alecsmithson
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Registered: 12-2004
Posts: 14
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Fall of Freudianism
The representative of the 19th century atheist dogma in the field of psychology was the Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud. Freud proposed a psychological theory which rejected the existence of the soul and tried to explain the whole spiritual world of human beings in terms of sexual and similar hedonistic motivations. But Freud’s greatest assault was against religion.
In his book The Future of an Illusion published in 1927, he proposed that religious faith was a kind of mental illness (neurosis) and that, as human beings progressed, religious faith would completely disappear. Due to the primitive scientific conditions of the time, the theory was proposed without the requisite research and investigation, and with no scholarly literature or possibility of comparison, and therefore, its claims were extremely deficient. Indeed, if Freud had the possibility of evaluating his propositions today, he would himself be surprised by the logical deficiency of his claims and he would be the first to criticize such senseless presuppositions.
After Freud, psychology developed on an atheist foundation. Not only Freud, but the founders of other schools of psychology in the 20th century were passionate atheists. Two of these were B.F. Skinner, the founder of the behaviorist school and Albert Ellis, founder of rational emotive therapy. The world of psychology ended up by becoming the forum for atheism. A 1972 poll among the members of the American Psychology Association revealed that only 1.1 percent of psychologists in the country had any religious beliefs.
But most psychologists who fell into this great deception were undone by their own psychological investigations. It became known that the basic suppositions of Freudianism had almost no scientific support and, moreover, that religion was not a mental illness as Freud and some other psychological theorists declared, but a basic element of mental health. Patrick Glynn summarizes these important developments:
Yet the last quarter of the twentieth century has not been kind to the psychoanalytic vision. Most significant has been the exposure of Freud’s views of religion as entirely fallacious. Ironically enough, scientific research in psychology over the past twenty-five years has demonstrated that, far from being a neurosis or source of neuroses as Freud and his disciples claimed, religious belief is one of the most consistent correlates of overall mental health and happiness. Study after study has shown a powerful relationship between religious belief and practice, on the one hand, and healthy behaviors with regard to such problems as suicide, alcohol and drug abuse, divorce, depression, even, perhaps surprisingly, levels of sexual satisfaction in marriage, on the other. In short, the empirical data run exactly contrary to the supposedly “scientific” consensus of the psychotherapeutic profession.25
Finally, as Glynn says, “modern psychology at the close of the twentieth century seems to be reacquainting itself with religion”26 and “a purely secular view of human mental life has been shown to fail not just at the theoretical, but also at the practical, level.27
In other words, atheism has been routed also on the field of psychology.
for further reading about the issue, visit muhammedhasenoglu.com or harunyahya.com
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7/Jan/05, 23:27
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