Sigmund Freud on Religion

Sigmund Freud is best known for the school of psychology 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 on the subject of religion. Learn more about Freud’s complex relationship with religion and spirituality.

Freud’s early religious influences

Sigmund Freud was born to Jewish parents in the heavily Roman Catholic city of Freiburg, Moravia. Although he was outspoken about his atheism and believed that religion was something to be overcome, he was aware of its powerful influence on identity. He acknowledged that his Jewish heritage, as well as the antisemitism he often faced, had helped shape his personality.

“My language is German. My culture, my achievements are German. Until I saw the growth of anti-Jewish prejudice in Germany and German Austria, I considered myself intellectually German. Since then, I prefer to call myself a Jew,” Freud wrote in 1925.

Religion according to Freud

How did Freud see religion? In some of his best-known writings, he described it as an “illusion”, a type of neurosis, and possibly an attempt to gain control.

Freud believed that religion was an expression of basic psychotic neurosis and anxiety – an attempt to gain control over the outside 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, a childish delusion, and the 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 derives its force from its readiness to fit our instinctual desires.”

Freud wrote in the book “New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis”: “Religion is an attempt to master the sensory world in which we inhabit by means of the desire world which we have developed within ourselves as a result of biological and psychological needs … If we try to determine the place of religion, it is not a permanent contradiction in the evolution of man, but it appears to be the neurosis through which individual civilized men have to pass. From childhood to puberty.”

In “The Future of an Illusion,” Freud wrote, “Religion may be compared to the neuroses of childhood.”

Freud’s Critique of Religion

Although fascinated by religion and spirituality, Freud was quite critical. He criticized religion for being unwelcoming, rigid and unwelcoming to those who do not belong to a particular religious group.

In “The Future of an Illusion” (1927), Freud wrote: “Our knowledge of the historical significance of certain religious doctrines increases our respect for them, but does not invalidate our proposal to stop positing them as reasons for the principles of civilization. On the contrary! These historical remains have helped us to see them as religious teachings, and now we can see them as religious concepts. Argue that perhaps the time has come.” is, as it does in an analytic treatment, to replace the effects of repression with the results of the rational process of reason.”

Some of Freud’s harshest criticisms appear in “Civilization and Its Discontents”: “Everything is so obviously infantile, so alien to reality, that it is painful to anyone friendly to humanity to think that the great majority of men will never rise above this view of life.”

Religions, at any rate, have never lost sight of the role played in civilization by the sense of guilt. Moreover—a point which I have elsewhere failed to appreciate—they claim to deliver men from that sense of guilt, which they call sin.”

Psychological theory

From Freud’s psychological 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 to absolve themselves of guilt.