Later Developments and Writings

In his mature years, Freud developed and refined his theories, looking always for new dimensions and wider applications of his core ideas: the unconscious, the Oedipus complex, neurosis, and the three-part framework of human personality. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), he revised his earlier understanding of the basic drives, which to him centered on sex and selfpreservation—the two urges that create and sustain life—by adding a different but equally basic drive that sought to do just the opposite. This “death instinct” (thanatos) was the backward urge to restore the world to its primal state, to the time when there was no life at all. Such a concept, he felt, was the only thing that could account for the many instances of such behaviors as masochism and sadism, in which people avoid pleasure and actually seek pain. In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), he expanded the concept of the libido, or sexual desire, to include the broader idea of diffused emotional attachment, such as is found in a family. Then he applied it to explain how an organized community like a church depends on personal attachments to a leader; in Christianity, for example, devotion to the person of Christ and one’s fellow believers is what gives this huge, varied community of people a sense of binding solidarity.

With the outbreak of World War I, Freud began to reflect at length on the themes of death, human weakness, and the limits of civilization. In the difficult years between the two world wars, his commitment to psychoanalysis remained strong, and he placed great faith in the progress of science. Still, a general sense of melancholy, of pessimism about the plight of humanity began to come forward. We find this attitude especially in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), where he explores the unhappy conflict between our instinctive personal desires, most notably the power of human aggression, and the strong restraints that society must place upon them if humanity is to survive.

-63-

Once he had developed the basic ideas of psychoanalysis, Freud found religion a most promising subject of study.¹¹ In childhood, of course, he had gained a basic acquaintance with the teachings of Judaism. Although his family was largely non-religious, he knew well the stories and writings of the Hebrew Bible. He also developed a useful working knowledge of Christianity, drawn partly from the facts of life in staunchly Catholic Vienna and partly from his own wide reading in the history and literature of Western civilization. Further, religious ideas, imagery, and parallels figured prominently in the neuroses of some of his first patients. His personal stance, however, was one of complete rejection of religious belief. The biographer who knew him best tells us bluntly that “he went through life from beginning to end a natural atheist.”¹² Freud found no reason to believe in God and therefore saw no value or purpose in the rituals of religious life.

In light of this background, it is not surprising that Freud’s approach to religion, like that of Tylor and Frazer, is quite the opposite of that taken by people who are themselves religious. In most cases religious believers say that they believe as they do because God has spoken to them through the Bible, because a divinity has touched their hearts, or because what their church or synagogue teaches is the truth. Freud, by contrast, is quite sure that religious ideas do not come from a God or gods, for gods do not exist; nor do such beliefs come from the sort of sound thinking about the world that normally leads to truth. Like Tylor and Frazer, Freud is certain that religious beliefs are erroneous; they are superstitions. At the same time, he notes that they are interesting superstitions, which raise important questions about human nature: Why, if they are so obviously false, do so many people persist in holding these beliefs, and with such deep conviction? If religion is not rational, how do people acquire it? And why do they keep it? Tylor shows almost no interest in these questions, and Frazer, though he does somewhat explore the attractions of magic, largely ignores them as well. Freud, however, does consider them —and with good reason. In psychoanalysis he claims to have found the answers.

In an early article published under the title “Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices” (1907), we can find a first clue to Freud’s approach. In it he observes that there is a close resemblance between the activities of religious people and the behaviors of his neurotic patients. Both, for example, place great emphasis on doing things in a patterned, ceremonial fashion; both also feel guilty unless they follow the rules of their rituals to perfection. In both cases too, the ceremonies are associated with the repression of basic instincts: psychological neuroses usually arise from repression of the sex drive; religion demands repression of selfishness, control of the ego-instinct. Thus,

-64-

just as sexual repression results in an individual obsessional neurosis, religion, which is practiced widely in the human race, seems to be “a universal obsessional neurosis.”¹³ This comparison suggests a theme that is fundamental to almost everything Freud writes on religion. In his view, religious behavior always resembles mental illness; accordingly, the concepts most suited to explaining it are those that have been developed by psychoanalysis.

With these premises in hand, Freud turns next to two practices of primitive peoples which strike modern minds as especially strange: the use of animal “totems” and the custom of “taboo.” Tylor, Frazer, and other anthropologists were fascinated by these customs, as we have noticed. In the first case, a tribe or clan chooses to associate itself with a specific animal (or plant), which serves as its sacred object, its “totem.” In the second, some person or thing is called “taboo” if a tribe wants to declare it “off limits” or forbidden. According to the oldest and strongest known taboos, most early societies seem to have strictly prohibited two things. First, there could be no incest; marriage must always be “exogamous,” that is, outside the immediate family or clan. Among primitives there is almost always what Freud calls a “horror of incest.” Second,

-65-

there could be no killing or eating of the totem animal; except on certain rare ceremonial occasions, when this rule was solemnly broken, eating the “totem” was also “taboo.” Third—and here Freud goes beyond other theorists—there could be no point in making taboos, in publicly disallowing these things, unless somehow, at some time, people actually wanted to do them. Evidently, these are crimes that people did try to commit. But if so, why make them crimes in the first place? Why make everyone miserable by creating rules that no one really wanted to keep?

More than anything else in primitive cultures, it is the practices of totemism and taboo that present us with a particularly striking display of psychic ambivalence—one which opens a window on the power of human emotions in the very earliest age of humanity. After all, says Freud, if Darwin is right about our descent from the apes, we should think of the first human beings as living, like their animal ancestors, in “primal hordes”—extended families of women and children dominated by one powerful male. Within these groups there would have been loyalty, affection, and security against danger; for the young males, however, there was also something else—frustration and

-66-

envy. Though they feared and respected their father, they also sexually desired the females, all of whom were his wives. Torn between their need for the security of the horde and their suppressed sexual urges, they were at length driven to a fateful act. In a fearsome turn of events, which undoubtedly occurred many times in different hordes, the sons banded together, murdered their father and (since they were cannibals) consumed his body, even as they proceeded to take possession of his wives. At first this primeval murder in the horde brought a sense of joy and liberation, but grave second thoughts soon followed. The sons were overcome with guilt and remorse. Wanting desperately to restore the master they had killed, they found in the totem animal a “father substitute” and symbol; they agreed to worship it, and before it they then swore the oldest of all taboos: “Thou shalt not kill the totem.” Over time, this rule was generalized to the entire clan and became the universal commandment against all murder. “Thou shalt not kill” thus undoubtedly became the first moral rule of the human race.

The case of the first taboo is more complicated than the second, and to explain it Freud draws on the work of William Roberston Smith, the very same man who influenced Frazer and first suggested the idea of the primitive “totem sacrifice.”¹⁴ Though normally the totem’s life was sacred, the newer Australian research had shown that there were certain sacred occasions on which the pattern was reversed. The totem animal then was killed and consumed by all in a ritual feast. From the standpoint of psychoanalysis, says Freud, this too is highly significant. The totem sacrifice makes sense only as a deeply emotional ceremony in which the community reenacts the primeval murder of the first father, who, through death, has now become its god. In the ritual, the sons publicly reaffirm their love for him and—quite unconsciously—also release the hate caused by the sexual renunciation they now endure.

The totem sacrifice thus confirms that the original murder of the father— a crime committed, fittingly, in the childhood of the human race—is nothing less than the acting out in history of the powerful, double human emotions that converge in every male’s infancy to form the Oedipus complex. The brothers’ assault upon their father is in essence the crime of Oedipus enacted

-67-

Seen in this light, moreover, a modern sacrament like the Christian communion shows its true character. Like the ancient totem ritual, it reenacts, and seeks to reverse, the original crime of humanity. In the communion, the flesh and blood of Christ, God’s son (symbolizing the eldest brother, leader of the rebellion), are eaten in remembrance of his crucifixion, a death suffered as punishment for the “original sin” of the primeval rebellion. On behalf of his brothers, Christ atones for their prehistoric crime. Yet the atonement is also reenactment. Since, in Christian theology, the father and son are one, the sacrament of the son’s death is symbolically in the same moment the sacrament of the father’s murder. Thus the communion secretly recalls oedipal hate as well as love.

Freud of course recognizes that a long process of evolution stands between the totem rites of early cannibals and the communion meal of Christianity. He suggests that, over time, the totem animal was reduced to a simple sacrificial gift. Its place was taken by others, first by animal-human deities, later by the gods of polytheism, and finally by the father God of Christianity. But these are details. Freud’s main concern, like Frazer’s, but now from the standpoint of emotions rather than intellect, is to show the striking connection between present-day religion and the dark ceremonies of the primitive past. If we want to find the origin of religion, he insists, we need look no further than these grim events and deep psychological tensions. The birth of belief is to be found in the Oedipus complex, in the powerful, divided emotions that led humanity to its first great crime, then turned a murdered father into a god and promised sexual renunciation as a way to serve him. In Freud’s own words, “Totemic religion arose from the filial sense of guilt, in an attempt to allay that feeling and appease the father by deferred obedience to him. All later religions are seen to be attempts at solving the same problem.”¹⁵

For Freud, then, the murder in the prehistoric herd is an event of momentous importance in the history of human social life. In the powerful emotions

-68-

it produced, we find the origin of religion. In the incest taboo—the agreement to protect the clan in its aftermath—we can see the origin of morality and the social contract. Taken together, totem and taboo thus form the very foundation of all that has come to be called civilization.

Freud begins The Future of an Illusion with certain facts recognized by almost everyone. Human life has arisen, or evolved, out of the natural world, an arena that is not necessarily friendly to our enterprises. Though it has produced our species, nature constantly threatens also to destroy us, whether through predators, disasters, disease, or physical decline. For protection, therefore, we have from the first joined into clans and communities, thereby creating what we call civilization. Through it we gain security, but at a price. As the events recounted in Totem and Taboo show us, society can survive only if we bend our personal desires to its rules and restraints. We cannot just kill when anger seizes us, take what we do not own, or satisfy sexual desires as we want. We must restrain our instincts, compensating ourselves (though never enough) with other satisfactions we can hope to find in, say, the joys of art and leisure or the ties of family, community, and nation. Yet even with these sacrifices and comforts, civilization cannot fully protect us. In the face of disease and death, we are all ultimately helpless. In the battle between nature and culture, nature’s laws of decay and death will always finally win.

Freud next observes that none of us finds this unhappy truth easy to accept; it runs counter to all we treasure most. We would rather face things as we did in the sunnier days of our childhood. Then there was always a father to reassure us against the dangers of the storm and the darkness of the night. Then there was always a voice of strength to say that all would be well in the end. As adults, in fact, we all continue to crave that childhood security, though in reality we can no longer have it. Or can we? The voice of religion,

-69-

The best word we can use to describe such beliefs, Freud contends, is “illusion.” By this he means something quite specific. An illusion for him is a belief whose main characteristic is that we very much want it to be true. My belief that I am destined for greatness would be a case in point. It could turn out someday to be true, but that is not why I hold it. I hold it because I strongly wish it to be true. An illusion is not the same as a delusion, which is something I may also want to be true but which everyone else knows is not, and perhaps never could be so. If I were to claim that I will one day be 8 feet tall (which, being now fully grown, I most certainly will not), I would be holding to a delusion. Rather shrewdly, Freud claims that he is not here calling belief in God as Father a delusion; in fact, he insists otherwise: “To assess the truth-value of religious doctrines does not lie within the scope of the present enquiry. It is enough for us that we have recognized them as being, in their psychological nature, illusions.”¹⁷

Religious teachings, therefore, are not truths revealed by God, nor are they logical conclusions based on scientifically confirmed evidence. They are, on the contrary, ideas whose main feature is that we dearly want them to be true. They are “fulfillments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind. The secret of their strength lies in the strength of those wishes.”¹⁸

We should notice here that, though it may be helpful for some, for Freud himself this distinction between “illusion” and “delusion” comes to very little. In his view, it hardly makes a difference which term we use, because even if they cannot be absolutely proved to be such, religious beliefs are in the end delusions; they are teachings we have no right to believe because they cannot pass the test of the scientific method, which is the only way we have of reliably telling us what is true and what is not. It is the habit of believers to draw on nothing more than personal feelings and intuitions, and these are notorious for being often mistaken. Hence, we ought never to put our trust in religion, even if its teachings can be shown to have provided certain services for humanity in the past. Freud concedes that, at times, religious beliefs may have been of

-70-

some small assistance in the growth of civilization. Certainly the early totem made a contribution through its role in the denunciation of murder and incest, and later religion did its part when these and similar crimes were discouraged by presenting them as offenses deserving of punishment in Hell. But civilization is now mature and established. We would no more want to build today’s society on such superstition and repression than we would want to force grown men and women to obey the rules of behavior we lay down for children.

Religion would thus be the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity; like the obsessional neuroses of children, it arose out of the Oedipus Complex, out of the relation to the father. If this view is right, it is to be supposed that a turningaway from religion is bound to occur with the fatal inevitability of a process of growth, and that we find ourselves at this very juncture in the middle of that phase of development.¹⁹

Echoing Tylor, Freud concludes it is best “to view religious teachings … as neurotic relics, and we may now argue that the time has probably come, as it does in an analytic treatment, for replacing the effects of repression by the results of the rational operation of the intellect.”²⁰ In short, as humanity grows into adult life, it must discard religion and replace it with forms of thought suitable to maturity. Mature people, Freud maintains, allow their lives to be guided by reason and by science, not by superstition and faith.

An interesting feature of The Future of an Illusion is its dialogue format. Freud routinely stops along the way of his discussion to answer the objections of an imaginary critic who takes the side of religion. Among other things, this critic insists that it is wrong to talk of religion as arising merely from our emotional needs, that religion ought to be believed on the basis of tradition, and—perhaps most important—that if religion is discarded as the ground for morals, society will collapse into violence and chaos. These criticisms are of course designed to strengthen Freud’s case, and in each instance he offers a skillful and persuasive reply. In one of these objections, Freud is asked why

-71-

he seems to have changed his theme since Totem and Taboo. That book was also about the origin of religion, but its subject was totemism and the father-son relationship; this one talks mainly about human helplessness. Has the theory now changed? Freud’s answer to this question is instructive if not quite convincing. He explains that Totem and Taboo explored only one element, though it was deeply concealed, of what goes into religion. That was the two-sided feeling of both love for and fear of the father, who ruled the primeval horde. The present book, he says, explores “the other, less deeply concealed part”—the realization of adults that in the face of nature’s crushing power, they will always be as weak as children and in need of a loving Father to defend them. Freud does not address the puzzling fact that while God is presented in the first book as a figure about whom human beings have very mixed emotions, in the second He is the Father who only loves—and is only loved in return. Still, whatever the motives, the result in Freud’s eyes is always the same. The God whom people call upon in prayer is not a being who belongs to reality; he is an image, an illusion projected outward from the self and onto the external world out of the deep need to overcome our guilt or allay our fears.