“They don’t realize that we are bringing them the plague.” Sigmund Freud to Carl Jung on his voyage to America in 1909
[I]t would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent Providence, … a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be. …
~ Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis and, to a great extent, modern psychology and psychiatry, came of age in Vienna in the late 19th century. At that time Vienna, despite its overt anti-Semitism, was a cultural and intellectual haven for Jews. Freud’s biographers aren’t exactly certain what series of events led to his virulent hatred and disregard of all religions (especially Judaism and Christianity), but what we do know is that in many of his most important writings – “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality” (1905), “Totem and Taboo” (1913), “Civilization and Discontents” (1930) and the book I will critique in this essay, “The Future of an Illusion” (1927) – Freud repeatedly and shamelessly attacks religion as nothing but a grand illusion; psychotic delusions that people who consider themselves to be rational, intelligent and scientific should straightway give up, grow up and admit “man’s insignificance or impotence in the face of the universe.”
Despite his hatred of religion and glorification of sexual perversity, Freud admittedly had many revelatory, thoughtful and profound insights into the deep, dark recesses of the conscious and unconscious mind, which for a century have aided scientists and psychologists to help people understand and resolve real and serious mental and emotional problems. Freud isn’t original in this respect. The Bible, arguably the first psychological treatise (or as Bishop Jakes says, “psychiatry for the poor”), for millennia has already told us about the grotesqueries of human nature, our irrational attraction to evil [sin] in all its innumerable forms and the need for a Redeemer to save humanity from committing suicide against itself.
“The Future of an Illusion” is a naked frontal assault against religion, dismissing it as mere illusion, foolish wish-fulfillment by infantile minds. Freud’s ideas originated in classical philosophy whose intellectual foundation lies squarely in the amoral political atheism of Machiavelli, reaching its philosophical zenith in the writings of Nietzsche. However, Freud provided a novel distinction by presenting atheism as ipso facto true. Rejecting the thought that religion exists because God exists and that human beings therefore have a natural tendency to worship, Freud thought that a more scientific explanation for religion was in order.
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