Freud's Flawed Philosophy of Religion: A Reply to Rempel

In “Understanding Freud's Philosophy of Religion” (this journal) Rempel (, 222) argues that “the less Freud engages in highly speculative religious anthropology and historical biography [as in Totem and Taboo and Moses and Monotheism], and the more he grounds his critique firmly in the powerful insights psychoanalysis affords us for the study of the psychology of religion, the better.” I wish to argue precisely the contrary: that Freud's antireligious—or, as Rempel himself points out, essentially anti-Christian, even anti-Catholic—theories are seriously flawed precisely as psychoanalytic psychology.

Rempel acknowledges that Freud was incorrect to advertise his theory in this field as a theory of religion in general, in that “it is not so much a critique of religion per se, but a critique of Christianity, especially modern European Catholicism”; he states that “Freud's failure to accurately define the scope of his critique does serve to undermine the proposed universalizability of a number of his claims (as we saw with respect to the absence of both ritual and a dominant father-figure in certain Eastern religious traditions).” Rempel also points out that “Compared to his treatment of what he once tellingly termed ‘my real enemy, the Roman Catholic Church’…, Judaism, for example, is treated with veritable kid gloves” (p. 236).

But there is another type of overgeneralization inherent in Freud's theory of religion (beyond its inapplicability to nontheistic religions such as Buddhism) that arises from Freud's failure to utilize his own psychoanalytic concepts of over-determination and epigenesis (Erikson 1959) and such related methodological principles as those of multiple function (Waelder 1930) and secondary autonomy (Hartmann 1939) in this field. The result is a failure to distinguish different manifestations of religious faith and practice on distinctly different