Sigmund Freud

The Future of an Illusion of 1927 is short and is regularly misquoted, because the key term is technical. An illusion, in Freud's definition, is not the same as an error and is not necessarily false. It is a belief whose motive force is the fulfilment of a wish, held with a disregard for its relation to reality. A middle class girl's belief that a prince will come and marry her is his example; it is an illusion, and it might happen.

Religious doctrines, on this account, are illusions in that precise sense. They answer the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of the species, and the psychological original is the child's relation to the father: helplessness before a power that both threatens and protects, resolved by love and obedience. Providence is that relation projected onto the universe. Freud does not claim to have shown the doctrines untrue, and says so explicitly; he claims to have shown what sustains belief in them independently of their truth.

What follows is a prediction rather than an argument, and it is the part that has aged least well. He expected that as science extended its reach, humanity would grow out of religion much as an individual grows out of the neurosis of childhood, and that an education to reality would replace consolation. A century later the prediction has failed in most of the world, which is a fact about the world that any account of religion, including a psychological one, now has to explain.

Totem and Taboo of 1913 goes much further than the later essay. Freud takes the anthropology available to him, chiefly the evolutionary schemes of Frazer, Robertson Smith and Darwin's speculation about a primal horde, and constructs an origin event: a band ruled by a violent father who monopolised the women, a rebellion in which the sons killed and ate him, and a guilt so unbearable that it produced, in one stroke, the totem meal, the prohibition of incest, and the first god. Every later religion, he argues, is a repetition of that crime and that remorse.

Almost nothing in that reconstruction survived professional scrutiny. The evolutionary anthropology it depends on was already being abandoned; the primal horde is not attested anywhere; and the argument requires an inherited memory of an actual event passed down the generations, a Lamarckian mechanism Freud held to for the rest of his life and which biology does not permit.

Moses and Monotheism, published in 1939, applies the same method to a specific case. Moses, Freud argues, was an Egyptian, a follower of the suppressed religion of Akhenaten who carried its monotheism to a Semitic people, was murdered by them, and became the object of a returning repressed guilt that shaped Judaism. No Egyptologist and no biblical scholar has accepted it. The atlas records the thesis because it is historically significant and because it is still widely repeated, and records that it is not held by the fields that would have to hold it.