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This book is an extended biographical essay on Sigmund Freud’s little-known, life-long, deep
involvement with religion, primarily Christianity and in particular Roman Catholicism. This
topic should be of serious interest to at least two major groups of readers. First, there are
those people, among whom I often count myself, who have an interest in or more typically a
fascination with Freud’s life and thought. Such people may love him or hate him-in true
Freudian fashion, they usually do a good deal of both-but they find that in their attempts
to understand and cope with the modern period, there is no denying his centrality, complexity,
and greatness. Such readers, being generally familiar with the large literature on Freud,
need an explanation of why this new book is worthy of their attention. My reply is that
there is at present no other systematic, biographical treatment of Freud’s relationship with
Christianity, in spite of its importance. Beyond that, all I can do is promise that much of
the material and most of the interpretive framework presented here is new and, I hope, challenging.
The other group of potential readers consists of those, among whom I always count myself, who are interested in psychology and religion and in the great conflict that has raged between them for the last 100 years and more. In this struggle, Freud’s critique of religion certainly has been the best known and the most widely influential. Hence, it is no surprise these days to hear the comment, as I did recently, “Didn’t Freud disprove religion?” However overstated and oversimplified, such a remark captures the general impact of Freud’s thought for countless educated people today. But how can a biographically focused treatment of Freud be addressed to readers concerned with the larger issue of the conflict between psychology and religion? Here it is necessary to recall that Freud’s critique was a psychological one. That is, he argued that religion is untrust- |