Freud, Sigmund

(1856–1939)

   Psychologist.

   Freud was born of Jewish parents in Freiberg, Moravia. He was educated at the University of Vienna where he studied medicine. He invented psychoanalysis, as a method of dealing with hysterical and psychological illness. On the ascendance of Nazism in Germany, he moved his practice to London in 1938, but died of cancer a year later. With his hypothesis of the unconscious mind, he has proved an outstandingly influential figure in modern culture. Within the history of the Christian Church, he is remembered for his hostility to religion, which he expressed in his Totem and Taboo, Moses and Monotheism and The Future of an Illusion. He argued that religion is the product of wish fulfilment and that it perpetuates infantile behaviour patterns since it allows the believer to retain the illusion of an omnipotent father figure. Similarly, he maintained that ethical imperatives are merely the internalisation of parental commands. Although Freud’s theories remain controversial, his psychoanalytic explanations of religion have not been ignored by modern Christian apologists.

   Sigmund Freud, The Origins of Religion, edited by A. Dickson (1985);

   P. Balogh, Freud: A Biographical Introduction (1971);

   A.J. de Luca, Freud and Future Religious Experience (1976);

   P. Gay, A Godless Jew: Freud, Atheism and the Making of Psychoanalysis (1987);

   H. Philp, Freud and Religious Belief (1956).