ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to understand why, in The Future of an Illusion (1927), Freud contrasted “totemism” with “religion.” If totemism was not religious, in what special sense did Freud use the term “religion”? And what did his special usage imply for the understanding of his views on religion? Although Freud considered social instincts and conscience to be related, he did not equate the two. Conscience is a manifestation of psychic conflict, for example, between the sexual instincts and the social ones. Freud might have argued that religion is a manifestation of conscience in symbolic form and, as such, attests to psychic conflict between social instincts and something else. For Freud’s theory of religion, the problem of social instincts was replaced by the problem of the ego ideal, on which Freud had already accumulated a body of research. Freud believed, of course, that he had abolished the problem of social instincts and validated his “scientific myth” of the primal crime.
