Synchronistic events can be explained fully in naturalistic terms. They comprise an instance of the uncanny as they return the individual subjectively to a period when the world, as the good parent, was sympathetically attuned to the individual's wishes and requirements. Jung invoked the spiritual, or the supernatural, or the paranormal to explain synchronicity rather than exploring the early stages of human existence.
Faber offers a critique of Jung's theory of synchronicity that develops an alternative to demystify synchronistic happenings by explaining them in purely naturalistic terms. The book's larger purpose is to demystify Jung's archetypal psychology and to explain the whole Jungian approach to human behavior in naturalistic terms. Because Jung's psychology is ultimately religious in nature, the book touches generally upon the implications of religion and religious conduct. The book offers the reader an opportunity to ponder the psychological nature of synchronicity either as a spiritual occurrence with paranormal overtones or as a return of the repressed, a mnemonic trace of events that actually transpired in the life of the individual.

Synchronicity: C. G. Jung, Psychoanalysis, and Religion

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Faber, M. D.

Psychology & Counseling

Praeger

This comprehensive, psychological, and naturalistic analysis of prayer offers an alternative to William James's model of prayer, represented in his work The Varieties of Religious Experience, which links supplication to the divine or supernatural realm. Through his examination of prayer, and its connection to faith, Faber also analyzes religious faith psychologically and anthropologically, concluding that subjective prayer is finally an instance of homeopathic magical conduct. It ritualistically conjures up, according to the author, a version of the first, primal, biological situation, in which the dependent little one cries out to a parental big one for physical and emotional nourishment. Eventually, religion…and its expression of faith through prayer, provides us with a magical protective presence that is natural in its return to the primal, rather than supernatural, as James argues, in its presence and existence.
The very instructional details of individual prayer, Faber argues, are unconsciously designed to recreate the magical alliance through which our existence on the planet commences and goes forward. Over and over again, dozens of times each day, thousands of times each year, the little one asks and the big one sees to it that the little one receives. Such asking and receiving is the central feature of a child's existence. As we internalize this reality and seek to re-create it in our adult lives, religious conviction and faith--as it comes through prayer--helps us to achieve a sense of security and a psychic return to the parental alliance. Faber's compelling arguments will challenge readers to consider prayer and faith as a magical circle of religious belief and to examine afresh the underlying nature of supplication.

The Magic of Prayer: An Introduction to the Psychology of Faith

M. D. Faber presents a meticulous, unremitting inquiry into the psychological direction from which Christianity derives its power to attract and hold its followers.

Becoming God's Children: Religion's Infantilizing Process

Religion & Spirituality

Christian Books & Bibles

This book is a psychoanalytic exploration of the witchcraft cult as it has emerged in the United States, Canada, and Europe during the last half-century. The book's broadest aim is to disclose key motivational factors underlying participation in mysticism and the occult. After examining the work of Sir James Frazer, Margaret Murray, and Robert Graves in an effort to indicate the cult's historical sources, M. D. Faber turns to the writings of Freud, Roheim, and Kluckhohn to discover what psychoanalysis has said about witchcraft to date. He then explores the texts, rituals, and practices of modern witchcraft - concentrating, for example, on the magic circle, the Great Goddess, the composition of the coven, the rites of initiation, the witch's tools (wand, pentagram, crystal ball), and rituals such as Drawing Down the Moon and the Openings of the Body. His analysis is complemented by several interviews with practicing witches and by a detailed, firsthand account of a coven meeting.Modern Witchcraft and Psychoanalysis approaches the rebirth of witchcraft with three major purposes in view. First, it seeks to discover what witchcraft means to the individuals who are involved. It explores the emotions, the wishes, the fantasies of these people to determine why they gravitate toward this particular cultic and religious movement. By doing this, the book strives to shed light on the reasons that lie behind an individual's involvement in cultic and religious movements generally. In short, it presents witchcraft as a representative example of the way in which cults and religions attract people to their ranks for powerful and emotional reasons that are rooted in the dynamic unconscious.Second, the text explores witchcraft with an eye to disclosing its meaning in the culture within which it operates. Twentieth-century occultists hijacked Jungian psychoanalytic theory to mystical ends, and this book begins the process of retrieving the theory. Thus it is the first systematic expose of the irrationality of the philosophy that is used to justify the retreat into magic. Faber applies psychoanalysis to a phenomenon that is rapidly acquiring genuine sociological significance, namely the diversion into magic in the Age of Science. There are many books on the New Age shelves, but these are almost wholly uncritical, written by aficionados. The present book, by contrast, works to demystify the retreat into the occult by viewing it as a response to certain major features of the developmental process, including the fear of separation.Finally, Faber's work aims to sort out the relationship of occult practice and magical action to the powerful social problems that have come to be a concern of the witchcraft movement, including the despoliation of the environment, the threat of nuclear conflict, discrimination against women, gays, and other minorities, animal experimentation, and religious persecution - all excesses of what witchcraft characterizes as "the old patriarchal scheme of things."

Modern Witchcraft and Psychoanalysis

UNKNO

The Design Within: Psychoanalytic Approaches to Shakespeare

Medical Books

Psychology

Jason Aronson

Culture and Consciousness: The Social Meaning of Altered Awareness

Human Sciences Press, 1981

Objectivity and Human Perception: Revisions and Crossroads in Psychoanalysis and Philosophy

University of Alberta Press

In this insightful new study, M.D. Faber, whose previous work on the psychology of religion has won widespread critical acclaim, offers a comprehensive, naturalistic explanation of religious experience from the intertwining perspectives of neuroscience and developmental psychology. Faber here argues that belief in God, the powerful sensation of his presence, and the heartfelt assent to the reality of the supernatural are all produced by the mind/brain's inherent tendency to discover in religious narrative a striking, memorial echo of its own biological development. Although Faber maintains that we are not "wired" specifically for God (as many contend), our brain is so constructed as to make us profoundly susceptible to religious myths. These myths encourage us to map our early, internalized experience onto a variety of supernatural narratives with the figure of the Parent-God and his angelic assistants at the center.A key point of Faber's analysis is the connection between the onset of infantile amnesia during childhood's later years and the evocative power of religious mythology. Although we cannot explicitly recall our earliest interactions with our parents or other caregivers, religious narratives can and do jog these implicit emotional memories in an uncanny way, which prompts us to accede to religion's central tenet--namely, that we are in the care of an omnipotent parental provider who watches over us and ministers to our needs. In the final analysis, religious experience attempts to recapture, and to reinstate in an idealized form, the symbiotic union of the early parent-child relation.This pioneering, highly original work takes the reader to the neurological-psychological bedrock of religious experience.

The Psychological Roots of Religious Belief: Searching for Angels and the Parent-God

Prometheus

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Faber, M. D.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Faber, M. D.