1 - Why Freud Wrote on Religion

Summary

Most psychologists are perfectly content to focus on their clinical sessions and theory-building and don’t feel the additional need to write numerous books on the dynamics of religion. But Freud engaged in both tasks. On the one hand, he had a full day of seeing patients, finding time to write dozens of volumes devoted to original theoretical formulations (his metapsychology), complete with detailed case histories. This aspect of his oeuvre (his clinical works) has rightly dominated over a century of criticism and subsequent modifications of his theories. Freud’s professional life was, after all, that of a medical doctor, psychologist, and scientist. Not only did he frame himself in exactly those terms but he also characterized psychoanalysis as a science born of empirical data and research. His heroes were men like Charles Darwin and the physiologist Ernst Brücke (the latter his teacher at the University of Vienna), and he modeled his theories in a way that later led to him being dubbed a “biologist of the mind.” Freud thought that psychoanalysis, like any scientific theory, should be falsified with the advent of new data, as indeed it was even during his own lifespan.