Freud insisted that that man’s basic problem is the sense of guilt and in this much, the Christian would agree. This guilt arose from the Oedipus complex where sons killed their father, sexually possessed their mothers and daughters, and then ate the father. According to Freud, the Eucharist arises out of this reality as a means by which the sense of guilt is assuaged by the sons for doing what they did to the father. Millions of years of this pattern and the genetically passed along irrational guilt from it make guilt part of man’s DNA.
However, Freud’s concern was to disassociate guilt from sin and make guilt a problem for science rather than religion. Freud’s means for dealing with guilt was psychoanalysis which in Freud’s world was never intended as the cure. Freud did not believe a cure was possible. In psychoanalysis, Freud was looking not for the cure but for the patient to arrive at the self-understanding that the presence of guilt was not due to a ‘god’ nor was guilt the function of any religious impulse, rather guilt was merely part of man’s evolutionary instinct. Guilt had been bred into man over man’s evolutionary cycle and it was just part of man’s makeup.
Therefore, Freud’s goal, in light of not being able to deliver man from his guilt was to make man comfortable with his guilt. Man may indeed feel guilty but man can come to the point where through the self-understanding arrived at via psychoanalysis he realizes that the sense of guilt is no indicator of the need for either behavioral adjustment on his part nor a petitioning of any deity for forgiveness. Per Freud, mental illness was found not in what was previously considered maladjusted or perverted behavior. Mental illness was found in worrying over wrongly considered maladjusted or perverted behavior. Psychanalysis was entered into in order to make one comfortable with their biologically bred inescapably irrational guilt.
Remember … there is no God so there can be no sin and if there is no sin there can be no objective guilt.
Freud realized the danger of this thinking and so he advocated a totalitarian state in order to keep the self-aware man in check. The total freedom of man from the admonishments of guilt required the necessity of total control by the scientific planning State and its scientific planners. This, in turn, meant that the Scientific planner’s role, while being free from the ravages of guilt themselves, would be required to leave the hoi polloi in their guilt if the hoi polloi did not conform to totally arbitrary behavioral diktats of the governing scientific elite.
Freud understood the anarchistic dangers present in his system and so he reserved the total release from guilt to the scientific planners while giving those same scientific planners the leverage to heap guilt on everyone else in keeping with the scientific plan of the totalitarian state and their scientific planners.
Freud taught us again either God will be God for us, or men will play god over us.
If you’ve ever come, cheek by jowl, up against the Psychological / Psychiatric industry you will easily realize just how true all of this is, particularly the idea that the mentally unbalanced Shrinks set themselves up as the god to whom the patient must conform in order to be considered mentally healthy.