Ideal of holiness as a requirement of repression: a conceptual course in Freudian metapsychology

Abstract

By denying human sexuality, religious sexual morality forged an ideal of sanctity based on the disregard of pleasure through the body, reducing sexuality to the function of procreation. Based on this, the purpose of this manuscript is to provide subsidies for the metapsychological description of what we call neurotic symptoms of sanctity. Using the theoretical research in psychoanalysis as a method, we correlate Freud's theses on libidinal economy in the genesis of neuroses to the premise that the ideal of sanctity can present itself as the neurotic symptom and, concomitantly, to accommodate the demands of repression and coat the possible symptomatic picture of a neurotic with a religious sense that legitimizes it. It is concluded that the religious worldview does not contribute to solving neurotic symptoms and that the construction of meaning, that is, the building of a worldview of its own, is a non-transferable task that belongs solely and exclusively to the subject.