Letter from Lou Andreas-Salomé to Freud, January 4, 1930

[Göttingen] 4.1.30*

Dear Professor,†

I have read your Civilization and its Discontents with the greatest contentment, following your arguments with full assent, and enjoying it all the more for the free time vouchsafed me by the holiday. And yet, just as in the case of The Future of an Illusion; I was struck

by the fact that despite this assent my—how shall I put it—attitude to ‘religious’ questions remains different from yours, in so far at least as you find it difficult to forgive the ‘common man’ his religion, whereas to me this remains a subject of great interest in all its various forms. If we are going to find it ‘humiliating’ when anyone enters into a pact with these religious infantilisms, then we must treat a person's culture and intelligence in precisely the same way—just as we now know how to assess moral indignation at its true worth. After all, infantile elements, alongside purely regressive or retarded elements, are closely allied to those powers of imagination which form part of all creative activity. And when, for instance, I read in your book of your friend with the ‘oceanic feeling’,209 who is certainly far from accepting the religion of the common man, I would be prepared to wager that he would nevertheless in his in-most being admit that his oceanic feeling shares many elements which ‘elevate’ the common man in his religion. Instead of the crude infantilisms which permit the old sensations towards the parents to express themselves in the form of delusions, he regresses still further to a quite vague and indistinct region of emotion, where he feels himself lulled in a kind of maternal embrace.

This may be the case with many of those people who so strangely maintain that what is ‘believed’ by the common man and by the more enlightened man is at bottom one and the same thing (quite apart of course from the hypocrisy which makes a hotch-potch of all th