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In The Future of an Illusion (1927), Freud states his view of “religious doctrines as illusions” (p. 43) and religion as “the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity; arising out of the Oedipus complex” (p. 55). Nevertheless, the relationship between religion and mental health has continued to fascinate a number of thinkers (Niebuhr, 1949; Fromm, 1950; Kaplan, 1957; Bakan, 1958; Tillich, 1959; Zilboorg, 1967; Shoham, 1979; Ostow, 1982; Kaplan, Schwartz, and Markus-Kaplan, 1984; Rotenberg, 1992; Kaplan and Schwartz, 1993) and has been the subject of several books in the last two decades (Gay, 1987; Yerushalmi, 1991; Schwartz and Kaplan, 2004). Furthermore, a number of articles and books deal specifically with the story of Isaac (Spiegel, 1993) and its relationship to that of Oedipus (Wellisch, 1954; Shoham, 1979; Kaplan, 1990, 2002; Kaplan and Algom, 1997; Rotenberg, 1999; Sugar, 2002).
Part of the continuing interest in the interface between religion and mental health may stem from an awareness of the therapeutic function that clergy in traditional societies performed. The situation is very different in contemporary America, with the role of clergy quite truncated with regard to psychological counseling and belief in a personal transcendent God quite low (40%) among trained psychotherapists but high (90%) among the general public (see Shafranske and Maloney, 1990).
Another reason may be the inherent distaste many of the Greek foundation stories underlying psychoanalysis (e.g., Oedipus, Electra, and Narcissus) provoke in people. Phillip Slater (1968) and Bennett Simon (1978) conclude that these Greek foundation stories are linked to pathological family patterns and inform the roots of modern psychiatry.
More than half a century ago, Eric Wellisch (1954) argued very much the same thing: