Sigmund Freud's views on religion are described in several of his books and essays. Freud considered God a fantasy, based on the infantile need for a dominant father figure.

Nov 6, 2023 · Sigmund Freud is most famous for the psychoanalytic school of thought he founded, but he also took a keen interest in religion. As an adult, Freud considered himself an atheist, but his Jewish background and upbringing played an important role in …

Sigmund Freud: Religion. This article explores attempts by Sigmund Freud (1850-1939) to provide a naturalistic account of religion enhanced by insights and theoretical constructs derived from the discipline of psychoanalysis which he had pioneered. Freud was an Austrian neurologist and psychologist who is widely regarded as the father of ...

May 23, 2015 · To put it simply, Freud believed that religion was the projection of the child’s physical relationship with its father. He recorded his first thoughts on the nature of religion in total and Taboo published in 1913.

Oct 23, 2022 · By linking religion to the unconscious mind and early childhood experiences, Freud provided a new way of thinking about religion as a psychological phenomenon rather than merely a cultural or social construct.

Sep 9, 2007 · There Freud, without abandoning his atheism, begins to see the Jewish faith that he was born into as a source of cultural progress in the past and of personal inspiration in the present. Close...

In Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices (1907), his earliest writing about religion, Freud suggests that religion and neurosis are similar products of the human mind: neurosis, with its compulsive behavior, is “an individual religiosity”, and religion, with its repetitive rituals, is a “universal obsessional neurosis.”

Feb 12, 2025 · Freud described it as a sense of indissoluble oneness with the universe, which mystics in particular have celebrated as the fundamental religious experience. Its origin, Freud claimed, is nostalgia for the pre-Oedipal infant’s sense of unity with its mother.

Atheism in Freud is an imperative of method: for psychoanalysis, religion is and can only be a purely human creation, to be explained in strictly psychological terms and categories; more specifically, religious realities

Freud was notorious for his anti-religious stance. He seems to have gone out of his way to offend believers, referring to the “barbarous god of volcanoes and wildernesses whom I grew to dislike very much” (Freud, 1970: 102).