The Dark Ages: Psychoanalysis, behaviourism and cultural anthropology

During the first decades of the twentieth century, the newly born HoR and the social sciences in general turned away from the Darwinian relation between evolution and cognition, and it became clear that there was no immediate future for the scientific study of religion.

Sigmund Freud's and Carl G. Jung's schools of psychoanalysis had a remarkable influence on the historical study of religions and on historiography as well, where it generated the psychohistorical offshoot (resp., Merkur 1996; Weinstein 1995). Freud, in particular, was regarded as a towering giant and, notwithstanding his unscrupulous use of others' theses and manipulation of his results (Orbecchi 2015), ‘no psychological theory has had a greater cultural impact than that of Freud', upon which Jung's theories rested (Plotkin 2004: 33). As to the scientific underpinnings of the theory, Freud and Jung were both educated and well-read in German evolutionary biology (Sulloway 1992; Noll 1994; Orbecchi 2015), and they both assumed a specific view of the mechanisms of the human unconscious ‘in which instincts and developmental experience figured large' (Plotkin 2004: 33). Both Freud and Jung adopted a Lamarckian approach, in that behaviours were thought to become fixated in memory during one's lifetime and passed on to future generations, and embraced recapitulation theory, a theory first proposed by German evolutionary biologist Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), according to which individual life history (i.e.

Although Freud is credited with having started a revolution in human understanding, the scientific underpinnings of all his theses were lacking. In an article entitled A Phylogenetic Fantasy, written in 1915 and published posthumously in 1987, Freud tried to develop a fully fledged evolutionary chain of psychopathological disorders in which psychological disorders (or ‘neuroses') ‘bear witness to the history of the mental development of mankind' (Freud 1987: 11). Interestingly, even if unpublished, this evolutionary speculation dominates the Freudian psychoanalytic production (cf. Gould 2001: 147-58). Inspired by a close correspondence with Hungarian psychoanalyst Sandor Ferenczi (1873-1933), who ‘viewed the full sequence of a human life [...] as a recapitulation of the gigantic tableau of our entire evolutionary past' (Gould 2001: 151), Freud established a developmental sequence of psychosexual neuroses in ‘six successive stages', with each neurosis linked to a precise evolutionary stage in human evolution (see Gould 2001: 152-3). In brief, the direst environmental conditions and social problems of the prehistoric Ice Age, as imagined by Freud, impressed the archaic human mind and became engrained in the human psyche as psychopathologies, with repressed sexual urges and desires leading to guilt, vengeance and shameful repair in the forms of societal organization and religious rituals - but also resurfacing occasionally as individual psychopathologies. Freud's reconstructed narrative included a prehistoric family organization dominated by a tyrannical father who controlled resources, limited sexual activity and exerted coercive control over his sons (Freud 1987). Freud's ‘fatally and falsely Eurocentric' speculations were unsupported, and the most relevant shortcoming was that ‘human evolution was not shaped near the ice sheets of Northern Europe' (Gould 2001: 154).

Jung started his career focusing on biological approaches; later, he embraced a markedly spiritual and occultist stance. He posited the existence of a ‘collective unconscious', that is, a racial repository of symbolic, instinctual knowledge accumulated from time immemorial during the proto-history of ethnic groups and which expressed itself in the unconscious of each person. It was a sort of quasi-eternal, and almost divine, wisdom experienced by modern human beings via dreams, archetypes and visions, and re-accessed thanks to a ‘transcendent function' aimed at interpreting personal events in the light of the history of mankind, thus overcoming the complementary oppositions of phylogeny (unconscious) and ontogeny (consciousness) (Noll 1994: 218-46). In order to disentangle the messages from the collective unconscious, a comparative historico-religious analysis of myth was to complement the psychoanalytical session: despite the superficial historical differences among cultures, deep similarity across worldwide mythologies was explained by ‘inherited mental preferences and images [...] deeply and innately embedded in the evolutionary construction of the human brain' (Gould 2001: 277). However, Jungian psychoanalysis slowly morphed into a phenomenological history of religions sub specie psychologica - which might appear as complementary to Eliadean psychoanalysis sub specie theologica (Filoramo and Prandi 1997: 199-200; see Ambasciano 2014: 457). Indeed, Jung and Eliade initially developed their ideas concurrently and independently, but they later adopted and shared more or less the same framework, both with mystically and spiritually explicit undertones (Spineto 2006: 68).

A peculiar version of psychoanalysis was mixed with other literary sources (e.g. James Joyce) by US scholar of comparative mythology Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) to create the hyper-reductionistic ‘mono-myth, a narrative magnification of a basic three-part structure: separation, initiation and return'.

While the HoR and the Humanities were toying with psychoanalysis, the proverbial nail in the coffin of scientific approaches to human cultures and religions came from the diffusion and success of behaviourism. Broadly, behaviourism was a psychological school that posited the blank slate of the human mind at birth (in Latin, tabula rasa), and that laws of conditioning are the sole engine of human behaviours. US psychologist John B. Watson (1878-1958) published what is generally regarded as the behaviourist manifesto in 1913, in which he excluded cognition and evolution from the study of psychology, focusing instead on the study of responses from peripheral organs:

psychology as the behaviorist views it is a purely objective experimental branch of natural science. Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior.

Introspection forms no essential part of its methods, nor is the scientific value of its data dependent upon the readiness with which they lend themselves to interpretation in terms of consciousness. The behaviorist, in his efforts to get a unitary scheme of animal response, recognizes no dividing line between man and brute. The behavior of man, with all of its refinement and complexity, forms only a part of the behaviorist’s total scheme of investigation. Similarly, in the study of language, the main paradigm held that external stimuli coming from the surrounding environment were sufficient to prompt an infant to learn to speak.

Watson 1913: 158; from Plotkin 2004: 58

As paradoxical as it may sound, Watson’s was a psychology without the brain, without ‘ideas, beliefs, desires and feelings’, a science based on reflexes and muscular responses due to conditioning and reinforcement (Pinker 2002: 19; Plotkin 2004: 62).

These were the most important contributions of psychology and anthropology of the past century, which helped pave the way for postmodern and anti-s cientific interpretations. It is no surprise, therefore, that, during the mid-twentieth century, evolution and cognition in the academic study of religion(s) were either misunderstood in a non-Darwinian way and imbued with spiritualism (Jungian psychoanalysis) or rejected in favour of an extreme form of empiricism (behaviourism) or culturalism (cultural anthropology). This schizophrenic attitude led to the HoR mainly holding to the first option, while entire fields of more historically oriented study of ancient religions embraced the other options, even rejecting the notion of ‘belief’ (e.g. Graeco-Roman history; an exhaustive bibliographical discussion is available in Mackey 2009).