Freud and Religion
Encyclopedia
Sigmund Freud
(1856-1939) deals with the origins and nature of religious belief in several of his books and essays. Freud regards God as an illusion, based on the infantile need for a powerful father figure; religion, necessary to help us restrain violent impulses earlier in the development of civilization, can now be set aside in favor of reason and science.
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".
, 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". Freud develops this idea further in Moses and Monotheism, his last book, discussed below.
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."."
Freud then examines the issue of whether, without religion, people will feel "exempt from all obligation to obey the precepts of civilization". 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".
Freud asserts that dogmatic religious training contributes to a weakness of intellect by foreclosing lines of inquiry. He argues that "[I]n the long run nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the contradiction which religion offers to both is all too palpable." The book expressed Freud's "hope that in the future science will go beyond religion, and reason will replace faith in God."
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."
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 that 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.
, 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". 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.
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". 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.
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?"
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 a reaction formation
revered him and became irrevocably committed to the monotheistic idea he represented.
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:.
says that Freud correctly exposed the irrationality of religion, but has not substituted anything beyond "a mythology of rational despair".
In a 1950 book entitled Christianity and 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."
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 "I do not have to believe. I know!"
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," 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.".
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...
(1856-1939) deals with the origins and nature of religious belief in several of his books and essays. Freud regards God as an illusion, based on the infantile need for a powerful father figure; religion, necessary to help us restrain violent impulses earlier in the development of civilization, can now be set aside in favor of reason and science.
Freud's religious background
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."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".
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."Totem and Taboo
In Totem and TabooTotem and Taboo
Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics is a book by Sigmund Freud published in German in 1913 under the title Totem und Tabu: Einige Übereinstimmungen im Seelenleben der Wilden und der Neurotiker...
, published in 1913, Freud analyzes the tendency of primitive tribes to promulgate rules against incest
Incest
Incest is sexual intercourse between close relatives that is usually illegal in the jurisdiction where it takes place and/or is conventionally considered a taboo. The term may apply to sexual activities between: individuals of close "blood relationship"; members of the same household; step...
within groups named for totem
Totem
A totem is a stipulated ancestor of a group of people, such as a family, clan, group, lineage, or tribe.Totems support larger groups than the individual person. In kinship and descent, if the apical ancestor of a clan is nonhuman, it is called a 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
Patricide
Patricide is the act of killing one's father, or a person who kills his or her father. The word patricide derives from the Latin word pater and the Latin suffix -cida...
--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". Freud develops this idea further in Moses and Monotheism, his last book, discussed below.
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."."
The Future of an Illusion
In The Future of an Illusion (1927) 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" He concludes that all religious beliefs are "illusions and insusceptible of proof."Freud then examines the issue of whether, without religion, people will feel "exempt from all obligation to obey the precepts of civilization". 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".
Freud asserts that dogmatic religious training contributes to a weakness of intellect by foreclosing lines of inquiry. He argues that "[I]n the long run nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the contradiction which religion offers to both is all too palpable." The book expressed Freud's "hope that in the future science will go beyond religion, and reason will replace faith in God."
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."
Harold Bloom
Harold Bloom
Harold Bloom is an American writer and literary critic, and is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. He is known for his defense of 19th-century Romantic poets, his unique and controversial theories of poetic influence, and his prodigious literary output, particularly for a literary...
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 that T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...
's criticisms of psychoanalysis. Bloom suggests that psychoanalysis and Christianity
Christianity
Christianity is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus as presented in canonical gospels and other New Testament writings...
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.
Civilization and its Discontents
In Civilization and its DiscontentsCivilization and Its Discontents
Civilization and Its Discontents is a book by Sigmund Freud. Written in 1929, and first published in German in 1930 as Das Unbehagen in der Kultur , it is considered one of Freud's most important and widely read works....
, 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". Freud suggests that the "oceanic feeling", which his friend Romain Rolland
Romain Rolland
Romain Rolland was a French dramatist, novelist, essayist, art historian and mystic who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1915.-Biography:...
had described to him in a letter, is a wish fulfillment, related to the child's egoistic need for protection.
James Strachey
James Strachey
James Beaumont Strachey was a British psychoanalyst, and, with his wife Alix, a translator of Sigmund Freud into English...
, 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". 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.
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?"
Moses and Monotheism
Moses and MonotheismMoses and Monotheism
Moses and Monotheism, 1939 by Sigmund Freud, ISBN 978-0394700144 is a book where Freud hypothesizes that Moses was not Jewish, but actually born into Ancient Egyptian nobility and was perhaps a follower of Akhenaten, an ancient Egyptian monotheist, or perhaps Akhenaten himself...
was Freud's last book, published in 1939, the year of his death. In it, Freud makes certain guesses and assumptions about Moses
Moses
Moses was, according to the Hebrew Bible and Qur'an, a religious leader, lawgiver and prophet, to whom the authorship of the Torah is traditionally attributed...
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 a reaction formation
Reaction formation
In psychoanalytic theory, reaction formation is a defensive process in which anxiety-producing or unacceptable emotions and impulses are mastered by exaggeration of the directly opposing tendency.-Theory:...
revered him and became irrevocably committed to the monotheistic idea he represented.
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:.
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.
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."
Responses and criticisms
In a 1949 essay in Commentary magazine, Irving KristolIrving Kristol
Irving Kristol was an American columnist, journalist, and writer who was dubbed the "godfather of neoconservatism"...
says that Freud correctly exposed the irrationality of religion, but has not substituted anything beyond "a mythology of rational despair".
In a 1950 book entitled Christianity and Freud, Benjamin Gilbert Sanders draws parallels between the theory of psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis is a psychological theory developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis has expanded, been criticized and developed in different directions, mostly by some of Freud's former students, such as Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav...
and Christian religion, referring to Jesus Christ as "the Great Psychiatrist" and Christians' love for Christ as "a more positive form of the Transference."
Karen Armstrong
Karen Armstrong
Karen Armstrong FRSL , is a British author and commentator who is the author of twelve books on comparative religion. A former Roman Catholic nun, she went from a conservative to a more liberal and mystical faith...
notes in A History of God
A History of God
A History of God is a best-selling book by Karen Armstrong. It details the history of the three major monotheistic traditions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Also included in the book are Buddhism and Hinduism...
that "not all psychoanalysts agreed with Freud's view of God," citing Alfred Adler
Alfred Adler
Alfred Adler was an Austrian medical doctor, psychotherapist, and founder of the school of individual psychology. In collaboration with Sigmund Freud and a small group of Freud's colleagues, Adler was among the co-founders of the psychoanalytic movement as a core member of the Vienna...
, 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 "I do not have to believe. I know!"
Tony Campolo
Tony Campolo
Dr. Anthony "Tony" Campolo is an American pastor, author, sociologist, and public speaker known for challenging evangelical Christians by illustrating how their faith can offer solutions in a world of complexity. With his liberal political and social attitudes, he has been a major proponent for...
, 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," 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.".