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worthy because it is based on a person’s childish needs and wishes. These desires,
mostly of an unconscious kind, are in turn heavily influenced by early neurotic
experience. In making such claims Freud was arguing ad hominem, or, if you will,
ad “biographicam”; his attack was not aimed at the reasonableness of the beliefs
themselves, but was instead an exposé of the unreasonableness of the presumed motives
behind them. Thus Freud established the central relevance of a person’s early life
for an understanding of his later religious beliefs.
What I attempt to do here is to show how Freud’s anti-religious beliefs and theories are to be understood is an expression of his own unconscious needs and traumatic childhood experiences. This explanation of Freud’s rejection of religion is not an interpretation restricted only to him; the analysis is general enough to have applicability to the motives of many who reject God today. So I urge the reader who is not otherwise directly interested in Freud’s life to weigh carefully, nonetheless, the biographical evidence that constitutes the major part of the book. This biographical material, presented in Chapters One through Six, contains relatively little reference to the question of Freud’s theories of religion. This procedure allows these chapters oriented toward Freud’s life to be developed in depth and detail, and to stand on their own with respect to their claims. It is only in the Epilogue (Chapter Seven), where the theoretical significance of the biographical evidence is drawn out, that Freud’s critique of religion is addressed directly. Thus, the purpose of this book is more than just to fill, out the life history of Freud (however interesting it may be in its own right); rather, it is to show how the curious and sometimes traumatic events in the life of one small Jewish boy growing up in Central Europe over 100 years ago have cast a very long shadow over the religious life of the modern West. |