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nistic theory is now quite dated and very hard to defend, but during Freud’s lifetime it wielded
enormous influence. Such a scientific position left no place, of course, for religious beliefs or
genuine religious experience; indeed, both were aggressively attacked in the course of the 19th century,
and their divine or supernatural legitimacy was denied by the proponents of this sort of view. Thus, in The
Future of an Illusion Freud attacked religion (especially Christianity) as an illusion, and he
contrasted religion with this kind of science, which Freud believed was no illusion.
Professor Robert Holt has identified in some detail the specific intellectual sources for Freud’s materialist philosophy.82 In addition to Ludwig Feuerbach (mentioned above; see also Chapter Seven), Freud was influenced by W. E. H. Lecky’s (1838-1903) History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe (1865/1955) and Ludwig Büchner’s (1824-1899) very popular Force and Matter (1855/1924). The latter book mixed a kind of hardline materialism and reductionism with hostility to religion. (As Holt points out, it also had its own curious kind of abstract, metaphysical cosmology.) Büchner often quoted Feuerbach and also David Friedrich Strauss (1808-1874), another modernist theologian well known for his attacks on the historicity of Jesus and on supernatural religion. Ernst Renan, a favorite of Breuer, was also part of this 19th-century secular humanistic “theology.”83 I certainly do not deny the skeptical and atheist aspect of Freud’s thought, which is a very legitimate part of the standard interpretation. My goal is to show that alongside of this commonly articulated attitude was another position, in many respects equally powerful but largely unconscious. Even in this period of his life, when Freud (like so many college students) was actively developing his modernist, “no-nonsense” materialistic training and preparing for his career, he showed signs of real ambivalence. For example, in The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud recalled: The…scene…dated from my early student days. There was a discussion in a German students’ club [Freud’s emphasis, here and throughout] on the relation of philosophy to the natural sciences. I was a green youngster, full of materialistic theories, and thrust myself forward to give expression to an extremely one-sided point of view. Thereupon someone who was my senior and my superior, someone who has since then shown his ability as a leader…stood up and gave us a good talking-to: he too, he told us, had fed swine in his youth and returned repentant to his father’s house. I fired up (as I did in the dream) and replied boorishly…that since I now knew that he had fed swine in his youth I was no longer surprised at the tone of his speeches. (In the dream I was surprised at my German nationalist attitude.) There was a general uproar and I was called upon from many sides to withdraw my remarks, but I refused to do so. The man I had insulted was too sensible to look upon the incident as a challenge, and let the affair drop.84 |