Sigmund Freud is most famous for the psychoanalytic school of thought he founded, but he also took a keen interest in religion. As an adult, Freud considered himself an atheist, but his Jewish background and upbringing played an important role in the development of his ideas. He even wrote several books focused on the topic of religion. Learn more about Freud’s complicated relationship with religion and spirituality.
Freud’s Early Religious Influences
Sigmund Freud was born to Jewish parents in the heavily Roman Catholic town of Freiburg, Moravia. Although he was straightforward about his atheism and believed that religion was something to overcome, he was aware of its powerful influence on identity. He acknowledged that his Jewish heritage, as well as the antisemitism he frequently encountered, had helped shape his personality.
“My language is German. My culture, my attainments are German. I considered myself German intellectually until I noticed the growth of anti-Semitic prejudice in Germany and German Austria. Since that time, I prefer to call myself a Jew,” Freud wrote in 1925.
Religion According to Freud
How did Freud view religion? In some of his well-known writings, he described it as an “illusion,” a type of neurosis, and possibly an effort to gain control.
Religion, Freud believed, was an expression of underlying psychological neuroses and distress—an attempt to gain control over the external world. At various points in his writings, he also suggested that religion is an attempt to control the Oedipal complex (as opposed to the Electra complex), a means of providing structure in social groups, wish fulfillment, an infantile delusion, and a desire to control the outside world.
He wrote several books devoted to the subject, including “Totem and Taboo” (1913), “The Future of an Illusion” (1927), “Civilization and Its Discontents” (1930), and “Moses and Monotheism” (1939).
Notable Quotes
In his “New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis” (1933), Freud wrote: “Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from its readiness to fit in with our instinctual wishful impulses.”
In the book “New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis,” Freud wrote: “Religion is an attempt to master the sensory world in which we are situated by means of the wishful world which we have developed within us as a result of biological and psychological necessities … If we attempt to assign the place of religion in the evolution of mankind, it appears not as a permanent acquisition but as a counterpart to the neurosis which individual civilized men have to go through in their passage from childhood to maturity.”
In “The Future of an Illusion,” Freud wrote, “Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis.”
Freud’s Criticisms of Religion
Although fascinated by religion and spirituality, Freud was quite critical. He critiqued religion for being unwelcoming, harsh, and unloving toward those who are not members of a specific religious group.
In “The Future of an Illusion” (1927), Freud wrote: “Our knowledge of the historical worth of certain religious doctrines increases our respect for them, but does not invalidate our proposal that they should cease to be put forward as the reasons for the precepts of civilization. On the contrary! Those historical residues have helped us to view religious teachings, as it were, as neurotic relics, and we may now argue that the time has probably come, as it does in an analytic treatment, for replacing the effects of repression by the results of the rational operation of the intellect.”
Some of Freud’s strongest critiques appear in “Civilization and Its Discontents”: “The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life.”
Religions, at any rate, have never overlooked the part played in civilization by a sense of guilt. Furthermore—a point which I failed to appreciate elsewhere—they claim to redeem mankind from this sense of guilt, which they call sin.”
Freud on Faith
“It is still more humiliating to discover how a large number of people living today, who cannot but see that this religion is not tenable, nevertheless try to defend it piece by piece in a series of pitiful rearguard actions.”
The Psychoanalytic View
From Freud’s psychoanalytic perspective, religion fulfills the unconscious mind’s need for wish fulfillment. He believed that people choose to believe in God, representing a powerful father figure, to feel secure and absolve themselves of guilt.
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Grubin D. Young Dr. Freud. Public Broadcasting Service.
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Library of Congress. A Word About Antisemitism. In: Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture Exhibition.
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Skoll GR, Maximiliano K. Risks, totems, and fetishes in Marx and Freud. Sincronía. 2012(62):1-27.
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Freud, S., & Freud, S. (1989). The Future of an Illusion (Standard ed). Norton.
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Freud, S., & Strachey, J. (2010). Civilization and Its Discontents. W.W. Norton & Company.
Additional Reading
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Freud S. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. (Strachey J, Freud A, eds.) 24 vols. London: 1953-1964.
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Novak D. On Freud’s theory of law and religion. International Journal of Law and Psychiatry. 2016;48:24-34. doi:10.1016/j.ijlp.2016.06.007
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