Mass Neurosis Religion

Fritz Erik Hoevels

This book is a collection of essays which the author, a practising psycho-analyst, has, in the course of nearly two decades, written on the subject of religious phenomena, which he, on the one hand, can explain by the means Sigmund Freud has made available to mankind (demonstrating at the same time that any other explanation would remain either incorrect or incomplete), and, on the other hand, also uses to demonstrate the psycho-analytic method itself; all readers who are not familiar with it thus gain the advantage of an immediate introduction to it by illustrative examples, even if the described phenomena themselves may sometimes be rather insignificant. But for this very reason, they are especially suitable for demonstrating the psycho-analytic procedure because in those merely exemplary cases there are no emotions involved; psycho-analysis itself, if its findings are correct, must be inevitably cathected with emotions as soon as one comes into contact with it, and as it cannot evade this regrettable fate, it is probably of particular advantage to become acquainted with it by means of a different and centrally emotion-loaded subject like religion, sometimes even in its peripheral issues. But its central issue should not be neglected either; we can become aquainted with it especially from the essay on immortality.