|
needs (and this seems extremely far-fetched), still these contacts and impressions would not constitute good psychoanalytic evidence.
Perhaps Freud got his knowledge of religion from reading theology? Again the evidence is negative, especially with respect to orthodox (whether Christian or Jewish) religious thought—the only kind of belief he was interested in. With the exception of Feuerbach and similarly secularized writers such as Renan, who were functioning as critics of traditional belief (a position Freud would adopt as his own), there is no evidence that he ever read religious writers at all, and still less evidence that he read any who defined and defended the traditional Christian faith. Instead, Freud’s many references to things Christian and Jewish, which have been cited so often in earlier chapters, came from two major sources: his own youthful reading of the Philippson Bible (Old Testament), and his immersion in a kind of ambivalent “Christianized” literature, such as Faust, Paradise Lost, and Merejkowski’s The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci. His quotations from the New Testament could easily have been picked up from these latter sources and from the widespread use of such phrases in the culture at large during this period. There is no evidence that he actually read the New Testament itself. Freud often took quotations from secondary sources. For example, his quotations from the Aeneid as in the motto of The Interpretation of Dreams, and in his famous analysis of the aliquis slip, both very likely came from a secondary source.24 Freud’s report that he couldn’t read Hebrew—along with the considerable evidence already cited of Freud’s antipathy to the Jewish rellgion—means that he was never seriously involved in the reading of Jewish scripture or of the commentaries, which would have presented to him a mature, intelligent basis for evaluating traditional Judaism. It might seem conceivable that Freud’s insights into religion came from his own personal religious experiences. The answer is negative: Neither I nor any other biographer has found evidence supporting the possibility of any obvious and significant religious experience in Freud’s life. On the contrary, in The Future of an Illusion, Freud explicitly complained: “If the truth of religious doctrines is dependent on inner experience which bears witness to that truth, what is one to do about the many people who do not have this rare experience?”25 Freud was including himself in this category. In fact, the evidence supports the notion that Freud was in many respects afraid of religious experience, and to some extent took steps to avoid it. It has been mentioned more than once in this book that Freud did not like music—an almost unheard-of attitude for an educated and sophisticated man in Vienna, a city that was in important respects the very center of Western musical achievement. It was a great Mozart center; the birthplace of Schubert; and the home of non-Viennese im- |