Justified True Belief

(●) The Viennese physician who taught the twentieth century to explain religion by the wish underneath it. + There is a room in north London with a couch in it, covered in a Persian rug, and for the last year of his life an old man with a cancer eating his jaw sat in a chair behind that couch and listened to people say whatever came into their heads. The couch is still there. So is the collection of small Egyptian and Greek and Roman gods, more than two thousand pieces by the end, with a crowd of favourites always lined up on the desk facing him while he wrote. Sigmund Freud invented psychoanalysis, which is the treatment that room was built for: the patient lies down and says whatever comes to mind, and the doctor sits out of sight and listens for the meaning the patient cannot hear in his own words. Along the way he did something that mattered far more to Christian apologetics than any of his clinical work. He put into wide circulation an explanation of religion that did not require religion to be discussed at all. He was not the first to try it. Ludwig Feuerbach had argued in 1841 that God is the human heart thrown up onto the sky, and in 1875 the student Freud wrote to his friend Eduard Silberstein that he revered Feuerbach above every other philosopher. What Freud added was a mechanism, a clinic and a vocabulary, and after him an educated person could simply say that belief in God is what a frightened child does with the memory of a father, and feel the question had been answered. That move, the explanation of a belief in place of an examination of it, is Freud’s largest bequest to unbelief, and it is still the most common thing an ordinary skeptic will say. There is one fact about him worth having in hand from the start, because it is the one his admirers and his opponents both tend to walk straight past. Freud defined the word he made famous, and his definition does not mean what almost everybody takes it to mean. An illusion, he wrote, is a belief held because it is wished for, and an illusion may perfectly well turn out to be true. He disbelieved religion on other grounds entirely. The distinction is his own, and he stated it in the same chapter that made him the twentieth century’s great debunker of faith.

(●) 1856 AD: Born in a Moravian market town to a wool merchant whose business was already sinking. + He was born on 6 May 1856 in Freiberg in Moravia, a small town in the Austrian Empire that is now Příbor in the Czech Republic, and he was registered as Sigismund Schlomo Freud. His father Jacob was a wool merchant of forty. His mother Amalia Nathansohn was twenty, and she was Jacob’s third wife, the second being a Rebekka who survives as little more than a name in a register. That arithmetic made for a household a small boy could not easily draw. Jacob’s grown sons from his first marriage were nearer his new wife’s age than his own, and one of them had a son, John, who was a year older than his uncle Sigmund and was his first playmate. So the boy grew up with a nephew older than himself and a half-brother who might just as plausibly have been his father, and he said later that puzzling over who stood where in that house was the beginning of his interest in how families work on the people inside them. Then the wool trade failed, as small trades did in those years, and the family went looking for a city where the money might work better. In 1859 they moved to Leipzig, and in 1860 to Vienna, where Freud lived for the next seventy-eight years and where he insisted, more than once, that he disliked the place.

(●) 1873 AD: He went up to the University of Vienna to read medicine, and found he was expected to be ashamed of being a Jew. + He arrived at seventeen and took eight years over a degree that should have taken five, because the laboratory kept distracting him from the wards. One month of it he spent in Trieste with a knife and a supply of eels, about four hundred of them opened one after another for his zoology professor. Nobody had ever managed to find the testes of a male eel, another researcher had lately claimed to have found them at last, and the student was sent down to the Adriatic to check. He came home unable to settle the question either way, which is a fair description of a great deal of honest laboratory work. What he did find was Ernst Brücke’s physiology laboratory, and a way of thinking he never abandoned: that mental life, like everything else in the body, runs on causes, and that a cause can be tracked. He also found the ordinary antisemitism of the Austrian universities. Looking back on those years half a century later in An Autobiographical Study, he wrote that he had been expected to feel inferior and an alien because he was a Jew, that he refused the first of those absolutely, and that learning so early what it is to stand in the opposition and under the ban of the compact majority laid the foundations of a certain independence of judgement. He was not a religious Jew and never became one. From about his seventh year he had read the Bible with his father in Ludwig Philippson’s illustrated German and Hebrew edition, and at the Gymnasium he took religion from Samuel Hammerschlag, a teacher he loved and stayed close to for decades; on his thirty-fifth birthday Jacob had that same Bible rebound and gave it back to him with a long dedication in Hebrew. He described himself for the rest of his life as an unbelieving Jew who had no wish to be anything else.

(●) 1884 AD: He promoted cocaine as a wonder drug, and a friend he loved died addicted to it. + In 1882 he became engaged to Martha Bernays and then could not afford to marry her. Four years of hospital work and separation followed, filled with letters, and a young doctor in that position wants one thing above all: a discovery with his name on it. He thought he had found one. In 1884 he published a paper on coca praising cocaine as a treatment for exhaustion, digestive trouble and morphine addiction, and he gave it to his friend Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow, a gifted physiologist who had lost a thumb to an infection and been left in chronic pain and dependent on morphine. The cocaine replaced one addiction with a worse one. Fleischl deteriorated for years and died in 1891, and Freud, who had sat up with him through nights of hallucination, carried it. In the same season he missed the one genuinely important use of the drug: his colleague Carl Koller worked out that cocaine numbs the eye and published the finding that made local anaesthesia possible in surgery, while Freud was away visiting Martha. The episode cost him standing in Vienna for years, and it belongs in his story at full weight. The rescue came from Paris. A travelling fellowship took him to the Salpêtrière hospital for the winter of 1885 to 1886, to study under Jean-Martin Charcot, the most famous neurologist in Europe, who put patients suffering from hysteria on a lecture-hall stage and produced and removed their paralyses under hypnosis. Hysteria then meant physical symptoms, blindness or paralysis or fits, in a patient whose nerves showed no damage at all. Freud went to Paris interested in the anatomy of the brain and came home interested in something else: symptoms that had a meaning rather than a lesion. He opened a private practice in nervous diseases that spring and married Martha in September 1886.

(●) 1896 AD: His father died, and out of the self-analysis that followed came the book on dreams he always thought his best. + The method he was about to turn on himself had not started with him, and it had not really started with a doctor at all. It came from a patient of his older colleague Josef Breuer. Bertha Pappenheim, called Anna O. in print, found that her symptoms eased when she traced each one back aloud to the moment it began, and it was she, not either doctor, who named the procedure: the talking cure. Breuer and Freud published Studies on Hysteria together in 1895 and then fell out over how much of the trouble was sexual. Jacob Freud died in October 1896. Freud, who was forty, called the loss of a father the most important event in a man’s life, and in the months after the funeral he began analysing his own dreams, writing week by week to his friend Wilhelm Fliess in Berlin about what he found in them. Out of that came the book he always regarded as his best. The Interpretation of Dreams was published in November 1899 with 1900 on the title page, argued that a dream is a wish of the dreamer’s in disguise, and called dream interpretation the royal road to the unconscious. Almost nobody read it. The first printing ran to six hundred copies, and it took eight years to sell them, which comes out at something like six copies a month for the book its author rated above everything else he wrote. Recognition, when it arrived, arrived in small denominations. In 1902 the university made him professor extraordinarius, seventeen years after it had first licensed him to lecture, and the Latin was grander than the thing itself: an honorary rank, a title rather than a chair.

(●) 1909 AD: America gave him the only honorary degree he ever received, and then his ablest followers left him. + From 1902 a handful of Viennese doctors met on Wednesday evenings in the waiting room at Berggasse 19 to argue about his ideas, and in 1908 that circle renamed itself the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. In 1909 the psychologist G. Stanley Hall invited him to Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, for the university’s twentieth anniversary. He sailed with Carl Jung and Sándor Ferenczi, gave five lectures in German without notes, and came home with an honorary doctorate, the only one anyone ever gave him. A story repeated from the French analyst Jacques Lacan has Freud remarking to Jung as they came into New York harbour that they were bringing the Americans the plague; it appears nowhere in Freud’s own papers and is best treated as a good line of uncertain parentage. Then the movement began shedding its best minds. Alfred Adler broke away in 1911, holding that the drive to overcome inferiority mattered more than sex. Jung, whom Freud had treated as his heir, was gone by 1914, and religion was one of the fault lines: Jung thought the religious impulse was a permanent and healthy feature of the mind, and Freud did not. Four years later Freud wrote to a Swiss pastor, Oskar Pfister, asking why it was that none of the pious had ever discovered psychoanalysis and it had had to wait for a completely godless Jew. Then the First World War took his three sons to the front, and, in a war that did not often do so, gave all three of them back. It emptied his consulting room as well, since a city at war has other uses for its money than a doctor who charges by the hour for conversation, and in the hunger winters that followed he wrote some of his hardest work.

(●) 1923 AD: A surgeon cut a cancer out of his jaw, and more than thirty operations followed. + The grief came first. His daughter Sophie died in the influenza pandemic in January 1920, at twenty-six. Her small son Heinele, whom Freud loved past his own guard, died of tuberculosis in 1923 at four and a half, and Freud said afterwards that he had never in his life known depression like it, and that with the boy something had gone out of him for good. In April 1923 a growth appeared on his palate. It was cancer, and the operations began. He smoked twenty cigars a day, was told to stop, and did not. Over the sixteen years that followed he went under the knife more than thirty times, lost most of the right side of his upper jaw and palate, and had to wear a prosthesis to close the hole between his mouth and his nasal cavity so that he could eat and be understood. The family called it the monster. It never fitted, and putting it in was a daily struggle. He kept seeing patients through all of it, and he refused anything stronger than aspirin for the pain because he wanted to be able to think. Those are the years of the books on religion. The Future of an Illusion came out in 1927 and Civilization and Its Discontents in 1930, the second of them written by a man in constant pain who had buried a daughter and a grandchild, which is worth knowing before reading what he says there about how much happiness a human being can expect.

(●) 1938 AD: The Gestapo let him out of Vienna, and he died in London the following autumn. + In May 1933 students in Berlin threw his books on a bonfire with Einstein’s and Marx’s. Freud’s comment was that this was progress: in the Middle Ages they would have burned him, and now they were content with burning his books. He was wrong about that, and he lived long enough to know it. Germany annexed Austria in March 1938. Brownshirts, the party’s street militia in their brown uniforms, came to the flat; Anna Freud was taken away for a day of questioning by the Gestapo, and she came back, which in that spring was not something a family could count on. Friends abroad went to work. Ernest Jones pulled what strings London had, Princess Marie Bonaparte worked Paris, and the American ambassador to France, William Bullitt, worked the wires from the same city. In the end the exit was simply bought, with a large emigration levy, the price the Reich put on letting a Jew go, which Bonaparte advanced. Before leaving, Freud signed a declaration that he had not been ill-treated. Jones’s biography reports that he asked whether he might add a line warmly recommending the Gestapo to everyone; when the actual document surfaced at auction in 1989 the line was not on it, so the joke is a story about Freud rather than a sentence he wrote. He reached London in June 1938. The four sisters he had to leave behind were all dead by the end of 1942, Adolfine at Theresienstadt and Rosa, Marie and Pauline at Treblinka. He settled at 20 Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead, with the couch and the little gods shipped after him, and finished Moses and Monotheism, which was published in 1939. By that September the cancer was inoperable and the wound would not stop smelling; his dog would not come near him. On 21 September he took his physician Max Schur by the hand and reminded him of an old promise that he would not be left to suffer pointlessly. Schur, with Anna’s agreement, gave him morphine, and Sigmund Freud died in the early hours of 23 September 1939, three weeks after Britain declared war.

What He Taught

(T1) Most of the mind is hidden from the person who has it, and the hidden part does much of the steering. + You drive a familiar road home and arrive with no memory of the last three miles. All evening you cannot produce the name of a colleague you see every week, and later it occurs to you that he was the one who took the promotion you wanted. Nothing in either experience is mysterious to anybody. Freud’s claim was that these small everyday failures are the visible edge of something large. His word for the mechanism was repression: the mind pushing a wish or a memory out of awareness because holding it consciously would be intolerable, and the pushed-away material going on working from where it was put. On his account it works from there in dreams, in slips of the tongue, in jokes, in the choice of what to forget, and in symptoms. The technique he built to reach it was free association, in which the patient is asked to say whatever comes, however trivial or shameful, and to stop editing. That is what the couch was for: he sat behind it, out of sight, so that the patient would not keep adjusting to a listener’s face. Christian readers have rarely had trouble with this part. Scripture never assumed a mind transparent to itself, and the Bible’s standing verdict on the human heart is that its owner cannot read it (Jeremiah 17:9). Where Freud parts company is not over the fact of the hidden self but over what is hidden and who can see it. For him what lies underneath is instinct, and the only lamp is the analytic method. Scripture says the hidden self is fully open to somebody: "And no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account" (Hebrews 4:13).

(Q) "the third and most irritating insult is flung at the human mania of greatness by present-day psychological research, which wants to prove to the 'I' that it is not even master in its own home" + Source: Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, Eighteenth Lecture (G. Stanley Hall translation, 1920). He is placing himself third in a line of blows to human self-importance. Copernicus moved the earth out of the centre of the universe, Darwin moved man out of a separate creation, and psychoanalysis, he says, takes away the last of it by telling the conscious self that it does not run the house it lives in (T1).

(T2) Religion is a wish granted: a child’s helplessness enlarged into a Father who protects the world. + A three-year-old in a thunderstorm is not frightened as long as his father is in the room. Nothing about the storm has changed. What has changed is that somebody bigger than the storm is present, and that is enough. Freud’s account of religion begins exactly there and then asks what happens when the child grows up. The helplessness, he said, never actually ends. Nature still kills people, injustice still goes unpunished, and death is still coming, so the grown man keeps the childhood arrangement and enlarges it: the protecting father is moved up into the sky and made strong enough for the job. Everything else in the system follows from the same need. A benevolent providence answers the fear of nature. A moral order guarantees the justice that this life keeps failing to deliver. A life after death provides the room in which those promises can be kept. The technical name for the move is projection: taking something that is inside a person, a wish or a fear or a hostility, and experiencing it as though it belonged to the world outside. Freud is not saying merely that faith is comforting, which everyone knows and no believer denies. He is making a claim about origin: that the doctrines are not conclusions drawn from evidence or from reasoning at all, but wishes that have taken the shape of doctrines, and that the strength of the belief is the strength of the wish behind it.

(Q) "they are illusions, fulfilments of the oldest, strongest and most insistent wishes of mankind. The secret of their strength is the strength of these wishes." + Source: Freud, The Future of an Illusion, chapter VI (W. D. Robson-Scott translation, 1928). He has just denied that religious doctrines are what they claim to be. They are not, he says, the residue of experience or the final result of reflection. Then comes the alternative account (T2).

(T3) Calling a belief an illusion is not the same as calling it false. + This is the part of Freud that almost nobody quotes, and he put it in the same chapter as the sentence everyone does quote, the one about the strength of the wishes (T2), because he was a careful writer and he could see he was about to be misread. He separates two words. An error is simply a belief that is wrong: Aristotle thought vermin were generated out of dung, and that is an error, and nothing about wishing is involved. An illusion, in Freud’s technical sense, is a belief whose motive is a wish, and whether it is also true is a separate question that his definition does not answer. His own examples make the point better than any summary. Columbus believed he had found a new sea route to India: wish-driven, and wrong. A poor girl believes a prince will come and take her away: wish-driven, and it has occasionally happened. The alchemists believed base metals could be turned into gold: wish-driven, and modern chemistry no longer calls it impossible. So on Freud’s own account, a belief can be wish-fulfilment through and through and still be true. He did not believe the doctrines himself, and he thought some of them so hard to square with what we have laboriously learned about the world that they come near to delusions. But he wrote in that same chapter that estimating the truth of religious teaching lay outside what he was doing, and he never claimed the wish had settled it. Anyone using the wish-fulfilment theory as a disproof of God has gone beyond what the man who built it said it could do.

(Q) "An illusion is not the same as an error, it is indeed not necessarily an error." + Source: Freud, The Future of an Illusion, chapter VI (W. D. Robson-Scott translation, 1928). He has just called religious doctrines illusions and stops to define his term before going on, since the word in ordinary speech means something he does not mean by it (T3).

(T4) Religion began in a murder, and the sons who committed it could not stop obeying the man they killed. + A family firm loses its founder, a hard man nobody could stand. Within a year his portrait hangs over the desk and the survivors are keeping his rules more strictly than he ever managed to enforce them. Freud thought something like that had happened once, at the beginning, and that every altar since has been built on it. He took the outline from two sources. Darwin had guessed that early humans lived in small groups dominated by a single powerful male who kept the females and drove off the growing sons. The Scottish biblical scholar William Robertson Smith had argued that the oldest religious rite was a communal meal in which a clan killed and ate its totem animal, an animal ordinarily forbidden to them and treated as kin. Two terms are worth having: a totem is the animal or plant a clan regards as its ancestor and protector, and a taboo is a prohibition felt as sacred rather than merely legal, the kind you do not break even when nobody is watching. Freud welded the two ideas together. One day, he wrote, the expelled brothers combined, killed the father and ate him. Then the feeling they had never let themselves have came up: they had loved the man as well as hated him, and with him dead the love had nowhere to go. Out of that remorse came the two great prohibitions, against killing the totem and against taking the women of one’s own group, and out of the dead father came the god. It matters that Freud meant this literally. He was not offering a parable about how guilt works. He held that the killing happened, that the memory of it is carried in the species, and that every religion since is a re-enactment. He never gave the theory up, and he was still building on it in Moses and Monotheism, the last book he published.

(Q) "One day the expelled brothers joined forces, slew and ate the father, and thus put an end to the father horde." + Source: Freud, Totem and Taboo, chapter IV (A. A. Brill translation, 1918). A few pages later he draws the conclusion the whole book was built for: society, he says, is now based on complicity in the common crime, religion on the sense of guilt and the remorse that follows it (T4).

(T5) Civilization is bought with renunciation, and the bill comes due as guilt. + Consider the neighbour who plays music at two in the morning. Everyone who has ever lain awake through it has wanted to do something about it that no settled society will let them do, and the wanting does not simply evaporate when the law forbids the doing. Freud built his last big book on that observation, scaled up. Every civilization, he argued, runs on renunciation. It requires people to give up aggression and a great deal of sexual freedom, and it gets very little of that for free. The aggression that cannot be discharged outward is turned around and directed inward, where it is taken over by what he called the super-ego, the internal authority a person builds out of parents and teachers and culture, installed early and never afterwards audited. The super-ego does not distinguish between a wish and a deed, and it punishes both. That is why guilt in real people so often runs well ahead of anything they have actually done, and why, on Freud’s reckoning, the better behaved a civilization becomes the guiltier it feels. He looked directly at the commandment to love your neighbour as yourself, granted that it is the strongest defence there is against human aggression, and called it impossible to keep. A Christian reader can accept nearly the whole diagnosis. Scripture agrees that the demand is beyond us and that the accusation is real. What Freud describes, though, is a debt with no creditor who can cancel it: a court permanently in session, a sentence permanently pending, and no provision anywhere in the system for the case to be closed.

(Q) "the price we pay for our advance in civilization is a loss of happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt." + Source: Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, chapter VIII (James Strachey translation). He is apologising, in the same breath, for how much of the book the subject has taken over, and saying that this was the intention all along: to present the sense of guilt as the most important problem in the development of civilization (T5).

(Q) "No, science is no illusion. But it would be an illusion to suppose that we could get anywhere else what it cannot give us." + Source: Freud, The Future of an Illusion, chapter X (W. D. Robson-Scott translation, 1928). The last two sentences of the book. He has spent the closing chapter in dialogue with an imagined opponent who has just turned his own weapon on him and accused him of making science into an illusion of its own, and this is his answer. It is a confession of faith as much as a rebuttal, and Christian readers have generally thought so.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) His first serious answer came from a Swiss pastor who was his friend, and Freud printed it in his own journal. + Oskar Pfister was a Reformed minister in Zurich who read Freud early, became a practising analyst without ever leaving his parish, and wrote to Freud from 1909 until Freud’s death thirty years later. They disagreed about the one thing that mattered most to each of them and stayed friends anyway. In October 1918 Freud put the needle in directly, asking Pfister why it was that none of all the pious had ever discovered psychoanalysis, and why it had had to wait for a completely godless Jew. Pfister wrote back three weeks later that piety is not the same thing as a genius for discovery; that Freud was no Jew, which, given his own unbounded admiration for Amos and Isaiah and Jeremiah and the author of Job and Ecclesiastes, he regretted deeply; and that Freud was not godless either, since a man who lives the truth lives in God. A better Christian, he told him, there never was. When The Future of an Illusion appeared in 1927, Pfister answered it the next year with a book called The Illusion of a Future, arguing that Freud had described the sick forms of religion and mistaken them for the thing itself. Freud published his friend’s attack on him in Imago, the journal he edited. It is worth pausing on that. The book that told a pastor his life’s work rested on a child’s fear was written by a man who had kept that pastor’s friendship for two decades and then handed him the printing press.

(†) Where a belief came from does not settle whether it is true, and Christians pressed that with his own definition in hand. + The reply that came back most often has a name in logic. The genetic fallacy is the mistake of treating an account of how somebody came to hold a belief as though it were a refutation of the belief. A jury does not acquit because the detective had a grudge; it acquits because the evidence is thin. The detective’s motives are a separate matter, and interesting, and not the verdict. C. S. Lewis gave the move a nickname that stuck. In a 1941 essay he invented one Ezekiel Bulver, whose life was decided at the age of five when he heard his mother tell his father, in the middle of an argument about a triangle, that he only said that because he was a man. Bulverism, in Lewis’s definition, is assuming your opponent is wrong and then explaining his error, and his rule against it is one sentence long: you must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong. He named the Freudians and the Marxists as the great practitioners of the age. The second reply is that the acid dissolves its own flask. If wanting something to be true explains belief, then wanting it not to be true explains unbelief just as neatly, and everybody’s position is now accounted for and nobody’s is examined. The psychologist Paul Vitz turned the argument around deliberately in Faith of the Fatherless (1999), surveying the famous atheists and finding dead, absent or contemptible fathers behind a striking number of them, Freud’s own difficult Jacob included. Vitz is careful to say what follows: a psychological story about an atheist refutes atheism no more than Freud’s story refutes theism. That is precisely the point of telling it. And Freud had conceded the principle himself before either of them wrote, since an illusion on his own definition may be true (T3).

(†) What the church kept from him: people really do hide from themselves. + Plenty of Christians who rejected every one of his conclusions took the observation underneath them seriously, and they had grounds in their own texts for doing so. "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?" (Jeremiah 17:9). Paul, describing his own case, reports the same opacity from inside: "For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate" (Romans 7:15). The psalmist does not ask to be told what he already knows about himself; he asks to be searched, because he cannot conduct the search (Psalm 139:23–24). Reinhold Niebuhr, the American theologian who spent the middle of the century arguing that Christian realism about human nature was better evidenced than the optimism around him, gave dishonesty a place of its own in the account of sin in The Nature and Destiny of Man. Deceit, on his reading, is the inevitable companion of pride, and the first person it is aimed at is the one practising it, which is a description Freud would have recognised. The practical trades absorbed the method more quietly, and without much argument about where it had come from. A chaplain sitting by a hospital bed learns early that the question a patient asks first is often not the question he came in with. Pastoral care, hospital chaplaincy and spiritual direction all learned to listen for what a person is not saying, to treat a sudden change of subject as information, and to take seriously that the presenting problem is often not the problem. Pfister spent his career training clergy in exactly that, and argued to the end that the technique was separable from the philosophy his friend had wrapped around it.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: a claim about history, a Father who is not a projection, and a guilt that can actually be lifted. + Four points, stated at their strength. - The claim is historical, and it publishes its own falsification clause. A wish-fulfilment does not tell you how to disprove it. Paul does: "And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins" (1 Corinthians 15:17), and, a couple of verses later, "If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied" (1 Corinthians 15:19). Whatever else that is, it is not the psychology of a man arranging comfort for himself. The question of whether the tomb was empty is a question about first-century Jerusalem, and no account of anybody’s childhood settles it. - The fatherhood runs the other way. Freud has God assembled out of the human father. Paul has the human family named out of God’s fatherhood: he bows his knees before the Father, "from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named" (Ephesians 3:15). Both accounts predict the resemblance a reader notices between the two. They disagree entirely about which one is the copy, and the resemblance by itself cannot decide between them. - The primal murder is a story without evidence, resting on a biology that was already failing. No anthropologist has found the horde or the crime, and Robertson Smith’s reconstruction of the totem meal, which Freud built on, did not survive later fieldwork. Worse, the theory needs the memory of a specific event to be inherited by descendants who did not witness it, and acquired memories are not passed down that way. Freud knew the objection and kept the theory, and in Moses and Monotheism (1939) he applied the same method to the Old Testament, making Moses an Egyptian and having the Israelites murder him, on a reconstruction that the historical evidence does not carry. His verdict on religion rests on his account of its origin, and that account is the weakest thing he wrote. - He described a debt and left it standing. This is where the parting is sharpest, because the diagnosis is so nearly right. Freud saw that guilt in human beings runs far ahead of the offences they can itemise, and that civilizations manufacture more of it the better behaved they get, and he had nothing whatever to offer for it except a clearer view of the mechanism. The gospel answers with a cancellation rather than an explanation: "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness" (1 John 1:9). "There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus" (Romans 8:1). He was right that people want God to exist, and right that wanting has more to do with what people believe than they like to admit. Neither observation touches the question of whether anybody is there. Freud stopped where the interesting part starts, and said so more honestly than most of the people who quote him.