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In this brilliant book, Ana-María Rizzuto makes an extremely important contribution toward understanding Freud's lifelong preoccupation with religion. She has previously distinguished herself by her research and writing from the perspective of object relations psychoanalysis, such as in one of her best-known works, a study of how children image their parents and God.1
In the present work, Rizzuto considers the “missionary atheism” (p. xix) of Freud in light of his problematic relationship with his father. Jakob Freud seems to have been greatly troubled by his son's atheism, and before his death pleaded with him to “return to the Lord” (p. xx), presenting him with the family Philippson's Bible. Immediately after his father's death, which he called “the most poignant loss of a man's life” (p. 2), Freud started a collection of objects of religious art, which he always kept close to him until his death, many of them representing figures illustrated in the family Bible.
Freud analyzed the paternal relationship as foundational to religion, leaving the maternal relationship strangely eclipsed in a way that seems to reflect his own relationship with his parents: he linked the father with God and the mother with death. Despite Freud's claim to a “natural atheism,” by which he meant that he had no religious sense or intuition, Rizzuto notes that before the age of three, Freud had already developed some representation of God “connected to his nurse, the Catholic Church, and the Czech language … ‘der liebte gott’… he ‘preached’ to his parents ‘all about God’” (p. 136; see also pp. 196-200).
Later on, in the midst of his medical studies, Freud became entranced with lectures on the existence of God by Professor Franz Brentano, and conducted a fascinating, in-depth correspondence