The first edition in Spanish of the work “(Religion und Individualpsychologie” – 1933 – ), was carried out by Prof. Yaír Hazán. This and “The Meaning of Life” that appeared in the same year highlight the fundamental role that religion and the idea of God have in the behavior of the individual and in the progress of society.
The book, a corollary of an epistolary exchange (1930 – 1933) between Alfred Adler and the Lutheran pastor Ernst Jahn, contains a debate on the theological and psychological approach to God. For Adler, it is a fiction/idea while for the Protestant minister, a reality. Although it is not that simple, I will try to clarify it further in the text.
Because religiosity encompasses both believers and non-believers.
This discussion has been configured into an argumentative confrontation between religion and culture that today has the merit of being topical. We have to live with philosophies or pseudo-philosophies such as the New Age that “promise salvation”, which are products of the crisis of post-modernity, the loss of values supplied by an exacerbated consumerism that makes people Fill your lives with disposable and supplementary objects. Direct consequence of the loss of power and credibility of some ancient institutions that have been concerned with preserving dogma as the expression of a doctrine that does not accompany the processes of cultural change. The maelstrom of the consumer market seems to be the new god with the change of the loss of sense of belonging. The global has hidden the local identity of the communities.
Barylko denounces that we live in the era of means without ends. People consume with the “fanatical dream of status”, the author asks why “to be superior, to be well seen, to be looked at, admired and envied”.
If you value articles like this, consider supporting us by becoming a Pro subscriber. Subscribers enjoy access to members-only articles, materials, and webinars.
The idea of God is best defined according to depth psychology as the search for divinity as that which we cannot touch. Rovera in his recent article “Cultures and religions in the crisis of post-modernity” prefers to talk about religiosity instead of religion. Because religiosity encompasses both believers and non-believers (including the so-called “devout atheists”) and can manifest itself in different ways and in various cultures, with ritual practices and ceremonial acts that arise from the historical and social frameworks of a given context. .
This is precisely the reason why we consider it useful to refer to the epistolary exchange between Jahn and Adler (1930-1933), which represents a commendable exchange of ideas. Religion and Adlerian psychology seem to have some “things in common”: thought, feeling, and will, with special emphasis on man’s search for perfection (Adler, 1933).
For Adler, humanitarian movements must be correlated not only to religion
In this debate, the emphasis is on the explanatory/shared understanding of the role played by feelings in psychological life. Adlerian psychology is based on the fact that feelings, like all other psychological processes, are oriented towards a unitary goal. By relying on a religious state of mind, it may be possible to understand God intuitively: but even if individuals pursue human ideals, feelings are accommodated to be driven by an ultimate goal. As a creature born on Earth, the individual is driven by a movement that derives from him and is pursued through intuitive knowledge and scientific testing.
For Adler, humanitarian movements must be correlated not only to religion, but also to science. On the contrary, Jahn claims that what drives man toward the interests of the community is a deeply felt faith and that the only appropriate way to solve human problems is by producing benefits for an ideal community.
When the pastor speaks of “tension of souls,” he alludes to Heraclitus’ concept that “harmony is the product of opposite tensions.”
Without fear of being wrong, one could affirm that the creator of the concept of stress or, to be cautious, the antecedents of the concept of stress can be found in Jahn himself when he uses the construct of “tension of souls.” The health problem that prevails today (and, as far as we know, the most serious) is stress. H. Selye, who is credited with being the creator of the concept of stress, defines it as “the rate of wear and tear of the human body.” Consequently, this definition would encompass demands – emotional or physical – that exceed the available capacity of any individual.
After therapy, people are still the same as they were before, they just see things differently.
In different parts of the text, Jahn mentions that in order to heal antisocial people, a mystery of love (“agape”) born from God and that acts as a sacred obligation is necessary. Agape in Greek is the same as “caritas” in Latin, which is selfless and sexless love. First, it is good to specify the term souls (which is in the theological sense) by that of psyche (in the psychological sense), secondly in psychotherapy we do not talk about “cure” since we consider lifestyles and not diseases. Empathy, taking a human interest in the patient, are the keys to carrying out successful psychotherapy or counseling. Considering that psychotherapy is a treatment of interpersonal relationships, an Adlerian position from the beginning, represents progress compared to the concept that therapy is the “cure.” After therapy, people are still the same as they were before, it just happens that they see things differently.
For Pastor Jahn, Adler has an anthropocentric position: that is, humanity is the center of the world, while the Christian interpretation of life is theocentric, man is judged by God. Here we can develop another important point of the discussion:
Guilt vs. Responsibility
For Pastor Jahn, the Christian is responsible for his sin before God: he is responsible before God for his actions, he faces the judgment and wrath of God. On the other hand, for Adler the human being must be responsible because he is free. Being responsible is being able to respond for what has been done, assuming it as one’s own act, and such a response has at least two important facets. One is to respond with “I have been” when others want to know who carried out a certain action (which may be good or bad or a little of both) and second, to be able to give reasons when we are asked why these actions were done. Actions. And the possibility of participating in a restorative way in what has been damaged, to be able to be forgiven for what was done so as not to return to the same thing. Freudian psychoanalysis placed man as determined by the unconscious and therefore not free. Dreikurs clarified the issue by expressing that “Adler freed man from causality and burdened him with responsibility” therefore free. For Adler, man is not born good or bad, but he can be educated in one of these ways. The role of every professional is to reeducate the person on the useful side of life: the feeling of community “Gemeinschaftsgefühl”.
Freudian psychoanalysis placed man as determined by the unconscious and therefore not free.
Freud has a skeptical and pessimistic attitude towards religion as an illusion, stating that “religion is interpreted as an infantile obsessive neurosis of humanity, where consciousness is the result of a discharge of aggression, a fault that becomes evident from of the Oedipus complex” (Jahn). In recent years Freud focused his interest on culture and religion and published a series of studies: “The Future of an Illusion” (1927), “The Malaise in Culture” (1929) “Moses and the Monotheistic Religion” ( 1934).
Jung in “Psychology and Religion” (1949) considers religious experience as “numinous,” lying beyond human understanding. He did not consider religion as an optional practice but as an essential aspect of man. The human need to believe in something superior is of all time and of a universal/collective nature, which is why Jung said that psychotherapy can become disastrous if the religious content of dreams is not taken into account. Religion remains linked to the Jungian construct of the “collective unconscious” and the “individuation process”: “in which the self yields to the centrality of the image of God, the self.” By religion he understands: “…a peculiar mental attitude that could be formulated according to the original use of the word ‘religio’, which means the careful consideration and observation of certain dynamic factors conceived as ‘powers’: spirits, demons, gods, laws , ideal ideas or any other name that man has given to the factors of his world…” (Mary Ann Matton, 51-52)
Adler alluded, in many of his works, to religion and the concept of God. This book forms a discussion around these topics and psychotherapy and spiritual direction from religious points of view and Adlerian psychology. The most important point of the discussion is found in Jahn, who considers God as a magnificent reality, while for Adler God is an idea or an ideal. According to the curator’s notes, Pastor Jahn does not discriminate between the psychological and the epistemological levels; the fact that God is in thought is, per se, a psychological reality. What happens is that he approaches the topic from a psychology that is highly influenced, as it could not be otherwise for a pastor, by theology and faith. Confrontation in which Adler recognizes the irrationality of religion when he expresses: “God as a gift of faith”, but for Jahn things are clearer when he says: “Faith is a gift from God.”
Adler does not hide his admiration and respect for religion, which is why we consider the articles circulating on the Internet that talk about Adler being an atheist to be a poor interpretation. Rather, he recognizes the social importance that religions have had throughout the evolution of man, as a form of expression of the feeling of community.
Adler does not hide his admiration and respect for religion
In the book “The Meaning of Life” Adler says:
“The supreme representation of this ideal human sublimation is the concept of divinity. There is no doubt that this concept of God encompasses within it as an objective that movement towards perfection, nor that as a concrete representation of improvement it is the one that is most in harmony with the dark desire of humanity towards perfection. Of course, each person represents their God in their own way. Surely there are representations that do not harmonize with the point of view of…