Note: to avoid misunderstanding, I believe Freud is a figure of huge cultural and historical importance, and I sympathise with his project of trying to devise a completely secular psychology building on Darwinian premises. Many of his ideas about sexuality as a central motive force, about the role of the unconscious in every aspect of mental life, how repressing instinctual drives can lie behind certain types of mental illness, his development of the talking cure, these and numerous other ideas have become part of the culture and underlie the way many people live and think about themselves today. However, I strongly disapprove of Freud’s gender stereotyping of men and women, his systematic sexism, his assumption of Western superiority over ‘primitive’ peoples, and so on. Despite the revolutionary impact of his thought, Freud carried a lot of Victorian assumptions into his theory. He left a huge and complicated legacy which needs to be examined and picked through with care. My aim in these reviews is not to endorse his opinions but to summarise his writings, adding my own thoughts and comments as they arise.

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1. The Future of An Illusion (1927)

Freud posits a parallel between the development of a child and the development of civilisation. In individuals you get a progression through helpless infant, wilful adolescent and mature adult. By an analogous evolution society can be said to develop through stages, from savage tribes with beliefs in all kinds of spirits; to semi-civilised societies who believe in one God; then onto modern society, rational, scientific and atheist.

1. Civilisation is based on, indeed, is to some extent defined as, the amount of instinctual repression it can achieve. Some people (i.e. communists) may wish for a redistribution of wealth so that everyone will work joyfully and creatively together. Unlikely. People don’t like work; people prefer indulging their instincts in pleasurable pursuits. Civilisation means coercing people into wealth-creating work and making them repress their instinctual desires.

2. Society organises instinctual repression. The upper classes repress their instincts in order to provide a ‘moral’ role-model for the workers. The workers are ambivalent towards this model of rational self-repression, partly resenting it because they are clearly not getting as much wealth and power as the upper classes; but allying with their rulers if the latter identify threats from outsiders, for example, the ‘barbarians’ for ancient Greece or Rome, or ‘outsider’ groups such as Jews in 20th century societies (or refugees and immigrants in contemporary Britain). But all sectors of society can be united by certain artistic ideals (in the sense that art is a sublimation of our instinctual wishes). A shared art can help unite people in their ideal.

(N.B. Freud wrote this during the heroic age of Bolshevik propaganda – 1927 – and anticipated many of the aesthetic theories of the Nazis, namely to unite the Volk in worship of high ideals while focusing anti-social energy onto outsider groups like the Jews.)

3. Primitive man is paralysed with fear in face of the horrors of existence, the arbitrariness of disease, famine, catastrophe, death and so on. He peoples the world with spirits who he tries to relate to in the same way he relates to those around him i.e. family, chief, slaves etc. As mankind develops, so does this primitive pantheism, so that the many spirits and their functions become concentrated into a king of the gods and, eventually, into one figure, one God, ruler of a totally controlled Providence, in charge of divine justice, deciding who has been good and will be rewarded etc. Naturally, whoever thought up this monotheism consider themselves to be The One People, the Chosen People (i.e. the Jews).

4. Freud reminds the reader of the theory he outlined in Totem and Taboo 15 years earlier. There he took a hint from Darwin about the possibility that early man lived in hordes, a band of brothers borne by a harem of mothers owned and inseminated by one semi-divine Father. In Freud’s fantasy of ‘primitive’ society the brothers rose up in rebellion, overthrew the ruling Father, killed him and ate him in a communal meal deliberately designed to implicate everyone in the guilt. This ‘historical’ fact is what lies behind the practice found among so many cultures – the worship of a totem animal which is superstitiously revered all year round, except for the one holy day when it is executed and ritually eaten. (In fact, no history or anthropology has come anywhere near confirming Freud’s fantasy of this primal parricide, which is generally discredited.)

Freud then highlights the continuity between his explanation of religion as a protection for the helpless savage from the cruel forces which surround him, and modern-day religious belief.

5. Freud lists the reasons our parents and priests give for believing religion:

1. it is handed down from time immemorial
2. there are many proofs
3. in any case, you’re forbidden to discuss it

In fact 2) is demolished because religious belief is so riddled with contradictions and falsehoods, for example, the contradictions in the Bible, the explosion of the Genesis myths by archaeology and geology and so on. Some Christians say, ‘I believe precisely because it is absurd’ but if that is the case, why not believe any old absurdity and fantasy? The fact is that religious people may differ in details of theology or ritual but overlap considerably in their basic, primeval wishes – to be consoled, protected, assured of life after death.

Spiritualists try and persuade us of the immortality of the soul but how pitiful is the transparent egotism of such a wish, the wish to live forever, to deny the upsetting reality of death and extinction.

6. Religion is an illusion: an illusion is a belief incorporating a large amount of wish-fulfillment. We all want a Big Daddy to hide from us the desolation and heartbreak of reality, to pick us up and dust us off and make things better. Religious beliefs cannot be proved or refuted, and this is clearly what gets Freud’s goat about religious people – they are so dishonest. They have no intellectual discipline but use whatever tools lie to hand – logic till that runs out, absurdity till that won’t serve, the strength of tradition till that is proved to be largely false, and then the testimony of personal experience which can’t be proved or disproved – they will do anything to cling onto their pitifully childish wishes: Yes, I will live forever; Yes, Daddy loves me, totally, completely; Yes, all the injustices I suffer now are recorded and will be set right in the Afterlife.

Even a bunch of ‘savages’ ought to be embarrassed by the childishness of all this, let alone so-called ‘civilised’ men.

7. ‘Ah but’ (says The Voice of The Believer, which Freud invents to play Devil’s advocate), ‘it is:

1. dangerous to undermine religion since this will lead to anarchy
2. cruel to deprive people of the illusions that sustain them

Now these are good points which Freud doesn’t really rebut. He concedes that that religion has achieved much, historically, by making civilization possible (i.e. focussing people’s anarchic wishes and fears onto one controllable God) but moves on swiftly to point out how, after thousands of years of its hegemony, just look around at the misery, injustice and inhumanity which still plague us. Far from ensuring moral behaviour, religion has in fact made many scandalous concessions to the weakness of human nature, for example, the rigmarole of confession and penance and masses for dead relatives, and so on.

But fortunately, in Freud’s view, the spirit of Science is now abroad: we live in dangerous times and pretty soon the repressed masses are going to realise that the sanctions against rebellion underpinned by religion have evaporated. So if we want to keep order in society, we have to do something about the fact that religion is collapsing and have to establish a firmer foundation for law and morality than this dying system – solid, secular ethics.

8. By basing the undoubtedly wise injunction ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’ exclusively on God’s authority, along with a host of other restrictions and laws, we risk the collapse of these injunctions so vital to civilisation when religion itself collapses, as it inevitably will, before the onslaught of science.

Better to be honest. Religion is ‘true’ (just like dreams and neurotic symptoms) insofar as it tells us a psychologically true story in symbolic terms (for example, the central event of the sacrifice and cannibalism of the Father as depicted in Totem and Taboo is psychologically true depiction of the Oedipus Complex which Freud claims every male human experiences). But now, says Freud, it’s time to cast symbols aside and face the facts, to move into the scientific – or adult – phase of civilization.

9. The Voice of the Believer says this is dangerous talk because it is naive to think that Reason can replace Religion as the glue binding Society together. Look at the French Revolution which tried just this and catastrophically failed.

Once again, Freud doesn’t quite refute this good point. Instead he says the reason to be sceptical about any triumph of Reason is because so many people’s adult intellects are weakened, and this is because:

1. their instinctual sex life is so repressed that they become obsessed and/or ill
2. as children they are force-fed so much illogical nonsense under threat of hellfire

No, says Freud, we must take the risk, we must draw up a plan for modern education which omits religion. It may take a while for the reform to take affect (he cites the slow progress of Prohibition in the USA, 1920 to 1933) but it will be worth it to build the just, unrepressed, scientific society of the future.

Instead of wasting our energy on vain hopes of an afterlife, let’s build a New Jerusalem on earth ‘by concentrating all our liberated energies into life on earth.’ Freud expresses the ‘hope that in the future science will go beyond religion, and reason will replace faith in God’.

10. The Voice of Religion says:

1. you are trying to replace a tried and tested illusion with an untried one, and
2. religion unites all levels of society from labourer to intellectual. What else can do this?

Once again Freud answers his own question unconvincingly by resorting to the relatively small example of the help he has been able to give individual patients in coming to terms with their illnesses. Freud hopes that psychoanalysis can extend that help to society at large.

This is, to put it mildly, quite a big hope…

Thoughts

Given Freud’s lifelong animus against religion, it’s surprising that, when he finally got round to writing a complete book on the subject, it turned out to be such a surprisingly bad and unsystematic text. It trots through various arguments for atheism, buttressed by bits of psychoanalytic theory, but is surprisingly ramshackle and unconvincing.

For me, the Voice of the Believer which he creates in order to dramatise the text, is much more persuasive, especially when you consider that, as Freud was writing, some European nations stood poised to experiment with just the sort of non-religious, ‘scientific’ ideologies to bind society together which Freud appears to recommend: Stalin’s Russia and Nazi Germany.

Obviously, Freud wasn’t a Nazi or a Bolshevik, but both those ideologies claimed to have ‘scientific’ solutions to society’s problems, circa 1927, which just goes to show what a slippery term ‘science’ is, just as liable to ideological manipulation and distortion as the ‘religion’ he so simple-mindedly attacks.

And then, looking back with the benefit of hindsight from 2023, it’s clear that, despite with all the gee whizz technology we in the West have invented, if you look at the world as a whole, religious fundamentalism (Muslim and Hindu, in particular) and irrational nationalisms (Russia, Turkey, Brazil), are on the rise almost everywhere.

It is Freud’s hopes for a rational, secular and scientific future which seem naive and superficial.

2. Oskar Pfister’s The Illusion of A Future: A Friendly Disagreement with Professor Sigmund Freud (1928)

Freud wrote The Future of an Illusion in 1927 partly with his friend and devout Christian, Oskar Pfister, in mind. The following year Pfister wrote a pamphlet refuting Freud’s points, The Illusion of a Future, which Freud welcomed (dissent was OK as long as fundamental allegiance to The Movement remained unquestioned).

Pfister summarises Freud’s critique of religion in The Future of an Illusion, thus:

1. Religion is a universal obsessional neurosis based on the Oedipus Complex.
2. Religion comprises a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality.
3. Religion is hostile to free thought.
4. Religion has failed as a guardian of civilisation.

Pfister’s rebuttals

1. Undoubtedly religious belief can include a neurotic component. Undoubtedly early religious systems were based on ‘primitive’ mental states. Undoubtedly religious belief in its earliest phase was bound up with the repression of instinctual drives accompanied by neurotic components. But that doesn’t disprove the validity of belief itself.

Freud oversimplifies to say the same Oedipal complex lies at the bottom of all religious belief. Can such a simple explanation really explain the religion of the totemists, the social-ethical monotheism of the Israelites, the Aten-belief of the Egyptians, the piety of the conquistadors, and so on?

In contrast to the many repressive elements of primitive religious belief, Pfister sets the uniquely unrepressed and liberating belief of reformed Christianity, and above all, the ethical achievement of Jesus’s commandment of Love.

Jesus overcame the collective neurosis of his people according to good psychoanalytic practice in that he introduced love – morally complete love – into the centre of life.

For Pfister, Jesus was the first psychoanalyst. Therefore Freud, insofar as he is following in Jesus’s footsteps, is a good Christian!

Whoever has fought with such immense achievements for the truth and argues for the salvation of love, as you have [Pfister’s book is directly addressed to Freud], is a true servant of God according to Protestant standards.

For Pfister Protestantism is the reverse of Freud’s neurotic, repressed illusion: it is the blossoming of man into his full biological destiny of love.

It is misleading of Freud to write his natural history of the development of religion in such a way as to tar Christian belief with the brush of primitive animism etc. The entire point of Christianity is that Jesus represents a triumph over the irrational compulsions of the Old Law, the superstitious repressions of the Old Testament, and its replacement with a new dispensation of brotherly love and love of God.

2. Undoubtedly there is a large element of wish-fulfilment in much religious experience. Pfister points out that Freud is indebted to the pioneering ideas of Ludwig Feuerbach (1804 to 1872) and his psychologising of religion; it was Feuerbach who first demonstrated that much theology is disguised anthropology and religion a dream.

But, for a start, many atheists are governed just as much by wish-fulfilment as believers; and their compulsion to disbelief, their atheism, is no more than their Oedipal wish to do away with the Father. Wishes are common to all mankind, as psychoanalysis shows. Pfister agrees with Freud that the moral progress of mankind consists of the overcoming of egotistical wishes: where he differs is in insisting that Jesus enjoins the highest form of overcoming egotism.

The gentleness and humility, the self-denial and rejection of the hoarding of wealth, the surrender of one’s life for the highest moral values, in short the whole way of living that he who was crucified at Golgotha demanded of the apostles, is diametrically opposed to the appetites of human nature.

Consider the Lord’s prayer. It embodies the overcoming of everything egotistical. Freud, by implication, is attacking a Judaic, a Mosaic religion, based on the jealous God of the Old Testament and operating through fear. Not Pfister’s God of liberation through love.

Pfister goes onto the attack to say that there is in fact a huge element of wish-fulfilment in science. The history of science is an unceasing struggle against anthropomorphisms. This was being highlighted at the time these books were being written by quantum physics and the splitting of the atom. Now we know that reality is textured and fissured in complicated, sometimes incomprehensible ways: to continue to see colours as colours not frequencies, to see this table as solid and not a buzzing mass of particles, these could be said to be wishes for the world to remain stable and meaningful despite the strict testimony of science.

Science and philosophy have to take into account the experiential, the phenomenological. In order to function in the world we make leaps beyond what science can now prove: this is not wish-fulfilment, it is being human.

Nor is Religion inflexible. After some resistance (and hasn’t psychoanalysis shown that resistance is a common human quality?) religion has adapted to Copernicus and Evolution. And so it will assimilate Freud’s insights as easily.

3. Is religion hostile to thought? No, says Pfister. On the contrary, his brand of Protestantism encourages freedom of thought whenever possible.

We calm frightened persons who are experiencing a crisis of belief with the assurance that God loves the sincere doubter and that a belief made more secure through thought is more valuable than one which has simply been taken over and taught.

Contrary to Freud’s claim that religion has stifled thought, consider the great thinkers who were Christians. Descartes, Newton, Faraday, Pasteur, Leibnitz, Pascal, Lincoln, Gladstone, Bismarck, Kant, Hegel, Goethe et al were all Christians; did belief stop them from thinking new and original thoughts? No. Look at Einstein who, through brilliant scientific achievement, has come to believe that the universe has a design.

4. Freud claims that religion has held the field for thousands of years as a civiliser of mankind and look at the mess we’re still in, so now – says Freud – it’s Science’s turn. Pfister agrees that there is much to abhor in the contemporary world. But it is just silly to blame religion for this. Religion is and always has been: ‘not a police force that conserves, but a leader and beacon toward true civilization from our sham civilization.’

Religion should bring forth the greatest achievements in art and science; should fill the lives of all people, even the poorest, with the greatest treasures of truth, beauty and love; should help to overcome the real stresses of life; should pave the way for new, more substantive and genuine forms of social life, and thus call into being a higher, inwardly richer humanity, which corresponds more closely to the true claims of human nature and of ethics than our much-praised uncivilisation.

Pfister then moves on to the offensive to attack Freud’s scientism (defined as ‘the belief that science and the scientific method are the best or only way to render truth about the world and reality’). Freud (optimistically) writes that Science will steadily reveal the truth of the world to us and that the advance of intellect will in time reconcile us to the hard facts of existence.

We believe that it is possible for scientific work to gain some knowledge about the reality of the world by means of which we can increase our power and in accordance with which we can arrange our life.
(The Future of an Illusion)

Pfister replies that this vision is breath-takingly naive. Freud sidesteps all the epistemological questions which have dogged science, questions about the ‘reality’ of the outside world on which we conduct our experiments, and the nature of the knowledge we acquire about it.

On the one hand Freud’s naive faith in the reality of external appearances has been hugely undermined by recent (1920s) science, which has consisted precisely in dissolving appearances: optics dissolves colour into frequencies, physics dissolves solids into whirling worlds of atoms, and atoms themselves disappear into smaller entities which are both particles and waves, at the same time. So Pfister accuses Freud of being a philosophical novice:

Natural science without metaphysics doesn’t exist. The world is accessible to us only through our intellectual make-up and not through the senses alone. Our categories of thought, whether one considers them according to Kant’s method or some other way, always play a part. Therefore we must engage in criticism of knowledge. We need concepts like cause and effect, although they have been discovered to have their origins in anthropomorphisms, we need molecules and atoms [though they are now realised to be artificial constructs]. Even the measuring and weighing has to do with abstractions for numerical concepts are, like all concepts, abstract. Philosophy, which begins as soon as experience ends, extends into the empirical sciences and whoever doesn’t seriously come to grips with philosophical problems will do so in an amateur confused way.

So, according to Pfister: 1) Freud’s deliberate ignorance of philosophy seriously undermines his understanding of what science is and how it proceeds. But 2) given that Freud’s ‘science’ is a rather simple-minded, uncritical concept, how can we believe Freud’s predictions of a future world ruled by it?

Thus I don’t know through Freud’s generally accessible concept of science how far knowledge extends, what degree of reliability it can establish and what opportunities are allotted to it. How can I know if the extension of power through knowledge means an increase in happiness for humanity?….

Is it unthinkable that a civilisation that is guided only by science will succumb to wild passions after the World War has revealed to us the barbarism lurking in the depths of nations? Has it been settled so definitely that progress in the sciences until now has increased the sum total of human joy in life? Is it certain that we are happier than we were 100 years ago? What will become of the most beautiful characteristics of technology when they are forced into the service of the inhuman hunger for money, of human cruelty, of inhuman dissipation?

(Very prophetic in the light of the uses science was shortly to be put to in the Soviet Union, in Nazi Germany, and in the countries who developed and dropped the atomic bomb.)

Pfister then delivers a sustained assault on the implications of Freud’s narrow scientism: human beings are not just thinking machines, they make and feel and judge. Setting up rational Science as the great shibboleth is throwing out everything which makes human existence glorious and humane: the great achievements in art, in poetry, in philosophy, in architecture; the entire realm of aesthetics and the judgement of beauty; the realm of ethics which must guide us through all the decisions of a lifetime.

Freud seems to think that knowing something gives us control over it and that therefore Science will provide the rational mind with everything it needs to rule its life. This is a demonstrably silly idea. What’s more, it is subverted by the very discoveries Freud himself has made about the vast amount of human behaviour which is subject to irrational determination, to unconscious motivation.

For Pfister Religion, not Science, offers the best means of overcoming these instinctual drives and determinants, of arriving at the full freedom and self-determination offered by Jesus.

A positivistic Science such as Freud promotes cannot begin to offer the foundations for morality, for art, for any sensible guidance on how to live our lives. Psychoanalysis can restore the overdetermined subject to his or her proper autonomy, but the big decisions in life still lay all before them and science alone is nowhere nearly enough of a guide.

Conclusion

Pfister summarises his case: Isn’t Freud’s scientism every bit as much of a wish-fulfilment, of an illusion, as the simple-minded version of faith he ascribes to religious believers?

Freud’s airy visions of the future triumph of his vague, ill-defined ‘Science’ are a limp wish next to the solidity of the science of the human heart which he has developed. And Pfister delivers his punchline: In his social and religious writings, then, Freud is labouring under ‘the illusion of a future’ i.e. a naive, utopian belief in a future where human beings are governed by reason and science – as obvious a wish-fantasy as anything Freud attributes to believers.

3. Psychoanalysis and Faith: The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Oskar Pfister

Oskar Pfister was a Swiss pastor who was introduced to Freud’s writings by Jung in 1909. Freud and Pfister exchanged letters between 1909 and 1937.

Pfister – born in 1873, the same year Freud entered University – was the youngest of four sons of a Swiss pastor. His father died when Pfister was three and he was afflicted with a lifelong sense of loss and a search for love. After attending university he trained in theology and took charge of his first congregation in 1902. Repelled by the word-spinning of traditional theology Pfister looked for a more practical way of helping the souls in his charge. When Jung introduced him to Freud’s work in 1909 he became a convert and from that moment never wavered in his belief in the insights and usefulness of psychoanalysis, writing books on technique, pastoral care and pedagogy up to his death in 1956.

When Jung left Freud in 1913 and then the Swiss psychoanalysts rebelled against the founder, Pfister stayed loyal. But Pfister never wavered either from his Christian faith, and in the letters and in the two pamphlets, Future of an Illusion and Illusion of a Future Freud and Pfister carried out a private and public debate about psychoanalysis’s implications for religion. Only some of their correspondence has been published. In among a good deal of chat about books, congresses and the spread of the Psychoanalytic Movement there are exchanges on religion. Here are some highlights:

Pfister sends Freud an outline of how he treats adolescents. Freud says analysis consists in two stages: the release of tension and the sublimation of instinctual drives. To release tension in his patients is relatively easy and helped, Freud says, by their irreligion and by the analyst’s openness to sexuality. Freud says Pfister is lucky to have religion to help him with the second part of the process.

Freud: ‘In itself, psychoanalysis is neither religious nor non-religious but an impartial tool which both priest and layman can use in the service of the sufferer.’

Pfister says there’s little difference between them in views on sexual morality. The Reformation was, after all, an analysis of Catholic sexual repression, imperfectly carried through. Pfister sees himself now at the forefront of a further evangelical movement towards the liberation of love. He is working for better education, better social conditions, a healthier moral outlook.

Freud agrees with the description of himself as ‘a sexual protestant’.

Freud ironically asks why none of the pious discovered psychoanalysis, why was it left to a godless Jew? Pfister replies that he doesn’t regard Freud as a Jew at all, but in his emphasis on the healing power of love, says of Freud, ‘A truer Christian never was.’ Anna Freud interpreted this as Pfister’s inability to accept Freud’s militant atheism. But then, Anna would say that. You can read Pfister’s Illusion of a Future as a (persuasive) attempt to incorporate Freud into a Christian tradition of love.

Pfister quotes Plato to Freud: ‘The art of healing is knowledge of the body’s loves and he who is able to distinguish between the good and bad kinds, and is able to bring about a change, so that the body acquires one kind of love instead of the other, and is able to impart love to those in whom there is none is the best physicians.’

Freud perceptively points out that psychoanalysis can only catch on in Protestant countries. No surprise that its first foreign conquest was Protestant Switzerland, with son-of-a-pastor Jung and son-of-a-pastor Pfister. Whereas it had hardly made any headway in arch-Catholic Austria. Cf Protestant England where it caught on up to a point, and Puritan America, where it became wildly popular.

Pfister critiques The Future of an Illusion by saying it is too simplistic. If there are contradictions in the religious world-view, why doesn’t Freud refer to the many theologians who have attempted new syntheses?

‘Your substitute for religion is basically the idea of 18th century Enlightenment in proud modern guise.’

How awful if the aim of Freud’s therapy is to bring people into ‘the dreadful icy desolation’ of a godless stoicism. Pfister, by contrast, tries to bring people through therapy to a love of life, a life of love.

Freud replies by saying that he wrote Future of an Illusion as his own opinion; his personal views on religion form no essential part of psychoanalysis (shrewd politics here, from Freud). The book only really contains one argument: religion is a means of sublimating instinctual drives; it is wish-fulfilment.

Freud regards the icy waste of atheism as beyond the reach of most analysands; most will have to sublimate their needs into higher forms – art, religion etc. (Note the implication that Freud’s atheism is in some sense heroic, beyond the reach of most mortals).

Pfister suggests that Freud’s militant atheism is due to his having been brought up round arch-Catholics (not least his Catholic nurse, who terrified the infant Freud with visions of hell and was then sacked for theft, leaving him with an indelibly poor opinion of Catholics).

Pfister assures Freud that Freud’s great god Science is just as full of contradictions as Religion and, what’s worse, it’s continually changing. Moreover, look at the great minds who have been believers – a counterthrust to Freud who had said, ‘Look at the great minds who have been twisted and distorted by religious repression’.

Freud says his one big argument against religion is, ‘How the devil do you reconcile all that we experience and have to expect in this world with your assumption of a moral world order?’ It is a restatement of the age-old, single biggest objection to belief in a caring God, the so-called Problem of Pain. Freud writes:

I do not know if you have detected the secret link between the Lay Analysis and the Illusion. In the former I wish to protect analysis from the doctors and in the latter from the priests. I should like to hand it over to a profession which does not yet exist, a profession of lay curers of souls who need not be doctors and should not be priests.

Pfister replies that it’s wrong to forbid priests to practice psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis purifies and refines art, philosophy and religion.

Freud: The essence of religion is the pious illusion of a providence and a moral world order, which are in conflict with reason. It becomes clear that Freud’s Number One problem is with the idea of a divine Providence ruling over everything and ensuring its followers peace, health and happiness. For him, this simply does not exist and people who pretend it does are giving in to infantile wishes. Ethics are not based on an external world order but on the inescapable exigencies of human existence.

On receiving a copy of Civilisation and its Discontents Pfister says: Freud is a biological conservative, Pfister a biological progressive. In the biological theory of evolution Pfister sees a progression upwards. Pfister reads Freud’s concept of the Death Drive, Thanatos, as not an instinct but a slackening of the master life-force, Eros. Civilisation aspires upwards.

Freud thinks Mind is special. But, at the end of the day, it is only an infinitesimally small part of Nature. Would Nature really miss ‘Mind’ if it was snuffed out? Only if you argue that Mind is the point, the purpose of Nature i.e. that the world was created as a garden for mankind, either in Christian or Jewish or Muslim belief. Freud looks coldly at the evidence and thinks such a belief is childish.

Pfister tells Freud that just because the ego-ideal (i.e. the ‘conscience’) may be based on an introjection of parental demands doesn’t diminish its value. Just because Freud demonstrates how even the highest products of the mind develop from the basest instincts doesn’t invalidate those highest products – art, religion, morality – in their own terms.

Morality is vital to physical and psychological health. Immoralism leads to anarchy and unhappiness. Morality is a kind of mental hygiene; it seems designed to keep mankind well. Pfister tries to persuade Freud that he himself lives a deeply moral, kind and loving life, despite all his attempts to deny it.

Right to the end of their correspondence, Pfister and Freud seem to be talking at cross-purposes, arguing past each other.

Thoughts

The difference between the two thinkers is they start from different premises. Freud has the panoramic view and Pfister the humanistic. Freud’s imagination roams across all of human history and across all the modern world. Makes you suspect that there is something in the panoramic imagination which predisposes a person to finding the miserable and the wretched aspects of human existence.

On the other hand Pfister, starting from the wishes and desires of the individual, our need for love, our creativity and imagination, produces a far more optimistic world-view.

Maybe all people who view human beings sub specie aeternitatis – possibly the great majority of scholars and intellectuals – are drawn to a pessimistic view,  whereas particularists, people interested in the trials and triumphs of the individual, tend towards a more optimistic view of life. Take the striking example of Bruno Bettelheim who went through Auschwitz but retained a faith in the improvability of ‘the informed heart’.

4. A religious experience (1927)

This an exchange of letters between Freud and an American doctor in 1927.

In the autumn of 1927 G.S Viereck, a German-American journalist who had paid me a welcome visit, published an account of a conversation with me, in the course of which he mentioned my lack of religious faith and my indifference on the subject of survival after death. This ‘interview’ as it was called, was widely read and brought me, among others, the following letter from an American physician:

“… What struck me most was your answer to the question whether you believe in a survival of the personality after death. You are reported as having said: I give no thought to the matter. I am writing now to tell you of an experience that I had in the year I graduated at the university of X.

“One afternoon while I was passing through the dissecting room my attention was attracted to a sweet-faced dear old woman who was being carried to the dissecting-table. This sweet-faced woman made such an impression on me that a thought flashed up in my mind: There is no God; if there were a God he would not have allowed this dear old woman to be brought into the dissecting room.

“When I got home that afternoon the feeling I had had at the sight in the dissecting-room had determined me to discontinue going to church. The doctrines of Christianity had before this been the subject of doubts in my mind. While I was meditating on this matter a voice spoke to my soul that ‘I should consider the step I was about to take’. My spirit replied to this inner voice by saying, ‘If I knew of a certainty that Christianity was truth and the Bible was the Word of God, then I should accept it.’

“In the course of the next few days God made it clear to my soul that the Bible was His Word, that the teachings about Jesus Christ were true, and that Jesus was our only hope. After such a clear revelation I accepted the Bible as God’s Word and Jesus Christ as my personal Saviour. Since then God has revealed Himself to me by many infallible proofs. I beg you as a brother physician to give thought to this most important matter, and I can assure you, if you look into this subject with an open mind, God will reveal the truth to your soul, as He did to me and to multitudes of others.”

I sent a polite answer, saying that I was glad to hear that this experience had enabled him to retain his faith. As for myself, God had not done so much for me. He had never allowed me to hear an inner voice; and if, in view of my age, he did not make haste, it would not be my fault if I remained to the end of my life what I now was – an infidel Jew.

In the course of a friendly reply, my colleague gave me an assurance that being a Jew was not an obstacle in the pathway to true faith and proved this by several instances. His letter culminated in the information that prayers were being earnestly addressed to God that he might grant me faith to believe.

I am still awaiting the outcome of this intercession. In the meantime my colleague’s religious experience provides food for thought. It seems to me to demand some attempt at an interpretation based upon emotional motives; for his experience is puzzling in itself and is based on particularly bad logic. God, as we know, allows horrors to take place of a kind very different from the removal to a dissecting-room of the dead body of a pleasant-looking old woman. This has been true at all times and it must have been so while my American colleague was pursuing his studies. Nor, as a medical student, can he have been so sheltered from the world as to have known nothing of such evils. Why was it, then, that his indignation against God broke out precisely when he received this particular impression in the dissecting-room?

For anyone who is accustomed to regard men’s internal experiences and actions analytically the explanation is very obvious – so obvious that it actually crept into my recollections of the facts themselves. Once, when I was referring to my pious colleague’s letter in the course of a discussion, I spoke of his having written that the dead woman’s face had reminded him of his own mother. In fact these words were not in the letter, and a moment’s reflection will show that they could not possibly have been. But that is the explanation irresistibly forced on us by his affectionately phrased description of the ‘sweet-faced dear old woman’. Thus the weakness of judgement displayed by the young doctor is to be accounted for by the emotion roused in him by the memory of his mother. It is difficult to escape from the bad psychoanalytic habit of bringing forward as evidence details which also allow of more superficial explanations – and I am tempted to recall the fact that my colleague addressed me as a ‘brother-physician’.

We may suppose, therefore, that this was the way in which things happened. The sight of a woman’s dead body, naked or on the point of being stripped, reminded the young man of his mother. It roused in him a longing for his mother which sprang from his Oedipus Complex, and this was immediately completed by a feeling of indignation against his father. His ideas of ‘father’ and ‘God’ had not yet become widely separated; so that his desire to destroy his father could become conscious as doubt in the existence of God and could seek to justify itself in the eyes of reason as indignation about the ill-treatment of a mother-object. It is, of course, very natural for a child to regard what his father does to his mother in sexual intercourse as ill-treatment. The new impulse, which was displaced into the sphere of religion, was only a repetition of the Oedipus situation and consequently soon met with a similar fate. It succumbed to a powerful opposing current. During the actual conflict the level of displacement was not maintained: there is no mention of arguments in justification of God, nor are we told what the infallible signs were by which God proved his existence to the doubter. The conflict seems to have been unfolded in the form of a hallucinatory psychosis: inner voices were heard which uttered warnings against resistance to God. But the outcome of the struggle was displayed once again in the sphere of religion and it was of a kind predetermined by the outcome of the Oedipus complex: complete submission to the will of God the Father. The young man became a believer and accepted everything he had been taught since his childhood about God and Jesus Christ. He had had a religious experience and had undergone a conversion.

All of this is so straightforward that we wonder whether this case throws any light on the psychology of conversion in general. Our case does not contradict the views arrived at on the subject by modern research. The point it throws into relief is the manner in which the conversion was attached to a particular determining event, which caused the subject’s scepticism to flare up for a last time before being finally extinguished.

This is an excellent example of Freud’s technique of rewriting or over-writing other people’s experiences and beliefs in terms of his own theory. Some patients found and still find it liberating. Others have found it authoritarian and oppressive.

Credit

The history of the translation of Freud’s many works into English forms a complicated subject in its own right. Freud’s works quoted here were translated into English as part of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, published throughout the 1950s and into the early 1960s. My quotes are taken from the versions which were included in the relevant volumes of the Pelican Freud Library, published in the 1980s. ‘The Future of an Illusion’ is in volume 12.

I read ‘The Illusion of a Future’ in The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Volume 74, part 3 (1993), in a translation by Susan Abrams, as edited by Paul Roazen. I can’t remember where the short text ‘A religious experience’ comes from. I’ll add an update when I find the source.

Freud and religion reading list

• Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905)
• Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices (1907)
• Totem and Taboo (1913)
• On Transience (1915)
• A Seventeenth Century Demonological Neurosis (1923)
• The Future of An Illusion (1927)
• Civilisation and Its Discontents (1930)
• Group Psychology (1930)
• Question of a Weltanschauung (1933)
• Moses and Monotheism (1939)
• Freud, A Life For Our Times by Peter Gay (1988)

More Freud reviews

• More Freud reviews