ABSTRACT
Most counsellors and psychotherapists learn during the course of their training how important S. Freud thought our sexuality is, and how central to human psychic development are the entanglements and the resolution of the Oedipus complex. Spiritual experiences, such as those Rolland referred to, unlike religion, are ill-defined, a mysterious reaching out towards an experience of links between unlikely things, such as the physical and psychic in paranormal experiences such as ghosts, synchronicity, poltergeists. M. Edmundson, an academic, suggests that Freud, in finding his idea of the Oedipus complex, was finding a context for his own murderous wishes towards his father, and that he was free to publish them only after his father had died of natural causes in 1896. Freud’s own religious upbringing had various elements and he seems ambivalent about what being a Jew meant to him. Freud considers obsessional compulsive neurosis “as an individual religiosity and religion as a universal obsessional neurosis”.
