Why I Keep Coming Back to Freud's Critique of Religion

The thing is, it is such a joy to read Freud; his seeming negativity and cynicism can feel like a tonic in a United States where religious people can't stop talking about religion, making sure others know they are religious, reserving their supposedly deepest friendships only for those who are religious friends.

I've recently returned to Freud while preparing a new edition of his The Future of an Illusion, first published in 1927. What strikes me is how much his questions about religion still matter, particularly for those questioning the religious traditions they inherited.

Many of us who are unfamiliar with Freud's writings about religion default to the caricature, perceiving him as simply antagonistic, another disgruntled intellectual who cannot accept human needs for spiritual comfort and inspiration. But the nature of Freud's relationship with religion is much more complex.

Here is Freud's main thesis, perhaps as disagreeable to those who privilege religion's influence in the US as it was a century ago in Europe: our god is a projection. What we believe involves projection. How we read our sacred texts involves projection. The rituals we engage in involve projection. In biblical parlance, we create our god in our own image, rather than our god creating us in its image.

Freud writes that religious doctrines:

“they are illusions, fulfilments of the oldest, strongest and most insistent wishes of mankind; the secret of their strength is the strength of these wishes.”

Again, it's important to remember that this theory is not reductionism for reductionism's sake. Freud does not set out to disprove this god; he shifts the focus. He is not necessarily asking whether religion is true, but why we believe it, and why such claims are believed so tenaciously—as they most certainly are.

Freud is asking questions about what human needs those beliefs might serve. The issue is no longer belief versus unbelief, but self-understanding and what we can learn.

We get the most from reading Freud on religion when we try to see beyond his advocacy for science and remember that the larger goal of the psychoanalytic method is to explore what is subterranean, what we can learn about ourselves, and how the resultant understanding might ultimately offer insight and inspiration.

Having now read and reread The Future of an Illusion myself, I've come to realize that it was not the actual words and specific arguments that made their impact on me.

What I realized is that it wasn't so much what Freud was directly saying, but whether you were willing to join a conversation about how to talk about religion, metaphysical beings, church, and so on.

Reading Freud is not exactly about determining whether he was right or wrong about religion, but about learning to live with questions.

---

I've written more extensively about Freud's ideas and their continuing relevance in Freud on Religion: Why The Future of an Illusion Still Matters, published on the Lake Drive Books website. The article draws from my introduction to our new annotated edition of Freud's book.