an introductionwas thus a projection of infantile forms of dependency onto external real-
ity. In his classic book Future of an Illusion, Freud argued that religious
beliefs could neither be proven nor refuted, but people wanted them to be
true. Unfortunately, they were mere illusions, which made the acceptance
of the truths of reason and science difficult to embrace. While reworking
Freud’s theory of religion, René Girard, a French theorist, equated the
sacred (religion) with violence.
Rejecting the Freudian theory of the Oedipus complex, the inevitable
struggle between father and son over access to the women, incestuous
feeling by a son toward his mother, and the conclusion that religion rep-
resented a neurosis, Carl Jung (1875–1961), a Swiss psychologist, traced
the origins of religion to the collective unconscious where universal
archetypes were to be discovered. These archetypes were associated with
such experiences as birth, death, desires, and danger, and they appeared
in dreams, myths, and symbols of religion. These psychologists of reli-
gion – James, Freud, Girard, and Jung – perceived their work as scientific
and themselves as scientists of the mind.
phenOmenOlOgy and the histOry
Of religiOns
Due to the influence of Edmund Husserl’s notion of phenomenology, an
attempt to develop philosophy as a rigorous science by returning to the
things themselves, with its two stages of eidetic reduction and phenom-
enological reduction proper, the phenomenological method came into
vogue in the twentieth century as a scientific method for studying reli-
gion distinct from the social science approaches of sociology, anthropol-
ogy, and psychology. The first stage of Husserl’s method enabled a
scholar to focus perceptual attention on the essence (eidos), meaning pure
generalities or structure for Husserl. From this stage, one moved from
particular phenomena on to general essences via the epoché (bracketing)
of one’s natural beliefs about objects of experience, a procedure that
stripped away questions about objective truth. Based in the intentionality
of consciousness that asserted that an awaken person is conscious of
something. Husserl wanted to take the raw data of sensations and create
a synthetic unity that would shape the essence of things. According to
Husserl, intentionality gave genuine identity to the data and even pro-
vided a continuous identity regardless of the changing modifications of
the data within the stream of consciousness.