ABSTRACT
Given the benefit of a close reading, Freud’s writings on religion offer remarkably profound resources for ongoing cultural and metapsychological reflection. The main features of the psycho-cultural model emerging from these writings can be summarized as follows:
• Subjects are open systems existing in and through language. • Cultural symbols and ideals play a necessary role in the formation of ethically
informed subjectivity. • Meaningful, ethical subjectivity is pluralistic; it includes functions classified
as id and super-ego as well as ego. • The culturally fostered capacities for renunciation and sublimation indicative
of an advance in Geistigkeit express subjectivity as informed by ideals. • There are both constitutive and traumatic effects of acculturation in the
distancing from relations governed by immediacy (understood in terms of the materiality of the real and the fixed images of the imaginary). This traumatization is partially responsible for tendencies to literalize and fixate upon cultural constructs.
