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For someone fond of describing himself as "a godless Jew," "a wicked pagan," and "totally non-religious" (Meng and Freud 1963, pp. 63, 17, 11), Sigmund Freud devoted a remarkable amount of time and energy to the study of religion and religious belief. From his first printed comments on religious practice, concerning the cathartic effect of the confession of one's sins (1893, p. 8), to his last attempt, at the age of 83, to come to understand from where religious "belief obtained its immense power which overwhelms 'reason and science'" (1939, p. 123), Freud explored the interplay of religious life and psychological life with more insight than perhaps any thinker before or since. Yet despite the sheer volume of his [anti] religious writings, and Freud's own high estimate of their worth (1925d, p. 66) in relation to his more celebrated, self-described "detour through the natural sciences" (1935, p. 72), his essays on religious belief remain among the least studied, certainly among psychoanalysts, of his works. This is due no doubt, at least in part, to their atypically polemical edge. But while some of these essays (The Future of an Illusion, for example) may not display Freud's customary detachment, and others (like Moses and Monotheism and Totem and Taboo) advance some rather speculative hypotheses, Freud's reflections on the origin, nature, and future of religious belief are, as I hope to demonstrate, entirely worthy of our study. I also hope to demonstrate that Freud's philosophy of religion, while by no means without its limitations, is not as "reductive" and deficient in "nuance and sophistication" (p. 19) as critics such as William Meissner (1984) routinely maintain, but in fact constitutes a more workable and internally consistent position on religious belief than the interesting responses advanced both by post-Freudian psychoanalysts, such as Meissner,1 and numerous religiously motivated critics, including Hans Kung.
Though Freud was at times given to hyperbole and openly hostile statements about religion and religious belief, his critical project as a whole-what he often terms his "education to reality" (1927, p. 49)has more in common in terms of its general tone and motivation, with Epicurus' systematic critique of superstition or the work of the philosophes of the Enlightenment than with Nietzsche's violent and unrelenting war on Christianity....