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Freud regarded his writings on culture, civilization, and religion as a special application of psychoanalysis, rather than as part of the main body of psychoanalytic theory; in his postscript to An Autobiographical Study he asserted that he had not made essential contributions to theory since 1923, that is, during the period in which he wrote The Future of an Illusion (), Civilization and its Discontents (), and the first draft of Moses and Monotheism (). Though these writings, along with the earlier Totem and Taboo, provide an immutable phylogenetic foundation for his claim of the universal significance of the Oedipus complex, Freud seldom invoked the myth of the murdered primal father as an explanatory concept in his writing on analysis proper. That is not surprising since, as Philip Rieff observed in his exemplary analysis of Freud's cultural writings, “scarcely anything that Freud discovered in the constitution of individual minds requires the Lamarckian hypothesis” (Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, 1959, pp. 207-208).
Most analytic writers (with the notable exception of Lacan) have followed Freud in leaving aside his anthropological speculations when writing about individual psychology, nor have they examined the relation of Freud's psychoanalytic theory to his theories of culture. This has been left to philosophers and theorists of culture, for example, Marcuse, Rieff, and Ricoeur. judith Van Herik's Freud on Femininity and Faith continues in that tradition, and links up explicitly with Philip Rieffs work. Her focus is on Freud's theories of religion. Her ambitious goal is to demonstrate a relationship between Freud's conception of individual development (especially as concerns gender differentiation) and his more sweeping ideas on culture and religion.
Van Herik presents an intriguing thesis-for Freud the Christian religion, whose cultural role he criticized in The Future of an Illusion, is linked to his conception of femininity, whereas the judaic religion, to