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Professor Freud has on a number of occasions displayed considerable interest in religious phenomena. One might say that the problem was, as it were, forced upon him by fate. Having been brought up in Catholic Austria, where anti-Semitism was more than a sporadic phenomenon, he had cause to taste its poisonous effects throughout his life. Numerous incidents of racial persecution perpetrated on his father and his people are recorded in his Interpretation of Dreams and in his Autobiography. He vividly describes how he was first confronted with the problem in childhood, how it pursued him in his student days, and how it restricted his academic career. Others in his place might have become embittered by these experiences, but not so Professor Freud. At the age of 82 years, he was forced to leave the land of his birth and the city where he had lived and worked for 78 years simply because he was born a Jew. He did not become embittered by this barbaric experience, but accepted his fate almost dispassionately. It is a question whether his interest in religion was determined by his personal experiences, or by his general interest in cultural evolution. Probably, by both; at least so it would seem after one reads his Moses and Monotheism.1
As early as in 1907, Professor Freud wrote a paper on “Obsessive Acts and Religious Practices,”2 in which he showed that the compulsive behavior and ceremonials observed in neurotic symptoms also exist in religious ceremonials.
In 1912 he published his Totem and Taboo.3 where he attempted to go back as far as possible into pre-history to show how religion and other moral and social institutions had their origin in the slaying of the primeval father of the horde by his rebellious sons.
In 1927 he wrote The Future of an Illusion,4 in which he goes into the deeper relations between religion and culture, and its relation to mankind. In 1930 in his Unbehagen in der Kultur (Civilization and Its