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Freud had a life-long interest in religion. In Totem and Taboo he drew attention to some apparent similarities between the mental life of ‘savages’ and those of neurotics and children; and in his late work, Moses and Monotheism (1939), he offered an almost novelistic reconstruction of some of the repressed history that he believed underlay Judaism and Christianity. Between these publications came The Future of an Illusion , his most passionate plea for scientific over religious ways of thinking.
This ‘pamphlet’ - as Freud described it to Pfister (Freud & Pfister, 1963, p. 109) - has now become the subject of a new volume in the IPA's Contemporary Freud: Turning Points and Critical Issues series, which seeks ‘to approach Freud's work from a present and contemporary point of view’ (p. ix). Edited by Mary Kay O'Neil and Salman Akhtar, who provide the Introduction and the Epilogue, it contains the Standard Edition translation of The Future of an Illusion and ten essays by an international group of psychoanalysts. For anyone interested in the current state of play between psychoanalysis and religion, this book is a gold-mine.
Freud tends simplistically to be portrayed as a dogmatic atheist. This disguises the sophistication of his thinking about religion. In the second Prefatory Note within Moses and Monotheism, for example, Freud wrote that, from the time he published Totem and Taboo, he had:
never doubted that religious phenomena are only to be understood on the pattern of the individual neurotic symptoms familiar to us - as the return of long since forgotten, important events in the primal history of the human family - and that they have to thank precisely this origin for their compulsive character and that, accordingly, they are effective on human beings by force of the historical truth of their content. (Freud, 1939, p. 58)
In other words, religious phenomena are not meaningless: they enshrine truth, but what is this truth? The fact that Freud returned repeatedly to th