What Sigmund Freud thinks about religion
Founder of psychoanalysis (1856 to 1939); physician and psychologist who lived and worked in Vienna until 1938; author of The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and The Ego and the Id (1923).
Sigmund Freud did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
3 dated positions, c. 1930, in their own words. Our reading of what Sigmund Freud has said — not written or endorsed by them.
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Their wordsThe derivation of a need for religion from the child’s feeling of helplessness and the longing it evokes for a father seems to me incontrovertible, especially since this feeling is not simply carried on from childhood days but is kept alive perpetually by the fear of what the superior power of fate will bring.
↗Civilization and Its Discontents (tr. Joan Riviere, 1930)gutenberg.org All 20 from this book
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Their wordsThe religions of humanity, too, must be classified as mass-delusions of this kind. Needless to say, no one who shares a delusion recognizes it as such.
↗Civilization and Its Discontents (tr. Joan Riviere, 1930)gutenberg.org All 20 from this book
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Their wordsAt such a cost—by the forcible imposition of mental infantilism and inducing a mass-delusion—religion succeeds in saving many people from individual neuroses. But little more.
↗Civilization and Its Discontents (tr. Joan Riviere, 1930)gutenberg.org All 20 from this book
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