Belief after Freud

Belief after Freud confronts the psychoanalytic experience and the experience of faith. A purified vision of faith, so many times disfigured by infantile or neurotic dynamics, can emerge through the crucible of psychoanalysis. The work contributes to the dialogue between psychoanalysis and faith, based on the respective lived experiences, rather than from theoretical positions only.

Part One centres on Freud’s position on religion. Part Two on the relation with God of a person undergoing psychoanalysand the child’s image of God against the one Jesus brings, before facing the problem of unconscious guilt feelings with the knowledge from sin and salvation.

Part Three opens with sexual, the secondary role that Jesus grants it in the Gospels and the central one it takes for so many Christians. The believer and authority: obedience, and the necessary change in the relations with power that may fit both the Gospel and present day democratic sensibility. The unconscious, pathological roots of the relation with money, against evangelical poverty: special meaning for the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience.