Religion is the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity.’ Freud’s famous utterance, tom from its context like that, had all the makings of a slogan. Whether we liked it, or found it thoroughly offensive, it was—like the one about the ‘opium of the people’—difficult, impossible to forget. Whether or not it wins our rational assent, it ‘rings a bell’ of some sort, there is (we feel) ‘something in it’. It will probably survive when the book in which it appeared is quite forgotten. It has already survived devastating criticism of its own premisses.

Freud’s critique of religion, perhaps reflected indirectly, perhaps thoroughly misunderstood and distorted, is part of our modem heritage. Believers or unbelievers, we can hardly have escaped its impact. Comparatively few can have studied, tested, examined it for themselves, but it can be all the more impressive for that. This was no case of a specialist trespassing outside his own field to express opinions on subjects about which he is no authority. When Freud said religion was a neurosis, he was presumably talking about what he knew. He was a pioneer discoverer of causes and cures of neurosis.

An obsession of humanity or not, religion was certainly something like an obsession with Freud himself. The subject seems to have fascinated him; in his books he can never leave it alone for very long. Perhaps it is ungracious to subject Freud’s writings to his own technique of psycho-analytic investigation, yet it is difficult to avoid doing so; and we begin to suspect that his anxious, sometimes tortuous, theorising about religion tells us more about Freud than religion. But that is hardly our business; we must consider what he says on its own merits, rather than his private motives for saying it. And it may be worth while to reset the slogan in its original context.