What Can We Learn From Freud's Critique of Religion?

This paper was given at the conference in All Hallows on 10 June 2011.[1] It deals with the influences on Freud‘s often neglected religious formation and his own subjective tendency towards religious superstition. This forms the background to his seminal 1907 analogy of obsessional neurosis as a private religion and religion as a universal obsessional neurosis. 'It is conceivable that an obsessional may not be able to make the slightest sense out of the discourse of another obsessional.…