For the famous doctor and psychologist Sigmund Freud, religion is a mental illness, more precisely an obsessional neurosis. In this clip you can find out how this disease comes about and whether, according to Freud, it can be cured. Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was a famous doctor and psychologist and is considered the founder of psychoanalysis. Although his psychoanalytic theories and methods are controversial today, he is still considered one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. Freud was born in 1856 to Jewish parents in Freiberg in Moravia - today's Czech Republic. He is the eldest of 8 children. Although Freud later becomes an atheist, he always emphasizes the meaning that Judaism has for him. His father, a wealthy merchant, is a patriarch, an authority to whom young Sigmund looks up. He develops an emotional relationship with his young mother. Freud spent his childhood and youth in Vienna. There he is repeatedly confronted with the anti-Semitic prejudices of his Christian classmates and feels humiliated. After graduating from high school, he begins studying medicine, becomes a private lecturer in 1885 and works a year later as a neurologist, i.e. as a specialist in nervous disorders. He marries and has six children. Freud begins to explore the relationships between physical and mental suffering , focusing primarily on unconscious processes. He founded depth psychology and developed the structural model of the psyche. After the National Socialists came to power in Austria, Freud emigrated to London in 1938 and died there a year later. Religion, like technology, science and morality, is a part of culture. Culture includes everything that distinguishes humans from animals. It essentially fulfills 3 functions: It satisfies people's thirst for knowledge, gives comfort and security and regulates social interaction. Its main task is to defend people against nature, including against their own drive-controlled and therefore socially harmful nature. On the one hand, culture protects people from extra-human nature by explaining it and making it controllable. And it ensures social coexistence by getting people to suppress their own needs and drives for the benefit of the community and to accept moral prohibitions and obligations. However, since culture is largely based on individual renunciation of instincts, people develop hostility towards it. Religion is regarded as the highest of all cultural assets. According to Freud, it is a logical consequence of cultural development: In the beginning, people humanized nature in order to understand it better and be less afraid of it. They personified nature as a divine father figure more powerful than themselves. With the advent of science, natural phenomena could be explained scientifically and controlled by technology. Religion now served to offer consolation in the face of suffering, to create an afterlife compensation for injustices on this side and to regulate human coexistence. However, religion only appears to fulfill the functions of culture. They cannot really satisfy people's thirst for knowledge because their answers to the unsolved questions are wrong. It cannot offer real comfort or security because it is based on a false promise. In addition, it demands a much greater renunciation of instincts than would be necessary for functioning social interaction. Religion prevents people from developing and recognizing their personality and leads to intellectual atrophy because it forces people to believe unconditionally in irrational content and prohibits them from thinking. Freud asks: What psychological explanation is there for the cultural phenomenon of religion? The basis for Freud's criticism of religion is Ludwig Feuerbach's projection theory. Like Feuerbach and later Marx, Freud also considered religion to be a projection of man. In contrast to Marx, Freud does not see the origin of religious illusion in the social order, but again - like Feuerbach - in the individual. Freud now tries to underpin Feuerbach's theory psychologically. In his view, the emergence of religion is a psychological phenomenon: "Psychoanalysis has taught us the intimate connection between the father complex and belief in God, has shown us that the personal God is nothing other than an exalted father, and demonstrates it to us daily Eyes how youthful persons lose religious faith as soon as their father's authority collapses in them. In the parental complex we recognize the root of the religious need.” (Sigmund Freud. 1910. A childhood memory of Leonardo da Vinci.) The starting point of Freud's criticism of religion is the question: “Why do so many people still believe in God, although the statements of religion are so absurd?” Freud assumes that people believe in a God because they do not want to grow up. Like a child, you seek comfort and help from an imaginary Heavenly Father. From a psychological point of view, religion is an expression of the child's desire for unconditional safety and security. As a young child, man experiences being completely defenseless in a dangerous and hostile world. He wants protection and security, which he finds in his father. As an adult, however, he then has to realize that his father's power is limited and not sufficient to protect him from all the dangers of life. He notes that the real father is not omnipotent. Especially in the face of his own mortality , he realizes that there are still dangers against which he is defenseless. It is from this frustrating insight that, in Freud's view, the religious illusion develops. Man creates an over-father for himself by elevating his real father to infinity, transforming him into an almighty, heavenly father - God. Such a father complex develops in humans because, of all animal species, they have been helpless and dependent on the care of their parents for the longest time. As a result, a psychological need for protection develops early on, which increases again as soon as the adult recognizes his or her helplessness in the face of the "great powers of life". The adult person feels helpless and in need of protection because he is afraid of the future and of death. Religion allays these fears while fulfilling man's strongest desires. Man hopes for justice from the illusion of God, answers to difficult questions such as how the world came into being or life after death and, above all, protection and support. According to Freud, the strength of religion is explained by the strength of these desires and hopes. He writes: “[Religious ideas] masquerading as tenets are not precipitates of experience or end results of thought, they are illusions, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest, most pressing desires of mankind; the secret of their strength is the strength of these desires.” (Sigmund Freud. 1927. The future of an illusion). God as an exalted father figure can save man from the dangers of life and in an eternal life after death atone for all suffering and injustice in this world. According to Freud, religion is a "helpful illusion" for man. It doesn't bring any real help, but it does provide mental relief. Freud calls them "a great relief for the individual psyche". (Sigmund Freud. 1927. The Future of an Illusion) For Freud, religion as an infantile illusion is neither provable nor disprovable, but very improbable. He writes: "It would be nice if there were a God as the creator of the world and benevolent providence, a moral world order and an afterlife , but it is very striking that all this is the way we have to wish it to be ." ( Sigmund Freud 1927. The future of an illusion) So religion is most likely too good to be true. Freud assumes that with increasing scientific knowledge more and more people will fall away from the faith. Because of science, man will become more and more aware of its insignificance.Freud, however, describes religion not only as a projection or an illusion, but also as a "universal obsessional neurosis". To understand what he means by that, let's first look at his image of man, more precisely his famous structural model of the psyche. According to Freud, as science advances, man becomes more and more aware of how small and insignificant he really is. He has already had to accept three insults from science. The first insult (cosmological insult) was the Copernican turning point: the earth - and thus also man - is no longer the center of the universe, but only a tiny part of it. As a result, the Catholic Church and the Christian image of man, which sees man as the crown of creation, also lose credibility. Man experienced the second insult (biological insult) from biology. The theory of evolution teaches that humans share common ancestors with apes. Man loses his special position and becomes the "animal among animals". The third insult (psychological insult) comes from psychology. She recognized that the human being is controlled by the unconscious, by his instincts. Man is no longer "master in his own house". The third insult is the most sensitive for Freud, because it attacks the human being as an individual and questions independent thinking and acting, reason, human freedom and thus also human responsibility. Sigmund Freud is the founder of psychoanalysis, a new science that for the first time systematically examines how the conscious and unconscious are connected in humans. Freud's structural model of the psyche consists of 3 instances, the ego, the superego and the id. All instances fulfill a specific function and influence human behavior. At birth man consists only of the id. The id is the unconscious: psychic expression of drives, needs and affects. It strives for the pleasure principle and demands immediate satisfaction of needs. According to Freud, human beings are governed by two basic instincts, the life instinct "Eros" (libidinal, sexual) and the destruction instinct "Destrudo" (destructive, aggressive). The life instinct includes all processes that have the goal of gaining pleasure, especially sexuality, but also food intake, etc. The destruction instinct includes threatening aspects, such as aggression. Only through interaction with the outside world does the ego develop and finally - through the influence of parents and other authorities - the superego. The superego is based on the principle of morality, i.e. on social norms, values, do’s and don’ts that have been learned and internalized since childhood. It demands obedience and tells us what we should and shouldn't do. Here we find what we colloquially call conscience, but also the ego ideal, i.e. the ideal image that man has of himself. The superego represents the catalog of social norms that people can use for their own orientation and sanctions. It strives to fulfill moral claims. The superego is shaped by religion, among other things, so it also contains internalized religious rules and prohibitions. There is a conflict between the id and the superego. The ego stands in the middle and mediates between the instances id and superego. It corresponds to conscious thinking, but is not exclusively conscious. The ego functions according to the reality principle. It tries to act rationally and to reconcile the desires of the id with the demands of the superego and the outside world . It's not that easy. A healthy person has ego strength, i.e. a successful balance between the id and the superego. Here the ego can mediate between the diverging demands of the id and the superego by making reasonable and realistic decisions. If this balance does not succeed, the person becomes mentally ill and develops a neurosis, for example. Freud sees such a neurosis in religious people. But how did he come to this diagnosis? According to Freud, religion is a collective obsessional neurosis. A neurosis is a compulsion, for example a compulsion to wash. It arises when instincts are suppressed or suppressed. Since the repression of the shoots is always imperfect succeeds, the person feels fear and compensates for his fears through neurotic compulsions. Freud notes that there are striking similarities between the actions of obsessive-compulsive neurotics and ritualistic religious actions. For example, religious people feel guilty if they don't perform a ritual. They absolutely want to protect the course of the ritual from external disturbances. They are extremely conscientious in performing the ritual, escalating it into an increasingly complicated ceremonial. There are acts of penance to avoid possible penalties for mistakes or deficiencies. And after the ritual has been performed, the short-term gratification quickly turns into a new, strong feeling of guilt. Freud writes: "According to these correspondences, obsessional neurosis can be understood as a pathological counterpart to the practice of religion, (...) religion as a universal obsessional neurosis." (Freud. 1907. Compulsive actions and religious exercises) According to Freud, religion also arose from the constant repression of human drives (It). In contrast to neurosis, not only sexual drives but also egoistic, socially harmful drives are suppressed in religion , which makes sense in principle. However , religion exaggerates and makes exaggeratedly high, senseless moral demands on people " It makes people feel guilty and threatens hellish punishment if the norms are violated. It responds to legitimate resistance to this with prohibitions on thinking. In this way, religion tames antisocial drives and ensures social interaction. At the same time, however, people develop an overpowering superego. The ego cannot find a meaningful balance between the exaggerated religious morality of the superego and the impulses of the id and consequently increasingly suppresses the impulses of the id. In addition, it keeps people from having to deal with their fears through a distorted perception and the illusion of an overpowering father. In this way man or the whole of religious humanity develops a neurosis, a collective obsessional neurosis. Freud demands that the collective obsessional neurosis of religion be overcome. Just as each individual person overcomes his neuroses in the course of his development, culture should also overcome the neurotic stage of religiosity. Humanity must free itself from the collective neurosis of religion by realizing that it is just an illusion. Freud is convinced that only science, as part of culture, is capable of really fulfilling the functions of curiosity, consolation and security as well as orderly social interaction. Because science is not an illusion, but offers real solutions to human problems. Only the power of human reason can really solve the problems for which religion previously offered only apparent solutions. Freud demands that man should finally grow up. Religion should no longer tame man's instinctual desires, but man himself through his reason. Man should detach himself from the hereafter and concentrate on this world with all his abilities and strengths. Freud writes: "By withdrawing his expectations from the afterlife and concentrating all the energies that have been released on earthly life, he will probably be able to make life bearable for everyone and culture no longer oppresses anyone." Religion is to be replaced by rationality . Man should release his powers and abilities from the hereafter and concentrate on his existence in this world. Freud thus advocates a rational, scientifically enlightened attitude to life and a commitment to a better world in the here and now. Religion paralyzes progress. Humanity must shed its religious illusions in order to take effective action in the here and now. But what does that mean in concrete terms? First of all, cultural norms should be justified rationally and not by an alleged will of God. In this way, people could create their own norms and comply with them on the basis of rational insight into their necessity. Accordingly, culture would not be from above imposed compulsion, but something that is in everyone's reasonable interest. Drives that are harmful to society no longer have to be suppressed, but can be rationally thought through and processed. Man should take note of his instincts and not deny them and repress them into the unconscious. Otherwise he develops a neurosis. Freud does not want to force people to suddenly give up their religion. No one can persuade a believer to give up his faith. And you can't ask anyone to get on with life overnight without the help and comfort of their religion. According to Freud , like a child slowly grows up, people have to get used to a self-determined life without religion step by step. This requires rational enlightenment. Because only this enables people to live a self-determined and free life. But isn't belief in science itself an illusion? "Unlikely," says Freud. Because in contrast to religion, science is open to refutations and has often been proven in practice. It has already solved many of humanity's problems, found rational explanations for various phenomena and is constantly evolving. Freud is convinced that rational and verifiable science will prevail over religion, since rational thinking can provide more stability than mere belief and hope. There are also some criticisms to be made of Freud's criticism of religion. Here are the 3 most important points of criticism. Freud bases his theory of religion as a collective obsessional neurosis primarily on observations he made in his patients of religious beliefs and behavior. This is an unacceptable generalization. One cannot infer an essential connection between religion and neurosis from incorrect forms of religious practice. Freud's image of God - God as an authoritarian father figure - is opposed to the God of the Bible, especially the New Testament. He is described as a loving and forgiving God who does not demand unconditional obedience, but became man in his son Jesus Christ and died on the cross for the sins of mankind. Non-theistic religions or religions with mother goddesses cannot be explained by Freud's theory either. We are familiar with the third important point of criticism from the criticism of Feuerbach. That God is a projection of human desires does not invalidate the fact that he can actually exist in reality. What is your opinion? Is Religion Really a Mental Illness? And: can science really replace religion? Feel free to share your thoughts on this exciting topic in the comments below. Now you can test your knowledge with the Sigmund Freud (Classical Critique of Religion) Quizlet learning set . Have fun learning and see you soon!