It is curious that, in his ambivalence Freud strongly resembled his patient the Wolf-Man. In discussing this case, Freud wrote, “The two opposing currents of feeling which were to rule the whole of his later life, met here in the ambivalent struggle over the question of religion.”170 Or, as Freud put it somewhat differently in a letter to Jung: “My paper on Taboo [Totem and Taboo] is coming along slowly. The conclusion has long been known to me. The source of taboo and hence also of conscience is ambivalence.”171 Freud, so obviously driven to debunk, expose, and denigrate the sacred, was equally—and in his unconscious perhaps more than equally—drawn to religion. Hence, in relation to Christian “taboos,” he gave “simultaneous expression to both currents.”172 Freud’s ambivalence, as we have seen, had a repetitive (indeed, an obsessive) quality. This obsessiveness is an important part of the construction being proposed. Freud’s literary preferences, from Faust to La Peau de Chagrin, were obsessive in their preoccupation with religion and demonic themes. His case histories (such as that of the Wolf-Man) and his essays (such as the ones on Leonardo, Hoffman’s “Sand-Man,” and Haitzmann) were also obsessive, since he returned over and over to the same set of religious issues and continually reworked them: Obsessiveness was expressed in behavioral terms by his repeated visits to Rome. Freud himself clearly connected obsessiveness with involvement in religion, thus confirming this part of our construction about him: “The predilection felt by obsessional neurotics for uncertainty and doubt leads them to turn their thoughts by preference to those subjects upon which all mankind are uncertain and upon which knowledge and judgments must necessarily remain open to doubt.”173 And we are instructed by Freud in his self-diagnosis contained in a letter to Jung: “…I must claim for myself the class ‘obsessive’….”174 Thus it was no accident that Freud, who described himself as an obsessive, also interpreted religion, in one of his major critiques, as a “universal obsessional neurosis.”175 Indeed, whatever the truth about religion may be, one thing is certain: Freud himself had a life-long and neurotic obsession about religion. One final interpretation of Freud’s relationship with religion strongly suggests itself. There was such an overwhelmingly personal quality in Freud’s involvement with religion that one may be compelled to under- |