Freud, Sigmund

Freud, Sigmund (1856–1938). A major founding figure of psychoanalysis, with strong views on the mainly negative role of religion in human life and society. He had a nomothetic ambition to become the first to uncover laws as invariant as those of Newton, but in his case governing, not cosmic, but psychological behaviour.

Religion, for Freud, emerges as a collective expression of neurosis, and as an attempt on the part of individuals to escape from the realities of a hostile and indifferent universe. Since individuals recapitulate the history of the human race, the phylogenetic and ontogenetic explanations are variations on the same theme, as can be seen in one of his major analyses of religion, Totem und Tabu: Über einige Übereinstimmungen im Seelenleben der Wilden und der Neurotiker (1913; Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Psychic Drives of Savages and Neurotics, 1917): religious solidarity and restraints begin in a primeval rebellion of the sons against the father. In Der Mann Moses … (1939; Moses and Monotheism, 1939), he drew on abandoned speculations of biblical historians to produce a theory of Mosaic religion. In Die Zukunft einer Illusion (1927; The Future of an Illusion, 1928), he made his most explicit attack on the error of humanity in relying on the collective neurosis of religion. Religion rests on an attitude of als-ob, ‘as-if’, in which people seek comfort in a universe which is indifferent to them. They seek it, therefore, in the only place it can be found, in the illusory world of make-believe, in a heaven and God which they project. In a long correspondence with Oskar Pfister (S. Freud/O. Pfister: Briefe 1909–1939, 1963), Freud constantly reviewed his estimate of religion, expressing occasional doubt about detail but not about the fundamentally illusory and neurotic nature of religion. This itself was deeply embedded in his own lifelong fear of death. His account of religion is generally contradicted by evidence, but his outlook and terminology have remained pervasive.