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It is particularly timely to review a book by Father Küng, who was censured by the Vatican on December 18, 1979, and who has since been removed from his chair of theology at the University of Tübingen in Western Germany. If this is part of a new inquisition to stamp out liberal theology, Küng's book on Freud, which was first presented as the Terry Lectures at Yale, will only add new fuel to the fire. To a layman it seems a very modest, historical account of Freud's atheism, yet its larger purpose is clearly to make a case for Freud's importance as a religious thinker. Küng chooses to interpret religion in its largest, most humanistic sense. He never seriously tries to refute Freud's atheism, but only traces its roots in the scientism of the nineteenth century.
Küng is wholly in sympathy with an important part of Freud's attack on organized religion:
When religion is completely concentrated on the “wholly Other,” contact with reality is inevitably lost. Religious questions thus easily become a form of self-deception and escapism. Religion becomes an infantile commitment, without regard to reality, to a tyrannical superego; God becomes a displacement-substitute.
When religion relies solely on wish-fulfillment and not on intrinsic truth, it is reduced to pure satisfaction of needs. Such a religion is unquestionably a return to infantile structures, a regression to childish wishing. (p. 97)
It is notable how well informed the author is and with what ease he uses psychoanalytic terminology.
Freud offers an ethnological explanation for the origin of religion: that religious rites parallel the obsessive actions of a neurotic by which he seeks to control a threatening environment. Religion is thus, according to Freud, a universal obsessional neurosis. Surprisingly enough, Küng agrees with Freud, but only in the sense that this obsessional quality is a perversion of religious truth:
When religion is manifested in rigid fidelity to the letter, in a legalistic conscience, in obsessi