Sigmund Freud: Religion

This article explores attempts by Sigmund Freud (1850-1939) to provide a naturalistic

account of religion enhanced by insights and theoretical constructs derived from the
discipline of psychoanalysis which he had pioneered. Freud was an Austrian
neurologist and psychologist who is widely regarded as the father of psychoanalysis,
which is both a psychological theory and therapeutic system. As a theory,
psychoanalysis conceptualizes the mind as a system composed of three constituent
elements: id, ego, and superego. It focuses on the interaction between those
elements, and includes such key concepts as infantile sexuality, repression, latency
and transference. Psychoanalytic therapy is an application of this conceptual schema,
in which the interaction of the mind’s conscious and unconscious elements in
individual cases is explored using the techniques of dream interpretation, free
association and the analysis of resistance to identify repressed conflicts and bring
them into the conscious mind.
Freud’s thought on religion is, perhaps fittingly, rather complex and ambivalent:
while there can be little doubt as to its roundly skeptical, and at times hostile,
character, it is nonetheless clear that he had a firm grounding in Jewish religious
thought and that the religious impulse held a life-long fascination for him. This
article charts the evolution of his views on religion from Totem and Taboo (1913),
through The Future of an Illusion (1927) and Civilization and its Discontents (1930)
to Moses and Monotheism (1939), focusing in particular on the parallels drawn by him
between religious belief and neurosis, and on his account of the role which the father
complex plays in the genesis of religious belief. The article concludes with a review of
some of the main critical responses which the Freudian account has elicited.

Table of Contents
1. Psychoanalysis and Religion
2. Freud’s Jewish Heritage
3. Philosophical Connections
4. The Orientation of Freud’s Approach to Religion
5. Totemism and the Father Complex
6. Religion and Civilization
7. The Moses Narrative: The Origins of Judaic Monotheism
8. Critical Responses
1. The Anthropological Critique
2. Myth or Science?
3. Lamarckian vs. Darwinian Evolutionary Principles
4. The Primordial Religion: Polytheism or Monotheism?
5. Religion as a Social Phenomenon
6. The Projection Theory of Religion
7. Moses and Monotheism: Interpretive Approaches
b. References and Further Reading
1. References
2. Further Reading
1. Psychoanalysis and Religion
 At the heart of Freud’s psychoanalysis is his theory of infantile sexuality, which
represents individual psychological human development as a progression through a
number of stages in which the libidinal drives are directed towards particular
pleasure-release loci, from the oral to the anal to the phallic and, after a latency
period, in maturity to the genital. He thus saw the psychosexual development of
every individual as consisting essentially of a movement through a series of conflicts
which are resolved by the internalization, through the operation of the superego, of
control mechanisms derived originally from an authoritative, usually parental,
source. In infancy, such a progression entails a process whereby parental control
involves the introduction to the child of behavioral prohibitions and limitations and
necessitates the repression, displacement or sublimation of the libidinal drives.
Central to this account is the idea that neuroses, which may include the formation of
psychosomatic symptoms in the individual, arise essentially either out of external
trauma or through a failure to effect a resolution of the internal conflict between
libidinal urges and the key psychological control mechanisms. Symptomatically,
these often present as compulsive and debilitating patterns of behavior—as in
hysteria, repetitive ceremonial movements or an obsession with personal hygiene—
which make a normal healthy life impossible, requiring psychotherapeutic
intervention in the form of such techniques as dream analysis and free association.
Of particular importance, he held, is the resolution of the Oedipus complex, which
arises at the phallic stage, in which the male child forms a sexual attachment with the
mother and comes to view the father as a hated and feared sexual rival. That
resolution, which Freud saw as essential to the formation of sexuality, entails the
repression of the drive away from the mother as libidinal object and the male child’s
identification with the father. The cluster of associations relating to the multifaceted
relationship between son and father Freud termed “the father complex” (1957, 144)
and, as we shall see, viewed it as central to a correct understanding both of the
developmental psychology of human beings and to many of the central and most
important social phenomena in human life, including religious belief and practice.

In his account of religion Freud deployed what Paul Ricoeur (1913—2005) terms a
hermeneutic “of suspicion” (Ricoeur 1970, 32), a reductive and demystifying style of
interpretation that repudiated what he saw as a masquerade of conventional
meanings operating at the level of common discourse in favor of deeper, less
conventional truths relating to human psychology. He sought to demonstrate by this
means the true origins and significance of religion in human life, in effect utilizing
the techniques of psychotherapy to achieve that goal. Freud’s general position on
religion stands firmly in the naturalistic tradition of projectionism stretching from
Xenophanes (c.570—c.475 B.C.E.) and Lucretius (c.99—c.55 B.C.E.) through Thomas
Hobbes (1588—1679) and David Hume (1711—76) to Ludwig Feuerbach (1804—
1872) in holding that the concept of God is essentially the product of an unconscious
anthropomorphic construct, which Freud saw as a function of the underlying father
complex operating in social groups. “The psycho-analysis of individual human
beings,” he thus stated boldly in Totem and Taboo, “teaches us with quite special
insistence that the god of each of them is formed in the likeness of his father, that his
personal relation to God depends on his relation to his father in the flesh and
oscillates and changes along with that relation, and that at bottom God is nothing
other than an exalted father” (Freud 2001, 171).
The following sections examine the considerations which led him to this view, to the
manner in which it found articulation in his writings on religion and to the main
criticisms which it has encountered.

2. Freud’s Jewish Heritage

 Freud was born to Jewish parents in the town of Freiberg, then in the Austro-
Hungarian Empire. His father Jacob was a businessman descended from a long line
of rabbinical scholars; a textile merchant, he went bankrupt when Sigmund was four
years of age and the family were forced to move to Vienna, where they lived in
genteel poverty for many years, dependent in part upon the generosity of relatives.
The young Sigmund found it difficult to come to terms with the new urban
surroundings and family’s reduced financial circumstances. Experience of the latter
left him with a life-long fear of poverty, his overweening ambition to establish
psychoanalysis as a new science and successful treatment for hysteria was as a result
partially motivated by the desire to achieve financial security for his family.
In the preface to the Hebrew edition of Totem and Taboo, published in 1930, Freud
described himself as being “in his essential nature a Jew and who has no desire to
alter that nature,” but one who is “completely estranged from the religion of his
fathers—as well as from every other religion” (Freud 2001 Preface, xiii). This
phrasing marks Freud’s recognition that, notwithstanding his skepticism regarding
religion, his character had largely been formed by a Judaic cultural heritage passed
on to him by his father Jacob, with whom he had a rather fraught relationship.
Freud’s ancestors were affiliates of Hasidic Judaism going back many generations,
and included several rabbis and distinguished scholars among their number (Berke
2015, xii). While Jacob was liberal and progressive in his outlook, he retained a deep
reverence for the Talmud and the Torah and had overseen Sigmund’s childhood
study of the Philippson family Bible, which generated in the young Sigmund a life-
long fascination with the story of Moses and his connection with Egypt. He also
ensured that the boy had a traditional Jewish schooling in which he was steeped in
Biblical studies in the original Hebrew. In that connection the young Freud
developed a deep admiration for, and friendship with, one of his religion teachers,
Rabbi Samuel Hammerschlag, who was a strong proponent of humanistic Reform
Judaism. Such was his admiration for his teacher that Freud ultimately named his
fifth and sixth children, Sophie and Anna, after Hammerschlag’s niece and daughter;
commentators now generally agree that the patient referred to as ‘Irma’ in Freud’s
pivotal The Interpretation of Dreams was in fact Anna Hammerschlag. It was Rabbi
Hammerschlag’s deep humanism, more than any other feature of his character,
which Freud found inspiring, inculcating in him a lasting commitment to the
universality of Enlightenment values. It is notable that, in seeking to pay
Hammerschlag the highest compliment possible in the obituary which he wrote for
him in 1904, Freud compared him to the Hebrew prophets, but also highlighted the
extent to which that aspect of his character was integrated with humanistic ideals: “A
part from the same fire which animated the great Jewish seers and prophets burned
in him … but the passionate side of his nature was happily tempered by the ideal of
humanism of our classical German period, which governed him and his method of
education” (Freud 1976 IX, 256).
Notwithstanding the positive impact of such religious influences, from adolescence
onwards Freud apparently found the observances and strictures required by
orthodox Jewish belief increasingly burdensome and he became overtly hostile to the
religion of his forefathers and to religion in general (Goodnick 1992, 352); it is likely
that this was the principal cause of the estrangement between Sigmund and his
father Jacob. That the estrangement ran deep and was a source of distress to Jacob
became evident on the occasion of his son’s 35 th birthday, when, in a gesture
conforming with an established Jewish custom, he presented Sigmund with the
family Bible which he had studied so closely as a child, newly rebound in leather.
This was accompanied by a richly lyrical dedication in Hebrew, written in the style
of melitzah, a literary tradition of Biblical allusion (Alter 1988, 23), referencing the
relationship between them and their shared Jewish heritage. In part, the verse ran:
Son who is dear to me, Shelomoh. In the seventh in the days of the years of your life
the Spirit of the Lord began to move you and spoke within you: Go, read in my Book
that I have written and there will burst open for you the wellsprings of
understanding, knowledge, and wisdom… For the day on which your years were filled
to five and thirty I have put upon it a cover of new skin and have called it: “Spring up,
O well, sing ye unto it!” And I have presented it to you as a memorial and as a
reminder of love from your father, who loves you with everlasting love. (trans. and
cited by Yerushalmi 1993, 71)

This attempt at effecting a rapprochement, which gently sought to remind Freud of his
father’s love for him and of their shared religious and cultural heritage—implying, as
one commentator puts it, “that their Bible embodies both the Jewish tradition and
this love” (Gresser 1994, 31)—appeared initially not to have been successful. Freud
never mentioned his father’s birthday dedication in his writings, though it was found
after his death perfectly preserved in the Philippson Bible with which he had been
presented, and his reductive critique of institutional religion became instead ever
more sustained and pointed. Yet, at the deepest level, an ambivalence remained; as
Freud acknowledged in his Autobiographical Study, “My deep engrossment in the Bible
story (almost as soon as I had learnt the art of reading) had, as I recognised much
later, an enduring effect upon the direction of my interest” (Freud 1959, XX 8).
The death of Jacob on 23rd October 1896 was one of the most important events in
Sigmund Freud’s life and precipitated a lengthy period of reflective contemplation on
their relationship. As he confessed later that year in a letter to his friend Wilhelm
Fliess, “… the old man’s death has affected me deeply. I valued him highly,
understood him very well, and with his peculiar mixture of deep wisdom and
fantastic light-heartedness he had a significant effect on my life… in my inner self the
whole past has been awakened by this event. I now feel quite uprooted” (Freud 1986,
202). The importance of the event cannot be overestimated; Jacob’s death triggered a
period of sustained self-analysis in which Freud had what he considered an
epiphany: the hostility which he had often felt towards his father, which had at one
point made him suspect that Jacob had been guilty of sexually abusing him, was due
to the fact that as a child he saw Jacob as a rival for his mother’s love. Thus was born
the ideas of the Oedipus complex to which we have referred above, which,
universalized by Freud, became one of the cornerstones of psychoanalytic theory. In
his 1908 preface to the second edition of The Interpretation of Dreams, the work which
made his reputation globally and brought him the financial security which he had
craved, Freud made clear the extent to which his articulation of the new science owed
to his analytical resolution of the crisis generated by Jacob’s death: “It was a portion
of my own self-analysis, my reaction to my father’s death—that is to say, to the most
important event, the most poignant loss of a man’s life” (Freud 2010, xxvi). Still
awaiting resolution at that point, however, was the conflict generated in Freud’s life
by the demand to find a means of affirming the richness and particularity of his
Jewish cultural heritage, as his father had urged in his dedication, without acceding
to the Biblical and theological orthodoxies associated with it. A number of scholars
(Rice, 1990; Gresser, 1994) have suggested that this problem is one of the keys to an
understanding of his final work, Moses and Monotheism.
3. Philosophical Connections
Two of the major formative influences upon Freud were those of the
philosophers/psychologists Franz Brentano (1838—1917) and Theodor Lipps (1851—
1914). Brentano was author of the seminal Psychology From an Empirical
Standpoint (1973, orig. 1874); Freud took two philosophy courses under his direction
when he first enrolled at the University of Vienna, as part of which he encountered
Feuerbach’s writings on religion. Freud was captivated by the scope and clarity of
Brentano’s lectures and found the latter’s emphasis on the need for empirical
methods in psychology and for philosophy to be informed by logical rigour and
scientific findings highly congenial. Less congenial to him, perhaps, were Brentano’s
rational theism and his dismissal of the notion of unconscious mental states; these
were two key issues on which Freud was subsequently to diverge sharply from him.
Freud—like other gifted students of Brentano such as Edmund Husserl (1859—1938)
and Alexius Meinong (1853—1920)—was enthralled by him as a teacher and scholar,
describing him in correspondence as “a darned clever fellow, a genius” (in Boehlich
(ed.) 1992, 95). Such was the impact of Brentano’s influence that, at one stage, Freud
resolved to take his doctorate in philosophy and zoology, a proposal towards which
Brentano was favourably disposed but which faculty regulations at the University
prevented from being realised.

In seeking to modernise psychology, Brentano had returned to the Aristotelian

definition of the subject, understanding it as “the science which studies the
properties and laws of the soul, which we discover within ourselves directly by means
of inner perception, and which we infer, by analogy, to exist in others” (Brentano
1973, 5). In that connection, he revitalised the famous principle of intentionality from
scholasticism as the defining criterion of mental phenomena and processes: unlike
the physical counterparts from which they must be distinguished, mental or
psychical phenomena, he argued, are necessarily directed towards intentional
objects. Further, since such phenomena are accessible to us directly by means of
“inner perception,” their existence and nature comes, he argued, guaranteed with an
epistemic certainty and transparency that is markedly lacking in relation to our
perception of physical phenomena, where, for example, we sometimes misapprehend
such subjective characteristics as colour and taste as objective properties of things.

Given this distinction between the physical and the mental, Brentano considered that
one of the key problems for an empirical psychology was that of constructing an
adequate picture of the internal dynamics of the mind from an analysis of the
complex interplay between diverse mental phenomena, on the one hand, and the
interactions between the mind and the external world, on the other. This conception
was to have a profound influence upon the development of Freudian psychoanalysis,
into which it was to become prominently incorporated. However, Brentano set his
face implacably against admitting the notion of unconscious mental states and
processes into a fully scientific psychology. In this he was in part motivated by his
conviction that all mental states are known directly in introspection or “inner
perception” and are thus, by definition, conscious; mental acts, he considered, are
pellucid in the sense that they take themselves as secondary objects and so are
consciously apprehended as they occur. Further, the positing of the existence of
unconscious mental states also seemed to him to introduce uncertainty and
vagueness into the field of psychology and to carry with it an implication of the
impossibility of the very rigorous, empirically-based science of mind which he sought
to establish.

While Freud adopted Brentano’s characterisation of the intentional nature of mental

phenomena throughout his work, he did not, of course, accept that all such
phenomena are conscious, and indeed extended the very notion of intentionality, in
the guise of symbolic meaning, to the level of the unconscious. For the primary focus
of Freud’s interest was medical and his therapeutic practice was, from the outset,
predicated upon the assumption of a level of scientific understanding of aberrant
behaviour and abnormal mental states. And it seemed evident to him from an early
stage that the restriction of psychology to the level of conscious processes and events
had made, and would continue to make, such a goal unattainable, and that it was
precisely because traditional psychology had operated with that restriction that it
found such occurrences problematic and inexplicable. Thus, while both Brentano and
Freud were motivated by the desire to create a fully scientific science of mind, they
reached diametrically opposed positions on the question of the inclusion of the
unconscious in its terms of reference. In contrast with Brentano’s belief that the very
notion of the unconscious lacks intellectual validity, Freud was convinced that a
scientific approach to the area of the mental requires the concept of the unconscious
as a critical presupposition.

Freud found strong support for this conviction in Theodor Lipps, a thinker who was
as committed as Brentano to the ideal of an empirically grounded psychology
governed by an experimental methodology, but who, unlike Brentano, considered
that this necessitated, at a fundamental level, reference to the unconscious. Lipps’
account of the nature of the unconscious was of particular importance to the
development of Freud’s thought for two reasons: In the first instance, when Freud
encountered Lipps’ view that consciousness is an “organ” which mediates the inner
reality of unconscious mental processes, he found in it a theory which was almost
identical to one at which he had independently arrived. Secondly, in his account of
humor—which also anticipated much of Freud’s later work on that subject—Lipps
had extended the notion of aesthetic empathy (Einfühlung; “in-feeling” or “feeling-
into”) from Robert Vischer (1847—1933) into the psychological realm to designate
the process that allows us to comprehend and respond to the mental lives of others
by putting ourselves in their place, which involved the key notion that meaningful
interaction between humans necessitates the projection of mental states and
occurrences from the self to others.
Freud adopted and integrated Lipps’ account of projection centrally in his
psychoanalytic theory, regarding it as a precondition for establishing the relationship
between patient and analyst which alone makes the interpretation of unconscious
processes possible. But perhaps of even greater consequence in connection with the
analysis of religion is the fact that concomitant to the idea of psychological projection
is the notion that the human need to ascribe psychological states to others can and
does readily lead to situations in which such ascriptions are extended beyond their
legitimate boundaries in the human realm. As David Hume had observed, “There is
an universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves, and to
transfer to every object those qualities with which they are familiarly acquainted, and
of which they are intimately conscious” (Hume 1956, Section 111). It is in that way
that personifications or anthropomorphisms arise: human beings, particularly at the
early stage of their development, have an innate tendency to go beyond the legitimate
boundaries of application of the psychological concept-range and thus to misapply
human-being concepts. A child relates to its environment at large most readily
through such a process: in the narratives provided by storybooks, school text-books
and film and televisual animation, the child’s interest, attention, and above all, its
understanding, are engaged through the attribution of anthropomorphic qualities to
non-human objects and organisms: bees worry, trees are sad, ants are curious, and
so on.

In his Essence of Christianity (1841; English trans. 1881), Ludwig Feuerbach had

offered a sustained critique of religion predicated upon the notion that the very idea
of God is such an anthropomorphic construct, with no reality beyond the human
mind, and that specific characteristics attributed to God in religion (Love,
Benevolence, Power, Knowledge, and so forth) embody an idealized conception of
human nature and of the values esteemed by human beings. This projectionist view,
which he first encountered under Brentano’s—no doubt, critical—tutelage, was one
which Freud came to accept implicitly and indeed to extend, holding that the insights
offered by psychoanalysis into the workings of the human mind can explain just why
and how religious anthropomorphisms arise. Freud accordingly integrated his
account of religion into the broader project of psychoanalysis, suggesting that “a
large portion of the mythological conception of the world which reaches far into the
most modern religions is nothing but psychology projected into the outer world… We
venture to explain in this way the myths of paradise and the fall of man, of God, of
good and evil, of immortality and the like—that is, to
transform metaphysics into meta-psychology” (Freud 1914, 309. Italics in original).
4. The Orientation of Freud’s Approach to
Religion
In articulating this project, Freud drew deeply upon a wide variety of anthropological
sources, particularly the work of such contemporary luminaries as John Ferguson
McLennan (1827—1881), Edward Burnett Tylor (1832—1917), John Lubbock (1834—
1913), Andrew Lang (1844—1912), James George Frazer (1854—1941) and Robert
Ranulph Marett (1866—1943) on the connection between social structures and
primitive religions. Freud’s claim to originality in this context resides in his attempt
to situate projectionism within the framework of psychoanalysis, ultimately
interpreting the social origins and cultural significance of the religious impulse in
terms paralleling his account of the father-son relationship in individual psychology.

The evolutionist paradigm, which projected a universal linear cultural development

from the primitive to the civilized, with the differences found in human societies
reflecting stages in that development, gradually came to function as a background
assumption in Freud’s thought from an early stage. Tylor, whose Primitive
Culture (1871) and Anthropology (1881) are generally regarded as foundational to the
then emergent science of cultural anthropology, held that, in terms of human
interaction with the world at large, civilization progresses through three
developmental “stages,” from magic through religion to science, with contemporary
Western culture representative of the final stage. This view was rearticulated by
Frazer in his famous Golden Bough  and referenced approvingly by Freud (2001, 90),
though he emphasized that elements of the first two stages continue to operate in
contemporary life. Accordingly, Freud gradually adopted the position of one who
seeks to explicate the significance of religion in the context of a cultural milieu in
which, having supplanted attempts to control the world through sympathetic magic,
it has itself been superseded by science. Furthermore, Freud found in Tylor’s and
Frazer’s evolutionist account of cultural progress an implication which had been
affirmed explicitly by Feuerbach: “Religion is the childlike condition of humanity”
(Feuerbach 1881, 13); it belongs to a social developmental stage paralleling that of
the individual, through which each civilization must pass en route to the maturity of
scientific understanding. It was perhaps this latter, more than any other factor,
which was to suggest to Freud that the psychoanalytical techniques which he
pioneered in his account of individual psychology could be applied socially, to
explain the nature of the religious impulse in human life generally.
5. Totemism and the Father Complex
Some of Freud’s earliest comments on religion give immediate evidence of the
psychologically reductionist direction which his thought was to take, which
represented the dynamic underpinning religion as deriving from the powerfully
ambivalent relationship between the child and his apparently omnipotent father. For
example, in his 1907 paper “Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices” he drew
attention to similarities between neurotic behavior and religious rituals, suggesting
that the formation of a religion has, as its “pathological counterpart,” obsessional
neurosis, such that it might be appropriate to describe neurosis “as an individual
religiosity and religion as a universal obsessional neurosis” (Freud 1976 S.E. IX, 125-
6), a view which he was to retain for the remainder of his life.

Freud’s first sustained treatment of religion in these terms occurs in his 1913 Totem
and Taboo, in the context of his account, heavily influenced in particular by the work
of James George Frazer, Andrew Lang and J.J. Atkinson, of the relationship between
totemism and the incest prohibition in primitive social groupings. The prominence
and strength of the incest taboo was of considerable interest to him as a psychologist,
not least because he saw it as one of the keys to an understanding of human culture
and as deeply linked to the concepts of infantile sexuality, Oedipal desire, repression
and sublimation which play such a key role in psychoanalytic theory. In tribal groups
the incest taboo was usually associated with the totem animal with which the group
identified and after which it was named. This identification led to a ban on the killing
or the consumption of the flesh of the totem animal and on other restrictions on the
range of permissible behaviors and, in particular, it led to the practice of exogamy,
the prohibition of sexual relations between members of the totem group.
Such prohibitions, Freud believed, are extremely important as they constitute the
origins of human morality, and he offered a reconstruction of the genesis of totem
religions in human culture in terms which are at once forensically psychoanalytical
and rather egregiously speculative. The primal social state of our pre-human
ancestors, he argued, closely following J.J. Atkinson’s account in his Primal Law, was
that of a patriarchal “horde” in which a single male jealously maintained sexual
hegemony over all of the females in the group, prohibiting his sons and other male
rivals from engaging in sexual congress with them. In this account, the psycho-sexual
dynamic operating within the group led to the violent rebellion of the sons, their
murder of the father and their consumption of his flesh (Atkinson 1903, chapters I-
III; Freud 2001, 164). However, the sons’ subsequent recognition that no one of them
had the power to take the place of the father led them to create a sacred totem with
which to identify him and to reinstate the practice of the exogamy which the
parricide was designed to abolish: the creation of the totem yielded a totem clan
within which sexual congress between members was forbidden. The identification of
the totem animal with the father arose out of a displacement of the deep sense of
guilt generated by the murder, while simultaneously being an attempt at
reconciliation and a retrospective renunciation of the crime by creating a taboo
around the killing of the totem. “They revoked their deed by forbidding the killing of
the totem, the substitute for their father; and they renounced its fruits by resigning
their claim to the women who had now been set free” (Freud 2001, 166). This
identification, Freud asserted, confirmed the link between neurosis and religion
suggested by him in 1907: given that the totem animal represents the father, then the
two main taboo prohibitions of totemism, the ban on killing the totem animal and
the incest prohibition, “coincide in their content with … the two primal wishes of
children [to kill the father and have sexual intercourse with the mother], the
insufficient repression or re-awakening of which forms the nucleus of perhaps all
psychoneuroses” (Freud 2001, 153).
The parricidal deed, Freud asserted, is the single “great event with which culture
began and which, since it occurred, has not let mankind a moment’s rest” (Freud
2001, 168), the acquired memory traces of which underpins the whole of human
culture, including, and in particular, both totem and developed religions. Such a
view, of course, presupposes the validity of the essentially Lamarckian idea that traits
acquired by individuals, including psychological traits such a memory, can be
inherited and thus passed through the generations. This was a controversial notion
to which Freud, who never fully accepted the Darwinian account of evolution through
natural selection, steadfastly adhered throughout his life, in the face of scientific
criticism. He also took it as being consistent with Ernst Haeckel’s (1834—1919) view
that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, that is, that the stages of individual human
development repeat that of the evolution of humanity—which he took as scientific
justification of his belief that psychoanalytical techniques could be applied with equal
validity to the social as to the individual.

The counterpart to the primary taboo against killing or eating the totem animal,
Freud pointed out, is the annual totem feast, in which that very prohibition is
solemnly and ritualistically violated by the tribal community, and he followed the
Orientalist William Robertson Smith (1846—1894) in linking such totem feasts with
the rituals of sacrifice in developed religions. Such feasts involved the entire
community and were, Freud argued, a mechanism for the affirmation of tribal
identity through the sharing of the totem’s body, which was simultaneously an
affirmation of kinship with the father. Freud saw no contradiction in such a ritual,
holding that the ambivalence contained in the father-complex pervades both totemic
and developed religions: “Totemic religion not only comprises expressions of
remorse and attempts at atonement, it also serves as a remembrance of the triumph
over the father” (Freud 2001, 169). The father is thus represented twice in primitive
sacrifice, as god and as totem animal, the totem being the first form taken by the
father substitute and the god a later one in which the father reassumes his human
identity. The dynamic which operates in totem religions, Freud argued, is sustained
by and underpins the evolution of religion into its modern forms, where the need for
communal sacrifice to expiate an original sin should also be understood in terms of
parricide guilt.
6. Religion and Civilization
In time Freud came to consider that the account which he had given in Totem and
Taboo  did not fully address the issue of the origins of developed religion, the human
needs which religion is designed to meet and, consequently, the psychological
motivations underpinning religious belief. He turned to these questions in his The
Future of an Illusion (1927; reprinted 1961) and Civilization and its Discontents (1930;
reprinted 1962). In the two works he represented the structures of civilization, which
permit men to live in mutually beneficial communal relationships, as emerging only
as a consequence of the imposition of restrictive processes on individual human
instinct. In order for civilization to emerge, limiting regulations must be created to
frustrate the satisfaction of destructive libidinal drives, examples of which are those
directed towards incest, cannibalism and murder. Even the religious injunction to
love one’s neighbor as oneself, Freud argued, springs from the need to protect
civilization from disintegration. Given that history demonstrates that man is “a
savage beast to whom consideration towards his own kind is something alien” (Freud
1962, 59), the fashioning of a value system based upon the requirement to develop
loving relationships with one’s fellow man is a social and cultural necessity, without
which we would be reduced to living in a state of nature. For Freud, the principal task
of civilization is thus to defend us against nature, for without it we would be entirely
exposed to natural forces which have almost unlimited power to destroy us.
Extending his account of repression from individual to group psychology, Freud
contended that, with the refinement of culture, the external coercive measures
inhibiting the instincts become largely internalized. Humans become social and
moral beings through the functioning of the superego in effecting a renunciation of
the more antisocial drives: “external coercion gradually becomes internalized; for a
special mental agency, man’s super-ego, takes it over and includes it among its
commandments… Those in whom it has taken place are turned from being
opponents of civilization into being its vehicles” (Freud 1961, 11). However, the effect
of such renunciations is to create a state of cultural privation “resembling repression”
(Freud 1961, 43), which in order to foster social harmony must in turn be dissipated
by sublimation, the creation of substitute satisfactions for the drives.

Professional work, Freud argued, is one area in which such substitutions take place,
while the aesthetic appreciation of art is another significant one; for art, though it is
inaccessible to all but a privileged few, serves to reconcile human beings to the
individual sacrifices that have been made for the sake of civilization. However, the
effects of art, even on those who appreciate it, are transient, with experience
demonstrating that they are insufficiently strong to reconcile us to misery and loss.
For that effect, in particular for the achievement of consolation for the suffering and
tribulations of life, religious ideas become invoked; these ideas, he held,
consequentially become of the greatest importance to a culture in terms of the range
of substitute satisfactions which they provide.

The role which religion has played in human culture was thus described by Freud in
his 1932 lecture “On the Question of a Weltanschauung” as nothing less than
grandiose; because it purports to offer information about the origins of the universe
and assures human beings of divine protection and of the achievement of ultimate
personal happiness, religion “is an immense power, which has the strongest
emotions of human beings at its service” (Freud 1990, 199). Since religious ideas thus
address the most fundamental problems of existence, they are regarded as the most
precious assets civilization has to offer, and the religious worldview, which Freud
acknowledged as possessing incomparable consistency and coherence, makes the
claim that it alone can answer the question of the meaning of life.
For Freud, then, the cultural and social importance of religion resides both in
reconciling men to the limitations which membership of the community places upon
them and in mitigating their sense of powerlessness in the face of a recalcitrant and
ever-threatening nature. In this respect again, Freud held, group psychology is an
extension of individual psychology, with the powerful father figure in patriarchal
monotheistic religions providing the required protection against the threat of
destruction: “Now that God was a single person, man’s relations to him could recover
the intimacy and intensity of the child’s relation to his father” (Freud 1961, 19). It is
in this sense, he argued, that the father-son relationship so crucial to psychoanalysis
demands the projection of a deity configured as an all-powerful, benevolent father
figure.

Genetically, Freud argued, religious ideas thus owe their origin neither to reason nor
experience but to an atavistic need to overcome the fear of an ever-threatening
nature: “[they] are not precipitates of experience or end results of thinking: they are
illusions, fulfilments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind. The
secret of their strength lies in the strength of those wishes” (Freud 1961, 30). In
declaring such ideas illusory Freud did not initially seek to suggest or imply that they
are thereby necessarily false; an illusory belief he defined simply as one which is
motivated in part by wish-fulfillment, which in itself implied nothing about its
relation to reality. He gives the example of a middle-class girl who believes that a
prince will marry her; such a belief is clearly inspired by a wish-fantasy and is
unlikely to prove justified, but such marriages do occasionally happen. Religious
beliefs, he suggested in The Future of an Illusion, are illusions in that sense; unlike
delusions, they are not, or are not necessarily, “in contradiction with reality” (Freud
1961, 31). However, by the time he wrote Civilization and its Discontents he was
prepared to take his religious skepticism a stage further, explicitly declaring religious
beliefs to be delusional, not only on an individual but on a mass scale: “A special
importance attaches to the case in which [the] attempt to procure a certainty of
happiness and a protection against suffering through a delusional remolding of
reality is made by a considerable number of people in common. The religions of
mankind must be classed among the mass-delusions of this kind” (Freud 1962, 28).
Given that religion has, as Freud acknowledged, made very significant contributions
to the development of civilization, and that religious beliefs are not strictly refutable,
the question arises as to why he came to consider that religious beliefs are delusional
and that a turning away from religion is both desirable and inevitable in advanced
social groupings. The answer given in Civilization and its Discontents is that, in the
final analysis, religion has failed to deliver on its promise of human happiness and
fulfillment; it seeks to impose a belief structure on humans which has no rational
evidential base but requires unquestioning acceptance in the face of countervailing
empirical evidence: “Its technique consists in depressing the value of life and
distorting the picture of the real world in a delusional manner—which presupposes
an intimidation of the intelligence” (Freud 1962, 31). He took this as confirming his
belief that religion is akin to a universal obsessional neurosis generated by an
unresolved father complex and is situated on an evolutionary trajectory which can
only lead to its general abandonment in favor of science. “If this view is right,” he
concluded, “it is to be supposed that a turning-away from religion is bound to occur
with the fatal inevitability of a process of growth, and that we find ourselves at this
very juncture in the middle of that phase of development” (Freud 1961, 43). That
Freud saw the movement from religious to scientific modes of understanding as a
positive cultural development cannot be doubted; indeed, it is one which he saw
himself facilitating in a process analogous to the therapeutic resolution of individual
neuroses: “Men cannot remain children for ever; they must in the end go out into
‘hostile life’. We may call this education to reality. Need I confess to you that the sole
purpose of my book is to point out the necessity for this forward step?” (Freud 1961,
49).
In Civilization Freud mentions that he had sent a copy of The Future of an Illusion to an
admired friend, subsequently identified as the French novelist and social critic
Romain Rolland. In his response, Rolland indicted broad agreement with Freud’s
critique of organised religion, but suggested that Freud had failed in his attempt to
identify the true experiential source of religious sentiments: a mystical, numinous
feeling of oneness with the universe, “a sensation of ‘eternity’, a feeling as of
something limitless, unbounded—as it were, ‘oceanic’” (In Freud 1962, 11). The
occurrence of this feeling, Rolland argued, is a subjective fact about the human mind
rather than an article of faith; it is common to millions of people and is undoubtedly
“the source of the religious energy which is seized upon by the various Churches and
religious systems” (In Freud 1962, 11). Thus, he suggested, it would be entirely
appropriate to count oneself as religious “on the ground of this oceanic feeling alone,
even if one rejects every belief and every illusion” (In Freud 1962, 11). In that sense,
he concluded, there is an important sense in which Freud’s account of the origins of
religion missed its mark to a significant degree.
Freud was clearly troubled by Rolland’s challenge, confessing that it caused him no
small difficulty. On the one hand his respect for Rolland’s intellectual honesty made
him take seriously the possibility that his analysis of religion might be deficient in
failing to take cognizance of mystical feelings of the kind described. On the other
hand, he was confronted with the obvious problem that feelings are notoriously
difficult to deal with in a scientific manner. Additionally—and perhaps more
importantly—Freud admitted to being unable to discover the oceanic feeling in
himself, though he was not disposed on that ground to deny the occurrence of it in
others. Given that such a feeling exists, even on the scale suggested by Rolland, the
only question to be faced, Freud declared, is “whether it ought to be regarded as
the fons et origo  of the whole need for religion” (Freud 1962, 12).
Dismissing the possibility of accounting for the oceanic feeling in terms of an
underlying physiology, Freud’s response was to focus on its “ideational content,” that
is, the conscious ideas most readily associated with its feeling-tone. In that
connection, he offered an account of the oceanic feeling as being a revival of an
infantile experience associated with the narcissistic union between mother and child,
in which the awareness of an ego or self as differentiated from the mother and world
at large has yet to emerge in the child. In that sense, he contended, it would be
implausible to take it as the foundational source of religion, since only a feeling
which is an expression of a strong need could function as a motivational drive. The
oceanic feeling, he conceded, may have become connected with religion later on, but
he insisted that it is the experience of infantile helplessness and the longing for the
father occasioned by it which is the original source from which religion derives
(Freud 1962, 19).
However, while this analysis of the relation between religion and mystical experience
is acknowledged as important and influential, few commentators have deemed it
entirely adequate, the self-confessed absence of any direct experience of the oceanic
feeling in Freud’s own case seeming to many to have led to an underestimation on his
part of the significance of such feelings in the genesis of religion.

A very significant body of literature has since grown up around the idea that religion
might have emerged genetically, and derive its dynamic energy, as Rolland
suggested, from mystical feelings of oneness with the universe in which fear and
anxiety are transcended and time and space are eclipsed. The work of thinkers as
diverse as Paul Tillich (1886—1965), Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889—1951) and Paul
Ricoeur (1913—2005) in this connection has proven influential and has established
an ongoing dialogue between psychology and philosophy/theology (compare
Parsons, 1998, 501). Additionally, Freud’s dismissal of the possibility of a
physiological approach to mystical experience has been questioned. Recent scientific
investigation of the neurophysiological correlates of mystical or spiritual experiences,
utilizing magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and related technologies, while
extremely controversial, appears to demonstrate that some deep meditative practices
trigger alterations in brain metabolism, occasioning the kind of numinous feelings
specified by Rolland (compare d’Aquili, & Newberg 1999, ch. 6; Saarinen 2015, 19).

7. The Moses Narrative: The Origins of Judaic

Monotheism
In 1939, while exiled in Britain and suffering from the throat cancer which was to
lead to his death, Freud published his final and most controversial work, Moses and
Monotheism. Written over a period of many years and sub-divided into discrete
segments, two of which were published independently in the periodical Imago in
1937, the book has an inelegant structure. The many repetitions that it contains,
coupled with the initial strangeness of the arguments advanced, persuaded some that
it was the product of a man whose intellectual powers had fallen into serious decline.
The analysis of Judaism offered in the text also evoked a vitriolic response from some
quarters and even led to allegations of Jewish self-hatred on Freud’s part. However,
in more recent times the book has become recognized as one of the most important
in the Freudian canon, offering an innovative contribution to the understanding of
the nature of religious truth and of the role played by tradition in religious thought.
The focal point of the work is the figure of Moses and his connection with Egypt,
which had exerted a fascination on Freud since his childhood study of the Philippson
bible, as evidenced also in his publication of the essay “The Moses of Michelangelo”
in 1914. Accordingly, at this late juncture in his life and with the threat of fascist
antisemitism looming over Europe, he turned his attention once more to the religion
of his forefathers, constructing an alternative narrative to the orthodox Biblical one
on the origins of Judaism and the emergence from it of Christianity. Developing a
thesis partly suggested by work of the protestant theologian Ernst Sellin (1867—
1946) in 1922, Freud argued that the historical Moses was not born Jewish but was
rather an aristocratic Egyptian who functioned as a senior official or priest to the
Pharaoh Amenhotep IV. The latter had introduced revolutionary changes to almost
all aspects of Egyptian culture in the 14 th century B.C.E., changing his name to
Akhenaten, centralizing governmental administration and moving the capital from
Thebes to the new city of Akhetaten. More significantly, he had also introduced a
strict new universal monotheistic religion to Egypt, the religion of the god Aton or
Aten, in the process outlawing as idolatrous the veneration of the traditional
Egyptian polytheistic deities, including the then dominant religion of Amun-Ra,
removing all references to the possibility of an afterlife and prohibiting the creation
of graven images. He had also proscribed all forms of magic and sorcery, closed all
the temples and suppressed established religious practice, thereby undermining the
social status and political power of the Amun priests. In Freud’s words, “This king
undertook to force upon his subjects a new religion, one contrary to their ancient
traditions and to all their familiar habits. It was a strict monotheism, the first
attempt of its kind in the history of the world as far as we know and religious
intolerance, which was foreign to antiquity before this and for long after, was
inevitably born with the belief in one God” (Freud 1939, 34-5). This religion was
represented as a universal rather than a local one, reflective of the fact that imperial
conquest had extended the Pharaoh’s rule beyond the borders of Egypt into Nubia,
Syria and parts of Mesopotamia, which brought with it the novel idea of exclusivity:
that the God Aton was not merely the supreme god, but the only god.
These radical innovations were not well received either by the disempowered Amun
priestly caste or by the Egyptian general populace; predictably, they produced a
fanatical desire for retribution and the return of the traditional religious practices on
the part of the priests and the discontented people, “a reaction which was able to find
a free outlet after the king’s death” (Freud 1939, 39). Thus, when the Pharaoh died in
1358 B.C.E. the religion of Aton was ruthlessly suppressed in Egypt and Akhenaten
became known to his successors as the “heretic king” whose memory they sought to
expunge from the historical record. In his narrative, Freud depicts a despairing
Moses, a devotee of the Aton religion, seeing “his hopes and prospects destroyed”
(Freud 1939, 46), responding to these events by placing himself at the head of an
enslaved Semitic tribe which had long been in bondage in Egypt and leading them to
freedom across the Sinai. In the process he converted them to an even more
spiritualized, rigorous and demanding form of monotheism, which involved the
Egyptian custom of circumcision, a symbolic act of submission to the Divine Will.

In the Freudian narrative the onerous demands of the new religion ultimately led his
followers to rebel and to kill Moses, an effective repetition of the original father
murder outlined in Totem and Taboo, after which they turned to the cult of the volcano
god Yahweh. But the memory of the Egyptian Moses remained a powerful latent
force until, several generations later, a second Moses, the son-in-law of the Midianite
priest Jethro, shaped the development of Judaism by integrating the monotheism of
his predecessor with the worship of Yahweh. By this means the guilt deriving from
the murder of the original Moses survived in the collective unconscious of the Jewish
people and led to the hope of a messiah who would redeem them for their
forefathers’ murderous act.
While Freud evidently retained his view of religion as the analogue of an obsessional
neurosis, this account now contained the recognition that, as such, its effects are not
necessarily pathological, but, on the contrary, can also be socially and culturally
beneficial in a marked way. Thus he points out in his narrative that, through the
example and guidance of the great prophets, there arose an ethical tradition within
Judaism, ultimately traceable back to Moses the Egyptian, which proscribed iconic
representation and ceremonial performance, demanding in their place belief and “a
life of truth and justice” (Freud 1939, 82), a tradition with which Freud evidently had
deep affinity. In his view, the Judaic ethic was one which demanded restrictions on
the gratification of certain instincts as being incompatible with its spiritualised view
of human nature and dignity, in a manner paralleling that in which the totem laws
had imposed the rule of exogamy within the totem clan. Such restrictions, he argued,
enabled Jewish culture to flourish and to take on its unique character. The prophets
“did not tire of maintaining that God demands nothing else from his people but a just
and virtuous life: that is to say, abstention from the gratification of all impulses that
according to our present-day moral standards are to be condemned as vicious”
(Freud 1939, 187). In this account, the murder of Moses was thus the initial event
which provoked a sense of guilt that in turn shaped the ethical content of Judaic
monotheism. This guilt, Freud argued, marked what he termed “the return of the
repressed” (Freud 1939, 197), the emergence of compulsive patterns of behavior in
the life of a social group generated by a dynamic originating in a traumatic event
lying in the distant past but mediated and transmitted to the present in covert form
by a tradition inspired, and partly shaped, by unconscious memory-traces. “All
phenomena of symptom-formation can be fairly described as ‘the return of the
repressed’,” he argued; “The distinctive character of them, however, lies in the
extensive distortion the returning elements have undergone, compared with their
original form” (Freud 1939, 201). This is something, he held, which constitutes an
“archaic heritage” that does not need to be reacquired by each generation, but merely
to be reawakened, and he charted the development of that heritage by means of an
enumeration of the stages by means of which the repressed returns, from the
primeval father through to the totem, to the hero, then to the polytheistic gods and
finally to the monotheistic concept of a single Highest Being.

On this account, the obsessional sense of guilt governing and shaping the ascetic,
highly spiritualized ethic implicit in Judaism has been passed on through the
generations, such that it has become the very essence of the Jewish character: “The
origin … of this ethics in feelings of guilt, due to the repressed hostility to God,
cannot be gainsaid. It bears the characteristic of being never concluded and never
able to be concluded with which we are familiar in the reaction-formations of the
obsessional neurosis” (Freud 1939, 212). To recognize, through this form of
(psycho)analysis, the genesis of the ethical system in the guilt arising from a
nefarious historical deed is, he suggested, to free oneself from its obsessive features
while simultaneously accepting its entirely human origins. But such a recognition
does not entail an abandonment of the core value system, as there is a sense, as
Freud acknowledged to be true in his own case, in which that ethical heritage cannot
be repudiated once it is acquired.

This narrative account of the rootedness of the Jewish monotheistic tradition in the
life and murder of the man Moses captures what Freud believed to be its most
essential feature, something “majestic,” an eternal truth, “historic” rather than
“material,” that “in primaeval times there was one person who must needs appear
gigantic and who, raised to the status of a deity, returned to the memory of men”
(1939, 204). For this reason, a number of commentators, in particular, Gresser and
Friedman, argue persuasively that the Moses text should be seen as a response to the
question posed by many of Freud’s critics after the publication of the Hebrew edition
of Totem and Taboo as to the sense in which he remained, as he claimed, “in his
essential nature a Jew,” given his psychologically reductive analysis of religion and
his perceived hostility to religious orthodoxy. The answer, they suggest, could be
offered by him in Moses and Monotheism only in terms of what he saw as essential to
Judaism itself, a rigorous, spiritually intellectualized life ethic, centering on the
virtues of truth and justice, derived from the man Moses, its human creator, through
the work and influence of the prophets (compare Whitebook 2017, 68-9).
In early Christianity, Freud argued, the guilt of Moses’ murder became reconfigured
in the Pauline tradition as the notion of an original sin for which atonement must be
sought through a sacrificial death, the effect of which was to abolish the feeling of
guilt and supplant Judaism with Christianity: “Paul, by developing the Jewish
religion further, became its destroyer. His success was certainly mainly due to the
fact that through the idea of salvation he laid the ghost of the feeling of guilt” (Freud
1939, 141). Once again, this historical transition was interpreted by Freud in clear
Oedipal terms: “Originally a Father religion, Christianity became a Son religion. The
fate of having to displace the Father it could not escape” (Freud 1939, 215). However,
he held that the advent of Christianity was in some respects a step back from
monotheism and a reversion to a covert form of polytheism, with the panoply of
saints standing as a surrogate for the lesser gods of pagan antiquity. He accordingly
saw the process whereby Christianity supplanted Judaism as comparable to the
historical expunging of the monotheistic religion of Aton in ancient Egypt after the
death of the Pharaoh Akhenaten: “The triumph of Christianity was a renewed victory
of the Amon priests over the God of Ikhnaton” (Freud 1939, 142).

What is arguably of most importance in the Moses narrative is that it constitutes a

final effort by Freud to reconcile himself with his own Jewish heritage; as one critic
suggests, “Freud uses Moses to re-affirm his loyalty to a people whose religion he
does not share but whose claim on him he steadfastly refuses to disavow” (Friedman,
1998, 148). The Jewish people, Freud pointed out, have a self-confidence which
springs from the idea of being chosen by God from amongst the peoples of the world,
an idea which derives strength from the related notion of participation in the reality
of a supreme Deity. But the tenet of the Judaic religion which historically has had
perhaps the most significant effect of all, he contended, has been the prohibition,
derived from the religion of Aton, of graven images as idolatrous. That forces the
believer into worship of a dematerialized God, an abstraction apprehensible only to
the intellect, a movement described by Freud as “a triumph of spirituality over the
senses” (Freud 1939, 178). This shift from the sensible to the conceptual was, he
believed, “unquestionably one of the most important stages on the way to becoming
human” (Freud 1939, 180), and it gave a preeminence to abstractions in Jewish
intellectual life that made possible some of its key contributions to Western
mathematics, science and literature, including, of course, the discipline of
psychoanalysis. In that sense, he ultimately recognized that the very science of mind
which he had pioneered and with which he sought to expose the Oedipal nature of
religion was itself a cultural product of the Judaic religious impulse.
8. Critical Responses
Freud’s utilization of the conceptual apparatus of psychoanalysis in his treatment of
religion yields a naturalistic account rooted in psychoanalytic theory which, while
being arguably one of the more self-consistent to be found in the modern age, is also
one of the most controversial. In its main features it strongly anticipated, and almost
certainly influenced, contemporary critiques of religion associated with the “New
Atheism” movement of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, such as those of Daniel
Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens (1949—2011). The
impact of Freud’s psychoanalytical projectionism can also be traced in the
development of contemporary radical theology, particularly in the work of Don
Cupitt and Lloyd Geering. The responses to it, in turn, occupy a very wide spectrum,
from enthusiastic affirmation to condemnatory repudiation. A representative sample
of these would include the following.
a. The Anthropological Critique
 The idea of the “primal horde” was derived by Atkinson and Freud from what was no
more than a cautious suggestion by Darwin in his Descent of Man that, amongst
several possibilities regarding the social organization of “primeval” humans, one was
that it might have consisted of small patriarchal groups led by a single dominant
male, “each with as many wives as he could support and obtain, whom he would have
jealously guarded against all other men” (Darwin 1981, II 362). This suggestion,
which became one of the linchpins of Freud’s account of totem religion, has not
received scientific corroboration, and it remains questionable whether the idea has
any basis in reality (compare Smith, R.J. 2016). Further, the progressivist
evolutionary paradigm championed by Freud, with its projection of a universal linear
cultural development from the primitive to the civilized, is largely rejected by
contemporary ethnologists and social anthropologists, in particular those influenced
by the work of Franz Boas (1858—1942). The assimilation of prehistoric humans with
contemporary “primitive” humans on which it is based, and the narrative constructed
out of that assimilation, is generally regarded as Eurocentric in its presuppositions
and as deriving from the mindset of 19th century imperialism (Kenny, R. 2015). Thus,
in his influential review of Freud’s Totem and Taboo in 1919, the eminent American
anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber, who was a disciple of Boas, subjected Freud’s
account of totemism to an extended and trenchant critique, suggesting that the
method employed in it amounted to “multiplying into one another, as it were,
fractional certainties … without recognition that the multiplicity of factors must
successively decrease the probability of their product” (Kroeber 1920, 51). Kroeber
attributed this almost entirely to the reliance by Freud on the speculative approach
taken by such nineteenth century ethnologists as Tylor and Frazer; their
anthropological work, he stated bluntly, “is not so much ethnology as an attempt to
psychologize with ethnological data” (Kroeber 1920, 55). In a less trenchantly-
worded retrospective review written 20 years later, Kroeber—who had in the interim
spent some time as a practicing lay psychoanalyst—sought to make conceptual space
for a reconciliation of Freud’s theory with scientific ethnology by making a
distinction between “historical” and “psychological” thinking, suggesting that Freud’s
account should be understood as involving the latter rather than the former (Kroeber
1939, 447). However, notwithstanding that, Kroeber’s strongly negative assessment
in his original review of Freud’s incursion into the field of scientific anthropology is
now generally accepted within the discipline. Accordingly, Freud’s account of
totemism, considered as a direct contribution to an understanding of the
development of human culture, would now be viewed with considerable suspicion by
professional anthropologists.
b. Myth or Science?
For these reasons, Freud’s projectionist theory of religion as evolving from a primal
parricide has been called into serious question as a scientific or historical hypothesis,
and with it, the status of psychoanalysis itself. Karl Popper (1902—1994) and Ludwig
Wittgenstein have both argued against Freud’s repeated claim for the scientific status
of psychoanalysis and—by implication—the account of religion which he developed
from it. Popper did so on the grounds that the terms in which psychoanalytic theory
is couched make it unfalsifiable in principle and thus unscientific. The theories of
Freud and Adler, he argued, describe some facts, but “in the manner of myths. They
contain most interesting psychological suggestions, but not in a testable form”
(Popper 1963, 37), unlike, for example, the propositions of the natural sciences which
almost certainly served as a model for Freud. Wittgenstein, who considered Freud to
be one of the few contemporary thinkers with “something to say” (Wittgenstein 1966,
41), albeit one whose whole way of thinking “wants combatting” (ibid., 50), was
intrigued by Freud’s focus on mythology in his narratives, and saw that much of the
persuasive force of his work derived from the claim that it has constructed a scientific
explanation of ancient myths. However, he considered that what Freud had effected
was of a different order: “What he has done is propound a new myth” (Wittgenstein
1966, 51).

In a similar vein, Paul Ricoeur, in conceding that the primal parricide depicted by
Freud is constructed out of ethnological scraps “on the pattern of the fantasy
deciphered by analysis” (Ricoeur 1970, 208), proposed that it, and indeed the entire
edifice of Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, should itself be read as being essentially
mythical rather than scientific. He thus argued that “one does psychoanalysis a
service, not by defending its scientific myth as science, but by interpreting it as myth”
(Ricoeur 1970, 20). This latter stratagem, with some variations, has subsequently
been adopted by a number of other commentators who seek a mechanism to validate
the Freudian cultural narrative in the face of its undeniable ethnological
shortcomings (compare, for example, Paul, 1996). It is worth noting that Ricoeur’s
conception of the mythic is complex, and occurs within the context of his
construction of a religious hermeneutics that engages and intersects with the
Freudian psychoanalytic one while seeking to go beyond it, a hermeneutics that
regards myths not as fables, “but rather as the symbolic exploration of our
relationship to beings and to Being” (Ricoeur 1970, 551). On such a view, the
deficiencies presented by the Freudian narrative are read as being hermeneutic
rather than scientific, open to further articulation and refinement through a more
nuanced and balanced interpretation of the symbolic structure of religious discourse.

However, the hermeneutic construal of the Freudian enterprise is itself open to the
charge that it fails utterly to acknowledge the over-arching importance attributed by
Freud to his claim that psychoanalysis is to be properly regarded as a rigorous
science of the mind and has been vigorously critiqued on those and related grounds
by Adolf Grünbaum (1923—2018). For Grünbaum, the hermeneutic approach to
Freud constitutes a serious distortion of its subject matter and is reflective of an
objectionable scientophobia; rather immoderately, he accused it of having “all of the
earmarks of an investigative cul-de-sac, a blind alley rather than a citadel for
psychoanalytic apologetics” (Grünbaum 1984, 93). By contrast, he insisted on seeing
psychoanalysis precisely as a testable theory, but one which is based upon clinical
reports from therapeutic practice rather than rigorous experimentally-derived
evidence. He pointed out that Freud, whom he considered “a sophisticated scientific
methodologist” (ibid., 128), was fully aware of and highly sensitive to the question of
the logic of the confirmation and disconfirmation of psychoanalytic interpretations,
but contended that his utilization of the notion of consilience in that connection
could not meet the demands of full scientific probity. Grünbaum accordingly came to
view psychoanalysis as being based upon an inadequate conception of scientific
confirmation; the clinical data ostensibly adduced in its favor from therapeutic
sessions—which Ernest Jones had described as “the real basis” of psychoanalysis
(Jones 1959, 1:3) —are, he argued, the products of a shared influence and are
irremediably contaminated by suggestion on the part of the analyst. They cannot
therefore properly be regarded as providing confirmatory evidence for the theory,
while contemporary psychoanalysis has not met the objection that successful therapy
operates as a placebo.
c. Lamarckian vs. Darwinian Evolutionary Principles
As we have seen, Freud’s transposition of the father complex from individual
infantile development to the social order relied heavily on Haeckel’s thesis that
ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. The latter is now largely rejected by contemporary
science, in particular the manner in which Freudians have adopted it to model the
social evolution of human beings analogically with the psychological development of
children. Further, it seems evident that Freud’s transposition is deeply problematic
and leaves psychoanalysis unable to explain the wide variety of culturally determined
personality structures which are demonstrated by contemporary empirical research.
Freud’s commitment to Lamarckian evolutionary principles has, of course, also
received significant critical comment from the scientific community (Slavet 2009,
Ch. 2; Yerushalmi 1993, Ch. 2), though it must be noted that his account of acquired
memory traces as being partly constitutive of Jewish identity in Moses and
Monotheism owes as much to August Weissmann’s germ-plasma theory of inheritance
as it does to Lamarckism (Slavet 2009, 28).
d. The Primordial Religion: Polytheism or
Monotheism?
The entire enterprise of accounting for the origins of religion as an evolutionary
trajectory from polytheism to monotheism has been challenged by the work of the
ethnologist Father Wilhelm Schmidt (1868—1954), whose multi-volume Der
Ursprung der Gottesidee (The Origin of the Idea of God; 1912—1955) is a wide-ranging
study of primitive religion. In it Schmidt argued that the “original” tribal religion was
almost invariably a form of primitive monotheism, focused on belief in a single
benevolent creator god, with polytheistic religions featuring at a later stage of
cultural development. Schmidt, who was influenced by Boas and his followers, was
accordingly critical of evolutionist accounts of religious development, contending
that they frequently lack solid grounding in the historical and anthropological
evidence, and was dismissive on those grounds of the totemic theory propagated by
Freud. It must be added that Freud was aware of Schmidt’s work and was less than
impressed by its quality or its scientific impartiality. He saw Schmidt, whom he held
partially responsible for the abolition of the journal Rivista italiana di Psicoanalisi in
Italy, as an implacable enemy of psychoanalysis, who was motivated by a desire to
undermine Freud’s account of the genesis of religion. Freud feared for a possible
suppression of psychoanalysis in Vienna in the mid-1930s by the ruling Catholic
authorities, with whom Schmidt had considerable influence. That fear, combined
with hope—which proved unfortunately ill-grounded—that those authorities might
function as a bulwark against the threat of Nazism, persuaded Freud to defer
publication of the full text of Moses and Monotheism until after he had taken up
residence in England (see Freud 1939, Prefatory Notes to Part 111), a fact which itself
had a considerably negative effect on the literary coherence of the work. The
substantive issue between Freud and Schmidt on the temporal primacy of polytheism
or monotheism remains unresolved and is almost certainly irresolvable; as the
theologian Hans Küng puts it, the scientific search for the primordial religion should
be called off, as “neither the theory of degeneration from a lofty monotheistic
beginning nor the evolutionary theory of a lower animistic or preanimistic beginning
can be historically substantiated” (Küng 1990, 70).
e. Religion as a Social Phenomenon
It is instructive to compare Freud’s attempts to deal with the social dimension of
religion with that of his near contemporary, the sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858—
1917), whose study The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1995; orig. 1912) has been
highly influential, though it should not in any way be seen as a response to Freud.
In The Elementary Forms Durkheim set himself the task of analyzing religion
empirically as a social phenomenon, holding that such a treatment alone can reveal
its true nature. For Durkheim, the social dimension of human life is primary; human
individuality itself is largely determined by, and is a function of, social interaction
and organization. This was a point missed by Freud, who, we have seen, sought to
deal with the social dimension of religion by an extension of psychoanalytical
principles from individual to group psychology. What Durkheim termed “social facts”
play an important role in his analysis; they are the collective forces external to
individuals which compel or influence them to act in particular ways. Such facts exist
at the level of society as a whole and arise from social relationships and human
associations, and include law, morality, contractual relationships and, perhaps most
importantly, religion.
Durkheim defined religion as “a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to
sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices
which unite in one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to
them” (Durkheim 1995, 44). He saw the connection between religious beliefs and
practices as a necessary one; for him, religious experience is rooted more in the
actions associated with rites than it is in reflective thought. Traditional accounts of
religion have tended to treat religious beliefs as essentially hypothetical or quasi-
scientific in nature—an approach clearly evident in Freud—which almost inevitably
raises skeptical doubts about their validity, whereas Durkheim saw that what is
important to the believer is the normative dimension of faith. The true function of
religion is to deliver salvation by showing us how to live; as such, it originates in and
receives legitimation from, moments of “general effervescence” (Durkheim 1995,
213), in which members of a group gather together to perform religious rituals. This
often leads the participants into a state of psychological excitement resembling
delirium, in which they come to feel transported into a higher level of existence
where they make direct contact with the sacred object. Participation in such rituals
has the effect of affirming and strengthening the collective identity of the group and
must be renewed periodically in order to consolidate that identity.
Durkheim took pains to ensure that his use of terms like “delirium” in such contexts
should not be misunderstood: the “delirium” associated with religious rituals is, he
stressed, “well-founded”  (Durkheim 1995, 228) in that it is produced by the
operation of social factors that are both irreducibly real and crucially important.
Given that it is a foundational postulate of sociology that no human institution rests
upon an error or a lie, he declared it unscientific to suggest that systems of ideas of
such complexity as religions could be delusory or be the product of illusion, as Freud
was to do. In that clear functionalist sense, he concluded, all religions are true;
“Fundamentally then, there are no religions that are false. All are true after their own
fashion: All fulfil given conditions of human existence, though in different ways”
(Durkheim 1995, 2).
This vindication of religion in general, however, has as its counterpart a commitment
on Durkheim’s part to an account of the nature of sacred objects or gods which was
no less egregiously projectionist than Freud’s. If it is impossible for religious belief,
considered as a set of representations relating to the sacred, to be erroneous in its
own social right, error can and does emerge, he argued, in the interpretation of what
those representations mean, even within the framework of a particular culture. At
that level, Durkheim conceded, false beliefs are the norm, because all collective
representations are delusional and religion is merely a case in point in that regard:
“The whole social world seems populated with forces that in reality exist only in our
minds” (Durkheim 1995, 228), non-religious examples of which are the meanings
attributed by people to flags, to blood and to humans themselves as a class of being.
This point regarding the socially-imposed nature of the meanings associated with
collective representations can perhaps be most clearly illustrated by reference to
now-defunct cultures and religions. For example, while we readily recognize that the
Moai, the deeply impressive monolithic statues of Easter Island, unquestionably had
a particular political, aesthetic and religious significance for the Rapa Nui people who
created them, the meaning of that symbolism largely escapes us—archeological and
anthropological reconstruction aside—as we view them from a perspective external to
that culture.
Durkheim contended that in a religious context, the sacred object, which is indeed
greater than the individual, is nothing more or less than the power of society
itself which, in order to be represented symbolically at all, has be objectified through
a process of projection. Gods or sacred objects then, are “a figurative expression of …
society” (Durkheim 1995, 227); they are society refined, idealized and apotheosized.
As such, they represent a power beyond all individual humans, but are ultimately
existentially interdependent with them: “while it is true that man is a dependent of
his gods, this dependence is mutual. The gods also need man; without offerings and
sacrifices, they would die” (Durkheim 1995, 36).
Durkheim’s treatment of religion, then, utilizes a methodology which offers a sharp
contrast with Freud’s highly-individualistic, psychological approach to the subject, a
contrast which highlights some of the sociological shortcomings of the latter. Unlike
Freud, Durkheim also sought to provide an account of religion which achieves full
scientific probity while simultaneously doing justice to the richness of the actual lived
experiences of believers. Notwithstanding that, however, it seems clear that in the
final analysis his anti-skeptical stratagem works satisfactorily only on its own,
scientific terms; a believer could scarcely derive comfort from a view which
legitimates his belief-system qua sociological fact while implying that the personal
God of worship which is its intentional object is, in reality, nothing other than society
personified.
f. The Projection Theory of Religion
This raises the whole question of the intellectual plausibility of the projection theory
of religion. The question is a complex one, a fact which Freud scarcely acknowledges
in his works. As we have seen, the theory, which has a number of related but distinct
forms, arose in modernity as a response to the anthropomorphic nature of the
attributes which the conceptualization of a personal God in many of the great world
religions seems to necessitate. Freud, like Feuerbach, took this as entailing strict
anthropotheistic consequences: Feuerbach’s argument reduced God to the essence of
man, and Freud sought to go beyond him in offering a psychoanalytical explanation,
in terms of the father complex, of why it is human beings have a need to hypostasize
their own subjective nature. Belief in God, and the complex patterns of behavior and
of rituals associated with that belief, he argued, arise essentially out of the deep
psychological need for a Cosmic father.
However, it has been pointed out that such a view underestimates the logical gulf
that exists between wishes and beliefs; the former may on occasion be a necessary
condition for the latter, but are rarely a sufficient one: an athlete may wish to
triumph in an event with every fibre of his being, but that will not necessarily
generate a belief that he can do so, much less the delusion that he has done so. Thus,
even if it is true that there is a universal wish for a Cosmic father, it is implausible to
suggest that such a wish is a sufficient condition for religious belief and the complex
practices and value systems associated with it (Kai-man Kwan 2006). Further, as
Alvin Plantinga (1932—) argues, in the absence of compelling empirical evidence to
support the view that such a universal wish exists, Freud was left with no option but
to contend that such wishes are equally universally repressed into the unconscious, a
move which opens his theory to the accusation of being empirically untestable
(Plantinga 2000, 163).
It is to be noted too that concerns about anthropomorphisms in religious language
are in no way restricted to religious skeptics: apophatic or negative theology, for
example, grew out of recognition of the logical difficulties implicit in attempts to
express the nature of the divine in language. As a result, theologians such as
Maximus the Confessor (580—662),  Johannes Scotus Eriugena (815—877) and—in
Judaism—Maimonides (1138—1204) repudiated the positive attribution of
characteristics to God in favour of “referencing” God exclusively in terms of what He
is not, through the via negativa. It is also important to note that some proponents of
the projection theory, such as Spinoza and possibly Xenophanes, saw the projection
theory as invalidating only those forms of religious belief which are anthropotheistic
in nature. Thus projectionism, so far from being hostile to all forms of religious belief
and practice, is in fact consistent with themes relating to the avoidance of idolatry
long central to the Abrahamic religions in particular, as evidenced in the proscription
on naming God in Judaism and in aniconism, the prohibition of figurative
representations of the Divine in the early Orthodox Church, in Calvinism and also in
Islam (Thornton, 2015: 139-140).
It is thus perfectly consistent to accept projectionism as an account of religious
concept formation without thereby repudiating religious belief. Indeed, the logical
compatibility of projectionism with religious belief has led some contemporary
religious thinkers to go so far as to embrace projectionism as a condition of a
reflective religious commitment. The view that religious representations are products
of the human imagination, it has been argued, can be accepted implicitly by
believers, as the “mark of the Christian in the twilight of modernity is … trust in the
faithfulness of the God who alone guarantees the conformity of our images to reality
and who has given himself to us in forms that may only be grasped by imagination”
(Green, 2000, 15). This argument is closely paralleled by a suggestion from Plantinga
that wish-fulfillment as a mechanism could have arisen out of a divinely created
human constitution. For while it may not, in general, be the function of wish-
fulfillment to produce true belief, that in itself does not rule out the possibility,
Plantinga contends—at least for those who believe in God—that humans have been so
constituted by the creator to have a deeply-felt need and wish to believe in him. On
this view, the very existence of the wish for a transcendent Father may be taken as
evidence for the truth rather than the falsity of the beliefs which it inspires: “Perhaps
God has designed us to know that he is present and loves us by way of creating us
with a strong desire for him, a desire that leads to the belief that in fact he is there”
(Plantinga 2000, 165).
Whatever level of plausibility may be assigned to these views, it is in any case clear
that the projection theory is also reflective of the difficulties which certain forms of
religious discourse generate: the characterization of God as possessing attributes
such as Love and Wisdom, however qualified such attributions may be, seems
invariably to invite the kind of challenge that is found in Feuerbach, Freud and even
in Durkheim. In that sense, the projection theory highlights deep theological and
philosophical issues relating to the nature and meaning of religious language. One of
the more promising approaches to this issue is that suggested by the work of of
Wittgenstein, who, in his Philosophical Investigations  (1974), propounded his
language-game theory of meaning, which argued that the meaning of any term is
determined by its actual use in a living language-system. In that connection, he
brought out the complex interplay of linguistic and non-linguistic activities and
practices in human life, in a manner analogous to Durkheim’s functionalism. An
application of this to religious discourse implies that the latter cannot be understood
in isolation from the broad web of cultural practices, beliefs and concerns in which it
is imbedded and from which it derives its meaning. This suggests that concerns that
skeptical conclusions necessarily follow from our use of human-being predicates in
speaking about the Divine are misguided; such concerns gain credence only when
accompanied by the deeply pervasive, but uncritical, philosophical assumption—
clearly evident in Freud—that the attributions of anthropomorphic predicates to God
are to be understood exclusively as factual descriptions of a particular kind, an
assumption which is at the very least gratuitous.
This point is made cryptically by Wittgenstein in an indirect allusion to the
projection theory: “‘God’s Eye Sees Everything’—I want to say of this that it uses a
picture…. [in saying this] I meant: what conclusions are you going to draw? etc. Are
eyebrows going to be talked of, in connection with the Eye of God?” (Wittgenstein,
1966, 71). In other words, while in factual discourse references to human eyes have
an internal relationship to references to human eyebrows, such that the occurrence
of one may and frequently does give rise to the other, no such correlation is possible
or necessary in religious discourse about God’s Eye (or Mercy, Anger, Love, and so
forth). Thus while “God’s Eye Sees Everything” conjures up the image of a stern,
judgmental all-seeing parental figure which, at one level, is amenable to the Freudian
father-complex analysis, at another, arguably deeper, level it is clear that the web of
relations that holds between the anthropomorphic terms used cannot meaningfully
be compared with that which holds in factual discourse about earthly fathers; even
the most literal-minded do not seek to speak of God’s eyebrows. The occurrence of
anthropomorphisms in religious discourse, then, does not in itself necessitate the
acceptance of anthropotheistic conclusions.

g. Moses and Monotheism: Interpretive Approaches

Moses and Monotheism is the most controversial of Freud’s works, seeking as it does to
both utilize psychoanalytic theory to reinterpret key historical events and to embed
psychoanalysis within a historiographical narrative. Not alone did it contest the
orthodox Biblical narrative of the role of Moses in the history of Judaism, it did so at
a time when the Jews of Europe were threatened with complete annihilation. It is
unsurprising, then, that it should have become the subject of very strong criticism, on
the grounds both of methodology and content; indeed, because its central account of
the Egyptian origins of Judaic monotheism has seemed so egregiously at odds with
both tradition and the historical evidence, much of the critical interest has focused
on the question of Freud’s motives in propagating it. The Freudian narrative is, of
course, problematic in the extreme when considered as a putative exegesis of the
Exodus story; as one commentator puts it, “There is hardly any need to state
that Moses and Monotheism does not operate at the level of an exegesis of the Old
Testament and in no way satisfies the most elementary requirement of a
hermeneutics adapted to a text” (Ricoeur 1970, 545). Though Moses is almost
certainly an Egyptian name, the evidence that Moses was an Egyptian is not
conclusive and it has also been suggested that his life was not in fact
contemporaneous with that of Amenhotep IV (Banks 1973, 411). Freud’s willingness,
towards the very end of his life, to construct such an apparently speculative narrative
on the very origins of Judaism has long puzzled scholars, but it is possible to
distinguish three broad exegetical approaches relating to the Moses text in the
secondary literature:
1. For much of his life Freud presented an image of himself to the world as an urbane,
cosmopolitan intellectual, committed to the ideals of secular humanism and modern
science, and at times that seemed to necessitate downplaying his Jewish background
and education. Some scholars, such as Jones (1957) and, more recently Gay (1987),
have accordingly represented the Moses text primarily as a critique of Judaism, a
comprehensive application of the reductive analysis of religion offered in Freud’s
earlier works to the religion of his forefathers. In a similar vein, Jan Assmann (1998)
sees Freud as continuing the more general task, initiated by Baruch Spinoza (1632—
1677), of combating monotheism and undoing the negative values, such as
intolerance, religious hatred and the configuration of alternative religions as
idolatrous, generated by the absolute conception of truth which monotheistic religions
seem to require.
2. The second approach, associated in particular with Yerushalmi (1993), Bernstein
(1998) and Slavet (2009; 2010) repudiates what it sees as a confusion of meaning
with motivation in the secondary literature regarding Freud’s text, stressing that what
is of importance is what Freud sought to convey, not what motivated him to do so.
While acknowledging the resonances within the text of personal factors operating in
Freud’s life at the time of publication, such as his relationship with the memory of his
father, the resurgence of antisemitism and the personal and professional threat
presented by Nazism from which he so narrowly escaped, this approach rejects any
autobiographical interpretation of the text, focusing instead on Freud’s account of the
nature of the Jewish religion and the factors which constitute and determine Jewish
identity. Thus Bernstein sees in Freud’s Moses text a powerful new account of
religion in general and of Judaism in particular, centering on the idea that a religious
tradition derives its dynamic from a complex interplay of conscious and unconscious
forces. Slavet attributes to Freud a racial theory of memory and sees Moses and
Monotheism as “the culmination of a lifetime spent investigating the relationships
between memory and its rivals: heredity, history, and fiction” (Slavet 2009, 7) in the
context of the question of “Jewishness.” On this view, Freud sought to show that the
advancement of intellectualized spirituality (Geistigkeit) has been the most important
part of the legacy of Judaic monotheism, but that this owed as much to the working
out of collective trauma, the return of the repressed, as it did to the conscious
influence of the patriarchs and prophets.
3. Finally, there is the semi-autobiographical approach, largely taken in this article,
which sees the text as primarily concerned with the long-standing problem for Freud
of resolving his personal father complex. That, in psychoanalytical terms, amounted
to the implementation of an instance of “deferred obedience” by defining in a positive
 way his relationship with the religion into which he was born, albeit with an emphasis
on the human origins of the Judaic ethic (Rice 1990; Gresser 1994; Friedman 1998).
In a thinker as complex as Freud, these approaches can neither be taken as
exhaustive nor as entirely mutually exclusive, as significant textual evidence can be
invoked for all three. What seems evident, at any rate, is that Freud was seeking, at
that critical point in Jewish history, to affirm his cultural and intellectual
indebtedness to the ethical basis of the religion of his forefathers while
simultaneously seeking to demonstrate that the validity of that ethic is not
contingent upon the Biblical and theological accretions traditionally associated with
it. On such a reading, the question of the accuracy of the historical detail in the
Freudian narrative becomes as peripheral as it is—on a non-literal interpretation—to
that of the Biblical one. The import of the book, as Friedman puts it, may reside
ultimately in a purpose which can certainly be discerned in it: to preserve Judaism
and articulate Freud’s own Jewish identity at a stage in a historical process in which
his people come to progress from worship of a transcendent God “to the rational and
self-conscious appreciation of themselves as a people of great accomplishment
descended from a great but human leader” (Friedman 1998, 139).

9. References and Further Reading

a. References
 Alter, R. 1988. The Invention of Hebrew Prose, Modem Fiction and the Language of
Realism (Samuel and Athea Stroum Lectures in Jewish Studies). University of Washington Press.
 Assmann, J. 1998. Moses the Egyptian: The Memory in Western Monotheism. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
 Banks, R. 1973. ‘Religion as Projection: A Re-Appraisal of Freud’s Theory’. Religious Studies,
vol. 9 (4), 401-426.
 Berke, J. 2015. The Hidden Freud: His Hassidic Roots. London: Karnac Books.
 Bernstein, R.J. 1998. Freud and the Legacy of Moses. Cambridge: University Press.
 Boehlich, W. (ed.) 1992. The Letters of Sigmund Freud to Eduard Silberstein, 1871-1881  (trans.
A. Pomerans). Harvard University Press.
 Brentano, F. 1973 (orig. 1874). Psychology From an Empirical Standpoint (trans. A.C.
Rancurello, D.B. Terrell and L.L. McAlister). London: Routledge.
 d’Aquili, E.G. & Newberg, A.B. 1999. The Mystical Mind: Probing the Biology of Religious
Experience. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.
 Darwin, C. 1981. Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. Princeton University Press.
 Durkheim, É. 1995 (orig. 1912). The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (trans. Karen
Fields). New York: Free Press.
 Feuerbach, L. 1881. The Essence of Christianity, 2nd edition (trans. George Eliot). London:
Trübner & Co., Ludgate Hill.
 Frazer, J. G. 2002 (orig. 1890). The Golden Bough. New York: Dover Publications.
 Freud, S. 1914 (orig. 1901). The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (trans. A.A. Brill). London: T.
Fisher Unwin.
 Freud, S. 1939. Moses and Monotheism (trans. Katherine Jones). London: The Hogarth Press and
Institute of Psycho-Analysis.
 Freud, S. 1957 (orig. 1910) ‘The Future Prospects of Psychoanalytic Therapy’, in The Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud ( & and ed. J. Strachey) Volume X1
(1911-1913). W. W. Norton & Company, 139-151.
 Freud, S. 1959. ‘An Autobiographical Study’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud  (trans. & ed. J. Strachey). Volume XX (1925-1926). London:
The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 7-70.
 Freud, S. 1961 (orig. 1927). The Future of an Illusion (trans. James Strachey). New York; W.W.
Norton.
 Freud, S. 1962 (orig. 1930). Civilization and its Discontents (trans. James Strachey). New York;
W.W. Norton.
 Freud, S. 1976. ‘An Obituary for Professor S. Hammerschlag’, in The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (trans. & and ed. J. Strachey) Volume IX (1906-1908).
W. W. Norton & Company, 255-6.
 Freud, S. 1976 (orig. 1907). ‘Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices’, in The Standard Edition
of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (trans. & ed. James Strachey) Volume IX (1906-
1908). W. W. Norton & Company, 115-128.
 Freud, S. 1986. The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887-1904 (trans. &
and ed. J. Moussaieff Masson). The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
 Freud, S. 1990 (orig. 1933). New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis (trans. James
Strachey). New York: W.W. Norton.
 Freud, S. 2001 (orig. 1913). Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental
Lives of Savages and Neurotics (trans. James Strachey). Oxford: Routledge Classics.
 Freud, S. 2010 (orig. 1900, 1908) The Interpretation of Dreams (trans. James Strachey). New
York: Basic Books.
 Friedman, R. 1998. ‘Freud’s Religion: Oedipus and Moses’. Religious Studies, 34 (2), 135-149.
 Gay, Peter. 1987. A Godless Jew? Freud, Atheism and the Making of Psychoanalysis. New Haven:
Yale University Press
 Goodnick, B. 1992. ‘Jacob Freud’s Dedication to His Son: A Reevaluation’. The Jewish Quarterly
Review, Vol. 82 (3-4), 329-360.
 Green, G. 2000. Theology, Hermeneutics and Imagination: The Crisis of Interpretation at the End
of Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
 Gresser, M. 1994. Dual Allegiance: Freud as a Modern Jew. Albany, NY: State University of
New York Press.
 Grünbaum, A. The Foundations of Psychoanalysis. Berkeley: University of California Press.
 Hume, D. 1956 (orig. 1757). The Natural History of Religion (ed. H.E. Root). London: A.C.
Black.
 Jones, E. 1957. Sigmund Freud. Life And Work: Volume Three – The Last Phase 1919-1939.
London: Hogarth Press.
 Jones, E. 1959 (ed). Freud: Collected Papers in 5 Volumes (trans. Joan Riviere). New York: Basic
Books.
 Kai-man Kwan. 2006 “Are Religious Beliefs Human Projections?” in Raymond Pelly and Peter
Stuart, eds., A Religious Atheist? Critical Essays on the Work of Lloyd Geering. Dunedin, New Zealand:
Otago University Press, 41-66.
 Kenny, R. 2015. ‘Freud, Jung and Boas: the psychoanalytic engagement with anthropology
revisited’. Notes and records of the Royal Society of London. Jun 20; 69(2): 173–190. Online:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4424604/
 Kroeber, A.L. 1920. ‘Totem and Taboo: An Ethnologic Psychoanalysis’, American
Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 22 (1), 48-55.
 Kroeber, A. L. 1939. ‘Totem and Taboo in Retrospect’. American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 45
(3), 446-451
 Lang, A. & Atkinson, J.J. 1903. Social Origins and Primal Law. London: Longmans Green.
 Parsons, W.B. 1998. “The Oceanic Feeling Revisited.” The Journal of Religion, vol. 78 (4), 501–
523.
 Paul, R. A. 1996. Moses and Civilization: The Meaning Behind Freud’s Myth. New Haven;
London: Yale University Press.
 Plantinga, A. 2000. Warranted Christian Belief. Oxford University Press.
 Popper, K. 1963. Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge. London:
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 Rice, E. 1990. Freud and Moses: The Long Journey Home. Albany, New York: SUNY Press.
 Ricoeur, P. 1970. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (trans. D. Savage). New
Haven & London: Yale University Press.
 Saarinen, J.A. 2015. A Conceptual Analysis of the Oceanic Feeling – With a Special Note on
Painterly Aesthetics. Jyväskylä: Jyväskylä University Printing House. Online at:
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 Slavet, E. 2009. Racial Fever: Freud and the Jewish Question. Fordham University Press.
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religion, language, art, and custom (2 vols). London: John Murray.
 Tylor, E.B. 1881. Anthropology: an introduction to the study of man and civilization. London:
Macmillan & Co.
 Whitebook, J. 2017. Freud: An Intellectual Autobiography. Cambridge University Press.
 Wittgenstein, L. 1966. Lectures & Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious
Belief (ed. C. Barrett). Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
 Wittgenstein, L. 1974. Philosophical Investigations (trans. G.E.M. Anscombe). Oxford: Basil
Blackwell.
 Yerushalmi, Y.H. 1993. Freud’s “Moses”: Judaism Terminable and Interminable. Yale
University Press.

b. Further Reading
 Alston, W.P. 2003. ‘Psychoanalytic theory and theistic belief’. In C. Taliafero, & P. Griffiths
(eds.). Philosophy of Religion: An anthology (123-140). Oxford: Blackwell Press.
 Bingaman, K. 2012. Freud and Faith: Living in the Tension. Albany, NY: State University of
New York Press.
 Blass, R.B. 2004. ‘Beyond illusion: Psychoanalysis and Religious Truth’. The International
Journal of Psychoanalysis, 85, 615-634.
 Derrida, J. 1998. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (trans. E. Prenowitz). University of
Chicago Press.
 Gay, P. 2006. Freud: A Life for our Time. London: W.W. Norton & Company.
 Ginsburg, R. et.al. (eds). 2006. New Perspectives on Freud’s Moses and Monotheism (Conditio
Judaica) 1st Edition. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag.
 Hewitt, M.A. 2014. Freud on Religion. London & New York: Routledge.
 R.A. 1986. Emile Durkheim: An Introduction to Four Major Works. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage
Publications.
 Kolbrener, W. (2010). ‘Death of Moses Revisited: Repetition and Creative Memory in Freud and
the Rabbis’. American Imago, 67 (2), 243-262.
 Milfull, J. 2002. ‘Freud, Moses and the Jewish Identity’. The European Legacy, vol. 7, 25-31.
 Nobus, D. 2006. ‘Sigmund Freud and the Case of Moses Man: On the Knowledge of Trauma and
the Trauma of Knowledge’. JEP: European Journal of
 Psychoanalysis: Humanities, Philosophy, Psychotherapies. Number 22 (1). Online at
http://www.psychomedia.it/jep/number22/nobus.htm
 Ofengenden, A. 2015. ‘Monotheism, the Incomplete Revolution: Narrating the Event in Freud’s
and Assmann’s Moses’.  Symploke, Volume 23 (1-2), 291-307.
 Palmer, M. 1997. Freud and Jung on Religion. London & New York: Routledge.
 Said, E. 2004. Freud and the Non-European. London: Verso.
 Smith, D.L. 1999. Freud’s Philosophy of the Unconscious. Studies in Cognitive Systems, vol. 23.
Dordrecht: Springer.
 Tauber, A.I. 2010. Freud, The Reluctant Philosopher. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Author Information
Stephen Thornton
Email: sfthornton@eircom.net
Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick
Ireland