Freud's Contribution to Culture and its Relation to Philosophy and Religion

Psychoanalysis, insofar as it defines itself through the interpretation of symptoms, is to be thought of in its tension with both philosophy and religion, which respectively presuppose concepts and revelation. Culture draws from all these different dimensions since, in the diversity of cultural forms, affect and representation are always tied to the imaginary as that which circles around the real. This article proposes that psychoanalysis, philosophy and religion be studied with regard to their own specificity but also in their mutual interrelations. In addition to the relations between, for example, economics and politics and in accordance with the plural understanding of subjectivity and community that characterizes postmodernity, it argues that a cultural development requires that these three disciplines (psycho-analysis, philosophy and religion) be connected.