ABSTRACT
This chapter describes “Fundamentalism” as “Word Worship” and Idolatry as “Thing Worship”. It suggests that they are bound together in mutual hostility and always co-exist. The fundamentalism is applied widely to a variety of religions including Judaism and the Muslim religion usually denoting literalism and worship of religious texts. It is almost invariably accompanied by condemnation of modernism and idolatry. Christendom and Islam have both had historical wars between Puritan members of their religion and co-religionists they regarded as Idolaters. In terms of Sigmund Freud’s structural theory the ego had divided itself together with its object relationships into an Id-complex and a Super-ego complex. In his 1915 paper on “The unconscious” Freud, in attempting to describe the form of representation in the conscious and unconscious mind, distinguishes between word-presentation and thing presentation. He believed that in the normal state of affairs that the two are brought together in the preconscious and that this conjunction gives them the potential for consciousness.
