“Freud himself […] insisted that people should not need religion, called it a cultural neurosis, and set himself up as an example of those who could do without it. Intentionally or unintentionally, he gave the world several generations of psychoanalysts who, coming to him from all walks of life, dropped whatever religion they had at the doors of their institutes.

If they refused to do so, they managed to dissociate their beliefs from their analytic training and practice, with the sad effect of having an important area of their lives untouched by their training. If they dealt with religion during their own analyses, that was the beginning of the end of it.”

Rizzuto, 1981

Sigmund Freud and religion. “Everyone” knows that Freud didn’t like people being religious. Ana-Maria Rizzuto (from The Birth of the Living God) She herself is a psychoanalyst, but she does not belong to the 1st generation, those who needed to go into analysis with the Master himself to be approved, but she has certainly drilled herself into the subject so she knows what she is talking about.

My view of that, Freud’s contribution to the subject of religion and spirituality, is that he was prepared to embrace and be fascinated by all sorts of strange things up to some kind of “limit”, but did not cross. He guarded that line very closely. For example, Jung, in Freud’s eyes, passed. (He’s in the front row :)) There is a famous quote in which he accuses Jung of unleashing “a flood of occultism” etc with the additions Jung wants to make to psychology. Assagioli did well, did not want to settle for the landscape over the border. (And the talented gentlemen went on to establish their own schools, systems.) But Freud’s contribution to understanding religion and spirituality when it becomes problematic lives. It is his valuable contribution to the area, as I see it.