The first question about any theoretical venture is its usability for the audience, as reflected in publications and citations. It may surprise some psychoanalysts, but in the twenty-first century, Sigmund Freud's ideas about religion are of more than historical interest.
Freud expected his theories to be tested in clinical work, but academic researchers had other ideas, starting in the 1920s. Here is the view of a leading researcher: “Freud's writings should be taken as a series of observations, some of which are worth converting into testable hypotheses” (Bulbulia, 2013, p. 125). These observations are still being applied not only in psychology, but also among anthropologists and sociologists (Beit-Hallahmi, 2010, 2015; Belzen, 2010; Bulbulia, 2013; Hood, 2010; Ladd, Spilka, & McIntosh, 2011).
We know that Freud's observations (1907) about private obsessive symptoms and public religious rituals are still deemed relevant to students of ritual (Boyer & Liénard, 2008; Liénard & Boyer, 2006), and have led to some interesting studies of clinical and non-clinical populations (Fiske & Haslam, 1997: Hobson et al., 2018; Previc, 2006; Tek & Ulug, 2001; Tolin et al., 2001).
It might surprise analysts even more to learn that Freud's idea of the primal crime (1913) has been cited by generations of anthropologists, even though they never accepted its reality, or the notion of it being the starting point for religion and culture. These included A.L. Kroeber, Ernest Becker, Meyer Fortes, Margaret Mead, Robin Fox, and Derek Freeman. Most recently, evolutionary anthropologists and biologists have regarded the sons' bloody rebellion as the beginning of democracy (Beit-Hallahmi, 2015).
Thus, these consumers of Freudian ideas have responded positively to the art and found nothing controversial in it. They did not care if somebody considered these writing (Freud, 1907, 1913) to be attacks on religion.
Richards mentions Totem and Taboo as “targeting” the Communion. This ritual raises substantive issues which and most researchers are happy to ignore. Why is a mythical human sacrifice celebrated through imaginary cannibalism? Did the Communion appear because of a pre-historical killing, or because of persistent tensions and conflicts, pressing to be resolved? Freud's (1913) theory may be farfetched and impossible to prove, but more parsimonious explanations are not being offered anywhere. The Communion remains a challenge and an enigma.
Is religion being targeted or under attack? All the human sciences are a threat to religion because they treat religion as a natural phenomenon, and not as a representation of a special reality or a special mode of knowledge. To add insult to injury, they study changes in culture over time and space, and show time and again that beliefs and customs, including religious ones, are relative and culturally conditioned. Even without psychoanalysis, any scholarly discussion of religion is an affront to the believers. It is subversive, deconstructive, and reductive, a most serious threat (Segal, 1989).
In Freud's case, the attack on religion, or the analysis of religion, started in 1901, when he spelled out a theory of religion based on the mechanism of projection: “I believe that a large part of the mythological view of the world, which extends a long way into the most modern religions, is nothing but psychology projected into the external world…. One could venture to explain in this way the myths of paradise and the fall of man, of God, of good and evil, of immortality, and so on, and to transform metaphysics into metapsychology” (Freud, 1901, pp. 258-259).
Asking questions about the artist's, or the theorist's, motives is indeed the order of the day when we are curious about the lives of great artists such Leonardo, Michelangelo, Tolstoy, or Faulkner, as well as major historical figures. Freud's stature puts him in the list of creative minds whose motivations will be examined closely by historians and biographers. Moreover, Freud himself was involved in more than one
psychobiographical exercise, and so is fair game, so to speak.
More has been written about Freud's motives and personal life that about other classical theorists of religion (and fellow atheists) such as J.G. Frazer or Émile Durkheim, first because he is better known and second because so much documentation is available. The only exception is Karl Marx. Even in the twenty-first century, the motivations of atheists are in question, and much less is made of religious propagandists such as C.S. Lewis or Thomas Merton.
Our unquenchable curiosity about private writings, private thoughts, and private deeds feeds what social psychologists call social comparison (the process of looking at other lives publicly presented as compared to my own) and what psychoanalysts call idealization and especially de-idealization.
Richards (2022) raises two psychobiographical questions about Freud's work on religion. First, why was Freud so militant about his atheism, and second, how much of Freud's ideas about religion can be accounted for by his Jewish heritage? Freud's Jewishness has been discussed ad nauseum, but Richards should be congratulated for his original contribution, which is backed by new documentation. Rejecting the stereotypical attempts to seek causes of adult behavior in early childhood, Richards regards Freud's motives as stemming from social solidarity and representing maturity.
How was Freud's work related to his atheism? Becoming an atheist, or being an atheist, does not require any special knowledge or training, and certainly not a theory about religion. Freud did not become an atheist after developing a theory about religion, but at a young age. Later on, when he started theorizing about human behaviour, he responded to the challenge of explaining why most of humanity clings to what he considered illusions and delusions.
Richards asks why Freud did not keep his atheism under wraps.
Was Freud a militant atheist, and if so, how? Most questions about militancy are related to political struggles, where militants, by definition, take risks and invest psychic energy in attempts to change the world
around them. Today, atheists in India, or in Moslem-majority countries such as Pakistan, Bangladesh, or Saudi Arabia, are taking enormous risks, and sometimes lose their lives, when they make their views public. Freud was not taking any such risks. Even a Godless Jew could speak his mind in Europe in the early twentieth century, unmolested. It might be said that anti-Semites did not care about whether a Jew was devout or not, but T.S. Eliot warned that: “…reasons of race and religion combine to make any large numbers of free-thinking Jews undesirable. if one wants to maintain or develop a society in which a Christian tradition can flourish” (Eliot, 1934, pp. 19-20). Freud was just one of many such Jews.
Bonaparte (1958) argued that psychoanalysis naturally leads to realism and atheism. At the same time, she pointed out that such realism is also a form of sublimated sadism. The voice of the debunker is indeed full of arrogance and superiority over his gullible fellow men.
Freud was ready to ask impolite questions about any materials presented in support of religion. Here is one such response: “God, as we know, allows horrors to take place of a kind very different from the removal to a dissecting-room of the dead body of a pleasant-looking old woman. This has been true at all times, and it must have been so while my American colleague was pursuing his studies. Nor, as a medical student, can he have been so sheltered from the world as to have known nothing of such evils” (1928, p. 170).
Freud's starting point in questioning this report is one of common sense. The next step is an interpretation which is counter-intuitive and speculative. We don't have to accept the interpretation in order to appreciate the basic question and the inquisitive attitude. Freud's convert reports that his trigger was seeing a woman's body on the way to dissection, (which got him to think bitterly about God permitting such evil in this world). Freud asked why is it that the “The problem of evil” serves as a trigger for change on some occasions and not on others, while the presence of evil in our life is permanent. Life-transforming moments should be scrutinized within the whole span of the transformed life.
Research, starting in the early twentieth century, found that eminent academics, who are marked by intellectualism, i.e., a total commitment
to scholarship and high levels of analytical, non-intuitive thinking, keep their distance from religion. This has been summarized by Feist and Gorman (1998, p. 13): “Scientists in general, and eminent scientists in particular, are conspicuous in …, an almost complete absence of current religious faith.”
Since the nineteenth century, an international intellectual elite, committed to the life of the mind, and made up of creative and highly secular individuals, has been very much in existence.
This low religiosity does not appear in individual academics during the years of academic training, but results from the tendency of those already lower in religiosity to select an academic career (Beit-Hallahmi, 2015). The early experiences of a gifted child in an environment that values academic achievement and independence would lead to the choice of an academic or professional career. Curiosity, intellectualism, critical or skeptical thought, and/or personal dedication to a branch of knowledge could be recognized by age 18 in many adolescents, and some of these qualities emerge much earlier. Age 16 was a turning point, with future academics switching to a religious nonaffiliated status at that age.
The family atmosphere plays a role. Fathers represent authority and tradition, and in traditional families they make crucial decisions. This was the case in the Freud family of Vienna in 1865, when the father, Jakob, decided to send his son to a public, secular, school and not to a Jewish one. Strictly Orthodox education was certainly available in Vienna then, as it is even today.
If we compare religiosity (or political views) in parents and children, continuity is the rule (Beit-Hallahmi, 2015). Conflict is tied to discontinuity, when children rebel against parental authority. This may take the form of apostasy, but also of hyper-religiosity. In the case of Jakob and Sigmund, there was no conflict, and we might speculate that the son was acting out paternal wishes.
Another phenomenon is the child who goes further than his parents in a liberal direction. The continuity and radicalization hypothesis was supported by research on United States youth in the 1960s, which found that politically liberal parents raised radical children.
Francis Collins, MD, PhD is the most outspoken Christian among eminent scientists today. His personal prestige and charisma make him highly effective, and universally liked. His motivation is never in question, but he is still the exception to the rule.
Non-believers are often ambivalent about speaking out. Max Perutz (1914–2002), Nobel Laureate in chemistry, was born in Vienna to Jewish parents, who baptized him as Roman Catholic. In later years, he was known for being an atheist who did not want to offend believers. Still, letting his atheism be a matter of public knowledge was a message by itself.
If most academics are non-believers, as we know, they are even less outspoken than Perutz. A few well-known academics have taken a stand. Linus Pauling (1901–1994), who has been called greater than Leonardo, and won the Nobel Prize twice, denied being a militant atheist, but did not hide his position. Stephen Hawking (1942–2018) was a world-famous physicist, who discussed his atheism on several occasions and has been bitterly attacked by defenders of religion. Jacques Monod (1910–1976), Nobel Laureate the Physiology or Medicine, was outspoken about his atheism. Noam Chomsky dismissed religion in the following way: “…if you ask me whether or not I'm an atheist, I wouldn't even answer. I would first want an explanation of what it is that I'm supposed not to believe in, and I've never seen an explanation.” (Chomsky, 2002) The biologist Richard Dawkins is, of course, the best-known atheist in the world, and the leading New Atheist.
In psychology, some of the names known to every Psychology 101 student have been atheists, such as Chomsky, Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, and B.F. Skinner. Maslow appeared in public to be sympathetic to religion, but in his private writings heaped scorn on believers. I once attended a public appearance by Carl Rogers, in which he demonstrated Unconditional Positive Regard and unlimited patience. When a member of the audience thought that Rogers shared with him a belief in a “personal God,” Rogers became furious, and his audience stunned. So, Freud is in good company.
As made clear above, once you start studying religion, not offending the believers is impossible. It has been said, wisely, that religion is fiction with authority (Boyer, 2008). There are tens of thousands of religions, offering many authorities and many fictions. If you do not accept any authority, all you have is fiction. It does not matter if the story is about Osiris, Moses, Jehovah, Jesus, Muhammad, Krishna, or Buddha, it is purely fictional and may be interpreted as reflecting wishes and anxieties (Beit-Hallahmi, 2010, 2019, 2023).
Richards writes about Moses (p. 5) “…where shockingly Freud even sought to dispose of the idea that Moses had been Jewish.” “Moses” is purely fictional, and the idea that “Moses” was Jewish is part of the fiction. What is Jewish about the “Moses” myth is that it was created by Judean scribes and became part of the Jewish tradition. Bible scholars ask questions about the creation of the myth, finalized in the third century BCE, not about any reality behind it (Ben-Zvi, 2019; Schellekens, 2022; Zlotnick-Sivan, 2004).
That is why Moses and Monotheism is Freud's most resounding failure. Generalizations and psychological insights contained in the book are still of value, but the main thesis reflects a shocking naivete and ignorance of earlier Freudian ideas. Freud (1908) introduced the idea of the family romance, which is relevant to the myth of Moses, as to many others. In Rank (1914) Moses is mentioned as a typical birth-of-the-hero myth, and in the 1915–1916 Introductory Lectures Moses is mentioned again as a myth.
Freud's identification with Moses might have caused a regression to childhood and a commitment to tradition. The atheist stance was forgotten. Why is monotheism an achievement? Why is one god better than 700? Biblical mythology about the Exodus was taken to be historical, and Judaism regarded as a source of pride and even chauvinism. This leads to references to Jewish intellectuality and ethical standards as superior and unique.
Growing anti-Semitism and the reality of the Nazi threat might have caused this reaction in Freud, as he was working on Moses in the 1930s. His last book was affected by anxiety and vigilance. Jews, despised and persecuted, soon to be hunted, could find consolation in the memory of
imagined past greatness. Such claims to greatness are common. In A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, the narrator Marcel ridicules Jews who claim Jesus, the mythological founder of Christianity, as one of their own (Proust, 1954). In Ulysses, we see Leopold Bloom doing just that: “Mendelsson was a Jew and Karl Marx and Mercadante and Spinoza. And the Saviour was a Jew…Christ was a Jew like me” (Joyce, 1986, p. 280). This takes place right after Bloom's attempt to define himself as being Irish fail to persuade his companions.
The Hebrew Bible, written in post-exilic times, was the result of a similar process. Defeated, powerless, Judeans invented stories of triumph over Pharaoh and the conquest of Canaan, including genocidal fantasies. Compensatory dreams of past and future glory fuel nationalism everywhere. Here is what one expert writes: “Nationalism … usually seems to be caused by wounds, some form of collective humiliation” (Berlin, 1972, p. 17).
In his writings, Freud shared with the world the way he was coping with the burden of Jewishness and his shame about his cowardly (or simply helpless) father. His honesty is commendable. In his private life, Freud was determined to save his descendants from the terrible fate of being Jewish.
The problem with being Jewish was twofold. First, Jewish identity was a stigma and a misfortune. Beyond that, it was a religious identity, tied to rituals which Freud considered barbaric. For modern Jews distance from the past was measured by adherence to the rites of passage and to the sacred calendar. For Freud the mere content of beliefs and rituals, which for some Jews has been associated with warm feelings of ties to home and ancestry, was only a source of alienation. There was nothing attractive about them.
Handling Jewishness in Freud's stoic manner meant a readiness to carry the burden of being socially identified as a Jew, together with avoiding any investment in either religious tradition, or in the modern incarnation of Jewishness as nationalism. Jewishness was a social fact, not something to be kept and preserved. “My parents were Jews, and I have remained a Jew myself.” (Freud, 1925, p. 7).
Jewish rites of passage (or holidays) were for Freud something he could not tolerate. He could analyze them as an observer, but not take part in any of them. In 1886, “Freud thought of joining the Protestant ‘Confession’ so as to be able to marry without having the complicated Jewish ceremonies he hated so much” (Jones, 1957, Vol. 1, p. 167). Then, when he had three sons, he did not have them circumcised. And when the time came, Freud's funeral ceremony, at Golder's Green Crematorium in North London, was devoid of anything Jewish or religious.
The model Sigmund Freud presented at his home was one of total secularity, which meant giving up any vestiges of Jewishness, because those were bound to be of a religious nature. Even the most minimally defined Jewish identity meant, for most individuals, some traces of religion. Among relatively secularized Jews, those who want to convey a symbolic sense of Jewish identity to the next generation still celebrate some holidays and some rites of passage, especially circumcision. Freud was quite strict in staying away from such symbolic or material gestures.
The message Freud passed on to his children was unmistakable: Don't be Jewish! This message was conveyed through daily life and explicit enough words. And so, within three generations, the distance from tradition has grown and the descendants of Jakob and Amalia Freud became non-Jews.
The case of the Freud family (or clan) is a good one to look at in assessing the success of integration into European society, as envisioned by Sigmund Freud. His descendants, most of whom live in Britain, are cosmopolitan Europeans, members in good standing of the First World elite, and mostly indifferent to either Jewishness or Zionism. We don't know much about many of them, and may not wish to invade their privacy, but some are public personalities. The best known among the grandchildren of Sigmund and Martha Freud were the brothers Lucian (1922–2011) and Clement Freud (1924–2009). When it comes to Jewishness, the two brothers (who became totally estranged in 1954) chose separate, but equally distant paths. Lucian, whose identity was clearly tied to art, denied any connection to Jewishness, and when Sir Clement Freud (knighted in 1987) was once listed among the Jewish members of the House of Commons, where he served 1973–1983, he was quick to correct the error. He had been a member of the Anglican Church
since his marriage in 1950 (Grunberger, 2001). His parents, Ernst and Lucie Freud, as atheists, refused to attend the church wedding, but did attend the reception that followed (Freud, 2001).
The next generation of British Freuds, the great-grandchildren, includes accomplished novelists, TV personalities and wealthy entrepreneurs such as Matthew Freud and Lord David Freud, who may be the only Zionist in the clan (Freud, 2008). Among the North American grandchildren, Sophie Freud made a name for herself as an articulate critic of her grandfather. One of her sons is a likely Nobel Laureate in economics.
The message of avoiding Jewishness was not rare among intellectuals of Jewish descent. If we look at the list of prominent psychoanalytic thinkers since Freud, we discover that those of Jewish descent chose the same tack. They did not want to be known as Jews and did not want their children to be Jewish. If we look at the life of Melanie Klein (Grosskurth, 1986), Erik Erikson (Falk, 1975-76; Friedman, 2000), or Heinz Kohut (Strozier, 2004), the picture is identical. All these well-known theoreticians of psychoanalysis wanted to cleanse their lives from any traces of Jewish identity. It was not a matter of ambivalence, but of total aversion.
Heinz Kohut, who was born in Vienna in 1913, decided after 1945, while living in Chicago, to assume a gentile identity. Kohut's actions regarding his Jewish ancestry seem the most baffling thing about his private and public persona. He was born to Jewish parents in Vienna, but since coming to the United States described himself as half-Jewish or as a gentile. Later on, he described himself as Christian, and attended church.
Kohut called himself Christian and was a member of a Unitarian congregation in Chicago for many years, but most Unitarians do not refer to themselves as Christian. Kohut wanted to call himself a Christian, apparently for the sake of appearances and for his son, who should not know of the curse of Jewishness among his ancestors (Strozier, 2004).
After the Holocaust, who among us could judge Kohut and other Jews who made the same decision?
Sigmund Freud seemed to have been proud of his stoic acceptance of personal Jewishness (Freud, 1925). Still, some may suggest that Freud's 100-year plan reflects a loss of nerve and is really no different than
Kohut's one generation plan. Who among us can judge Freud, who wished his descendants to escape persecution, hoping for their survival in a better world?
Freud was impatient with humanity, telling fellow humans to give up illusions and grow up as soon as possible.
“The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life” (Freud, 1930, p. 74).
Freud was a spokesman for Enlightenment humanism, promoting a vision of autonomy and freedom. Like others, he regarded religion as a roadblock to progress. He sounded like Karl Marx and other Enlightenment thinkers when, during a visit to Rome in 1901, he wrote: “I found almost intolerable the lie of salvation which rears its head so proudly to heaven” (Masson, 1985, p. 449). Religious salvation was a lie and should be exposed as such. Even if it does bring temporal relief, for Freud and Marx it dooms humanity to eternal damnation, because progress must follow truth and nothing but the truth.
While denouncing the lie that religion is, Freud had no misconceptions about the impact of his own work. His writings posed no danger to the status quo and will not corrupt the mind of any believers: “There is no danger of a devout believer's being overcome by my arguments and deprived of his faith” (1927, pp. 57-58).
As noted above, Freud was able to express his views because of historical secularization in Europe. Public atheism in the West was a consequence of secularization, not its cause. What led to secularization were major historical changes over centuries, including new social classes, the Reformation, and the Thirty-Year War, not to mention industrialization and technological developments.
Atheist intellectuals are impatient with the way individuals stay loyal to religious identities inherited from parents even when they no longer believe or practice anything related to those identities. They don't understand the power of identity, the sense of belonging and the feeling of
superiority and certainty. These intellectuals are willing to give up such an identity because they have an individual sense of superiority and certainty thanks to their intelligence and intellectualism. Like Sigmund Freud, they were admired as children for their talents and did not need group belonging to support their self-esteem. Such intellectuals are rarely committed nationalists and may be suspicious of most ideologies.
If they dream of changing humanity's fate, it is, for Freud, by increasing knowledge about human desires. Does increasing psychological knowledge work? We are still unsure.
Freud's dream was a world where “Jew and Christian ought to meet on the common ground of irreligion and humanity” (Wortis, 1954, p. 144). Cutting off all ties to Jewish tradition was the only way to create a better world, with as little religion as possible. The humanist, stoic, way was not just a matter of ideals, but of everyday practice. This clearly could lead only to total integration (or “assimilation”). It is possible that he wanted all of humanity to be reborn as realistic, moral, human beings without neurotic practices and religious illusions, but then he was wishing for a human liberation, rather than just a Jewish one.