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Here is something a bit unique: an Inaugural Thesis for a Doctorate in Theology at the University of Jena in which the author essays to elucidate the psychoanalytic theory of the religious attitude and sentiment.
The author indicates his negative attitude from the beginning chiefly directed against the Freudian formulations as they apply to cultural horizons on the basis of their being too ‘mechanistic.’ Thus he would largely recite the old, old pseudo-antithesis of religion and science, which more than almost any other faulty either-or is happily resolved in the light of the Freudian hypotheses. Through the empirical findings of the unconscious the organismic unity of all of man's activities is being better comprehended.
The thesis, a brochure of 76 pages, first would essay to state the psychoanalytic theory of the development of culture more or less formulated in Freud's “Totem and Tabu” and later added to in the “Future of an Illusion.” Cultural development as a reaction to the Œdipus complex is posited with an erroneous insistence on a pansexual foundation. The argument here has been many times repeated. It reads as if, “Because water is found in all living matter, living matter is nothing but water”—i.e., because in all human strivings the sexual enters ergo all human strivings are only sexual. A totally ignorant appeal to the well known repressions concerning sexuality in general.
This general skew-deviation shows throughout the entire thesis. Von Baer's “Ontogeny as a Recapitulation of Phylogeny,” wrongly ascribed to Haeckel, comes in for special criticism as do the early contributions of Reik and Rank.
As we read we find some excellent resumés of the working out of the general hypothesis always however with the bias of a “supernatural” origin for many of the universal activities classed as “religious.” The author is specially annoyed at the “natural science” postulates of the psychoanalytic hypotheses. “Psychoanalysis is the laboratory of the Freudian natural