Religion, Narcissism and Fanaticism

"""Psychoanalysis from the first preferred reason over religion, even as it acknowledged religion’s extraordinary powers. Religious commitments, beliefs and practices invest all sorts of human activities; such phenomena do not always admit to their own religious character. In this ambitious, rigorous and polemical book, which draws on an impressive range of scholarship, Tamas Pataki takes up the challenge of analysing and combating the pathological aspects of religions, from the ancient entrance of spirits into human affairs, through the development of the monotheisms, to the unconscious psychic investments that continue to sustain them."" Justin Clemens, associate professor at The University of Melbourne is author of Psychoanalysis is an Antiphilosophy and co-author of Barron Field in New South Wales. Pataki is a philosopher who explores the evolution of religion through a critical atheistic perspective pivoting on psychoanalytic object-relations theory. It is this aespect of his thought that provides a much-needed depth of understanding of religious fundamentaism and extremism, the dominant themes of this timely book. Well informed by prehistoric and anthropological scholarship and argued with exceptional clarity, this revised version of his Against Religion offers a sobering critique in the current historical context when much of humankind is becoming overinflated by its divine images and their correlative this-worldy identities. Dr Jadran Mimica, Senior Lecturer, Department of Anthropology, The University of Sydney and author of Of Humans, Pigs and Souls."