Search results
-keeping … a shop-keeper … a postman … a restaurateur . (Kierkegaard 2005 : 42–3, italics in the original) Freud too asserted an economic drive at the root of a normal well-functioning psyche. As he states: In psychoanalytic theory we assume without further ado that the evolution of psychic processes is automatically regulated by the pleasure principle; that is to say, we believe that these processes are invariably triggered by an
only these brief visual recordings at their disposal, they are forced to attribute to them the knowledge they have of healing from their own practices – thereby rendering the ‘other’, as Levinas (see Wyschogrod 2002 : 191) would have it, into the ‘same’. A process of mirroring – or what in the language of psychoanalysis could be called ‘transference’ (Freud 1959[1912] ) – starts when Jørgen compares the injection of gold in the treatment of Rheumatoid Arthritis with the removal of impure blood or the intake of purified water in the Islamic treatment. In a peculiar
processes occurring ‘behind the backs’ of individual agents. According to Sigmund Freud ( 1980[1899]) , the invisible forces governing our lives could also be discovered in unfulfilled desires hidden within the ‘unconscious’ of the human psyche. In structuralist anthropology, the invisible was located in universal structures existing before and beyond the individual, directing the tangible form of various social phenomena from kinship alliances and myths to ways of carving a stone (Lévi-Strauss 2001[1978] ). All of these grand social theories
(Luhrmann 2016 : 147; Willerslev and Suhr 2018 ). The Durkheimian approach offered a framework for understanding religious beliefs and practices as corresponding not to the reality of gods or spirits, but to social reality. For Émile Durkheim ( 2008 [1912]), religion was the very glue that kept society together by securing a moral order. Religion was to be understood as a manifestation and cementing of social solidarity through worship. Sigmund Freud ( 1989 [1933]: 207) held a less optimistic view of religion as a form of illness comparable to
Danish psychiatrist Erling Jacobsen's ( 1984 ) work on the foundational processes of the mind (see also Freud 2003 : 119. See Luhrmann 2000 for an analysis of the dynamics between psychotherapy and biomedical psychiatry in the US). 5 Philips ( 2007 : 10ff) describes the differences in opinion among Muslim scholars regarding the nafs and rūḥ , some arguing that the two terms can be used interchangeably, others arguing that they refer to essentially different entities in the constitution of human consciousness