The Thesis: Freud’s Pro-ChristianBut in a state of curious coexistence with this standard image of Freud the atheist (and anti-Christian), there is another side of Freud. Many of his biographers, including Jones, have noted, at least in passing, a substantial number of pro-religious comments, concerns, and relationships scattered throughout Freud’s life. Freud was, after all (for many years — indeed, until his death), very preoccupied with religious issues, as his important writings on religious topics make clear. He persistently, and in many, ways obsessively, returned over and over to religion. For example, at the end of his Moses and Monotheism (1939), he came back to the same set of closely related issues he had treated much earlier in Totem and Taboo (1913). Paul Roazen, biographer and Freud scholar, implies that Freud’s feelings about religion were deeper and more ambivalent than he ever acknowledged. “Whenever Freud sounds intolerant, it is likely that something in him was threatened and he may have been more involved with the problem of religion than he cared to know.”5 To the extent that Freud’s involvement with religion was with Judaism, this issue has been extensively treated by several authors.6 What primarily concerns us at present, however, is Freud’s personal, often positive, relationship with Christianity. This topic has not been systematically addressed before.7 The neglect is apparently due in part to an almost reflexive acceptance of the standard interpretation of Freud as anti-religious, and in part to the fact that many of Freud’s letters and other biographical material have only recently become available. But it must be said that it is also due in part to the common lack of knowledge about and at times antipathy toward things Christian within contemporary psychological scholarship. Despite this neglect, I think that even before beginning this discussion, the reader reasonably familiar with Freud’s life and thought will grant upon reflection that Freud’s relationship to religion — in particular Christianity — was not one of simple, uncomplicated rejection. He was a public atheist, but he was certainly not a simple, “natural atheist.” In any case, it is the present thesis that Freud was deeply ambivalent about Christianity; such ambivalence requires at least two strong opposing psychological forces. Since much of the anti-religious character of Freud’s life and thought is now well established and documented, the emphasis in this book is usually on the other side of the coin. Indeed, I develop the claim here that Freud had a strong, life-long, positive identification with and attraction to Christianity. I hasten to add, however, that an important secondary emphasis of this book is on Freud’s little-known, unconscious hostility to Christianity, which is reflected in his curious preoccupation |