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with three major subjects, religion, science, and culture; we are concerned here almost entirely with his treatment of religion.
First, a few comments on what Freud was not writing about are in order. The findings and logic of psychoanalysis were not relevant to his discussion of religion here. He explicitly said in a letter to Oskar Pfister: “Let us be quite clear on the point that the views expressed in my book [The Future of an Illusion] form no part of analytic theory [emphasis added]. They are my personal views, which coincide with those of many non-analysts and pre-analysts, but there are certainly many excellent analysts who do not share them.”5 This was, however, Freud’s private message to Pfister; the public impression given by The Future of an Illusion then, as now, is that psychoanalysis somehow supports the atheistic thesis. The Future of an Illusion is not a book in which theology is debated and rationally evaluated. Freud again made this clear: “To assess the truth-value of religious doctrines does not lie in the scope of the present enquiry.”6 Instead, Freud’s concern was with a general psychological interpretation of the motives or wishes that lie behind religious beliefs. Given these two important qualifications, what did Freud say about the underlying psychology of religion? Freud claimed that religious ideas derive from our desires, that they are “born from man’s need to make his helplessness tolerable and built up from the material of memories of the helplessness of his own childhood and the childhood of the human race.”7 Religion thus protects us from our greatest anxieties: from the fear of natural forces, from the threat of injury or injustice inflicted by other men, from the terror of death. Religion provides a higher purpose in life and makes us feel that all is well. In the end, we believe that justice triumphs, because in life after death all evil is punished and good rewarded. The sufferings of this life are thus compensated for. Freud claimed that these ideas are convenient illusions, that these religious “truths” just happen to be exactly what we would want there to be.8 These beliefs, which are given out as teachings, are not precipitates of experience or end-results of thinking: 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—protection through love….9 Freud went on to note, however, that an illusion is not necessarily an error. It is conceivable that an illusion might be true; it is possible that a girl who dreams of a handsome prince may actually meet one, get married, and live happily ever after. (For Freud, we may recall, the Acropolis did turn out to exist!) But as Freud saw it, any idea or belief is an illusion “when a wish-fulfillment is a prominent factor in its motivation.”10 |