Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices In a prefatory note to the Hebrew translation of Totem and Taboo (1930) Freud describes himself as 'an author who is ignorant of the language of holy writ, who is completely estranged from the religion of his fathers-as well as from every other religion' but who remains 'in his essential nature a Jew and who has no desire to alter that nature'. In An Autobiographical Study, originally published in 1925, Freud recounts that 'My parents were Jews, and I have remained a Jew myself.' Familiarity with Bible stories, from an age even before he learned to read, had 'an enduring effect on the direction of my interest.' In 1873, upon attending the University at Vienna, he first encountered antisemitism: 'I found that I was expected to feel myself inferior and an alien because I was a Jew.' Before his wedding, Freud desired to convert to Protestantism to avoid a Jewish ceremony but was ultimately persuaded not to. Freud considered God as a phantasy, based on the infantile need for a dominant father figure, with religion as a necessity in the development of early civilization to help restrain our violent impulses, that can now be discarded in favor of science and reason.

Freud died in 1939, on the cusp of the Second World War.Sigmund Freud's views on religion are described in several of his books and essays. His notions of repression and the unconscious are important to literary scholars well into the twenty-first century, and his understanding of the brain prompted investigations in modern neurology.

Freud’s work, though grounded in psychology, has implications across several fields. Freud’s studies introduced into popular culture a great number of terms and ideas, some technical, others used more generally, including: “the Oedipus complex” (describing a son’s desire to kill his father and wed his mother) “anal retentiveness” (regarding obsessive organization in early childhood) and the “ego,” “id,” and “superego”-which Freud described as the three components of the mind. Trained in medicine, Freud studied the brain before developing methods of treating psychological ailments through “the talking cure,” which consisted of a combination of “dream analysis,” “free association,” and intensive questioning into the patient’s familial relations. Sigmund Freud was the originator of psychoanalytic theory, and one of the twentieth-century’s most influential thinkers in the fields of psychology and sociology.

Sigmund freud civilization