ABSTRACT
Freud took himself to have a psychoanalytically valid argument against the honest viability of religious belief. Freud famously argued that religious belief is illusion. He meant this in a precise sense: a belief is an illusion if it is caused by a wish. This would typically be a misfire in the process of belief-formation. Freud thought that there were parallels between individual and historical development. Freud wanted to make a stronger claim than that religious belief could be put to wishful use: he wanted to claim that it was constitutive of religious belief that it was wishful. The claim of psychoanalytic validity implies that there is no way one can both believe in the principles of psychoanalysis and live according to them and live a life that embodies religious commitment. One needs to imagine someone for whom illusion does not exhaust or give the fundamental basis of their life of religious commitment.
