Freud - Complete Works (722 page)

   But, as was shown by arguments
which I need not repeat here, the primal father was the original
image of God, the model on which later generations have shaped the
figure of God. Hence the religious explanation is right, God
actually played a part in the genesis of that prohibition; it was
His influence, not any insight into social necessity, which created
it. And the displacement of man’s will on to God is fully
justified. For men knew that they had disposed of their father by
violence, and in their reaction to that impious deed, they
determined to respect his will thenceforward. Thus religious
doctrine tells us the historical truth - though subject, it is
true, to some modification and disguise - whereas our rational
account disavows it.

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   We now observe that the store of
religious ideas includes not only wish-fulfilments but important
historical recollections. This concurrent influence of past and
present must give religion a truly incomparable wealth of power.
But perhaps with the help of an analogy yet another discovery may
begin to dawn on us. Though it is not a good plan to transplant
ideas far from the soil in which they grew up, yet here is a
conformity which we cannot avoid pointing out. We know that a human
child cannot successfully complete its development to the civilized
stage without passing through a phase of neurosis sometimes of
greater and sometimes of less distinctness. This is because so many
instinctual demands which will later be unserviceable cannot be
suppressed by the rational operation of the child’s intellect
but have to be tamed by acts of repression, behind which, as a
rule, lies the motive of anxiety. Most of these infantile neuroses
are overcome spontaneously in the course of growing up, and this is
especially true of the obsessional neuroses of childhood. The
remainder can be cleared up later still by psycho-analytic
treatment. In just the same way, one might assume, humanity as a
whole, in its development through the ages, fell into states
analogous to the neuroses, and for the same reasons - namely
because in the times of its ignorance and intellectual weakness the
instinctual renunciations indispensable for man’s communal
existence had only been achieved by it by means of purely affective
forces. The precipitates of these processes resembling repression
which took place in prehistoric times still remained attached to
civilization for long periods. Religion would thus be the universal
obsessional neurosis of humanity; like the obsessional neurosis of
children, it arose out of the Oedipus complex, out of the relation
to the father. If this view is right, it is to be supposed that a
turning-away from religion is bound to occur with the fatal
inevitability of a process of growth, and that we find ourselves at
this very juncture in the middle of that phase of development. Our
behaviour should therefore be modelled on that of a sensible
teacher who does not oppose an impending new development but seeks
to ease its path and mitigate the violence of its irruption. Our
analogy does not, to be sure, exhaust the essential nature of
religion. If, on the one hand, religion brings with it obsessional
restrictions, exactly as an individual obsessional neurosis does,
on the other hand it comprises a system of wishful illusions
together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find in an
isolated form nowhere else but in amentia, in a state of blissful
hallucinatory confusion. But these are only analogies, by the help
of which we endeavour to understand a social phenomenon; the
pathology of the individual does not supply us with a fully valid
counterpart.

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   It has been repeatedly pointed
out (by myself and in particular by Theodor Reik) in how great
detail the analogy between religion and obsessional neurosis can be
followed out, and how many of the peculiarities and vicissitudes in
the formation of religion can be understood in that light. And it
tallies well with this that devout believers are safeguarded in a
high degree against the risk of certain neurotic illnesses; their
acceptance of the universal neurosis spares them the task of
constructing a personal one.

   Our knowledge of the historical
worth of certain religious doctrines increases our respect for
them, but does not invalidate our proposal that they should cease
to be put forward as the reasons for the precepts of civilization.
On the contrary! Those historical residues have helped us to view
religious teachings, as it were, as neurotic relics, and we may now
argue that the time has probably come, as it does in an analytic
treatment, for replacing the effects of repression by the results
of the rational operation of the intellect. We may foresee, but
hardly regret, that such a process of remoulding will not stop at
renouncing the solemn transfiguration of cultural precepts, but
that a general revision of them will result in many of them being
done away with. In this way our appointed task of reconciling men
to civilization will to a great extent be achieved. We need not
deplore the renunciation of historical truth when we put forward
rational grounds for the precepts of civilization. The truths
contained in religious doctrines are after all so distorted and
systematically disguised that the mass of humanity cannot recognize
them as truth. The case is similar to what happens when we tell a
child that new-born babies are brought by the stork. Here, too, we
are telling the truth in symbolic clothing, for we know what the
large bird signifies. But the child does not know it. He hears only
the distorted part of what we say, and feels that he has been
deceived; and we know how often his distrust of the grown-ups and
his refractoriness actually take their start from this impression.
We have become convinced that it is better to avoid such symbolic
disguisings of the truth in what we tell children and not to
withhold from them a knowledge of the true state of affairs
commensurate with their intellectual level.

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IX

‘You permit yourself contradictions
which are hard to reconcile with one another. You begin by saying
that a piece of writing like yours is quite harmless: no one will
let himself be robbed of his faith by considerations of the sort
put forward in it. But since it is nevertheless your intention, as
becomes evident later on, to upset that faith, we may ask why in
fact you are publishing your work? In another passage, moreover,
you admit that it may be dangerous, indeed very dangerous, for
someone to discover that people no longer believe in God. Hitherto
he has been docile, but now he throws off his obedience to the
precepts of civilization. Yet your whole contention that basing the
commandments of civilization on religious grounds constitutes a
danger for civilization rests on the assumption that the believer
can be turned into an unbeliever. Surely that is a complete
contradiction.

   ‘And here is another. On
the one hand you admit that men cannot be guided through their
intelligence, they are ruled by their passions and their
instinctual demands. But on the other hand you propose to replace
the affective basis of their obedience to civilization by a
rational one. Let who can understand this. To me it seems that it
must be either one thing or the other.

   ‘Besides, have you learned
nothing from history? Once before an attempt of this kind was made
to substitute reason for religion, officially and in the grand
manner. Surely you remember the French Revolution and Robespierre?
And you must also remember how short-lived and miserably
ineffectual the experiment was? The same experiment is being
repeated in Russia at the present time, and we need not feel
curious as to its outcome. Do you not think we may take it for
granted that men cannot do without religion?

   ‘You have said yourself
that religion is more than an obsessional neurosis. But you have
not dealt with this other side of it. You are content to work out
the analogy with a neurosis. Men, you say, must be freed from a
neurosis. What else may be lost in the process is of no concern to
you.’

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   The appearance of contradiction
has probably come about because I have dealt with complicated
matters too hurriedly. But we can remedy this to some extent. I
still maintain that what I have written is quite harmless in one
respect. No believer will let himself be led astray from his faith
by these or any similar arguments. A believer is bound to the
teachings of religion by certain ties of affection. But there are
undoubtedly countless other people who are not in the same sense
believers. They obey the precepts of civilization because they let
themselves be intimidated by the threats of religion, and they are
afraid of religion so long as they have to consider it as a part of
the reality which hems them in. They are the people who break away
as soon as they are allowed to give up their belief in the
reality-value of religion. But they too are unaffected by
arguments. They cease to fear religion when they observe that
others do not fear it; and it was of them that I asserted that they
would get to know about the decline of religious influence even if
I did not publish my work.

   But I think you yourself attach
more weight to the other contradiction which you charge me with.
Since men are so little accessible to reasonable arguments and are
so entirely governed by their instinctual wishes, why should one
set out to deprive them of an instinctual satisfaction and replace
it by reasonable arguments? It is true that men are like this; but
have you asked yourself whether they
must
be like this,
whether their innermost nature necessitates it? Can an
anthropologist give the cranial index of a people whose custom it
is to deform their children’s heads by bandaging them round
from their earliest years? Think of the depressing contrast between
the radiant intelligence of a healthy child and the feeble
intellectual powers of the average adult. Can we be quite certain
that it is not precisely religious education which bears a large
share of the blame for this relative atrophy? I think it would be a
very long time before a child who was not influenced began to
trouble himself about God and things in another world. Perhaps his
thoughts on these matters would then take the same paths as they
did with his forefathers. But we do not wait for such a
development; we introduce him to the doctrines of religion at an
age when he is neither interested in them nor capable of grasping
their import. Is it not true that the two main points in the
programme for the education of children to-day are retardation of
sexual development and premature religious influence? Thus by the
time the child’s intellect awakens, the doctrines of religion
have already become unassailable. But are you of opinion that it is
very conducive to the strengthening of the intellectual function
that so important a field should be closed against it by the threat
of Hell-fire? When a man has once brought himself to accept
uncritically all the absurdities that religious doctrines put
before him and even to overlook the contradictions between them, we
need not be greatly surprised at the weakness of his intellect. But
we have no other means of controlling our instinctual nature but
our intelligence. How can we expect people who are under the
dominance of prohibitions of thought to attain the psychological
ideal, the primacy of the intelligence? You know, too, that women
in general are said to suffer from ‘physiological
feeble-mindedness’ - that is, from a lesser intelligence than
men. The fact itself is disputable and its interpretation doubtful,
but one argument in favour of this intellectual atrophy being of a
secondary nature is that women labour under the harshness of an
early prohibition against turning their thoughts to what would most
have interested them - namely, the problems of sexual life. So long
as a person’s early years are influenced not only by a sexual
inhibition of thought but also by a religious inhibition and by a
loyal inhibition derived from this, we cannot really tell what in
fact he is like.

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   But I will moderate my zeal and
admit the possibility that I, too, am chasing an illusion. Perhaps
the effect of the religious prohibition of thought may not be so
bad as I suppose; perhaps it will turn out that human nature
remains the same even if education is not abused in order to
subject people to religion. I do not know and you cannot know
either. It is not only the great problems of this life that seem
insoluble at the present time; many lesser questions too are
difficult to answer. But you must admit that here we are justified
in having a hope for the future - that perhaps there is a treasure
to be dug up capable of enriching civilization and that it is worth
making the experiment of an irreligious education. Should the
experiment prove unsatisfactory I am ready to give up the reform
and to return to my earlier, purely descriptive judgement that man
is a creature of weak intelligence who is ruled by his instinctual
wishes.

   On another point I agree with you
unreservedly. It is certainly senseless to begin by trying to do
away with religion by force and at a single blow. Above all,
because it would be hopeless. The believer will not let his belief
be torn from him, either by arguments or by prohibitions. And even
if this did succeed with some it would be cruelty. A man who has
been taking sleeping draughts for tens of years is naturally unable
to sleep if his sleeping draught is taken away from him. That the
effect of religious consolations may be likened to that of a
narcotic is well illustrated by what is happening in America. There
they are now trying - obviously under the influence of petticoat
government - to deprive people of all stimulants, intoxicants, and
other pleasure-producing substances, and instead, by way of
compensation, are surfeiting them with piety. This is another
experiment as to whose outcome we need not feel curious.