© Roger M Tagg 2010
Welcome to FROLIO – a new attempt to merge philosophy and the "semantic web" . This website is under continuing development.
This is just a long essay, written in 1927, when Europe was in an unstable state between the two world wars, and the dictatorships were just getting going.
The general gist is that Freud describes religion as a universal neurosis, brought about by humans' need to alleviate the anxieties of facing the perils of living in the world, and - not surprisingly - inventing a substitute father figure.
Italics indicate things that I have added. Double quotes are words taken directly from the book. The words 'man', 'he', 'his' and 'him' should be taken to include both male and female humans, unless explicitly stated.
| Chapter | Page | Highlight |
|---|---|---|
| 1 - | 2 | "I refuse to separate culture and civilization ... (human) culture shows the observer two sides" |
| 1 - "all the knowledge and skill that humanity has acquired in order to control the forces of nature and obtain from it goods to satisfy human needs" | ||
| 2 - "all the institutions that are required to govern the relations of human beings one to another - and, in particular, the distribution of such goods as can be obtained." | ||
| 3 | "... every individual is, in virtual terms, an enemy of culture" | |
| 4 | "It seems that every culture must be based on coercion and 'drive renunciation' ..." (my single quotes for emphasis) | |
| 5 | "Leaders ... in order to retain their influence, they will yield to the mass more than the mass yields to them, which is why it seems necessary for them to have access to instruments of power making them independent of the mass." | |
| "... human are not, of their own volition, keen on work, and arguments are powerless against their passions." | ||
| 6 | "The limits of educability will therefore also define the effectiveness of any such (i.e. to a coercion-free society with selfless leaders) cultural change." | |
| 7 | "... I have no intention of passing judgment on the great cultural experiment currently being conducted in the stretch of land between Europe and Asia" (i.e., Soviet Russia). I guess it failed anyhow, but some people thought it might be just the cultural change mentioned on page 6. | |
| 2 - | 11 | The 'Above-I' (i.e. super-ego, or conscience) represents a direction in human evolution beyond always needing coercion. |
| 10-11 | "Untold numbers of civilized human beings, who would recoil from murder or incest, do not deny themselves satisfaction of their greed, aggression or sexual desires, and will not hesitate to harm others through lying, cheating and calumny, if they can get away with it." | |
| 11 | "A culture that fails to satisfy so many participants (e.g. oppressed working classes), driving them to rebellion, has no chance of lasting for any length of time, nor does it deserve one." | |
| 12 | "... the ideals of a culture (i.e. its judgments as to which are the supreme achievements, those most worth striving for) ... for it (an ideal) to be complete, it requires comparison with other cultures ... every culture gives itself the right to look down on the others." | |
| 13 | The oppressed may share in this cultural narcissism too | |
| 3 - | 15 | The 'state of nature' (i.e. the 'law of the jungle') applies if culture is abolished. |
| 17 | "How does he (the human being) defend himself against the superior forces of nature, of fate, which threaten him like everyone else? Culture does the job for him ... man's badly threatened self-esteem craves consolation ..." | |
| 18 | If a human personalizes "rage in the elements ... an act of violence perpetrated by an evil will ... by beings like those he knows from his own society, then he will breathe easier." | |
| "He can try beseeching them, appeasing them, bribing them ..." | ||
| "That kind of replacement of a natural science by psychology not only brings immediate relief; it also points the way towards further coping with the situation." | ||
| 19 | "... he invests them with a paternal character, turning them into gods ... an infantile model ..." | |
| Despite science, "the helplessness felt by human beings remains, as do their paternal yearnings and the gods." | ||
| "... the bewilderment and helplessness of the human race is beyond remedy." | ||
| 20 | "And the more nature becomes autonomous, with the gods withdrawing from it, the more earnestly all expectations focus on ... the moral sphere ... to make good the ills and shortcomings of culture ... and to supervise implementation of the rules of culture with which humans find it so hard to comply. The rules are themselves deemed to be of divine provenance ..." (but compare David Brink's (and Socrates') views on the Autonomy of Ethics, see my highlights of "I am, therefore I think") | |
| "The message is: life in this world serves a higher purpose, one not easy to guess ..." (we are now following Freud's description of the religious viewpoint) | ||
| "The spiritual side of humanity, the soul, which has slowly and reluctantly separated from the body down the ages, is the intended object of such elevation ..." | ||
| 20-21 | "Everything that happens in this world does so in execution of the intentions of a higher intelligence that ... ultimately steers it all in the direction of the good, i.e. that which is gratifying to ourselves." | |
| 21 | (With religion) "all life's terrors, sufferings and hardships are destined to be obliterated; life after death ... will bring all the perfection that we may have missed here." | |
| (The 'superior wisdom', the 'universal goodness', and justice) "are the properties of the divine beings ... or rather, of the one divine being into which, in our culture, all the gods of earlier times have become compressed." | ||
| 22 | "With God now a single being, relations towards him could recover the intimacy and intensity of the child's relationship with its father." | |
| "... folk wanted to be rewarded, they wanted at least to become the only beloved child, the chosen people." | ||
| "... a pious America claimed to be 'God's own country' ..." (so currently do both Australia and New Zealand!) | ||
| "The question is: what are these ideas in the light of psychology, why are they held in such high esteem, and ... what are they actually worth?" | ||
| 4 - | Freud uses this chapter to address what he thinks an opponent might argue from a religious viewpoint - including an accusation of inconsistency with his previous work Totem and Taboo. | |
| 24 | "... this body of religious ideas is usually presented to us as divine revelation. However ... it completely ignores what we know to have been the historical emergence of those ideas and the way they differed in different eras and cultures." (Not to mention archaeological evidence, e.g. of the origin of the 'Israelites' - see John Bimson's 1989 article at http://www.biblicalstudies.org.uk/article_canaan_bimson.html ) | |
| 25 | "... the first form in which protective divinity revealed itself to man was animal ..." | |
| 27 | (For a child) "the mother is soon supplanted (in the protective function) by the stronger father ... the child's relationship to its father is burdened with a curious ambivalence ... the child fears him no less than it yearns for and admired him." | |
| "If as a person grows older, he realizes that ... he can never manage without protection against alien superior powers, he invests those powers with the traits of the father-figure ..." | ||
| 5 - | 29 | "What is the psychological significance of religious ideas? ... they are dogmas, statements about ... reality that convey something we have not discovered for ourselves and that demand to be believed." |
| 29-30 | There are many such dogmas regarding a wide variety of things in the world (e.g. geography) - and we can accept many of them without actually seeing for ourselves. | |
| 31 | "Let us try gauging the dogmas of religion by the same measure (i.e., they are widely accepted, investigated and testable). But ... we receive three answers that are oddly out of harmony with one another: 1- ... our forefathers believed in them ... ; 2 - we possess (unreliable) proofs handed down ... from a dim and distant time; and 3) it is forbidden to ask for such authentication anyway." | |
| 32 | "Precisely those pronouncements from our cultural inheritance that might be of the greatest significance so far as we are concerned ... have the feeblest authentication of all." | |
| "Probably many of them (our forefathers) harboured the same scepticism as we have ourselves, but the pressure on them was too great for them to dare voice their misgivings." | ||
| 33-34 | People can't be obliged to accept every religious pronouncement however absurd. We can demand that people apply reason, but not to accept something that only a limited number can accept. | |
| 34 | The 'as-if' philosophy ... "there are plenty of assumptions in our intellectual activity that we quite agreed are unfounded, even absurd (like Father Christmas?). They are called fictions, but for a variety of reasons we allegedly have to act 'as if' we believed those fictions." | |
| "This (we are told) applies with regard to the teachings of religion because of their incomparable importance as regards sustaining human society." | ||
| 6 - | 37 | "An illusion is not the same as an error, nor is it necessarily an error." |
| "Typically, the illusion is derived from human desires ..." | ||
| "... it resembles the psychiatric delusion ... key feature ... its inconsistency with reality, while the illusion is not necessarily false ..." (so, is it a 'model'?) | ||
| 38 | "That the Messiah will come and establish a new golden age ... depending on the personal stance of the person assessing it, he will classify this belief as an illusion or as analogous to a delusion." | |
| "... we refer to a belief as an illusion when wish-fulfilment plays a prominent part in its motivation." | ||
| "... the teachings of religion, we may say again: they are all illusions, unverifiable, no one should be forced to regard them as true, to believe in them." | ||
| "Some of them are so improbable, so contrary to everything that we have laboriously learned about the reality of the world, that ... they can be likened to delusions." | ||
| 39 | "To stick one's own caprice into the gap and use private judgment to pronounce this or that bit of the religious system more or less acceptable would be a wanton undertaking." | |
| 40 | "Philosophers stretch the meaning of words ... they call some vague abstraction of their own invention 'God' ... and pride themselves on having discovered a higher, purer concept of God ... no longer the mighty figure of religious teaching." | |
| "The person who (instead) humbly accepts the minor role of humanity in the wider world - that is the person who is irreligious in the true sense of the word." | ||
| 40-41 | "We know approximately when the teachings of religion were created and by what kinds of people. If we go on to uncover the motives that prompted this, our standpoint ... will undergo a marked shift. We tell ourselves how lovely it would be ... if there were a God who created the world and benign Providence, a moral world order, and life beyond the grave ... yet it is very evident, is it not, that all of this is the way we should inevitably wish it to be." | |
| 7 - | 42 | "... we shall not even shrink from asking whether our own conviction (that by applying observation and thinking in scientific work we can learn something of external reality) is any more firmly grounded." |
| 43 | (Says Freud's supposed opponent) " ... no one starts an excavation if it is going to undermine the dwellings of the living. ... The teachings of religion are not just another object to be pored over. Our culture is based on them, it is a condition of the preservation of human society that the vast majority of people believe in the truth of those teachings." | |
| (Says Freud's supposed opponent) "If people are taught that there is no all-powerful, all-righteous God, no divine world order, and no life after death, they will feel under no obligation to obey the rules of culture." | ||
| 44 | (Freud's rebuttal) "Culture is at greater risk if its present attitude towards religion is maintained than if that attitude is abandoned." | |
| 46 | "What do we see instead (of there being great benefits of religion for the world)? That a large number of people are dissatisfied with culture and are unhappy within it." (This might have been truer in 1927 than now) | |
| 47 | (Counter argument) ... but this might be ascribed to the decline in influence of religion and the "regrettable effect of scientific advances". | |
| (Freud) "It is doubtful whether, at the time when religious teachings held unrestricted sway, the human race was happier, by and large, than it is today." | ||
| (Highlighting sin, emphasizing human weakness has been 'good business' for priests - it's a way to keep people in subordination.) | ||
| 48 | (If that's the best that priests can do in the name of religion) "do we overrate its essentialness for humanity, and are we wise to base our cultural requirements on it? | |
| "The natural sciences have exposed the error they (religious documents) contain ..." | ||
| 50 | "The alternatives are: A) unrelenting oppression of those dangerous masses, coupled with very careful blocking of all opportunities for intellectual awakening, or B) a thorough review of the relationship between culture and religion." ('A' sounds a bit like some governments' hopeful attempts to block web pages they disagree with) | |
| 8 - | 52 | "The risk of physical insecurity (e.g. Corsican vendettas) ... has the effect of uniting human beings in a society that forbids the individual to kill ... It is called justice and punishment. However this rational explanation of the ban on murder is not the one we give; we claim that God enacted the ban." |
| "... the character of holiness or inviolability has spread from a few major bans to all other cultural institutions, laws and ordinances." | ||
| "It is not simply that they (religion and human institutions) devalue each other by reaching conflicting decisions at different times and in different places; they also display every sign of human inadequacy." | ||
| 53 | "It is a difficult task deciding what God himself required and what is more likely to stem from the authority of an all-powerful parliament or lofty magistrate." | |
| "So it would be an undoubted advantage to leave God out of it altogether and frankly concede the purely human origin of all cultural institutions and rules." | ||
| "People would understand that such precepts had been created not so much to keep them under control, rather to serve their interests." | ||
| 54 | "... primal father was the primitive image of God ..." | |
| "... the treasure-house of religious ideas does not contain wish-fulfilments alone, but also significant historical reminiscences." | ||
| 55 | (Freud here likens religious ideas to childhood neuroses, something he specializes in!) | |
| "Religion, in this reading, is the universal human obsessional neurosis; like the child's, it stemmed from the Oedipus complex, the relationship to the father." | ||
| 56 | "... the devout believer is to a great extent protected from the risk of certain neurotic ailments; adoption of the universal neurosis relieves him of the task of cultivating a personal neurosis." | |
| 57 | "The truths contained in the teachings of religion are so distorted and systematically dressed up that the mass of humanity is incapable of recognizing them as truths. It is not unlike the way we tell children that babies are brought by the stork." | |
| 9 - | 61 | "We have no means of controlling our libidinal nature apart from our intelligence. How can people dominated by intellectual prohibitions be expected to attain the psychological ideal of the primacy of intelligence?" |
| "... women in general are accused of so-called 'physiological feebleness of mind' - i.e. of being less intelligent than men. The fact itself is in dispute ..." | ||
| "Maybe the effect of the religious ban on thought is not as bad as I am assuming ..." (I think he did rather over-reach himself on that) | ||
| 62 | (In America) "an attempt is currently being made (clearly under the influence of matriarchy) to deprive people of all stimulants, drugs and semi-luxuries and sate them, by way of recompense, with the fear of God. The outcome of this experiment (i.e. prohibition) is another thing over which we need squander no curiosity." | |
| 63 | "A person cannot remain a child for ever; eventually the child must go out into what has been called 'hostile life'." (Some young people seem to be putting this off for as long as possible these days) | |
| 10 - | 67 | (Replying to his supposed opponent who accuses Freud of having just as many illusions) "But one difference I insist on. My illusions ... are not unalterable, as are those of religion; they lack that manic character." |
| 71 | It isn't valid to devalue science and logic because their laws are often provisional and get replaced. Nor that they are tied to the conditions of our own "organization (i.e. our mental apparatus)". |
What Freud is labelling as an illusion (or maybe he is just saying wishful thinking) is the traditional, fundamentalist sort of religion that claims to set itself above not only material interests but also logical and scientific thought.
Personally, I think the world has moved on a bit since 1927. While fundamentalists are still noisy and sometimes threatening and dangerous, they are seen by many as a lunatic fringe. Many people I meet have views of their own. A "ban on thought" seems to be a hopeless idea when one has a more educated public - especially since the wide accessibility of the internet. Some schools in Australia are encouraging thinking for oneself through Ethics sessions, in some cases as an alternative to Scripture. Many countries have high immigrant populations and can no longer enforce a single paradigm of thought.
I do think, however, that Freud is right in implying that too large a part of our religious thinking is concerned with the old - and probably now inappropriate - concept of God the Father, together with miracles and other magic-like stories. There is a need to be concerned with the Good, Value, Love, concern for others, and living a good life. But we can do this voluntarily, and should not be obliged to go along with any one particular mythology or holy writ.
Index to more highlights of interesting books
Some of these links may be under construction – or re-construction.
This version updated on 14th September 2010
If you have constructive suggestions or comments, please contact the author rogertag@tpg.com.au .