feel that when Ivan's son touched Ivan's hand Ivan realized that his childhood is when he was whole. At the end of Ivan's life, he started to look for something meaningful in his life. Ivan was meaningful to his son, but Ivan would ask who or what is meaningful for me. Freud suggests that perhaps the greatest danger of facing a person is his or her own eventual demise. Religion, however, typically promises the existence of an afterlife and hence that there is no genuine death, as in Ivan's case. Not only is death not genuine, but the "true believer" can look forward to wonderful rewards for their allegiance to the "true faith" as compensation for whatever tribulations they endured on earth. That is what was Ivan Ilych's problem. A principle component for Freud was the feeling of helplessness, occurring in a number of different areas, namely external dangers, internal impulses, death, and society. For Ivan, the helplessness feeling came with death. Ivan was scared to die, so he produced his own illusions. As wish-fulfilling illusions, religious faith and gods had specific tasks. They must exorcise the terrors of nature, they must reconcile men to the cruelty of Fate, particularly as it is shown in death, and they must compensate them for the sufferings which a civilized life in common has imposed on them. The first, of course, would be the feeling of helplessness before the awesome and unpredictable powers of nature - mortal dangers from the external world. Ivan believed that he was helpless and that no drugs or prayer would help him on his journey to death. Ivan had no desire to survive and or fight for life. Obsessions, a final form of helplessness against which religion acts is, according to Freud, our helplessness before our own internal and uncontrollable desires. Freud made much of the similarities between religious rituals and obsessional rituals (for example, when the Priest came to give Ivan his last rights.), the l...
