The psycho-analytic study of the family

by J. C. Flugel

(1) the Father

(a) as hated and killed,

(b) as honoured.

(2) the Son, as slain to atone for the father-murder and offered up in honour to the Father.

The actual consumption of the food represents:—

(1) the eating of the Father

(a) as a sign of hostility,

(b) as a sign of honour or affection,

(c) as a means of partaking of the divine nature (i. e. acquiring the father attributes).

(2) the eating of the Son, as a means of establishing identity with him and thus sharing in the atonement which he has made by his sacrifice.

(3) the establishment of a sense of communion and of kinship between the fellow worshippers themselves and between them and the deity, through participation in the divine meal with all that this implies.

We thus see that, as regards both religious beliefs and The influence of family tendencies in religion religious practices, the emotions, feelings and tendencies originally aroused in connection with the family play a part of great importance. The gods in whose form man has personified the natural forces of the Universe, or whom he has himself called into being, are to a very large extent projections of the infantile conceptions of the parents—beings whom he has created in his phantasy to serve as objects on to whom might be transferred that part of what remains of his primitive attitude towards the parents which has found no adequate sublimation on to living human beings. Sometimes the phantasy is worked out entirely in the dramatic form, the desires and tendencies connected with the family finding their projected expression in the behaviour of the divine beings. It is for this reason that the conduct of the gods is, from the moral standpoint, often below rather than above the human standard; the crude and primitive wishes belonging to the infancy of the individual and the race, wishes that so far as adult and civilised life is concerned have been outgrown or at least repressed and held in check, finding a relatively unobstructed outlet in the (usually archaic) forms and ritual of religion. At other times it is only the figures of the gods themselves that are projected, the worshipper remaining himself in intimate contact with them through a relationship which represents a sublimated form of that which existed between child and parent.

In spite of its basis in primitive infantile fixations, there Value of religion as a form of displacement can of course be no doubt that religion has performed a work of very great value in the history of human culture. Both in the case of the individual and in that of the race the displacement of the primitive tendencies directed towards members of the family has been, as we have seen, a matter of the greatest importance, but at the same time of the greatest difficulty, in the history of mental and moral development. The provision of a suitable outlet for those parts and aspects of the tendencies in question which could find no adequate object among living human beings was of itself no mean service. The establishment of a moral authority which should stand in the same relation to adult men as parents do to children, thus affording a higher sanction for morality than could otherwise be obtained under primitive conditions; the solidification of the social bond between neighbours and fellow tribesmen, through the consciousness of a common worship and a common parentage from the same divine ancestor; the utilisation of the exaggerated and idealised notions that had been formed concerning the parents in early childhood, to create the concept of a being of more than human virtue, a being who enjoined the nearest possible approach to his own divine perfection on the part of his human followers, thus contributing in no small measure to the raising of the level of morality; the confirmation (through the idealised and sublimated love of the divine parents) of the stage of object-love as contrasted with the lower stage of Narcissism[198]; the stimulation of interest in natural forces, objects and events by endowing them with the strong emotional tone originally connected with the parents; these are some (and only some) of the benefits which humanity has derived from the displacement of the primitive parent-regarding feelings that is involved in religion.