RELIGION ABSORBED FREUD’S INTEREST in his final years. Freud had never denied his Judaism. He loved Jewish jokes and the companionship of Jewish friends. He identified with the triumphant underdog. But these were cultural ties. As a scientist, Freud equated religion to superstition. The victory of psychoanalysis would signal the end of belief in divine influence on human affairs.
Freud had implied as much in Totem and Taboo, but his frontal attack began with The Future of an Illusion, in 1927. The main argument was simple: The tenets of religion cannot be authenticated empirically. Religion requires a credo quia absurdum, belief whose virtue consists in acceptance of the absurd. But why, Freud asks, have people chosen allegiance to particular absurdities? Freud lists religion’s claims: “Over each one of us there watches a benevolent Providence which is only seemingly stern and which will not suffer us to become a plaything of the overmighty and pitiless forces of nature.” Death will be vanquished. If these tenets have a psychical origin, their functions are clear. Like dreams, beliefs are wishes. Like symptoms, they allay anxiety.
For Freud, monotheism, with its idealization of the deity and humbling of the self, bears the mark of guilt passed down from the ancient father-murder. Religion is like an obsessional neurosis in which rituals and ruminations ward off evil. And here Freud makes a prediction: Just as the child outgrows the Oedipus complex, mankind will outgrow religion and cast it off, in the foreseeable future.
Most of the time, Freud would say that the complications of childhood sexuality are difficult to escape and that humankind has an endless capacity for self-deception. But The Future of an Illusion is more a taunt than a reasoned attempt to dissuade the faithful. Freud asks, “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?”
Freud would later write that he had never experienced the “oceanic feeling” that inspires belief. To a scientist who lacks natural sympathy for religion, faith is preposterous. Then, too, Freud’s contempt for religion had the effect of allying psychoanalysis with empiricism. Freud concludes, “No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere.”
Freud’s preoccupation with religion was a product of the times. Russia, Italy, and Germany had given themselves over to ideology and dictatorship. Freud was keenly aware that he lived under the protection of a Catholic country, a truth that left him uneasy, since he considered the Church an adversary. In 1937, when a colleague urged him to flee Vienna, Freud replied that he was not afraid of the Nazis but would welcome help against his true enemy. Asked what he meant, Freud explained: “Religion, the Roman Catholic Church.” This inflated view of Catholicism’s political will and secular power would prove dangerous.
Freud transformed worry into inspiration. Combining his concern over religion and his fascination with the hero, Freud turned his attention to the biblical leader Moses. In a characterization that surely reflects his own self-image, Freud writes: “The decisiveness of thought, the strength of will, the energy of action are part of the picture of the father—but above all the autonomy and independence of the great man, his divine unconcern which may grow into ruthlessness.”
Moses and Monotheism is Freud’s most forceful challenge to conventional faith. He pulls no punches: “[O]ur work leads us to a conclusion which reduces religion to a neurosis of humanity and explains its enormous power in the same way as a neurotic compulsion in our individual patients.”
Freud’s argument is astonishing. He wants to establish the reality of the primal patricide by questioning the ability of psychoanalysis to explain or cure the Oedipus complex. After all, Freud writes, castration anxiety often seems “unjustified in the individual case,” since the child has not experienced a threat sufficient to produce it. The elements of the Oedipus complex “only become intelligible phylogenetically, by their connection with the experience of earlier generations.” Our genetic patrimony includes inborn ideas, “memory-traces” of what Freud calls humankind’s “archaic heritage.”
What was once speculation is now accepted truth for Freud, the inheritance of responses to murders committed by prehistoric man. Freud confesses, “I cannot do without this factor in biological evolution.” Freud concludes with an unexpected method of proof: “[W]e have no stronger evidence for the presence of memory-traces in the archaic heritage than the residual phenomena of the work of analysis which call for a phylogenetic derivation, yet this evidence seems to us strong enough to postulate that such is the fact.” “Residual phenomena” refers to intractable traits and symptoms. Where once the efficacy of psychoanalysis justified Freud’s theories, now the limitations of treatment play that role.
Freud makes these concessions in the midst of another tour de force, an analysis of the Moses story as a myth that defines a culture, Judaism. Founding myths generally concern a noble child raised by a humble family. Because the Moses story goes in the reverse direction, Freud concludes that “the man Moses” (Freud’s phrase echoes Exodus 11:3) was a noble Egyptian. He recruited the Jews into monotheism, which had briefly flourished in Egypt, and gave them circumcision, an Egyptian rite. Freud considers a good deal of Genesis, including the covenant with Abraham, to be a distortion, like the misleading elements in dreams, designed to conceal the fact that Yahweh is an Egyptian god—and that the Jews murdered Moses, in a reenactment of the archaic heritage. (Freud comes up with two men named Moses. It is the uncompromising monotheist who is murdered.) The Passion of the Christ, then, is a ritual undoing of this murder, a gathering in of the communal guilt. Jews find it hard to shake the label of Christ killer and the more recent blood libel in part because they did kill a prophet, Moses. The power of monotheism arises from its foundation in repressed memory, which creates a disturbingly stable force, the guilt complex, within both individuals and groups.
This monumental final work bears the hallmarks of the Freudian corpus, stretching back to the Leonardo essay and beyond. As history, the work fails the standards of its era. Martin Buber complained, “That a scholar of so much importance in his own field as Sigmund Freud could permit himself to issue so unscientific a work, based on groundless hypotheses, as his Moses and Monotheism (1939) is regrettable.” At the same time, Freud’s apparent discoveries are unoriginal.
A line of historical commentary, beginning in the third century B.C. and revived in the first century and again in the Renaissance, understands Moses to be an Egyptian. Strabo, the ancient Greek historian, and John Toland, the seventeenth-century philosopher, held this view. Other writers identified Moses as an assimilated Hebrew who initiated the Jews into the mystical secrets of the Egyptian aristocracy. In updated form, elements of this tradition passed into Germanic literature through writings of the poet and polymath Friedrich Schiller. Many of the early texts that traced Moses’ non-Jewish roots were ecumenical, but some were anti-Semitic, which is why they were hard for humanists to discuss in the late 1930s. Still, scholars had hardly shied away from the Moses-as-Egyptian thesis in a way that would indicate the cultural repression of a shameful truth.
Though Freud’s correspondence suggests that he was aware of these antecedents, in his text he presents himself as a hero making intellectual leaps. His originality was largely limited to the insertion of his favored myth, of the archaic heritage. Even the theory that Moses was murdered—Freud does make this acknowledgment—had appeared in the German theological literature.
And yet, and as always, Freud’s book is moving. It contains a jab at European anti-Semites. Freud calls them “mis-baptized” barbarians whose hatred of Jews hides a grudge against the monotheism imposed on them in the form of Christianity. In a more temperate vein, he explains anti-Semitism as a denial of the important truth that monotheism, from the Egyptians to the Hebrews to the Christians, represents a series of historically linked responses to Oedipal anxiety. At the same time, in associating Jews with their enemies the Egyptians, and thus questioning the special (“chosen”) status of his own tradition, Freud is striking a blow against sectarianism and displaying the ruthless unconcern that he equated with heroism.
Freud published the first two sections of Moses and Monotheism in 1937. He withheld the third out of prudence, fearing the reaction of the Catholic Church. Then, on March 12, 1938, Wehrmacht troops entered Vienna. The Church celebrated Hitler’s victory. On March 13, Brownshirts raided Freud’s home at Berggasse 19 and his publishing press nearby. His son Martin was held hostage for some hours. Even so, Freud was not keen to leave his homeland, believing, in Martin’s words, “that the Nazi eruption was so out of step with the march of civilization…that a normal rhythm would soon be restored and honest men permitted to go on their ways without fear.” Then on March 22, Anna was held all day at Gestapo headquarters. Freud agreed to emigrate. It has been said that when required to provide a certificate attesting that he had been well treated, he wrote a cheeky note: “I can recommend the Gestapo very much to everyone.” Though in character, the story is, sadly, apocryphal.
Freud was leaving four of his sisters behind. One died of starvation at Theresienstadt. The others were murdered, probably at Auschwitz. When Freud was still ambivalent, he had set as a condition of his leaving Vienna that his in-laws and his physician’s family be allowed to exit as well. He did not mention the sisters, perhaps because he could not imagine harm coming to unexceptional old women. Despite his pessimism about humans in groups, Freud seems not to have fully appreciated the immediate potential for barbarism in Europe.
Freud was frail, recovering from yet another surgery. He wrote his son Ernst, “Two prospects present themselves in these troubled times—to see you all together once more, and to die in freedom. Sometimes I see myself as a Jacob being taken by his children to Egypt when he was very old. Let us hope that there will not follow an exodus from Egypt. It is time that Ahasver [i.e., the Wandering Jew] comes to rest somewhere.” In June, Freud made his way to London, via Paris. Many of his antiques came along, as did his chow.
In England, Freud worried over his sister-in-law Minna, who was dying. He suffered intervals of depression. But on the whole, Freud took pleasure in the generous reception that had greeted him. The Royal Society, the British science academy, sent a delegation to honor Freud. He resumed work on Moses. There is poignancy in the thought of Freud, suffering, in exile, struggling to address anti-Semitism through psychoanalytic theory.
The cancer was relentless. Despite major surgery, Freud was in constant pain. Radiation therapy provided some relief. Remarkably, Freud continued to treat patients. He said his farewells to friends. In September 1939, Freud reminded his physician, Max Schur, “[Y]ou remember our ‘contract’ not to leave me in the lurch when the time had come. Now it is nothing but torture and makes no sense.” It was a request of a realist and a scientist, a heroic request. Freud instructed Schur, “Talk it over with Anna, and if she thinks it’s right, then make an end of it.” Once Anna gave her consent, Schur administered a fatal dose of morphine.