Philosopher · Modern
Sigmund Freud
1856–1939 · Psychoanalysis
A “godless Jew” by his own description, proud of his Jewishness and hostile to all religion.
Freud founded psychoanalysis on the unconscious, repression, infantile sexuality and the Oedipus complex, and read religion as an illusion born of the wish for a protecting father (The Future of an Illusion) and ritual as collective obsessional neurosis. Civilization and Its Discontents saw culture as the necessary and painful repression of aggressive and sexual drives.
Why he matters: He is one of the “masters of suspicion” whose unmasking of motives Catholic thought has had to answer and partly absorb; Pius XII (1953) and later popes admitted psychology's legitimate help with discernment (CCC 2352 on culpability), and Paul Vitz's Catholic studies turn the analysis back on Freud.
Where to be careful
His reduction of God to a projection and of conscience to an internalized father is the atheism and psychologism the Church rejects (CCC 2123–2126; Gaudium et Spes 19–21); his psychic determinism denies free will; his view of religion as neurosis is incompatible with the faith, though his clinical insights can be used with discernment.
Documented positions
Where this thinker stands on each dispute the test covers.