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concepts of father and God. The logic of such a rejection is explicit in such a statement as this:
Psycho-analysis has made us familiar with the intimate connection between the father-complex and belief in God; it has shown us that a personal God is psychologically nothing other than an exalted father, and it brings us evidence every day of how young people lose their religious beliefs as soon as their father’s authority breaks down.41 Here we have in a nutshell Freud’s theory of the psychological basis for loss of belief. And again, as in so many instances, we need only assume that it was true for him and not that it is necessarily true for everyone. Let the father’s power, strength, or authority be undermined, and God no longer seems credible—this is hardly a sound rational basis for atheism. However, the psychological basis of atheism receives a still clearer expression within the Freudian system. Atheism and the Oedipus Complex42The most powerful expression of Freud’s rejection of his father is to be observed in the concept of the Oedipus complex. In this motivational system, which is at the very heart of psychoanalysis, Freud proposed hatred of the father and the desire to kill him, in fact or in fantasy; he saw this proposed complex as the source of countless dreams, wishes, and illusions. And, certainly, Freud’s own neurotic tendencies were intimately bound up with his father. Now one striking thing about Oedipal motivation is that, in postulating it, Freud was inadvertently proposing a powerful, unconscious, universal, childish, and neurotic wish for the death not only of the father but also of his symbolic surrogate, God. As a consequence, Freud himself has given us the conceptual basis for understanding atheism as Oedipal wish-fulfillment. By Freud’s own definition, atheism is an illusion like any other—a belief where “wish-fulfillment is a prominent factor in its motivation.”43 Freud’s life is a rich testimony to his theory: He was a man so permeated with Oedipal motivation that his atheism was overdetermined. And from Freud’s example, one has reason to suspect that behind many an atheist, agnostic, or skeptic of today lies shame, disappointment, or rage directed at the father. For many people, disbelief in “God the Father” is the closest to revenge that they can get. In the case of Freud, the childhood suffering that burdened him all his life, and with which he obsessively and tenaciously struggled, arouses our sympathy. Sigmund Freud, like Heinrich Heine in his last Lazarus poem, never put down his weapons. Our sympathy for Freud’s struggle |