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The title of this book must come as a surprise to many Freud scholars. To think of the irreligious and atheistic Freud as having a Christian unconscious makes one blink in disbelief at first glance. But let us not be too hasty in our judgment. To write about religion in today's world of science without arousing antagonism is no easy task. The author of this treatise, apparently a believing Roman Catholic, must know that he reveals a good deal of hostility, and perhaps even some contempt, toward Freud. These attitudes are not to be conceived of, in themselves, as grounds for rejection of his thesis. They do not, however, incline one toward credence in his conclusions. Lest any false notions about the book have already been created, the reviewer hastens to state that the book is scholarly and thoroughly researched—well worth reading. Moreover, to put it mildly, it is original.
The main point of the book is apparently grounded in the fact that Freud lost his Catholic nanny after only three years of her service in his infancy and that he never recovered from his longing for her and never forgave her for abandoning him. She introduced him to the Church and thereby instilled in him an unceasing yearning to prolong this experience, as manifested by his interest in religious art, his addiction to visiting churches, his eternally unsatisfied longing for the Eternal City, and so forth. We even read that Freud considered conversion, and not just for the advancement in German society that such a step might bring. The result of all this turmoil:
The Future of an Illusion was, then, a neurotic derealization of religious reality and a projection of Freud's own past disillusionment with his “unfaithful” religious nanny-mother. His reactions—that is, his intellectual interpretations of religion—were based on his strong, persistent, unconscious, childish needs, connected to his nanny's early abandonment of him and his first experience of helplessness. In short, Freud's religious neuros