Freud, Sigmund (1856–1939)

Sigmund Freud was the founder of psychoanalysis, one of the great theoretical contributions to 20th-century Western modernity. Psychoanalysis is simultaneously a theory of mind and of psycho-pathology, a therapeutic method, and a theory of culture. In his works on culture, Freud wrote extensively about religion, but situating Freud within the context of global religion reveals certain contradictions. First, many of Freud's writings are harshly critical of religion. Second, Freud's work, often seen in the tradition of Enlightenment thought, propounds a universal theory of the psyche that implies psychological commonalities across cultures; yet it was conceived in the shadow of European imperialism and, like other disciplines that emerged at around the same time, can be seen to bear the marks of Western ethnocentrism. Nonetheless, both Western and non-Western students of religion have made significant use of Freud's work to understand a variety of the world's religions.

Freud was born in what is now the Czech Republic to a Jewish family that emigrated to Vienna 4 years after his birth. He trained as a neurologist before turning his interest to hysteria and studying with the French neurologists JeanMartin Charcot and Hippolyte Bernheim. After returning to Vienna in the 1890s, he began to treat patients with his newly developing method of free association, and he engaged in his own self-analysis. In 1900, he published The Interpretation of Dreams, and by 1905, he had written several books that set out many of the elements that would remain central to psychoanalysis: the unconscious, infantile sexuality, the Oedipus complex, and the mechanisms by which the conscious mind defends itself against knowledge of the contents of the unconscious.

Although born into a Jewish family and in spite of his abiding identification as Jewish, Freud was himself not religious. He famously called himself a “godless Jew,” and his antipathy toward religion is central to many of his writings on culture. Starting with the essay “Obsessive Acts and Religious Practices” in 1907, where he traced the psychological analogies between obsessional neurosis and religious ritual, calling religion a universal obsessional neurosis, Freud's cultural works detail the human and compensatory nature of religion, although they also display continuous revisions throughout his life. In Totem and Taboo, Freud set out his theory that religion, like civilization itself, arose from the murder of the leader of the first [Page 415]human community—the primal horde—by the leader's own sons. After this primal sacrifice, Freud argued, the sons were so filled with remorse that they internalized the very prohibitions their leader had enforced: prohibitions against the oedipal desires of incest and murder. This remorse also led to the worship of the slain father, creating the beginnings of religion.

In The Future of an Illusion, Freud condemned religion for providing illusions—wish fulfillments—unable to stand the test of reason. In Civilization and Its Discontents, he went on to accept religion as a necessary feature of civilization, one that provided compensation for the strains of living within civilization's constraints yet increased personal guilt in so doing. Freud's approach to religion took a final turn with the posthumously published Moses and Monotheism. This highly speculative and scientifically antiquated work represented religion as the traumatic, repressed events of a people's history: Here, religion has for Freud a psychological history, validity, and function. The guilt that it creates is no longer simply pathological but is now seen to be linked to the production of greater ethical capacities.

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