Creating a religious cult as a defense against reality

Psychoanalysis and culture

Abstract

Perhaps with somewhat less intensity than in Freud's time, we often become willing or unwitting participants or witnesses of discussions about God, religion and its various directions.
And if discussions about religion cause so many feelings, then we can conclude that in everyone religious feelings are touched to some extent by some early, very deep memories, fantasies and experiences. Of course, psychoanalysis cannot ignore such an important aspect of human life.

A person's relationship with God can be viewed as an unconscious reproduction of his early relationship with parental figures.
In his work "The Future of One Illusion", Z. Freud points out that religion can be considered as a "universal obsessive neurosis", which, like a child's neurosis, originates in the Oedipus complex, namely in an ambivalent attitude to the father. At the same time , Z. Freud says very little about the relationship with the mother in relation to religion.

But religion can serve as a powerful protective reaction that allows the psychic through the construction of an alternative reality to maintain its integrity and continue to function.