God Arises
Challenge of Modern Knowledge
~ 19 ~
After extensive research in psychology, Freud
discovered that, during childhood, certain
happenings and ideas are repressed in our
unconscious minds, which can later result in the
irrational behaviour of adults. The same applies to
the religious concepts of the hereafter, heaven, hell,
etc., which are but echoes of those very wishes
which were born in the child’s mind but never
fulfilled, circumstances being unfavourable, and
consequently, repressed in the subconscious. Later,
the subconscious, for its own satisfaction, supposed
the existence of a dream world in which its
unfulfilled wishes would be realized, just as, deep
in sleep, one dreams of wishes coming miraculously
true. When childhood fancies, which had been
thoroughly repressed, suddenly burst through to
the surface, producing a state of frenzy or hysteria,
or other abnormal behaviour, people mistakenly
attributed this to supernatural forces, which had
found expression in human language. Similarly, the
generation gap and the ‘Father complex’ in a family
gave rise to the concept of God and slave. Thus
what was simply a social malaise was carried to the
cosmic scale in order to forge a theory. In the words
of Ralph Linton:
