Final Phases of Belief Found in Religion and in Obsessional Neurosis—An Introductory Communication

Every scientific communication is of a tentative kind. If the introductory character of the present contribution is specially emphasized, it is because the author can here only give outlines instead of details. Moreover, the three sections, taken from a larger context, make no pretension to the degree of approximation to truth which scientific publications generally claim.

I have been concerned to show through what phases religious belief passes to its end, and to carry the comparison between religion and obsessional neurosis as far as the final development of both phenomena. This I shall do by consideration of three examples of representative character rather than by methodical investigation. I have striven after essentials rather than completeness. This communication must be considered as merely introductory also for the following reason: the analytical discussion of the problems will be carried only a little way and broken off at a certain point. The problem is stated and the kind of solution possible indicated, but the solution itself cannot be given here. It could only be attempted on a much broader basis of religious science.

One of the motives which determined me to publish such incomplete matter was the realization that the science of religions has not even remarked the existence of the problem here raised. This discipline, which investigates the origins and manifestations of religious life, has not hitherto had sufficient means to open up and state such questions. This has only become possible through psycho-analysis, which enables us to examine the essential mental processes that determine religious experience at depths hitherto inaccessible to investigation.

The three examples here given show the manner in which the mental motives and mechanisms characteristic for religion work out in the decadent and transitional forms of this social phenomenon. The first example is taken from the field of religious practice itself; the other two appear to belong