Yes! screams Jacob Lupfer in an article for the Religion News Service. The following excerpts from his article present the substance of his argument for this joining:
Perhaps a deeper religious engagement with psychoanalysis could yield a more comprehensive view of the mind and soul — and what mental frameworks lead to healing and human flourishing. In addition, religion’s emphasis on rightly ordered desires and psychoanalysis’s intensive probing of desires themselves may be more complementary than is often assumed.
Among Freud’s more thoughtful, if controversial, interpreters was the late Philip Rieff, a conservative [?] sociologist who argued that the language and ethos of “the therapeutic” had subsumed elite culture and, eventually, the broader culture as well.
… Rieff was sympathetic to Freud and, contrary to many who associate Freud with allowing or even demanding deference to liberatory and libidinal impulses, he saw Freud as allied with the repression on which civilized society depends. Rieff also saw religion as central to the project of maintaining civilization. Rieff, who was a secular Jew, strongly influenced Christian conservatives.
…
Freud will always have his detractors on the left and the right. But the distance between psychoanalysis and faith is needlessly wide. In this moment of reconsideration, religious leaders and psychoanalytic practitioners should take a step toward each other.
The two need not be enemies. Conceptions of sin, forgiveness, grace and redemption can be recognized alongside deep analytic work on family systems, dreams and the unconscious. Healing deep mental or emotional wounds naturally makes people morally better. Freud’s insights about parental influences and the unconscious mind may lead to deeper commitments among people who love God as father and church as mother.
And believers can be comforted that their conviction that repressing certain impulses can be beneficial is widely shared outside of religious circles.
It is no surprise that an atheist Jew (whose first wife, the Jewess Susan Sontag, said, “The white race is the cancer of human history”) should be “sympathetic to Freud,” who was just as godless as himself, and for the same reasons.
Altlutheraner 