Eight theories of religion second edition

1. The Future of an Illusion, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psycho logical Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey with Anna Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), 21: 43.

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2. The classic older biography of Freud, written by an Englishman who belonged to the circle of his original followers, is Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, 3 vols. (New York: Basic Books, 1953–1957). An authoritative recent biography is by Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for our Times (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988). There are also numerous thematic and shorter biographical studies.

4. Much in this book was based on self-analysis, especially Freud’s interpretations of his own dream experiences. See Gerald Levin, Sigmund Freud (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1975), p. 28.

5. Much has been written on Freud’s concept of repression. A good brief account of this idea and its place in Freud’s thought can be found in Philip Rieff’s Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), pp. 37–44, 314–20.

6. Freud’s study Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood (1910) and his articles on “The Moses of Michelangelo” (1914) and “Dostoyevsky and Parricide” (1928) continue to fascinate historians of art and literature.

7. Freud first presented this formulation in The Ego and the Id in 1923.

8. See Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, in Standard Edition, 23: 146.

9. Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, in Standard Edition, 23: 190.

10. Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, in Standard Edition, 23: 191.

11. Among a number of instructive works on Freud’s Jewish background and his religious opinions, see Howard Littleton Philp, Freud and Religious Belief (New York: Pitman, 1956); G. Zillboorg, Freud and Religion: A Restatement of an Old Controversy (Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1958); Earl A. Grollman, Judaism in Sigmund Freud’s World (New York: Appleton-Century, 1965); Hans Küng, Freud and the Problem of God (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979); Edwin R. Wallace IV, “Freud and Religion,” in Werner Muensterberger et al., eds., The Psychoanalytic Study of Society, vol. 10 (Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press, 1984), pp. 113–61; and Peter Gay, A Godless Jew: Freud, Atheism, and the Making of Psychoanalysis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987). Wallace and Gay also provide substantial recent bibliographies.

12. Jones, Life and Work of Freud, 3: 351.

13. Freud, “Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices” (1907), in Standard Edition, 9: 126; this famous phrase, which heads this chapter, appears again in The Future of an Illusion.

14. Totem and Taboo, in Standard Edition, 13: 132–42.

15. Totem and Taboo, in Standard Edition, 13: 145.

16. Freud, The Future of an Illusion, in Standard Edition, 21: 19.

17. The Future of an Illusion, in Standard Edition, 21: 33.

18. The Future of an Illusion, in Standard Edition, 21: 30.

19. The Future of an Illusion, in Standard Edition, 21: 43.

20. The Future of an Illusion, in Standard Edition, 21: 44.

21. See his important work, The Foundations of Psychoanalysis (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984).

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23. On Freud’s literary talents, especially in the area of expository nonfiction, see Patrick J. Mahony, Freud as a Writer (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987). The scientific criticisms, along with appreciations, of Freud are put with special force in Frank Sulloway, Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend (New York: Basic Books, 1979); see also Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, The Assault upon Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1984) and Frederick C. Crews, Skeptical Engagements (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). For summaries of these criticisms and the heated debates they have elicited, see Paul Robinson, Freud and His Critics (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), and Frederick C. Crews, “The Unknown Freud,” New York Review of Books 40, no. 19 (November 18, 1993): 55–66.

Bernstein, Richard J. Freud and the Legacy of Moses. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni versity Press, 1998. Reappraises Moses and Monotheism, claiming this much criticized book is Freud’s most important because it offers a new conception of religion.

Crews, Frederick C. “The Unknown Freud.” New York Review of Books 40, no. 19 (November 18, 1993): 55–66. Questionings by a formerly Freudian literary theorist who has since become a stern critic of psychoanalysis, its history, and its methods.

Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Translated under the editorship of James Strachey, in collab oration with Anna Freud. London: Hogarth Press, 1953. The definitive collection of Freud’s works in English. Individual works are available in many reprints and editions.

Gay, Peter. Freud: A Life for Our Times. New York: W. W. Norton, 1988. The most substantial and authoritative recent biography by a distinguished intellectual historian.

Gay, Peter. A Godless Jew: Freud, Atheism, and the Making of Psychoanalysis. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987. A brief, insightful assessment of Freud’s perspective on religion.

Grünbaum, Adolf. The Foundations of Psychoanalysis. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.

Grünbaum, Adolf. Validation in the Clinical Theory of Psychoanalysis: A Study in the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis. Madison, Connecticut: International Universities Press, 1993. Two important, compelling studies by the philosopher who is the leading current critic of psychoanalysis as a science.

Herzog, Patricia. Conscious and Unconscious: Freud’s Dynamic Distinction Reconsidered. Madison, Connecticut: International Universities Press, 1991. An informative recent examination of the central concepts in Freudian thought.

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Kerr, John. A Most Dangerous Method: The Story of Jung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993. Raises questions, both moral and scientific, about certain aims and agendas of Freud, Jung, and one of their early associates.

Küng, Hans. Freud and the Problem of God. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. A thoughtful analysis of Freud’s theological opinions by a distinguished modern Catholic theologian.

MacIntyre, Alasdair C. The Unconscious: A Conceptual Analysis. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958. Now somewhat dated, but valuable as a clear, brief, and instructive study of the idea that gave birth to psychoanalysis. Written by an influential English analytical philosopher.

Masson, Jeffrey Moussaieff. The Assault upon Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1984. A controversial exposé of Freud’s methods which attempts to show how he mishandled one of his early patients in psychoanalysis.

Neu, Jerome, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Freud. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Instructive essays on Freud by various scholars currently writing on his life and thought.

Palmer, Michael. Freud and Jung on Religion. London: Routledge, 1997. Explores the fundamentally opposite appraisals of religion offered by the two founders of psychoanalysis.

Rieff, Philip. Freud: The Mind of the Moralist. 3rd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979. A widely read and much appreciated study of Freud’s ideas in their biographical and cultural context.

Rizzuto, Ana-Maria. Why Did Freud Reject God? A Psychodynamic Interpretation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. Argues that Freud’s childhood devel opment and family circumstances made serious consideration of belief in God impossible for him.

Roazen, Paul. Encountering Freud: The Politics and Histories of Psychoanalysis. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 1990. An exploration of the controversies surrounding the aims of both Freud and his new field of study.

Roazen, Paul. Freud and His Followers. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975. An instruc tive study of the “first Freudians” and their intellectual agenda.

Robinson, Paul. Freud and His Critics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Summarizes and evaluates issues in the current heated debate over Freud and the validity of psychoanalysis as a science.

Sulloway, Frank. Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend. New York: Basic Books, 1979. A comprehensive study by a scholar who, since this book, has gradually grown more critical of Freud’s science.

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The idea of society is the soul of religion.

Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life¹

In the very years during which Freud put forward his controversial views in Vienna, an equally original thinker in France, Émile Durkheim, set to work on a theory of religion that was just as revolutionary, though in quite a different way. If Freud is the first name that people associate with modern psychology, then that of Durkheim—though less widely known—should be one of the first that comes to mind at the mention of sociology. Durkheim championed the central importance of society—of social structures, relationships, and institutions—in understanding human thought and behavior. His distinct perspective consists in his determination to see almost every major enterprise of human life—our laws and morality, labor and recreation, family and personality, science, art, and above all religion—through the lens of their social dimension. Without a society to give them birth and shape them, he claimed, none of these things could exist.

At a first glance, of course, a theorist who sounds this social theme hardly seems revolutionary. In the present climate of thought, few discussions of any kind take place without some reference to the “social environment.” Hardly a day passes without some comment on “social decay,” “social engineering,” “social reform,” or “social context.” Less than a century ago, however, such language would have been almost as rare as it is common now. “Society” was a word mostly associated with upper-class manners and the dinner parties of the wealthy. The leading systems of thought were quite individualistic, with a tendency to see any social arrangement—from a single family to a village, a church, or an entire nation—as little more than a collection of separate persons who happened to be brought together by a common location and shared interests. Durkheim’s view was decidedly different. He went so far as to say that social facts are more fundamental than individual ones—that they are, in

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In accord with this social premise, Durkheim insisted, very much like Freud, that his subject required nothing less than a new scientific discipline to investigate it. This field he chose to call “sociology,” even though he was not the first to use the word and was not himself very fond of it. Simply put, sociology was to be the science of society. In a significant measure it is because of Durkheim’s strong advocacy and guiding influence that social science holds such a prominent place in modern life, whether we appeal to it in matters of government, economics, education, or in any other forum of public discussion, from the university lecture room to the television talk show. Today, our instinctively social view of the world is an index of just how thoroughly successful Durkheim’s revolution in thought has turned out to be.²

Durkheim actually presents us with two parallels to Freud. Not only did both men feel the need to promote special fields of study—psychology in the one case, and sociology in the other—but both also found that their new perspectives led them unavoidably back to the very old question of religious behavior and belief. Like Freud, Durkheim too was driven to ask: What is religion? Why has it been so important and central in human affairs? What does it do for both the individual and society? Freud, as we saw, thought he could not fully explain the individual personality without also accounting for the appeal of religion. Durkheim felt precisely the same about society. In the course of trying to understand “the social” in all of its hidden and powerful dimensions, he found himself drawn steadily and repeatedly to “the religious.” For Durkheim, religion and society are inseparable and—to each other— virtually indispensable.
Life and Career

Durkheim was born in 1858 in the town of Epinal, near Strasbourg in northeastern France.³ His father was a rabbi, and as a young boy he was also strongly affected by a schoolteacher who was Roman Catholic. These influences may have contributed something to his general interest in religious endeavors, but

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they did not make him personally a believer. By the time he was a young man, he had become an avowed agnostic.

Over the next fifteen years, while working at Bordeaux, Durkheim diligently pursued his sociological inquiries and developed his ideas. His first major book was The Division of Labor, published in 1893. It was followed in 1895 by The Rules of Sociological Method, a theoretical work which stirred a great deal of debate. He also published an important study, Suicide (1897), which looked for the public, social factors behind what others of his day commonly regarded as a strictly private act of despair. At about the same time, he established with other scholars L’Année sociologique, a new academic journal which published articles and reviewed other writings from a sociological perspective. This journal, which became famous throughout France and the world, did as much as any of Durkheim’s own books to promote the discipline of sociology. Other talented scholars were drawn to contribute their work to its pages and in the process developed Durkheim’s perspective into an identifiable “school of thought.” Not surprisingly, on the strength of these impressive achievements (and with the help of some political maneuvering in the government), Durkheim was named a professor at the University of Paris. At the age of forty-four, he could boast the supreme achievement of a French academic career.

At Paris, Durkheim passed through years of triumph and later of tragedy. Already in Bordeaux his interests had begun to turn strongly toward an exploration of religion’s role in social life, but after his move, new commitments and tasks slowed the progress of this research. Nonetheless, he kept to his plan and a decade later published The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life

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Durkheim’s great interest in society was not some sudden creation of his own. As he would have been the first to point out, a sequence of French thinkers before him had shown similar interests, and his ideas could be seen as a development of theirs.⁴ One of his two dissertations had been written on the Baron de Montesquieu, the French philosopher of the eighteenth century who carefully observed and analyzed European culture and political institutions. Montesquieu’s work showed that social structures could be examined in a critical scientific fashion. Durkheim also read the writings of the Comte de Saint-Simon, a socialist thinker of the early 1800s who believed that all private property should be given over to the state. And he was even more impressed by the most famous French thinker of the early nineteenth century, August Comte (1798–1857), who proposed, somewhat like Tylor and Frazer, a grand evolutionary pattern of civilization. In this scheme, earlier stages of human thinking, governed first by theology and then by the abstract ideas of philosophers, are eventually surpassed by the current age of “positive,” or scientific, thought, in which close study only of observable facts provides the key to all knowledge. During this present epoch of science, a new “religion of humanity” replaces the discredited religions and philosophies of the past. From Comte, Durkheim took an appreciation of the human need for communal ties and a deep commitment to scientific analysis of social phenomena, even though he committed himself only in a quite vague and general way to the notion of evolutionary social progress.

In addition to these earlier figures, we must not forget two of the most celebrated scholars in France during Durkheim’s youth: the great biblical critic Ernest Renan, who took a keenly social interest in both ancient Judaism and early Christianity; and an extraordinarily gifted classical historian who was one of Durkheim’s own greatly admired university teachers at the École Normale. This was Numa Denys Fustel de Coulanges, whose influential book The Ancient City (1864) was to become a classic study of social life in the ancient world. In this fascinating work, Coulanges presented his readers with a close social analysis of the Greek and Roman city-states, showing not only how ordinary life was governed by deeply cherished traditions and rooted in conservative moral values but also how thoroughly these traditions and values were saturated with the beliefs of classical polytheistic religion.Durkheim built naturally upon the ideas of these thinkers in framing his own perspective. But the circumstances of modern French life contributed something as well. As most would know, by the later 1800s France and Europe had passed through two great revolutions. One was economic: the industrial revolution; the other was political: the French Revolution and its several successors. In Durkheim’s estimate, the joint impact of these two momentous developments permanently changed the pattern of life in Western civilization. Europe had long relied for stability on its agriculture, its well-defined social classes, its property-owning aristocracies and monarchies, and the intimate community ties of its villages and towns, along with the overarching truths, traditions, and structures of the Christian church. In the aftermath of the twin revolutions, these fixtures of Western culture found themselves shaken as never before and altered in such a way as never again to be the same. Around and within them, there began to grow up a truly new and different kind of civilization, which saw its people moving to factories and cities, its wealth moving from titled lords to enterprising merchants, its power shifting from the old privileged classes to radical movements or popular causes, and its religion everywhere facing disputes, indifference, or open disbelief. In specific terms, Durkheim noticed especially the following four trends, or patterns: