| Chapter One |
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The First Three Years The standard interpretation of Sigmund Freud is that he was a thorough enemy of religion, in particular of Christianity, and there is much well-known evidence that shows Freud in this light. After all, Freud did write that religion is a universal obsessional neurosis.1 He said, too, that religious doctrines, psychologically considered, are illusions — that is, projections of infantile needs that comfort people unable to face suffering, uncertainty, and death.2 Furthermore, Freud often developed his critical interpretations in major works in which he presented new psychological theories with which he attempted to justify his conclusions about religion. Certainly Freud publicly proclaimed his religious skepticism, and all his biographers agree that he was an atheist or agnostic. For example, Ernest Jones, in his three-volume biography, has written that Freud “went through life from beginning to end as a natural atheist…. One who saw no reason for believing in the existence of any supernatural Being and who felt no emotional need for such a belief.”3 Freud’s daughter Anna declared only a few years ago that her father was a “lifelong agnostic.”4 The preceding picture is brought into further focus by the fact that Freud affirmed his ethnic and cultural Jewishness while living in an Austro-German culture during a time when anti-Semitism waxed and waned — but mostly waxed, and to the point of paroxysm. This anti-Semitism eventually forced Freud to leave Vienna toward the end of his life, after National Socialism (Naziism) rose to power. In short, Freud is commonly viewed as a secularized Jew who accepted his Jewish ethnic identity but rejected all things religious, including and especially Christianity; he is seen as a pessimistic free-thinker, an unrepentant atheist, a scientist-humanist, a skeptical realist. |