I do not want at this point to make a thorough investigation of religious feeling. I would like merely to summarize what is already known. At a certain point there is a correlation between the phenomena of orgastic excitation and the phenomena of religious excitation, ranging from the simplest pious surrender to total religious ecstasy. The-idea of religious excitation is not to be confined to the sensations that are wont to arise in deeply religious people while attending a religious service. We have to include all excitations that are characterized by a definite psychic and somatic state of excitation. In other words, we also have to include the excitation experienced by submissive masses when they open themselves to a beloved leader’s speech, and the excitation one experiences when one allows oneself to be overwhelmed by impressive natural phenomena. Let us begin by summarizing what was known about religious phenomena before sex-economic research.
Sociological research was able to show that religious forms and also the contents of various religions were dependent upon the stage of development of socio-economic conditions. For example, animal religions correspond to the mode of life of primitive peoples who lived from hunting. The way in which people conceive of a divine supernatural being is always determined by the level of the economy and of the culture. Another very important sociological factor in determining religious conceptions is man’s ability to master natural and social difficulties. Helplessness in the face of natural forces and elemental social catastrophes is conducive to the development of religious ideologies in cultural crises. Thus, the sociological explanation of religion refers to the socioeconomic soil from which religious cult’s spring. It has nothing to say about the dynamics of religious ideology, nor does it give us any clue as to the psychic process that takes place in the people who come under the influence of this ideology.
Thus, the formation of religious cults is not dependent upon the will of the individual. They are sociological formations, which originate from the interrelations between man and man and the relation of man to nature.
The psychology of the unconscious added a psychological interpretation to the sociological interpretation of religion. The dependency of religious cults upon socioeconomic factors was understood. Now one began to study the psychological process in the people who came under the influence of these objective religious cults. Thus,
psychoanalysis was able to show that our idea of God is identical with our idea of father, that the idea of the Mother of God is identical with the mother of every religious individual. The triangle of father, mother and child is directly reflected in the trinity of the Christian religion. The psychic content of religion is drawn from early childhood familial relationships.
Thus, psychological research enabled us to interpret the content of religious cults, but it gave us no insight into the energy process by means of which this content became embedded in man’s structure. Above all, no insight was given into the fanaticism and the high degree of emotionality of religious conceptions. Why the ideas of the all-powerful father and the benevolent mother became mystical ideas, and what relation they have to the sexual life of the individual, was also vague.
Many sociologists have established that some patriarchal religions have an orgastic character. It has also been established that patriarchal religions are always of a political reactionary nature. They always serve the interests of the ruling power of every class society and preclude, to all intents and purposes, the elimination of mass misery by ascribing it to God’s will and by putting off claims to happiness with fine words about the Beyond.
To the existing knowledge on religion, sex-economic research now adds the following questions:
How do the idea of God, the ideology of sin and the ideology of punishment — which are produced by society and reproduced in the family - become embedded in the individual?
In other words: Why is it that man does not feel these basic conceptions of religion as a burden? What is it that compels him not only to accept them but to affirm them fervently, indeed, compels him to defend and preserve them at the sacrifice of his most fundamental interests of life?
When do these religious conceptions become embedded in man?
What energy is used to accomplish this? It is clear that until these three questions are answered, it may indeed be possible to give a sociological and psychological interpretation of religion, but it will not be possible to effect a real change in man’s structure. For if religious feelings are not imposed on man, but are embedded and retained in his structure, opposed as they are to his own vital interests, then what is needed is an energetic change in man’s structure. The basic religious idea of all patriarchal religions is the negation of sexual need. There are no exceptions, if we disregard the sexually affirmative primordial religions, in which the religious and the sexual experience were still a unity. In the transition of society from a matriarchal organization based on natural law to a patriarchal organization based on the division of classes, the unity of the religious and sexual cult was split. The religious cult became the antithesis of the sexual cult. At this juncture the sexual cult ceases to exist and is replaced by the barbarism of brothels, pornography and clandestine sexuality. No additional proof is required to show that at that moment when sexual experience ceased to constitute a unity with the religious cult and indeed became its antithesis, religious excitation also had to become a substitute for the socially affirmed sensuality that was lost. It is only on the basis of this contradiction in religious excitation, which is anti-sexual and a substitution
for sexuality at one and the same time, that the strength and tenacity of religions can be comprehended.
The emotional structure of the genuinely religious man can be briefly described as follows: biologically, he is subject to sexual tensions just as all other human beings and creatures.
Owing, however, to his assimilation of sex-negating religious conceptions, and especially to the fear of punishment that he has acquired, he has completely lost his ability to experience natural sexual tension and release. Consequently, he suffers from a chronic state of physical excitation, which he is continuously compelled to master. He is not only shut off from earthly happiness - it does not even appear desirable. Since he expects to be rewarded in the Beyond, he succumbs to a feeling of being incapable of happiness in this world. In view of the fact that he is a biologic creature and cannot under any circumstances forego happiness, release and gratification, he seeks illusionary happiness. This he can obtain from the fore pleasure of religious tensions, i.e., the vegetative somatic currents and excitations with which we are familiar. Together with his fellow believers, he will arrange entertainments and create institutions that alleviate this state of physical excitation and are also capable of disguising the real nature of this excitation. His biologic organism prompts him to construct a musical instrument, an organ, the sound of which is capable of evoking such currents in the body. The mystical darkness of the church intensifies the effect of a super personal sensibility to one’s own inner life and to the sounds of a sermon, a chorale, etc., intended to achieve this effect.
In reality, the religious man has become completely helpless. As a result of the suppression of his sexual energy, he has lost his capacity for happiness as well as the aggressiveness necessary to deal with life’s difficulties. The more helpless he becomes, the more he is forced to believe in supernatural forces that support and shelter him. Thus, it is not difficult to understand that in some situations he is also capable of developing an incredible power of conviction, indeed, a passive indifference towards death. He draws this power from his love of his own religious conviction, which, as we said, is borne by highly pleasurable physical excitations. Naturally, he believes that this power stems from ‘God’. In reality, therefore, his intense longing for God is the longing that derives from his excitations of sexual fore pleasure and clamours for release. Deliverance is and can be nothing other than the deliverance from the unbearable physical tensions, which can be pleasurable only as long as they are lost in a fantasized unification with God, i.e., with gratification and release. The tendency of fanatically religious people to injure themselves and to behave masochistically, etc., confirms what we have said. Clinical experience in sex-economy shows that the desire to be beaten or to castigate oneself corresponds to the instinctual desire for release without incurring guilt. There is no physical tension that will not evoke fantasies of being beaten or of being tortured as soon as the person concerned feels that he himself is incapable of bringing about the release. Here we have the root of the passive ideology of suffering of all genuine religions.
The need to be consoled, supported and helped by others, especially in the struggle against one’s own evil impulses -’sins of the flesh’, as they are called - stems from one’s actual helplessness and intense physical suffering. If a religious person becomes more and more excited under the influence of religious conceptions, the state of vegetative irritation increases with the physical excitation and reaches a point of near gratification
without, however, bringing about an actual physical release. It is known from the treatment of mentally sick priests that an involuntary ejaculation often occurs at the height of religious ecstasy. Normal orgastic gratification is replaced by a general condition of physical excitation, which excludes the genitals and, as if by accident, brings about a partial release against one’s will.
Originally and naturally, sexual pleasure was the good, the beautiful, the happy, that which united man with nature in general. When sexual feelings and religious feelings became separated from one another, that which is sexual was forced to become the bad, the infernal, the diabolical.
Elsewhere I attempted to show the etiology and mechanism of the pleasure anxiety, i.e., the fear of sexual excitation. Let me briefly summarize: As time goes on, people who are incapable of release must begin to sense sexual excitations as torturous, burdensome, and destructive. In fact, sexual excitation is destructive and torturous if it is not allowed to achieve release. Thus, we see that the religious conception of sex as an annihilating, diabolical force, predisposing one for final doom, is rooted in actual physical processes. As a result the attitude towards sexuality is forced to become divided: The typical religious and moralistic valuations ‘good’-’bad’, ‘heavenly’-’earthly’, ‘divine’-’diabolical’, etc., become the symbols of sexual gratification on the one hand and the punishment thereof on the other hand.
The deep longing for redemption and release - consciously from ‘sins’, unconsciously from sexual tensions - is warded off. States of religious ecstasy are nothing other than conditions of sexual excitation of the vegetative nervous system, which can never be released. Religious excitation cannot be comprehended and therefore cannot be mastered, without first understanding the contradiction by which it is ruled. It is not only anti-sexual, but to a large extent sexual as well. It is not only moralistic; it is altogether unnatural. From a sex-economic point of view, it is unhygienic.
In no social class do hysteria and perversions flourish to such an extent as they do in the ascetic circles of the church. One should not conclude from this, however, that these ascetics should be treated as perverse criminals. In talking with religious people it is often found that they have a very good understanding of their own condition. As everyone else, their personalities are divided into a public and a private side. Officially, they regard sexuality as a sin; privately, they know only too well that they cannot exist without their substitute gratifications. Indeed, many of them are accessible to the sex-economic resolution of the contradiction between sexual excitation and morality. If one does not reject them as human beings and succeeds in winning their confidence, one finds they understand very well that that which they describe as union with God is the feeling of relatedness to the process of nature as a whole, that their selfhood is a part of nature. As all human beings, they too feel themselves to be a microcosm in a macrocosm. It has to be admitted that their deep conviction has a true core. What they believe is really true, namely the vegetative currents of their bodies and the states of ecstasy to which they can rise. Especially in the case of men and women who come from poor social strata, religious feeling is absolutely genuine. It loses its genuineness only insofar as it rejects and veils from itself its origin and the unconscious desire for gratification. It is in this way that that attitude of priests and religious people that has a contrived goodness about it comes into being.
This presentation is incomplete. Summarizing the basic points, however, we can say:
Religious excitation is vegetative excitation whose sexual nature is disguised.
Through the mystification of the excitation, the religious individual negates his sexuality.
Religious ecstasy is a substitute for orgastic vegetative excitation.
Religious ecstasy does not produce a sexual release; at best, it produces a muscular and mental fatigue.
Religious feeling is subjectively genuine and has a physiological basis.
The negation of the sexual nature of this excitation causes one’s character to lose its genuineness.
Children do not believe in God. It is when they have to learn to suppress the sexual excitation that goes hand in hand with masturbation that the belief in God generally becomes embedded in them. Owing to this suppression, they acquire a fear of pleasure. Now they begin to believe in God in earnest and to develop a fear of him. On the one hand they fear him as an omniscient and omnipotent being, and on the other hand they invoke his protection against their own sexual excitation. All of this has the function of avoiding masturbation. Thus, it is in early childhood that religious ideas become embedded. However, the idea of God would not be able to bind the child’s sexual energy, if it were not also associated with the actual figures of father and mother.
He who does not honour the father is sinful. In other words, he who does not fear the father and indulges in sexual pleasure is punished. The strict father, who denies the fulfilment of the child’s desires, is God’s representative on earth and, in the fantasy of the child, is the executioner of God’s will. If the respect for the father is shaken by a clear insight into his weaknesses and human inadequacies, this does not lead to his rejection by the child. He continues to exist in the figure of the abstract mystical conception of. God. In a patriarchal social organization an appeal to God is really an appeal to the actual authority of the father. When a child invokes ‘God’, he is really invoking his actual father. In the structure of the child, sexual excitation, idea of father and idea of God constitute a unity. In treatment we meet this unity as a palpable condition of genital muscular spasm. With the elimination of the spastic condition in the genital musculature, the idea of God and the fear of the father always lose ground. Hence, the genital spasm not only represents the physiological anchoring of religious fear in the human structure, but at the same time it also produces, the pleasure anxiety that becomes the core of every religious morality.
I have to leave it to later investigations to work out the very complicated and detailed interrelations among the different kinds of cults, socio-economic social organization and human structure. Genital shyness and pleasure anxiety remains the energetic core of all anti-sexual patriarchal religions.
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