Civilization And Its Discontents By Sigmund Freud

In Civilization and its Discontents, written by Sigmund Freud, he discusses the “oceanic” feeling and its claim as the source of religious energy. This is a sensation of “eternity,” something limitless and unbounded. This is a feeling that Freud has not experienced himself and he says that it is not easy to deal with feeling in a scientific matter. Even though he has not experienced this feeling, he attempts to understand it scientifically with a psychoanalytic explanation. According to Freud, the “oceanic” feeling is a fragment of infantile consciousness when an infant begins to differentiate itself from the human and non-human environment. At an early stage of development, the ego had an all-encompassing, almost boundless sense of the world around it and with maturity came a diminished sense of reality because the ego had delimited itself from the outside

This means that the “oceanic” can be traced back to an early phase of ego-feeling. Freud explains that the mind is exceptional because infantile and mature feelings continue to co-exist throughout a person's life. For instance, once a memory has been recorded, it has never been erased, and that memory can be called to the surface under the right circumstances. Once a person goes from infancy to maturity, the mind is preserved during the transformation. He does not deny that this feeling may occur in people. In fact, he says this feeling exists in many people. However, he did not believe the claim that this feeling is the source of religious energy. He states, “a feeling can only be a source of energy if it is itself the expression of a strong need”. The “oceanic” feeling is an intangible quantity that is impervious to traditional scientific analysis and it frustrated Freud, as there is no physiological basis. Do you believe the claim that the “oceanic” feeling is the source of religious