Freud and Faith Deconstruction

Scary man, eh?

According to Wikimedia Commons, this cropped, public domain photo of Sigmund Freud dates to circa 1926, about the time he was writing and editing his second major essay on religion that would become the small, standalone volume The Future of an Illusion.

I first read this book in the early 1990s, in a graduate seminar at Drew University’s Graduate School of Religion, pursuing a PhD in psychology and religion. Having nerded out in a history and systems of psychology class as an undergraduate student at James Madison University, it thrilled me to be in a small group of fellow PhD candidates and seminarians reading a book written about sixty-five years earlier by the single best-known pioneer in psychology. Instead of reading about historical psychological theory proper, however, we were studying an application of it to religious life. The book is a sustained, thoughtful argument that would become integral to Freud’s work on religion.

In short, Freud theorizes about religious ideas and doctrines, that “they are illusions, fulfilments of the oldest, strongest and most insistent wishes of mankind.” Psychological life, for Freud, was a matter of acknowledging that humans have need-based sexual, possessive, and desirous “drives” and that when those needs aren’t met or sublimated, we create narratives, fictions, and illusions. Religion is one such illusion, he argues, an elaborate system of rituals, doctrines, stories, and experiences that help comfort and give meaning to our lives.

Just look at Freud’s gaze in the photo above. It wasn’t a matter of whether he was right about religion; he wasn’t making epistemological arguments about whether religion is true per se, at least not on the surface. He was asking us to be more self-aware. He was asking us to be honest about what we’re doing with religion, and to admit to ourselves that we as often shape religion into what we want it to be rather than it shaping us. We make our god into our own image rather than our god making us in its image. We project ourselves onto the divine, and in that process, we commit emotional transactions, narcissisms, omnipotencies, both individually and collectively. Most of all, we don’t see the contradictions in these fictions, the realities that we include and the ones we leave out; it’s an unconscious dynamic.

This is a photo of a man who is imploring us to realize that we are sometimes, maybe even most of the time, not telling ourselves the whole truth about how we construct and reinforce our beliefs. In other words, I consider The Future of an Illusion essential reading for anyone going through a process of faith deconstruction.

My specific mission as a book publishing professional and as a part-time scholar is to resource those of us who are rightfully disenchanted with our religious traditions. I do this work especially in this moment of Christian nationalism and the seemingly benign but hypocritical evangelical support of a leader whose behavior exhibits every sin we were told not to commit as children growing up in church.

I am working to republish a new edition of the approximately 20,000-word, now 100-year-old The Future of an Illusion, which is perhaps Freud’s clearest statement of his theory of religion. The book recently entered the public domain, including an English language translation of the originally titled German edition, Die Zukunft Einer Illusion. Drawing on years of reading Freud, post-Freudians, and secondary literature in psychology and religion, I have drafted a new introduction to the book that discusses Freud’s theory, summarizes what he says in his rambling prose, and offers some critical and contextual insights. In addition, I’m offering footnoted annotations to help the reader navigate the book and better absorb its key contribution. I’m hoping this edition will be published by Lake Drive Books in the spring or summer of this year. I’ll keep you posted.

I’m quite familiar with the accusations of reductionism that I can bet some of you readers have already brought to the surface of your minds, and I’m aware of and will discuss the feminist critique of Freud briefly, but in this case, also apply it to his theory of religion. I will, above all, ask readers to suspend judgment and simply enjoy the pontificating of this early twentieth-century psychological “scientist”.

For those in a faith deconstruction journey, my hope is that you’ll revel in Freud’s unsparing, ruthlessly honest discussion about religion. It’s a refreshing experience and worth reading, just to absorb the tone and imagine the man in the picture above sitting across a table from you, talking about religion.