Sigmund Freud, well known as the founder of psychoanalysis, was born in 1856 in Freiberg, Moravia. He moved with his family to Vienna, Austria, at the age of four. Freud received a thorough scientific training in his early years and went on to a distinguished career in scientific research, establishing himself as a leading neuropathologist. He made important contributions to the study of the neuron (nerve cell) and wrote influential treatises on aphasia and cerebral palsy. In his later career, Freud labored to establish psychoanalysis as a form of natural science. As a late representative of Enlightenment thinking, Freud joined the issue of the relation between science and religion most directly in his long drawn out debate with Oskar Pfister (1873–1956), a Swiss Lutheran pastor and his devoted friend of many years.

Debate with Pfister

The debate came to a head in Freud's writing of The Future of an Illusion (1927). Pfister took up the challenge and responded in a lengthy article, "The Illusion of the Future" (1928). The inter-change was, in fact, the high point of a dialogue contained in letters exchanged over more than thirty years. The two men differed radically in their assessment of and attitudes toward religious experience and belief. Freud viewed religious beliefs as forms of illusion (if not delusion) and religious experience and practice as universal forms of obsessional neurosis. Freud continually presented himself to Pfister as an unbeliever, a "godless Jew" (1928, p. 170).

The analytic insistence on the resolution of transference, rather than the dependence (as he saw it) of religion on transference in the sense of emptional attachment and dependence, was central in Freud's assessment of religion. In 1928, Freud wrote to Pfister:

The rift, not in analytic, but in scientific thinking which one comes on when the subject of God and Christ is touched on I accept as one of the logically untenable but psychologically only too intelligible irrationalities of life. . . . In contrast to utterances as psychologically profound as "Thy sins are forgiven thee; arise and walk," . . . if the sick man had asked: "How knowest thou that my sins are forgiven?" the answer could only have been: "I, the Son of God, forgive thee." In other words, a call for unlimited transference. And now, just suppose I said to a patient: "I, Professor Sigmund Freud, forgive thee thy sins." What a fool I should make of myself. To the former case, the principle applies that analysis is not satisfied with success produced by suggestion, but investigates the origin of and justification for the transference. (Meng and Freud, pp. 125–126)

Yet, Freud clearly envied the power of religion: "As for the possibility of sublimation to religion, therapeutically I can only envy you. But the beauty of religion certainly does not belong to psychoanalysis. It is natural that at this point in therapy our ways should part, and so it can remain" (Meng and Freud, p. 63).

Freud's argument in The Future of an Illusion was fairly straightforward. In opposition to nature, civilization exacts a heavy price in the form of instinctual renunciation. In addition to prohibitions and privations, imposed externally or internally by the superego, culture proposes certain ideals as its highest achievements. The satisfaction associated with such ideals is basically narcissistic. In this unending struggle between civilization and the forces of nature, religion serves to defend civilization against nature. Thus, "Man's self-regard, seriously menaced, calls for consolation; life and the universe must be robbed of their terrors; moreover his curiosity, moved, it is true, by the strongest practical interest, demands an answer" (1927, p. 16). In their hopelessness, mankind turn the forces of nature into gods with whom they can associate on relatively human terms. But this transformation follows the prototype of the original infantile state of helplessness in relation to one's parents. The gods thus are transformed fathers, who could be both feared and looked to as sources of protection against unknown dangers.

Religious ideas, therefore, are in essence illusions. They are enunciated as dogmatic teachings rather than as the product of experience or of argument and proof. As Freud proclaimed: "They are illusions, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest, and most urgent wishes of mankind. The secret of their strength lies in the strength of those wishes. As we already know, the terrifying impression of helplessness in childhood aroused the need for protection—for protection through love—which was provided by the father; and the recognition that this helplessness lasts throughout life made it necessary to cling to the existence of a father, but this time a more powerful one" (1927, p. 30). Religion, like obsessional neurosis in childhood, becomes a universal obsessional neurosis of humanity, arising out of the Oedipus complex, specifically out of the relationship to the father.

Science and religion

Freud's polemic against religion was cast in the form of a radical opposition between natural science and religion. Religion had failed in making the majority of people happy or, for that matter, in bringing them to a more moral condition of life. Rather it achieved little more than keeping them submissive to religious beliefs and practices. Freud attributed the decline of religion to the rise of natural science. He observed:

We have heard the admission that religion no longer has the same influence on people that it used to. . . . And this is not because its promises have grown less, but because people find them less credible. Let us admit that the reason—though perhaps not the only reason—for this change is the increase of the scientific spirit in the higher strata of human society. Criticism has whittled away the evidential value of religious documents, natural science has shown up the errors in them, and comparative research has been struck by the fatal resemblance between the religious ideas which we revere and the mental products of primitive peoples and times. (1927, p. 38)

Anticipating the grim vision later enunciated in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Freud painted a dire picture of the weakening of the influence of religion on the mass of people. He argued that incestuous and murderous passions would surge to the surface without the suppressive force of religious convictions—"If the sole reason why you must not kill your neighbor is because God has forbidden it and will severely punish you for it in this or the next life—then, when you learn that there is no God and that you need not fear His punishment, you will certainly kill your neighbor without hesitation, and you can only be prevented from doing so by mundane force" (1927, p. 39).

Freud's answer, of course, is to replace religion with science. Since religion has proven so deceitful, misguided, untrustworthy, and oppressive, humankind is obviously better off without it. Moreover, people can do without illusions, and the sooner they abandon their dependence on such infantile illusions, the better off they will be. Moreover, those who abandon such illusions are not without resources or assistance. Their scientific knowledge, which is increasing every day, gives them power to deal with and control their environment, to face the demands of harsh reality more effectively. And, Freud says, "as for the great necessities of Fate, against which there is no help, they will learn to endure them with resignation." (1927, p. 50)

Freud's reply to this imagined argument seems to lack conviction. Certainly, he says, no one has to tell him about the difficulty of avoiding illusions, and perhaps his own hopes, rooted in scientific methodology, are illusory too. But at least his illusions are not, like religious ones, incapable of correction. To that extent, they are not delusions, as religious convictions would be. Finally, he holds out some optimism that people can overcome and free themselves from their neurotic entanglements in virtue of better scientific knowledge, specifically psychoanalysis.

Freud stakes his modest claim for the superiority of the human intellect to religious beliefs:

We may insist as often as we like that man's intellect is powerless in comparison with his instinctual life, and we may be right in this. Nevertheless, there is something peculiar about this weakness. The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing. Finally, after a countless succession of rebuffs, it succeeds. . . . It will presumably set itself the same aims as those whose realization you expect from your God (of course within human limits—so far as external reality, "Ananke," allows it), namely the love of man and the decrease of suffering. (1927, p. 53)

In "The Illusion of the Future," Pfister summarized the Freudian viewpoint in one trenchant sentence: "The God, Logos, hurls the God of religion from the throne and reigns in the realm of necessity, about whose meaning we, in the meantime, do not know the least." (p. 172)

See also PSYCHOLOGY; PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION

WILLIAM. W. MEISSNER, S.J.