no. man's internal struggles with good and evil are manifested externally through all manner of behavior. religion makes manifest society's struggle to control the individual and CALLS itself a regulator of good and evil, but it defines good and evil by what keeps people controlled or doesn't. i don't know what freud meant but i doubt he meant anything to do with the devil because freud was jewish and there is no devil in judaism. the devil as portrayed in popular culture is a christian construct.

g

Freud was full of shit, throw all his theories out and start with a new premise.

I'm no authority on Freud but I know that the id was the innate instinctive impulses -- sort of the basic operating system of the mind. And this, to Freud, was not necessarily what Jung later called the "shadow", and certainly not inherently "evil". It was also synonymous with the unconscious.

He saw the superego as one's moral conscience and the ego as sort of the "practical self" mediating between superego and id.

So Freud certainly didn't mean to create the equivalences you mention and it doesn't look to me like hey map particularly well.

That's a fair point but I would consider God to be the appeal to wisdom and authority beyond the world itself. It is an explanation (not necessarily an adequate one though) for any questions a person might have, offering simple answers to complicated questions. That's a big thing I have had to deal with in my community, that simple answers are not always the best solution.

I think that the ego is initially* ruled by desire (the Id) where pleasure and pain provide the motivation. If there is an inherent source of good and bad, it may be traced back to this differentiation (which is what Melanie Klein, who followed Freud asserted) between the good breast and the bad breast.

"The breast that feeds the hungry infant is the "good breast", while a hungry infant that finds no breast is in relation to the "bad breast".[en.wikipedia.org]

• the ego is not united in itself until after the mirror stage (Lacan, also close follower of Freud)

CB, this might be reading too much into Freud's writings. The analogy seems to fit, but I have not read enough of Freud',s work to infer this meaning. I do not remember how he viewed religion. I'll have to go back look. Interesting question though.

First I believe Good and Evil are a social construct. They are a necessary one, yet still defined by society. Are they manifested through religion? Yes, as far as religion being the tool contrived by man to control the population. If the 'ruling class' decides what is good and evil, what better way to force the population in line that to convince them of a god figure and eternal punishment That causes man's struggle. So I would say religion is manifested through the control of the 'ruling class' to force their idea of good and evil.