Freuds Atheismus im Widerspruch: Freud, Weber und Wittgenstein im Konflikt zwischen säkularem Denken und Religion [Freud's atheism in contradiction: Freud, Weber and Wittgenstein in the conflict between secular thought and religion]*

The project of classical modernity shapes the world in secular terms, institutionally and – especially – in the critique of religion. Freud is a late proponent of classical modernity, and his concept of ‘discontent in civilization’ represents the acme and the crisis of modernity. Both Charles Taylor and Zygmunt Bauman address the topos of discontent to conceptualize the post‐temporality of classical modernity, which has various names: liquid modernity, postmodernity, reflexive modernity, post‐secularism, the Spiritual Turn and so on.

Herbert Will explains the basic thesis of his book in relation to the lives of Sigmund Freud and his wife Martha Bernays: Sigmund, considered by many simply as an atheist, married Martha, who was from an orthodox Jewish family in Hamburg. Sigmund has to submit to a religious wedding ceremony because of official regulations but he rejects circumcision of his sons as well as a religious burial for himself. Sigmund (patriarchally!) forbids Martha to celebrate the Sabbath on Friday evening by lighting candles; Martha (unlike his daughter Anna) resumes this custom after Sigmund's death after a gap of some decades.

Will's thesis can be summarized as follows: Freud was able to externalize the contradictory and conflicted nature of his atheistic world view by ambivalent splitting, and to deal with it in relation to (external) religious institutions. Many psychoanalysts have adopted this pre‐analytic world view in misconceived obedience towards the ‘father’ of psychoanalysis. In post‐modernity, the basic religious conflict is (re‐)internalized. Anyone who confronts his own spirituality today does so much less often by engaging with churches and other religious communities than people did in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries. The unbelieving sons and daughters of modernity, as we can say with Habermas, are looking for post‐secular translations of religious language to exhaust the ‘semantic potentials’ of what is traditionally called creation, s