantile helplessness and ambivalence towards the father. This explanation encounters a dilemma when confronted with the sense of completeness and infinity in religious sentiment and fails to address components related to death, such as the transcendent and surmounting nature of the believer’s fear of death. Experience has shown that numerous religious sentiments occur through a process of emotional transformation, from a melancholic state of extreme mental anguish to a state of blissful, complete joy. This process, from a psychogenetic perspective, is essentially a defense of the self-preservation impulse. In this transformation, the ego removes chronic suffering by identifying itself with the superego. Therefore, the ego undergoes a symbolic death, through which it regains the energy of life.