The Normal Groundwork of the Religious Attitudes

Ladies and gentlemen, let me begin with a reference to Freud's “The Future of an Illusion”; Freud there regards the religious ideas as a remnant of the individual's and humanity's infancy, as something to be overcome. We are, indeed, ready to admit that there exist, to a considerable extent, infantile forms of religiousness to which Freud's interpretation applies. But we maintain that the groundwork of religiousness and, hence, of all religion, fails to be adequately dealt with by this interpretation. We contend that there exists a religiousness representing the self-expression of the mature adult, and that the research into this matured religiousness leads up to attitudes, adjustments and ideas belonging to humanity at large and standing for what an individual representing a matured personality must necessarily manifest.

I shall, for the purpose of laying before you a psychoanalytic evidence of this statement, avail myself of the (psa.) theory of Faculties. I do not, however, intend to cover the whole range of religious ideas and attitudes, but I will confine myself to one of them only: the idea of God. Freud holds this and other similar ideas to be illusions, i.e., wish-formations born of the infant's helplessness and need of protection and solace. He believes the Idea of God to be incompatible with reality such as it is, and to yield a wrong picture of it, formed in accordance with the yearnings of the infantile stage.

Now if religion really consisted of these wishes only, it would indeed be devoutly to be wished that such ideas were replaced by others. But when we consider the Idea of God, as held by a healthyminded,