Sigmund Freud e Oskar Pfister: o diálogo entre a psicanálise e a religião

Abstract

The subject immersed in culture is anchored on elements that support their reason for being and existing. Among these elements, religion appears as a social phenomenon that can compose the structuring of the subject in their subjective construction, which takes place around the emptiness of existence. In this way, the religious discourse marks the subject through its expressions, meanings and subjectivities, since culture, language and traditions contain the marks of this phenomenon that permeates human life. At the end of the 19th century, psychoanalysis emerged as a new science in the theoretical-clinical field of investigation and treatment of psychic suffering. However, Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, started some movements in a very reduced way, in an attempt to explain how religion can derive from the ambivalent relationship between father and son through an instinctual dynamic. The letters between Freud and Pfister can be considered the starting point for the dialogue between Psychoanalysis and religion, which continues today, although it has acquired new perspectives. On the one hand, the physician Freud and his rationalist view and, on the other, the theologian Oskar Pfister, seeking to find a way to introduce psychoanalysis in the healing of souls, built a path of friendship and respect, moving between these two areas, now in agreement, now in contradiction. The scarcity of content about this dialogue between religion and psychoanalysis generates an important gap that raises research in this field of dialogue, and there is still a need to establish boundaries between the psychoanalytic task, specific to the field of science and the religious implications in human subjectivity. However, a consistent theoretical and epistemological framework is essential to establish this complex dialogue between science and faith, firm on the idea that this discussion does not present itself as a coincidence, given the endless character of the dialogue between psychoanalysis and the religion.