Sigmund Freud
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Is He an angry God, insistent on holiness, demanding perfection, offended and irate because he made a law and we willfully disobeyed? This seems to be the question I will try and examine using the works of Sigmund Freud and his many years of psychoanalysis on this theological debate. If someone is a drug addict, or an overeater, or smoker, or involved in other habitual sins is God interested in condemning them? I say no, he is interested in healing and delivering. Gods motivation seems to always be love and restoration. The mystery that remains for me is if God is more inclined to heal his relationship with the sinner if the sin is more or less serious than the previous, is he in fact more lenient to someone who lied to a parent than someone who had committed a murder? My view remains that sin does indeed teach a lesson and God fully understands every person and the sins they encounter. Sigmund Freud has indeed changed the way that we look at ourselves, our relationships with each other and in society, through many psychoanalytical studies of both the mind and its ability to think.
Sigmund Freud, physiologist, medical doctor, psychologist and father of psychoanalysis, is generally recognized as one of the most influential and authoritative thinkers of the twentieth century
Freud was born in Frieberg, Moravia in 1856, but when he was four years old his family moved to Vienna, where he was to live and work until the last year of his life. Although a highly original thinker, Freud was deeply influenced by number diverse factors which overlapped and interconnected with each other to shape the development of his thought. From a very early age he had many interests, unfortunately his career choices were limited because of his Jewish heritage. In 1881 he obtained his doctorate in medicine. From 1876 to 1882 he worked as a research assistant at the Institute of Physiology under Ernst BrÑŒcke, with neurology as his main focus. Freud practiced and observed hypnosis as a clinical technique, and began to formulate the beginnings of his theory on the mind. According to Freud the human mind is like an iceberg. It is mostly hidden in the unconscious. He believed that the conscious level of the mind was similar to the tip of the iceberg which could be seen, but the unconscious was mysterious and was hidden. The unconscious also consists of aspects of personality of which a person is unaware. The conscious on the other hand is that which is within our awareness. The preconscious consists of that which is not in immediate awareness but is easily accessible. Freud didnt exactly invent the idea of the conscious versus unconscious mind, but he certainly was responsible for making it popular. According to Freud, the unconscious is the source of our motivations, whether they are simple desires for food or sex, neurotic compulsions, or the motives of an artist or scientist. And yet, we are often driven to deny or resist becoming conscious of these motives, and they are often available to us only in disguised form. Relating Freud to the concept of just how God is able to forgive and view sins can be quit complex but also rather intriguing.
Romans 3:23 states that we are all guilty of sin, the question remains what in fact drives us to sin and will God be able to forgive those “larger” sins as easily as he would the “smaller”. Freuds idea of the pleasure principle seems to most relate to the reason in which one may sin. Freud says at birth, that nervous system is little more than that of any other animal, an “it” or id. The nervous system, as id, translates the organisms needs into motivational forces which in turn lead to drivers or instincts. The id works in keeping with the pleasure principle, which can be understood as a demand to take care of needs immediately. When looked at in terms of sin Freuds theory would in fact relate quit easily. Freud says that the id can be satisfied