Another (maybe the last) in this series. It shows that, even for people sympathetic with Freud’s project, his atheism doesn’t have as strong of a case as he–or those who continue to make that case–thought it did. Includes a summary of a dialogue with Oskar Pfister, a Swiss pastor’s son who made a case for Christianity. One interesting takeaway from the whole narrative:
Given Freud’s lifelong animus against religion, it’s surprising that, when he finally got round to writing a complete book on the subject, it turned out to be such a surprisingly bad and unsystematic text. It trots through various arguments for atheism, buttressed by bits of psychoanalytic theory, but is surprisingly ramshackle and unconvincing.
For me, the Voice of the Believer wins, especially when you consider that, as Freud was writing, some European nations stood poised to experiment with just the sort of alternative, non-religious, pseudo-scientific ideologies to bind society together which Freud appears to recommend: Stalin’s Russia and Nazi Germany.
Positive Infinity 
What’s amazing is that progressives in the church are so keen to incorporate therapeutic ideas when the father of talk therapy was such an over atheist. Likewise for post-truth and power based identitarianism and Foucault.
Of course, Freud and Foucault (and really Nietzsche) have been filtered by generations of morons in and outside of the church to become neutered, stupid versions of themselves by now. But still! Sheesh.
The interesting stuff is what happens when you have an institution so torn by contradiction. I think you get a lot of cognitive dissonance and ultimately the destruction of the law. If all principles are contradicted, then everything comes down to power. That sounds extreme, but for example, TEC pastoral counseling comes from Carl Rogers’s humanism and is very close to secular psychotherapy but with much less training and bad boundaries. So when the lesson is don’t be self-sacrificing, adapt to the world, but follow Jesus and be self-sacrificing, it’s pretty easy to apply one standard to oneself and another to others.
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Freud’s effect on American life and thought in the 1960’s and 1970’s is one of those things that has been shoved under the rug in the aftermath (and, as you observed, superseded/built upon by Foucault and others.) The problem in TEC is that, in those days and afterwards, an entire generation of ministers became obsessed with being “with it” to the point that they would uncritically adopt the ideas of atheists, not realising that they were undercutting themselves in the process.
The real result of this kind of thing is confusion, of which TEC has more than its share.
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