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Freud was oddly preoccupied with religion, considering that he held the subject in enormous contempt as a kind of universal neurosis and impediment to the maturation of the human species. His view is developed most forcefully in The Future of an Illusion, a justly famous work which has earned the praise of even so relentless a critic of psychoanalytic logic as Adolf Grünbaum.1 Indeed, in the unmasking of religion, the “master of suspicion,” to use Paul Ricoeur's (1970) phrase may have made his most important cultural discovery.
In The Future of an Illusion, Freud derives the essence of religious thinking from two factors. The first is our helplessness before nature, or to be more exact, our awareness of this helplessness. And second is the persistence of infantile and irrational thinking, both in the individual and society. Actually, our helplessness is against inner as well as outer nature. Externally, consciousness is bounded by awareness of our insignificance before the universe and the inevitability of death. And subjectively, consciousness is beset by the pressure from the unconscious and its drives. According to Freud, both sources of helplessness call forth from the infantile mind an urge for parental protection. Externally, we wish for a powerful parent to protect us from the threats of nature as mother or father cared for us when we were equally helpless as infants before the tasks of everyday reality;