You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Early in my first psychotherapy training, we were invited by the tutor to talk about why we had been drawn to the field. One of the group was a Catholic priest. I cannot now remember what he said. But I do recall the tutor’s response: “Well, you’re clearly trying to work something through.”
It seemed as though the tutor felt that the priest, as a Christian, had more unresolved difficulties than the rest of us. In that moment, it felt that not much had moved on since Freud’s declaration in “The Future of an Illusion” that religion is “a universal obsessional neurosis” (Freud 1927, 43) and, as such, “ought to be given up, just as children relinquish their infantile neurosis as they progress in their development” (Quinodoz 2005, 227).
For Freud, the value of religious ideas lay in the fact that they helped defend man against the chaos that would ensure if all prohibitions against instinctual activity were relaxed. The idea of an omnipotent deity, furthermore, protected man against feeling helpless in the face of unpredictable and often cruel-seeming fate. As to the character of “God”, that depended on each individual’s relationship with his or her father: “Religion would thus be the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity; like the obsessional neurosis of children, it arose out of the Oedipus complex, out of the relation to the father” (Freud 1927, 43). In healthy development, then, just as the child gradually grows out of his infantile neurosis, so too should religious belief fall away.
“The Future of an Illusion” began a debate that continues to this day, with Freud’s friend and correspondent, the Lutheran pastor Oskar Pfister, being the first to object. While Freud saw no possibility for any reconciliation between psychoanalysis and religion, Pfister believed that psychoanalysis held out the possibility for believers to develop a more mature faith. Interestingly, Freud, recalled Ernest Jones, was
very fond of Pfister. He admired his high ethical standards, his u