Psicanálise da religião: um ensaio sobre o legado cristão

Abstract

This thesis emerges from the desire to bring to scene an interpretative style that the philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005) found in the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), which makes it possible to reflect about psychic origins of the religious phenomenon and on its expressions in culture. By mapping this specific theme in Freud, Ricoeur established its legitimacy, the great themes it concerns, its validity and its limits, showing, therefore, the psychoanalysis of religion that exists in Freud’s work. The psychoanalysis of religion, as a hermeneutics of suspicion, is articulated through a critique of culture and understands God and religion as an illusion, the fruit of desire. This illusion, that the psychoanalysis of religion seeks to unmask, is a production of meaning whose key to understanding escapes those who promote it and, therefore, needs an interpretation technique that adapts to the dissimulations of its object. Just when religion was thought to be on its final path of decline, just like a phoenix, it has risen again, with expressions ranging from Christian and Islamic fundamentalisms to a variety of post-secular and New Age spiritualisms. The legacy of Christianity, however, with its subversive core, contrasts with all these manifestations. Supported by the psychoanalysis of Freud, Lacan and Žižek, I seek to show, in the psychoanalysis of religion essay that I present in this thesis, that the central core of the Christian kerygma is a paradox, since what it presents to us is, precisely, an atheistic proposal: the death of the transcendent God.