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Freud Against God: The Development of Sigmund Freud’s Atheism

Author(s) : Christfried Toegel

Reviews and Endorsements

We are already hugely indebted to Christfried Toegel's for his numerous and crucial contributions to Freud scholarship, above all the first complete edition of anything Freud published during his lifetime. Here, Toegel is setting the record straight: Despite frequent claims to Freud's 'hidden' or 'repressed' religiosity, he minutely traces the development of Freud's unabashed, unwavering, and indeed un-ambivalent 'absolutely negative attitude towards all religion.' Indispensable reading for anyone seeking an accurate understanding of Freud and, in a broader context, the uneasy relationship between science and religion.
Ernst Falzeder, former senior research fellow at University College London (retired), editor of Freud/Abraham and Freud/Ferenczi correspondence, author of Psychoanalytic Filiations: Mapping the Psychoanalytic Movement

Freud Against God takes us on a chronological guided tour through the landscape of Freud’s disbelief, beginning with the two-year-old infant preaching on ‘God Almighty’ and ending with the 82-year-old Professor stating his ‘absolutely negative attitude toward any religion’. There has never been any doubt about Freud’s antipathy towards religion, but it has often been obscured by other details of his life and work, or even overlooked. By bringing together a lifetime’s scattered comments Christfried Toegel underlines the fundamental importance of that ‘negative attitude’ in Freud’s science and life. There could be no better guide to this territory than Christfried Toegel. Over the past four decades his books and articles have greatly expanded the range of Freud biography. This concise study offers the newcomer an excellent overview of the theme: scholars familiar with the biographies will find here a useful compendium of references to the lifelong duel between Freud and religion.
Michael Molnar, an archivist, researcher and Director of the Freud Museum London between 1986 and 2009, he edited Freud’s 1929–1939 Diary Notes and wrote Looking through Freud’s Photos, a study of Freud’s photo library, and has published numerous articles on Freud biography

In famously characterising himself as ‘a completely godless Jew’ to his friend the Swiss pastor Oskar Pfister, Freud was not joking. He was a thoroughgoing atheist, who rarely lost an opportunity to challenge the illusions of religion, though he could see – and was not without compassion towards – how comforting these might be. In this succinct and eminently readable volume, leading international Freud scholar Chris Toegel guides the reader through Freud’s life and writings revealing in great clarity the key successive encounters he had with religion and religious belief. Toegel lets Freud speak, quoting his actual words extensively, thus leaving us in no doubt what the Professor actually thought and his still radical and trenchant proposals for policy and social reform in this area. With the place of religion in modern civil society remaining a highly contested subject, this unsparing volume will be an invaluable read for anyone who wants a reliable primer on the foundations of psychoanalytic thinking on god. Challenging, controversial, and eminently readable, Freud Against God will no-doubt prove one of the most compelling volumes on the subject. Buy it! Read it!
Roger Willoughby, Oxford Brookes University, UK, clinical psychologist and historian of psychoanalysis, author of Masud Khan: The Myth and the Reality and Freud’s British Family: Reclaiming Lost Lives in Manchester and London