When Sigmund Freud took his children hunting for mushrooms he always insisted that they follow a certain ritual. Part of the ritual consisted of placing fresh flowers every day at the shrine of the Virgin near the wood.
Although he publicly attacked religion as an illusion, Freud seems to have had a private preoccupation with it, particularly with Catholicism. When in Rome and Paris he haunted St. Peter’s and Notre Dame. In his correspondence he refers frequently to Easter and Pentecost but never to Jewish holidays. His favorite books—Faust, The Temptation of St. Anthony, Notre Dame de Paris, Paradise Lost, The Inferno—are centrally concerned with Hell, the Devil, possession by the Devil, or pacts with the Devil. Indeed, Freud seems to make more references to Heaven, Hell, the Devil, and damnation in his correspondence than many contemporary priests do in a lifetime of sermons. Were he alive today we can imagine him accusing such modern clerics of emptying Christianity of its content—a charge he leveled against his friend the Reverend Oskar Pfister, a liberal Protestant pastor.
In Sigmund Freud’s Christian Unconscious, Paul Vitz develops the original yet well-documented thesis that “Freud had a strong life-long positive identification with and attraction to Christianity.” At the same time Freud harbored an unconscious hostility to Christianity and seems at times to have associated himself with the Devil and the Antichrist.
In the course of establishing his thesis. Professor Vitz treats the reader to some fascinating biographical material. One item that stands out is a cocaine purchase Freud conducted with Emanuel Merck, the greatgrandson of the man who founded Merck Pharmaceutical and upon whom Goethe modeled the character of Mephistopheles. Freud, who was well aware of the symbolic overtones of this exchange, seemed to believe that cocaine would provide a shortcut to knowledge, power, and success. He first took the drug on Walpurgisnacht—the night Faust sealed his pact with the Devil.
According to Vitz, Freud’s ambivalence about Christianity stemmed from his early relationship with a nanny, a devout Catholic, who cared for him until the age of three and apparently introduced young Freud to Catholic practices and rituals. In many European families at that time the bond between child and nanny was quite intimate, and was not unlike the relationship between the white child and black mammy that typified certain Southern households. In any event, Freud’s relationship with his nanny seems to have had a profound lifelong impact on him. Not so curiously, perhaps, he hired a devout Catholic nanny for his own children.
Vitz devotes considerable attention to Freud’s early years, as well as to dreams, slips of the tongue, and literary analysis. It is no mistake that the approach seems rather Freudian. That is the author’s intent. One result is that whatever criticisms one is tempted to make against Vitz are the same criticisms one would want to level against the Freudian method itself But by the same token, anyone who takes Freud seriously will have to take Vitz seriously. What he demonstrates so ably is that the Freudian system is a two-edged sword which can be used to cut both ways—in this case, against atheism as well as against belief.
In the Future of an Illusion, Freud argued that religious beliefs are illusions “born from man’s need to make his helplessness tolerable and built up from the material of memories of the helplessness of his own childhood and the childhood of the human race.” Freud was concerned not with the beliefs themselves but with the motives for belief, and concluded that religion was untrustworthy because based on childhood needs and wishes, often of a neurotic nature.
But in that case Freud’s attachment to his Catholic nanny, coupled with her abrupt departure, goes far toward explaining his lifelong ambivalence about Christianity and his public rejection of religion. Likewise, Freud’s rejection of his father, a weak and passive man who seemed unable to control the super-charged Oedipal atmosphere of the household, provides the psychological motive for his rejection of God. Freud’s atheism, as well as atheism in general, can be interpreted as unconscious Oedipal wish fulfillment. And in fact, as Vitz has pointed out elsewhere, the biographies of many prominent atheists reveal a pattern of shame, disappointment, or rage directed at their fathers.
Freud himself connected the primeval murder of the father by the sons with the Christian doctrine of original sin, and in one startling passage in Totem and Taboo seems to acknowledge—at least on the mythical and symbolic level—that no better resolution had been found for the Oedipal crime than Christ’s radical obedience to His Father’s will. Nevertheless, in his public persona, Freud seems to have been more often on the side of the fallen angels. “Do you not know that I am the Devil?” he once asked, then added, “All my life I have had to play the Devil, in order that others would be able to build the most beautiful cathedral with the materials that I produced.”
In Sigmund Freud’s Christian Unconscious, Vitz uses those materials to neutralize the thesis presented by Freud in The Future of an Illusion. Judged by his own criteria, Freud turns out to be an unreliable witness on the subject of religious belief For a long time now, The Future of an Illusion has been one of the most frequently required readings in college psychology courses. Through it, generations of students have learned to view religious belief as the result of immature projections and wish fulfillments. Fair play would suggest that in the future they get an equal opportunity to examine the psychological motives for agnosticism and atheism. Paul Vitz has written an important book which deserves to be widely read.
[Sigmund Freud’s Christian Unconscious, by Paul C. Vitz; New York: Guilford Press]
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