Femme Fatale
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Faith, fides in Latin and pistis in Greek, can be understood within a spectrum ranging from the content of a particular set of beliefs to the act of trust, usually in a particular community, doctrine, or deity. In fundamentalist religions, the understanding of faith leans toward an emphasis on the content of belief, especially one’s assent to a certain set of beliefs. In these contexts, faith has a noetic quality and is fixed within boundaries to define what is inside or outside its scope. To assent to the appropriate propositions of religion means to have faith, and to be outside these limits is to be unfaithful (or an ‘‘infidel,’’ a term which derives from the Latin root of fides). On the other side of the spectrum, faith is simply characterized as synonymous with trust, an attitude of believing, and thus refers more to the act of trusting than to the specific content of one’s beliefs. Within this pragmatic emphasis, the psychological effects of comfort and release from anxiety and insecurity seem to be highlighted, even to the extreme of a marked absence of noetic content. Most expressions of faith seem to exist in the middle, including an act of trust, with the corollary of the promise of hope, and some particular content in which one’s trust is placed (i.e., Deity, religious community, and sacred text). For both religion and spirituality, faith seems to have some particular, specific content that is reflected in the trust of believers. In Buddhism, the believer takes the ‘‘refuges’’, stating that ‘‘I take refuge in the Buddha, the dharma (Buddhist teaching), and the sangha (the community of monastics).’’ This tri-fold affirmation of faith points to the important of the divine figure, the doctrine, and the community as the component location of spiritual strength and protection. In this affirmation, the individual/community dichotomy is addressed, in that the individual makes the affirmation of faith, placing trust in that tradition, in the midst of the tradition and in continuity with it.
Commentary Freud explained belief in a Deity as meeting the needs for a projected father-figure, in service to cultural ideals of control and manipulation (Freud, 1928/1961: 21–22; Freud, 1957). Freud was critical of the potential for faith to be used as denial, and suggested that the more mature person would face fate (which he personified as the Greek goddess Ananke) without recourse to divine escapism (Rizzuto, 1998: 170). Jung more positively identified with faith, but without an emphasis on its social or doctrinal aspects. He understood it primarily in terms of gnosis (literally ‘‘knowledge’’), as directly apprehended spiritual knowledge which the individual encounters and which brings about psychic healing through reconciliation of the opposite poles of one’s experience (Melanson, 2002: 168). Object relations theorists modified Freud’s theories about projection and understood faith as arising from the liminial space between the mother and child in which the child creates and is grasped by transitional objects. Perhaps
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