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As is well known, religion, and in particular the figure of Moses, haunted Freud throughout his life. Freud's complex, multivalent relationship to his Jewish heritage has caused scholars of psychology and religion to “put Freud on the couch” many times to discern the psychological causes of his repudiation of the “oceanic feeling”—the psychological experience of religion, a term coined by Romain Rolland—coupled with his adamant identification with the Jewish people as a race. From the early 1900s Freud classified religious rituals and practices as akin to obsessional symptoms, and religion as a bearer of severe moralism and a source of pathogenic repression. Expanding on the subject of religion in his later years, especially after the solidification of his oedipal theory, Freud increasingly focused in his cultural writings on religion as a psychic defense against the harsh demands of reality, an expression of an infantile wish fulfillment for a soothing escape from Ananke (necessity). Religion (according to Freud's speculative reading of prehistory as primal parricide and reparation) and its resulting patriarchal law (expanded via linguistics by Jacques Lacan) were the primal building blocks of civilization. Freud intentionally avoided proposing any ethical or moral prescriptions for behavior, and even refused to acknowledge any distinctive weltanschauung within psychoanalysis—other than adherence to the scientific method and allegiance to seeking the “truth,” however unpopular or uncomfortable.
Scholars of psychoanalysis have since discerned in it an implicit ethic or morality, which in some ways remains separate from, though it is