The Modern Holy Grail and My Problems With Freud [July 16]

I’ll be honest: I’m not entirely sure how what I want to talk about ties in with what we are covering in class right now, but this week I was particularly interested in the article, “Sigmund Freud and die Weltanschauung.” In this article, “Weltanschauung” is defined as “an intellectual construction which gives a unified solution of all the problems of our existence in virtue of a comprehensive hypothesis, a construction, therefore, in which no question is left open and in which everything in which we are interested finds a place”. I may have been reading this the wrong way, but I took it that Freud considered science, religion, art, and philosophy to be different types of Weltanschauung. He eventually goes on to say that science is the only viable option, that religion, art, and philosophy fall short where science excels.

It is interesting that in the given definition, Freud is talking about a sort of cohesion of disparate parts into a unified whole that explains everything while taking every internal and external factor into account. In a way I can see how religion and science might be seen as two different approaches to such a construction, but this is problematic for me. If Freud is talking about a means of smoothing out the intellectual wrinkles with various systems in relation to one another, I think that the religion/science dichotomy is the ultimate problem to be solved.

For a long time now I have held the belief that there is without a doubt an interconnection in and between all things that we can’t begin to fathom. Science, religion, art, and philosophy might seem to have different properties that could never be reconciled, but I like the idea that such dissimilar systems and ideas really fit together with the elegance and precision of a complex molecular compound. Basically what I’m getting at is that I don’t understand why Freud’s model (or really just definition) doesn’t take this into account. He was a psychoanalyst; surely he could see that everything fits together without science taking the trophy. Science might offer answers, but you can’t discount the way religion in the aboriginal tribes of Australia took people to dimensions science has not yet charted, or the way an M.C. Escher piece can give visual life to mathematic qualities, the simplicity and harmony of geometric symmetry. I could list off a number of other examples, but you see what I’m saying.

I realize I’ve gone off on a tangent, but I found that at least this portion of this article irritated me. The Weltanschauung sounds to me like a modern holy grail, but I don’t understand why the world’s most famous psychoanalyst would deem science above religion or art or philosophy, when clearly these things play a role in human psychology that cannot be denied or ignored.