Sigmund Freud believed that religion should be altogether disregarded and that those who identify themselves with a religion or religiosity are attempting to fulfill an infantile helplessness and longing for a father figure to protect them from the suffering in life. He believed humans created religion as an illusion, to avoid suffering and that those who are part of this mass delusion do not realize they are escaping from reality. As of 2010, more than eight in ten people identify with a religious group: 5.8 billion people, representing 84% of the world population, believe in a God. That is quite a large mass-delusion. A delusion Freud could never understand because of his upbringing and pessimistic view of life.
Freud spent his early years in a devoutly Jewish household with a Roman Catholic nanny who took him to church; thus, from the beginning he had a confusing concept of religion. As he aged, (and no doubt rebelled against such a religious household) he became an atheist who preferred science to religion and like many psychiatrists, sought to cure his own pathologies through his theories of psycho-analysis. His father died when he was thirty years old, his sons both fought in WWI and his daughter, Sophie, died of the flu. Freud smoked (which we will see later was a means of achieving pleasure) and suffered from mouth cancer most of his adult life. He ultimately committed suicide by lethal injection of morphine. It is evident that Freud’s life and the time in which he lived (Nazi regime, WWI, and male-dominated society) drove him to pessimistic thought and his theories which he explained in the Civilization of Discontents.
In order to understand the Civilization, a reader needs to understand the preceding work and the last chapter of the book. Before Civilization, Freud published the Future of Illusion in which he set his beliefs about religion: that organized religion and religious people are part of a mass-delusion. In “The Future of an...
