Sigmund Freud's views on religion are described in several of his books and essays. Freud considered God as a fantasy, based on the infantile need for a dominant father figure, with religion as a necessity in the development of early civilization to help restrain our violent impulses, that can now be discarded in favor of science and reason.[1]
In An Autobiographical Study, originally published in 1925, Freud recounts that "My parents were Jews, and I have remained a Jew myself." Familiarity with Bible stories, from an age even before he learned to read, had "an enduring effect on the direction of my interest." In 1873, upon attending the University at Vienna, he first encountered antisemitism: "I found that I was expected to feel myself inferior and an alien because I was a Jew."[2] Before his wedding, Freud desired to convert to Protestantism to avoid a Jewish ceremony but was ultimately persuaded not to.[3][4][5]
In a prefatory note to the Hebrew translation of Totem and Taboo (1930) Freud describes himself as "an author who is ignorant of the language of holy writ, who is completely estranged from the religion of his fathers—as well as from every other religion" but who remains "in his essential nature a Jew and who has no desire to alter that nature".[6]
Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices
In Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices (1907), his earliest writing about religion, Freud suggests that religion and neurosis are similar products of the human mind: neurosis, with its compulsive behavior, is "an individual religiosity", and religion, with its repetitive rituals, is a "universal obsessional neurosis".[7]
Totem and Taboo
In Totem and Taboo, published in 1913, Freud analyzes the tendency of primitive tribes to promulgate rules against incest within groups named for totem animal and objects, and to create taboos regarding actions, people and things. He notes that taboos (such as that regarding incest) still play a significant role in modern society but that totemism "has long been abandoned as an actuality and replaced by newer forms". Freud believes that an original act of patricide—the killing and devouring of "the violent primal father"—was remembered and re-enacted as a "totem meal...mankind's earliest festival" which was "the beginning of so many things—of social organization, of moral restrictions and of religion".[8] Freud develops this idea further in Moses and Monotheism, his last book, discussed below. For Freud, the totem is a father figure that replaces the actual father who was killed, which both allays the intense guilt of the sons and prevents one of them assuming the position of father and dominating the others.[9] Initially representing an animal or other natural feature, the totem later develops into human form as God as societies evolve.[10] Freud further goes to attribute creation of gods to humans: "...we know that, like gods, [demons] are only the product of the psychic powers of man; they have been created from and out of something."[11]
In An Autobiographical Study Freud elaborated on the core idea of Totem and Taboo: "This view of religion throws a particularly clear light upon the psychological basis of Christianity, in which, it may be added, the ceremony of the totem-feast still survives with but little distortion in the form of Communion."[12]
The Future of an Illusion
In The Future of an Illusion (1927),[13] Freud refers to religion as an illusion which is "perhaps the most important item in the psychical inventory of a civilization". In his estimation, religion provides for defense against "the crushingly superior force of nature" and "the urge to rectify the shortcomings of civilization which made themselves painfully felt".[14] He concludes that all religious beliefs are "illusions and insusceptible of proof".[15]
Freud then examines the issue of whether, without religion, people will feel "exempt from all obligation to obey the precepts of civilization".[16] He notes that "civilization has little to fear from educated people and brain-workers" in whom secular motives for morality replace religious ones, but he acknowledges the existence of "the great mass of the uneducated and oppressed" who may commit murder if not told that God forbids it, and who must be "held down most severely" unless "the relationship between civilization and religion" undergoes "a fundamental revision".[17]
Freud asserts that dogmatic religious training contributes to a weakness of intellect by foreclosing lines of inquiry.[18] He argues that "in the long run nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the contradiction which religion offers to both is all too palpable."[19][20] The book expressed Freud's "hope that in the future science will go beyond religion, and reason will replace faith in God".[21]
In an afterword to An Autobiographical Study (1925, revised 1935), Freud states that his "essentially negative" view of religion changed somewhat after The Future of an Illusion; while religion's "power lies in the truth which it contains, I showed that that truth was not a material but a historical truth."[22]
Harold Bloom calls The Future of an Illusion "one of the great failures of religious criticism." Bloom believes that Freud underestimated religion, and that as a result his criticisms of it were no more convincing than T. S. Eliot's criticisms of psychoanalysis. Bloom suggests that psychoanalysis and Christianity are both interpretations of the world and of human nature, and that while Freud believed that religious beliefs are illusions and delusions, the same may be said of psychoanalytic theory. In his view nothing is accomplished with regard to either Christianity or psychoanalysis by listing their illusions and delusions.[23]
Civilization and its Discontents
In Civilization and its Discontents, published in 1930, Freud says that man's need for religion could be explained by "a sensation of 'eternity', a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded—as it were, 'oceanic'", and adds, "I cannot discover this 'oceanic' feeling in myself".[24] Freud suggests that the "oceanic feeling", which his friend Romain Rolland had described to him in a letter, is a wish fulfillment, related to the child's egoistic need for protection.[25]
James Strachey, editor and translator of this and other works of Freud, describes the main theme of the work as "the irremediable antagonism between the demands of instinct and the restrictions of civilization".[26] Freud also treats two other themes, the development of civilization recapitulating individual development, and the personal and social struggle between "Eros" and "Thanatos", life and death urges.[27]
Freud expresses deep pessimism about the odds of humanity's reason triumphing over its destructive forces. He added a final sentence to the book in a 1931 edition, when the threat of Hitler was already becoming apparent: "But who can foresee with what success and with what result?"[28]
Atheist political commentator and author Christopher Hitchens cited this book as a reason behind Freud being one of his most influential figures. Hitchens described the book as a "pessimistic unillusioned tale of realism," noting that Freud "wasted little time in identifying [the need for religion] as infantile" and pointing out a summary by Freud's biographer Ernest Jones that "Human happiness, therefore, does not seem to be the purpose of the universe."[29]
Moses and Monotheism was Freud's last book, published in 1939, the year of his death. In it, Freud makes certain guesses and assumptions about Moses as a historical figure, particularly that he was not born Jewish but was adopted by Jews (the opposite of the Biblical story) and that he was murdered by his followers, who then via reaction formation revered him and became irrevocably committed to the monotheistic idea he represented.[30][31][32]
Mark Edmundson comments that in writing Moses and Monotheism, Freud, while not abandoning his atheism, perceived for the first time a value in the abstract form of monotheism—the worship of an invisible God, without Jesus or saints—practiced by the Jews.[33]
So the mental labor of monotheism prepared the Jews— as it would eventually prepare others in the West— to achieve distinction in law, in mathematics, in science and in literary art. It gave them an advantage in all activities that involved making an abstract model of experience, in words or numbers or lines, and working with the abstraction to achieve control over nature or to bring humane order to life. Freud calls this internalizing process an “advance in intellectuality,” and he credits it directly to religion.
In Moses and Monotheism, Freud proposed that Moses had been a priest of Akhenaten who fled Egypt after the pharaoh's death and perpetuated monotheism through a different religion.[34]
According to Jay Geller, Moses and Monotheism is full of "false starts, deferred conclusions, repetitions, rationalizations, defensive self-justifications, questionable methods, and weak arguments that are readily acknowledged as such by Freud."[35]
The Question of a Weltanschauung
The later developments in Freud’s views on religion are summarized in his lecture on the Question of a Weltanschauung, Vienna, 1932. There he describes the struggles of science in its relations with three other powers: art, philosophy and religion.
Art is an illusion of some sort and a long story. Philosophy goes astray in its method. Religion constructed a consistent and self-contained Weltanschauung to an unparalleled degree. By comparison science is marked by certain negative characteristics. Among them it asserts that there are no sources of knowledge of the universe other than the intellectual working over of carefully scrutinized observations, and none that is derived from revelation, intuition or divination.
On relations between science and philosophy and science and religion Freud has this much to say in one sentence: “It is not permissible to declare that science is one field of human mental activity and that religion and philosophy are others, at least equal in value, and that science has no business to interfere with the other two: that they all have an equal claim to be true and that everyone is at liberty to choose from which he will draw his convictions and in which he will place his belief.” Then he goes on to say that such an impermissible view is regarded as superior and tolerant, but that it is not tenable, that it shares all the pernicious features of an entirely unscientific Weltanschauung and that it is equivalent to one in practice.
With respect to religion in particular he explains that a religious person had once been feeble and helpless. A parent had protected him. Later such a person gets more insight into the perils of life and he rightly concludes that fundamentally he still remains just as helpless as he was in his childhood.
In a 1949 essay in Commentary magazine, Irving Kristol says that Freud exposed what he believed to be the irrationality of religion without evidence, but has not substituted anything beyond "a mythology of rational despair".[37]
In a 1949 book entitled Christianity after Freud, Benjamin Gilbert Sanders draws parallels between the theory of psychoanalysis and Christian religion, referring to Jesus Christ as "the Great Psychiatrist" and Christians' love for Christ as "a more positive form of the Transference".[38]
Karen Armstrong notes in A History of God that "not all psychoanalysts agreed with Freud's view of God," citing Alfred Adler, who believed God was a projection which had been "helpful to humanity", and C.G. Jung, who, when asked whether he believed in God, said "Difficult to answer, I know. I don't need to believe. I know."[39]
Tony Campolo, founder of the Evangelical Association for the Promotion of Education, observes that "With Freud, God, and the need for God-dictated restraints, had been abolished,"[40] resulting in an increase in social chaos and unhappiness which could have been avoided by adherence to religion.
A number of critics draw the parallel between religious beliefs and Freud's theories, that neither can be scientifically proven, but only experienced subjectively. Lee Siegel writes that "you either grasp the reality of Freud's dynamic notion of the subconscious intuitively– the way, in fact, you do or do not grasp the truthfulness of Ecclesiastes– or you cannot accept that it exists."[41]
↑ Gay, Peter. Freud: A life for our time (New York: Norton, 1998) p. 535 ISBN0-393-31826-5
↑ Mary K. O'Neill and Salman Aktar, eds, On Freud's 'The Future of an Illusion' (London: Karnac Books, 2009) p. x ISBN978-1-85575-627-4
↑ Freud, Sigmund, An Autobiographical Study (New York:W.W. Norton & Co., 1989 [1952]) pp. 130–131, 138 ISBN0-393-00146-6
↑ Bloom, Harold. The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992, pp. 34–35.
↑ Freud, Sigmund, Civilization and its Discontents (New York: Norton 1962), pp. 11–12 ISBN0-393-09623-8)
↑ Fisher, David, Cultural Theory and Psychoanalytic Tradition (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers Rutgers University 2009) p. 117 ISBN978-1-4128-0859-0
↑ James Strachey, "Editors' Introduction", in Freud, Sigmund, Civilization and its Discontents (New York: Norton 1962), pp. 11–12 ISBN0-393-09623-8)
↑ S. Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXIII (1937-1939), "Moses and monotheism". London: Hogarth Press, 1964.
Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating pathologies seen as originating from conflicts in the psyche, through dialogue between patient and psychoanalyst, and the distinctive theory of mind and human agency derived from it.
Civilization and Its Discontents is a book by Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. It was written in 1929 and first published in German in 1930 as Das Unbehagen in der Kultur. Exploring what Freud sees as the important clash between the desire for individuality and the expectations of society, the book is considered one of Freud's most important and widely read works, and was described in 1989 by historian Peter Gay as one of the most influential and studied books in the field of modern psychology.
In psychology, sublimation is a mature type of defense mechanism, in which socially unacceptable impulses or idealizations are transformed into socially acceptable actions or behavior, possibly resulting in a long-term conversion of the initial impulse.
Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics, or Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics, is a 1913 book by Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, in which the author applies his work to the fields of archaeology, anthropology, and the study of religion. It is a collection of four essays inspired by the work of Wilhelm Wundt and Carl Jung and first published in the journal Imago (1912–13): "The Horror of Incest", "Taboo and Emotional Ambivalence", "Animism, Magic and the Omnipotence of Thoughts", and "The Return of Totemism in Childhood".
In classical Freudian psychoanalytic theory, the death drive is the drive toward death and destruction, often expressed through behaviors such as aggression, repetition compulsion, and self-destructiveness. It was originally proposed by Sabina Spielrein in her paper "Destruction as the Cause of Coming Into Being" in 1912, which was then taken up by Sigmund Freud in 1920 in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. This concept has been translated as "opposition between the ego or death instincts and the sexual or life instincts". In Beyond thePleasure Principle, Freud used the plural "death drives" (Todestriebe) much more frequently than the singular.
Moses and Monotheism is a 1939 book about the origins of monotheism written by Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. It is Freud's final original work and it was completed in the summer of 1939 when Freud was, effectively speaking, already "writing from his death-bed." It appeared in English translation the same year.
The Future of an Illusion is a 1927 work by Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, in which Freud discusses religion's origins, development, and its future. He provides a psychoanalysis of religion as a false belief system.
Father complex in psychology is a complex—a group of unconscious associations, or strong unconscious impulses—which specifically pertains to the image or archetype of the father. These impulses may be either positive or negative.
In psychoanalysis, the narcissism of small differences is the idea that the more a relationship or community shares commonalities, the more likely the people in it are to engage in interpersonal feuds and mutual ridicule because of hypersensitivity to minor differences perceived in each other. The term was coined by Sigmund Freud in 1917, based on the earlier work of English anthropologist Ernest Crawley. Crawley theorized that each individual is separated from others by a taboo of personal isolation, which is effectively a narcissism of minor differences.
Peter Joffre Swales was a Welsh "guerilla historian of psychoanalysis and former assistant to the Rolling Stones". He called himself "the punk historian of psychoanalysis", and he is well known for his essays on Sigmund Freud. A 1998 article in The New York Times Magazine noted his "remarkable detective work over the last 25 years, revealing the true identities of several early patients of Freud's who had been known only by their pseudonyms." He is one of three men whose machinations are described in Janet Malcolm's 1984 book In the Freud Archives, which originated as two articles in The New Yorker magazine that provoked Masson to file an unsuccessful $10 million libel suit against the magazine and Malcolm.
Sociological, psychological, and anthropological theories about religion generally attempt to explain the origin and function of religion. These theories define what they present as universal characteristics of religious belief and practice.
Psychoanalytic sociology is the research field that analyzes society using the same methods that psychoanalysis applies to analyze an individual.
In a 1927 letter to Sigmund Freud, Romain Rolland coined the phrase "oceanic feeling" to refer to "a sensation of 'eternity'", a feeling of "being one with the external world as a whole", inspired by the example of Ramakrishna, among other mystics. According to Rolland, this feeling is the source of all the religious energy that permeates in various religious systems, and one may justifiably call oneself religious on the basis of this oceanic feeling alone, even if one renounces every belief and every illusion. Freud discusses the feeling in his Future of an Illusion (1927) and Civilization and Its Discontents (1929). There he deems it a fragmentary vestige of a kind of consciousness possessed by an infant who has not yet differentiated itself from other people and things.
The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud is a complete edition of the works of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. It was translated from the German under the general editorship of James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson. The Standard Edition consists of 24 volumes, and it was originally published by the Hogarth Press in London in 1953–1974. Unlike the German Gesammelte Werke, the SE contains critical footnotes by the editors. This editorial material has later been included in the German-language Studienausgabe edition of Freud.
Thoughts for the Time of War and Death is a set of twin essays written by Sigmund Freud in 1915, six months after the outbreak of World War I. The essays express discontent and disillusionment with human nature and human society in the aftermath of the hostilities; and generated much interest among lay readers of Freud.
A religious delusion is defined as a delusion, or fixed belief not amenable to change in light of conflicting evidence, involving religious themes or subject matter. Religious faith, meanwhile, is defined as a belief in a religious doctrine or higher power in the absence of evidence. Psychologists, scientists, and philosophers have debated the distinction between the two, which is subjective and cultural.
Freud: A Life for Our Time is a 1988 biography of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, by the historian Peter Gay. The book was first published in the United Kingdom by J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. The book has been praised by some commentators and compared to the psychoanalyst Ernest Jones's The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (1953–1957). However, it has been criticized by authors skeptical of psychoanalysis, who have accused Gay of lacking objectivity and of repeating incorrect claims about Freud's work.
Johann Christoph "Jan" Assmann was a German Egyptologist, cultural historian, and religion scholar.
This is a list of writings published by Sigmund Freud. Books are either linked or in italics.
Sigmund Freud is considered to be the founder of the psychodynamic approach to psychology, which looks to unconscious drives to explain human behavior. Freud believed that the mind is responsible for both conscious and unconscious decisions that it makes on the basis of psychological drives. The id, ego, and super-ego are three aspects of the mind Freud believed to comprise a person's personality. Freud believed people are "simply actors in the drama of [their] own minds, pushed by desire, pulled by coincidence. Underneath the surface, our personalities represent the power struggle going on deep within us".
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