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Disclosure: A pamphlet, written by a psychoanalyst who early in life studied for the priesthood is being reviewed by another analyst who spent his early life studying Rabbinics. One might well query: What tragedy, pray tell, has arisen in the traditionally atheistic World of psychoanalysis to allow this confluence of oddities?
The antipathy between Psychoanalysis and Religion is ever-so-present in Freud's writings. With a nod to Romaine Rolland at the very beginning of Civilization and Its Discontents (Freud, 1930), Freud does take a roughly agnostic position in just barely not denying the existence of oceanic or transcendental feelings among his collocutors:
One of these exceptional few calls himself my friend in his letters to me. I had sent him my small book that treats religion as an illusion, and he answered that he … was sorry I had not properly appreciated the true source of religious sentiments. This, he says, consists in a peculiar feeling, which he himself is never without, which he finds confirmed by many others, and which he may suppose is present in millions of people. It is a feeling which he would like to call a sensation of ‘eternity’, a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded—as it were, ‘oceanic’. … The views expressed by the friend whom I so much honour, … caused me no small difficulty. I cannot discover this ‘oceanic’ feeling in myself. It is not easy to deal scientifically with feelings. (p. 64)
Never having experienced even these forecourts of transcendental experience, Freud leaves little doubt—here and in the Future of an Illusion (Freud, 1927)—that his belief was that man created God in mankind's image in order to serve the defensive needs to deny infantile and childhood helplessness and adult fears. It has furthermore been widely reported (e.g., Gay, 1987, p. 153) that Freud's disdain for religion was similarly infused into his personal life. Immediately upon marrying Martha Bernays (who had grown up in an orthodox Jewish home), for inst