Preface

Despite the undeniable centrality of Freud's Jewish identity to his life and work, this centrality was predicated on an experience of marginality From his earliest years in Freiberg where he attended Mass with his Czech nanny to the bitter end in Vienna and then London, Freud lived in a world dominated by Christianity, and by the extremely conservative Austrian Catholic church in particular.

Thus, when Freud writes about religion, in The Future of an Illusion and elsewhere, it is above all what he terms “the final form taken by our present-day white Christian civilization” (1927, 20) that he has in mind. Jews, to be sure, are credited with the establishment of monotheism, from which Christianity is a “cultural regression” insofar as it “reestablished the great mother-goddess and found room to introduce many of the divine figures of polytheism only lightly veiled” (1939, 88). But even here, in Moses and Monotheism, Freud argues that Christianity, by virtue of being a “return of the repressed” in its acknowledgment of the guilt incurred by the primal patricide, is “an advance and from that time on the Jewish religion was to some extent a fossil” (88).

Just as Freud's polemics against religion, epitomized by his lament in Civilization and Its Discontents that “the whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone friendly to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life” (1930, 74), are aimed most squarely at Christianity, so too those who have sought to combat Freud's atheism while remaining on psychoanalytic ground—from Oscar Pfister and Romain Rolland in his own day to Paul Ricoeur, W. W. Meissner, and Ana-Maria Rizzuto in ours—have almost always been Christian apologists.

Insofar as religion is to be approached analytically, Rizzuto makes the important point that “the psychic rules that facilitate belief must also condition unbelief (1998, 233), and therefore