Series "Animism and Omnipotence" N1 - 2023

Mixed Media on Aluminium Framed Canvas - 180x90cms Animism bears a striking resemblance to the ways obsessional neurotics and children understand their ability to influence the universe, all of which suffer in Freud’s view from belief in the omnipotence of thoughts, or in other words that human thoughts have efficacious power in the world. Human thoughts and desires can lead to physical results, according to these three groups, thus creating magical belief, that one’s thoughts and intentions can have impacts in the world if combined with proper rituals. In animism such omnipotence humans attribute to themselves, causing Freud to postulate an early form of the theory of narcissism that underlies this viewpoint, where one overvalues oneself as a love object and attributes to oneself the powers that one later attributes to others. In religious thinking, omnipotence of thinking is attributed to a god or gods who are stand-ins for one’s parents, representing the psychological stage where one’s sexual attraction is directed towards one’s family. And finally in scientific thinking, it is renounced entirely, corresponding to the psychological point where “an individual has reached maturity, has renounced the pleasure principle, adjusted himself to reality and turned to the external world for the object of his desires.”