Was just thinking a little bit earlier about Freud’s view of the make-up of the human mind, into three parts, the Superego, Ego, and the Id, and was wondering how that syncretically matches the traditional Christian tripartite image of the Divine, in the shape of the Holy Trinity, The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

Saw a discussion thread on Beliefnet.com, about it, but didn’t really like where they were going with it. One person said that the Father was the superego (moral restraints, conscience), and that the Son was the Id (the satisfaction of the pleasure principle) and that the Spirit was the Ego (which basically mediates between the other two). But I don’t really like this explanation. Then somebody else throws in the Devil as the Id, and Jesus as the Ego, and “God, the Father” as the superego. This is a little better maybe, and is actually a bit closer to how the Tarot symbols might be used to approach the subject.

But what about the Spirit? Cause the Devil isn’t considered part of the Holy Trinity, because to accept him as an aspect of God is to admit that God has an evil side, which traditional mainstream Christianity is completely against doing. Anyway, I like doing these syncretic matching games, because they make all these symbols vibrate and bounce around against each other and come alive in kind of different ways. They open up a certain dynamic interplay.

So yeah, I don’t think there is one solid 100% agreeable matching system between Freud’s concept of the mind (which, incidentally, I don’t at all agree with) and the Christian Holy Trinity. But a fun thing that it got me thinking about was Freud’s fixation with sexuality (libido) as the prime mover of everything that people do. Again, this is another thing that I don’t agree with him on (and neither did Jung, who modified the concept of libido to just be primal psychic energy, which may or may not be sexually expressed). Anyway, right, so I was thinking that if Freud’s view of the mind correlates to a predominantly male pantheon, maybe this is why he was so obsessed with sexuality - sexual libido may, for him, have been the suppressed feminine aspect of his story-system. Christianity suffers from the same problem, with denying the feminine elements of the divine/mind. They spring to life in the Virgin Mary of course, but she’s never considered a part of the Trinity either, much like the Devil, even though both are major players in the story-system. (Plus, you can look at how in the “origin story” of Genesis, Eve [another instantiation of the archetype that birthed Mary] and the Devil are linked by Original Sin.

All very interesting. There’s a bunch of tangled threads there that I would like to pull apart and see what else I could weave together with them. I’m going to assign it to whatever part of my mind works on these things when I’m not paying attention. Then I’ll come back and try to drop the results into an article.