Freud as a young
physician

Freud as the world
came to see him.

THE FUTURE OF AN ILLUSION 
SIGMUND FREUD   (1856-1939)
Doubleday Anchor Book, 1955, 22-24 [German original:  1927]

Freud shared in the atheism common to many European intellectuals of his time. He thought that all religious belief was based on anthropomorphism. He refers to this here as "the humanization of nature"-- attributing human qualities to natural forces.  He also thought that animism and polytheism were just variant forms of a mistaken  anthropomorphic thinking.  So all religion was to him just primitive and archaic superstition, albeit sometimes dressed up in fancier language.  When people began to realize that the forces of nature followed natural laws, then they could have abandoned anthropomorphisms.  But by this time they had gotten used to relying on God as a parental figure, as a guide, guard, and helper, so they could not give up their belief.  And this belief also allowed them to think that their lives serve a higher purpose and that there is a God-given moral law.  Freud did not think that there is adequate basis for such beliefs.

When someone defended belief in God as the Infinite Ocean of Being he responded by saying that that was not the kind of God that people believed in.  Because it seemed so obvious to him that belief in gods or (an anthropomorphic) God was superstition, he had to ask why so many people continued in such beliefs.  Here is a sample of his answer. Notice that cites two sources of trouble for humans -- nature and other people.

Excerpt From The Future of an Illusion by Sigmund Freud:

     "For the individual, as for mankind in general, life is hard to endure. The culture in which he shares imposes on him some measure of privation, and other men occasion him a certain degree of suffering, either in spite of the laws of this culture or because of its imperfections.  Add to this the evils that unvanquished nature--he calls it Fate--inflicts on him.  One would expect a permanent condition of anxious suspense and a severe injury to his innate narcissism to be the result of this state of affairs. . . .  But how does he defend himself against the supremacy of nature, of fate, which threatens him, as it threatens all?

     "With the first step, which is the humanization of nature, much is already won.  Nothing can be made of impersonal forces and fates; they remain eternally remote.  But if the elements have passions that rage like those in our own souls, if death itself is not something spontaneous, but the violent act of an evil Will, if everywhere in nature we have about us beings who resemble those of our own environment, then indeed we can breathe freely, we can feel at home in face of the supernatural, and we can deal psychically with our frantic anxiety.  We are perhaps still defenseless, but no longer helplessly paralyzed; we can at least react; perhaps indeed we are not even defenseless; we can have recourse to the same methods against the violent supermen of the beyond that we make use of in our community; we can try to exorcise them, to appease, them to bribe them, and so rob them of part of their power by thus influencing them. . . . 

     "For there is nothing new in this situation.  It has an infantile prototype, and is really only the continuation of this.  For once before one has been in such a state of helplessness: as a little child in one's relationship to one's parents.  For one had reason to fear them, especially the father, though at the same time one was sure of his protection against the dangers then known to one.

* * * *.  

     "In the course of time the first observations of law and order in natural phenomena are made, and therewith the forces of nature lose their human traits.  But men's helplessness remains, and with it their father-longing and the gods.  The gods retain their threefold task: they must exorcise the terrors of nature, they must reconcile one to the cruelty of fate, particularly as shown in death, and they must make amends for the sufferings and privations that the communal life of culture has imposed on man. . . . .
     "What it amounts to is this: life in this world serves a higher purpose; true, it is not easy to guess the nature of this purpose, but certainly a perfecting of human existence is implied.  Probably the spiritual part of man, the soul, which in the course of time has so slowly and unwillingly detached itself from the body, is to be regarded as the object of this elevation and exaltation. . . . Over each of us watches a benevolent, and only apparently severe, Providence, which will not suffer us to become the plaything of the stark and pitiless forces of nature; death itself is not annihilation, not a return to inorganic lifelessness, but the beginning of a new kind of existence, which lies on the road of development to something higher. And to turn to the other side of the question, the moral laws that have formed our culture govern also the whole universe, only they are upheld with incomparably more force and consistency by a supreme judicial court. In the end all good is rewarded, all evil punished, if not actually in this life, then in the further existences that begin after death. And thus all the terrors, the sufferings, and the hardships of life are destined to be obliterated." 

Freud never changed his opinion of religion.  In his later work, Civilization and Its Discontents, he repeated his basic charge.  He argued that religion remains a "system of doctrines and promises which on the one hand explains the riddles of this world to a person with enviable completeness, and, on the other, assures him that a careful Providence will watch over his life and will compensate him in a future existence for any frustrations he suffers here."   Freud asserted once again that belief in this Providence takes the form of belief in a supreme father-figure who can take care of people as their own father once did.  Freud's final judgment is harsh:  "The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals  will never be able to rise above this view of life."