Interplay Between Culture and Psychoanalysis in Understanding Religion

Why do people in different parts of the world pray differently, fear different gods, and observe wildly different rituals – yet all seem to be driven by similar deep psychological needs? The answer may lie at the intersection of culture and psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis, the theory of mind developed by Sigmund Freud, was originally built on observations of 19th-century European patients. But as scholars carried it into fieldwork across Africa, India, and beyond, something fascinating emerged: culture doesn’t just color religious experience on the surface – it shapes the very psychological structures through which people relate to the sacred.

Freud’s foundation: the psychoanalytic view of religion 🔗

To understand how culture complicates psychoanalysis, we first need to understand what Freud proposed. According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of religion is built around the idea that religious belief closely parallels individual neurosis – specifically, that the emotional dynamics of the father-son relationship in childhood are reproduced, at a collective level, in humanity’s relationship with God. At the heart of this is the Oedipus complex: the child’s attachment to the mother and rivalry with the father, which must be repressed and resolved through identification with paternal authority. Freud believed this conflict – and its resolution – was the psychological engine behind all religion.

In works like Totem and Taboo (1913) and The Future of an Illusion (1927), Freud argued that religion functions as a kind of universal neurosis: it helps maintain social cohesion by projecting the parental authority structure onto a divine figure, while simultaneously repressing individual desires that could destabilize the group. In his framework, religious rituals are not unlike the compulsive, ceremonial behaviors of a neurotic patient – both are expressions of repressed unconscious conflicts seeking an outlet.

This was a groundbreaking claim. But it had a significant blind spot: it assumed a universal psychological template derived almost entirely from Western, particularly European, experience. What happens when you apply psychoanalytic thinking to the Tallensi of Ghana, or to the spiritual world of Hindu India? That is precisely the question scholars like Meyer Fortes and Sudhir Kakar took on – and their answers changed the field.

Meyer Fortes: Oedipus meets West Africa 🔗

Meyer Fortes (1906-1983) was a South African-born social anthropologist who spent decades studying the Tallensi and Ashanti peoples of Ghana. What made him unique was his background: he began his professional career as a trained psychologist, only later moving into anthropology. This dual training gave him a rare ability to think simultaneously in psychological and sociological terms.

His most celebrated contribution to the intersection of culture and psychoanalysis is his 1959 work, Oedipus and Job in West African Religion. This book fused his two interests – psychology and ethnography – and set a standard for comparative ethnology. In it, Fortes examined the religious life of the Tallensi, a people whose social organization revolves intensely around ancestor worship and lineage. His central argument was that the dynamics Freud associated with the Oedipus complex do appear in Tallensi religious life, but they are shaped and expressed in a culturally specific way – not through rivalry and repression in the European sense, but through a structured, ritualized relationship between fathers and firstborn sons.

Destiny, ancestors, and the social self 🔗

Among the Tallensi, the firstborn son occupies a fraught position. He is simultaneously the heir and a symbolic threat to his father’s authority. This tension, however, is not suppressed or privately neurotic – it is publicly managed through elaborate religious rituals involving ancestor spirits and divination. Fortes’ study has been characterized as a sketch of the religious concepts that define and explain the individual’s relationship to his or her society – what could be called Tallensi “social psychology.” In other words, the psychological drama that Freud located inside the individual’s unconscious is, in West African society, externalized and managed through communal religious practice.

This is a fundamental shift. For Freud, religion is a symptom of unresolved private conflict. For Fortes, religion is the very mechanism through which conflict between individuals and their social roles is negotiated and resolved. Culture is not a backdrop to the psychological drama – it is the stage, the script, and the cast of characters all at once. In his two books on the Tallensi, Fortes underlined the centrality of ancestor worship in everyday life, particularly in matters of marriage, family, and tribal organization – showing how the sacred and the social are inseparable in ways Freud’s framework never anticipated.

Sudhir Kakar: psychoanalysis from the Indian terroir 🔗

If Fortes challenged Freud from the outside – as an anthropologist bringing fieldwork to bear on psychoanalytic theory – Sudhir Kakar challenged it from the inside, as a practicing psychoanalyst. Kakar (1938-2024) was an Indian psychoanalyst and scholar in the fields of cultural psychology and the psychology of religion, widely regarded as one of the most original thinkers of post-independence India. He trained in Freudian psychoanalysis at the Sigmund Freud Institute in Frankfurt and was deeply shaped by Erik Erikson’s developmental framework – but when he returned to India in 1975, he found that these Western tools needed significant reworking to make sense of the Indian psyche.

His landmark 1978 book, The Inner World: A Psycho-Analytic Study of Childhood and Society in India, set the agenda for what would become a career-long project. Kakar infused classical psychoanalysis with uniquely Indian experiences of tradition, religion, mythology, and folktales to enter the inner world of Hindu families and households. His analysis showed how cultural routines and religious practices influence the development of children’s identities – offering a nuanced understanding of how mythology and psychology intersect in Indian society.

The porous self and the limits of Western models 🔗

One of Kakar’s most important contributions is his critique of the Western psychoanalytic model of the self. The dominant Western model – rooted in Freudian and post-Freudian theory – imagines the individual as a bounded, autonomous self whose psychological development moves toward separation and independence from the family. Kakar argued that this model simply does not fit Indian experience, where the self is defined relationally and collectively. He wrote that the traditional Indian view of the person is “open, porous and connected to all of existence” – an intangible human heritage worth defending against those who insist on a single, modern Western model of personhood.

In the Indian context, religious experience is not primarily a symptom of repressed instincts, as Freud would have it. It is, for many people, a genuine mode of knowing and being. Kakar’s psychoanalytic work on mysticism – including his studies of Ramakrishna, Swami Vivekananda, and Gandhi – demonstrated that spiritual experience in India operates within a cultural framework that cannot be reduced to the Oedipal drama. Scholar Jeffrey Kripal has noted that Kakar showed psychological thought need not be bound to a particular place or time – it can illuminate the human condition anywhere, but it must draw on the complexities of the local culture, particularly its mythologies and mystical traditions.

The guru-disciple relationship as a psychological structure 🔗

One particularly striking example of how Kakar brought culture into psychoanalytic thinking is his analysis of the guru-shishya (teacher-disciple) relationship. In Western psychoanalysis, a patient’s intense attachment to an authority figure might be interpreted as transference – the projection of early parental relationships onto the therapist. In India, such relationships have a distinct cultural grammar rooted in centuries of religious tradition. Kakar’s essays on Ramakrishna and his disciples redefined the study of the guru-shishya relationship in the scholarly study of religion – showing it not as pathology, but as a culturally structured pathway to transformation. This was a direct challenge to reductionist psychoanalytic readings that saw all such intense religious bonds as simply disguised neurosis.

Culture as a co-author of religious psychology 🔗

The work of Fortes and Kakar points toward the same fundamental conclusion: culture is not merely the context in which psychological life unfolds – it actively co-authors the psychological structures through which people experience religion. This insight has far-reaching implications for how we study religious belief and practice.

Research in cross-cultural psychology has confirmed that culture and religion are deeply intertwined, with cultural-level dimensions – from family practices to socioeconomic factors – shaping religious cognitions, emotions, and behaviors in fundamental ways. A psychoanalytic approach that ignores these dimensions risks producing explanations that are, at best, partial, and at worst, distorting.

The psychoanalytic tradition applied to religion has always focused on three key relationships: between religion and the structure of the psyche; between religion and development from childhood to adulthood; and between religion, culture, and human progress as cultural beings. Fortes and Kakar made that third relationship – between religion, culture, and the individual – impossible to ignore. They showed that the psychological meaning of a religious act is never self-evident: it must be read against the cultural text in which it is embedded.

From Freud’s universalism to cultural specificity 🔗

Freud’s great ambition was to produce a universal theory of mind that could explain religion across all human societies. What Fortes and Kakar demonstrate is that such universalism must be built from the ground up, starting with culturally specific data, rather than imposed from above using categories derived from a single cultural tradition. Kakar’s work spans almost three decades, converging multiple disciplines and representing a breakthrough in Indian social thought – something anthropologists and historians of religion had long been calling for. His approach did not abandon psychoanalysis; it deepened it by insisting that the unconscious, too, is culturally shaped.

This is why Kakar’s model of a culturally embedded psyche, and Fortes’ model of socially managed psychological conflict, remain so important. They don’t discard psychoanalysis – they expand it, making it capable of taking seriously the diversity of human religious experience without flattening it into a single narrative. The result is a richer, more honest picture of how human beings construct meaning, manage fear and desire, and ultimately find their place in the cosmos – not as isolated individuals, but as social beings immersed in culture from birth.

What do you think? Does the cultural shaping of religious psychology mean that psychoanalytic theories of religion developed in the West have limited validity outside their cultural context – or can a truly cross-cultural psychoanalysis of religion be built? And if the psychological meaning of religious acts is always partly defined by culture, what does this imply for how societies should approach interfaith understanding?

References

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3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meyer_Fortes
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