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The thesis of Marsha Aileen Hewitt's well-researched, thoughtful, and highly readable Freud on Religion is that his views on this subject are far more sympathetic to religion and more complex than the reader who is familiar only with The Future of an Illusion can know. It is true that in that work Freud is passionately critical of the tendency of religion to subvert reason and autonomy, to substitute a wish-fulfilling reliance on an omnipotent and loving father-figure for a scientifically oriented appraisal of reality. (Hewitt remarks that it is not the capacity of science to reveal truths that Freud reveres, but its encouragement of critical thinking.) Yet at the same time he holds that religion can provide comfort—not much of a plea on behalf of his open-mindedness—and, more positively, that religion is the vehicle for some of the greatest cultural achievements of mankind. Freud doesn't mention art and music in this context, but surely these are great testaments to the cultural value of religious belief.
Hewitt points out, somewhat repetitively, that Freud was not arguing for atheism but inquiring into the psychoanalytic sources of religion, in something like the spirit in which Feuerbach writes: “I by no means say … God is nothing, the Trinity is nothing, the word of God is nothing, etc. I only show that they are not that which the illusions of theology make them…. The reproach that according to my book religion is an absurdity … would be well founded only if, according to it … that into which I resolve religion … namely, anthropology, were an absurdity ….” (p. xviii). “Psychoanalytic” here means a genetic account that traces religion to early childhood experience.
The focus throughout Hewitt's exploration is the extent to which the oedipal complex is the foundation for a community ethos that binds individuals together into an order that suppresses the darkest human motivations and, Hewitt claims later in her book, emphasizes the human creature's need and capacity