Frühe Schriften zu Religion und Dichtung

(lit.: Early Writings on Religion and Literature)

Two short pieces from 1907 and 1908 that turn Freud's clinic outward, onto the believer's rituals and the novelist's daydreams.

by Sigmund Freud39 passages held

German, the original language

First published: 1907(aged 51)
Original language: German

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Overview

Two short pieces from 1907 and 1908, joined in this volume on the site only by their date, show Sigmund Freud carrying the findings of his consulting room into religion and literature; each first appeared on its own. "Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices" (1907) was printed in the first volume of a journal for the psychology of religion. It starts from patients who cannot go to sleep until the chair stands just so, the sheet is smoothed and the pillows lie in their exact places. The patients themselves find these rules meaningless, yet are seized by unbearable anxiety if one is skipped. Others before him, Freud grants, had noticed how much such private rites resemble the observances of the devout; the very word for them, ceremonial, says as much. He goes further. Both rest on giving up the satisfaction of a drive, and he proposes calling obsessional neurosis a private religion and religion a universal obsessional neurosis — an idea he returned to twenty years later in The Future of an Illusion. "Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming", first given as a talk in 1907 and printed in 1908 in the periodical Neue Revue, asks the question a cardinal is said to have put to the poet Ariosto: where does a writer find his stories? Freud's answer begins with a child at play, who builds a world of its own and takes it entirely seriously. Adults give up playing but go on daydreaming, in secret and with some shame, and the writer is the daydreamer who can make his fantasies public. The hero whom nothing can harm, in daydreams and in popular novels alike, is the dreamer's own ego, and the craft of form offers readers a small advance pleasure that lets them enjoy the deeper one without self-reproach or shame.

Key concepts

Why does Freud call an obsessive action a compromise?

Because it serves both sides of the conflict that produced it. An obsessive action is meant to ward off a forbidden wish, yet it always brings back a little of the pleasure it was built to prevent. The ritual both defends against the repressed drive and secretly satisfies it, which is why it cannot be given up and why it keeps spreading.

What does it mean that repression in obsessional neurosis is incomplete?

The forbidden drive has been pushed out of awareness but not put to rest. It returns as a temptation at every fresh occasion, and with it comes a constant dread of misfortune, felt as the expectation of punishment. The patient has to keep adding new defensive acts, so the ceremonial grows. Freud finds the same pair, unending temptation and fear of divine punishment, in religious life.

What is a fantasy, in Freud's sense of daydreaming?

A fantasy is the fulfilment of a wish that reality has left unsatisfied, played out in the imagination. Happy people, Freud says, do not daydream; only the unsatisfied do. The wishes are mostly ambitious ones that raise the dreamer's standing, or erotic ones, and often both together. A fantasy is not fixed but changes with each new impression of life.

What does Freud mean by the split ego of the psychological novel?

The modern psychological novelist, Freud suggests, uses self-observation to divide his own ego into several partial egos, and gives each to a different character. The conflicting currents of the writer's own mind are then acted out between the people of the story. The hero of the popular novel is the dreamer's ego undivided; here the ego appears in pieces.

Why does Freud call myths the age-old dreams of young humanity?

Where a writer takes his material ready-made, it comes from the store of myths, legends and fairy tales. Freud thinks it likely that myths are the distorted remains of the wishful fantasies of whole nations, so that a people's myth stands to its history as a daydream stands to a single life. The writer who retells them is working with wishes that many share.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

A Private Religion

Is the anxious patient who cannot sleep until the pillows lie just so performing a kind of worship? "Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices" takes the resemblance seriously and asks what it reveals about both.

Freud's patients guard their rituals jealously, hide them from onlookers and feel dread if one step is skipped, yet cannot say what they mean. Analysis finds a meaning in every detail, often a memory of sex, and a temptation that keeps returning because repression has only half succeeded. Religion, he proposes, rests on the same giving up of drives, though the drives are selfish and antisocial rather than sexual. Neurosis then looks like a private religion, and religion like a universal obsessional neurosis.

compulsion
ritual
religion
guilt
drive renunciation
concealment
anxiety
repression
sin

Enter a dialogue

The Writer Who Dreams Aloud

Where does a writer find his stories, and why do they move us? "Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming" looks for the answer not in genius but in a child at play.

A child takes its play entirely seriously and still knows it from reality. The adult gives up playing and daydreams instead, in secret, ashamed of wishes that are childish or forbidden. A daydream starts from something in the present, reaches back to a childhood memory and sketches a future in which the wish comes true. The popular novelist publishes such a dream, invulnerable hero and all, and the craft of form bribes readers with a small pleasure so they can enjoy the larger one without shame.

fantasy
literature
imagination
play
creativity
wish fulfillment
childhood
aesthetics
shame

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 39
distinct concepts: 64
by passages held, corpus-wide: #686

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “compulsion” and “psychoanalysis”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 11 pairings. 63 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
compulsion	psychoanalysis	9
compulsion	ritual	6
compulsion	religion	5
fantasy	literature	5
fantasy	wish fulfillment	5
psychoanalysis	religion	5
psychoanalysis	ritual	5
religion	ritual	5
literature	wish fulfillment	4
imagination	literature	2
fantasy	psychoanalysis	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1900 The Interpretation of Dreams (Die Traumdeutung)
Begun from his own dreams in the 1890s and enlarged in edition after edition, this is where Freud sets out the method of interpretation that his later books apply to slips of the tongue, jokes and myths.
DE
1901 The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens)
The dream book's method carried into waking life; its slips and forgettings became the opening part of the lectures Freud later gave to beginners in Vienna.
DE
1905 Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten)
Freud's only book-length study of comedy, and the one most built from borrowed material: puns, anecdotes and Jewish jokes, each taken apart in turn.
DE
1907 Frühe Schriften zu Religion und Dichtung you are here DE
1910 Zur Theorie des Unbewußten
Four theoretical papers written between 1910 and 1915 and gathered here in one volume, on the road from the dream book to the metapsychological essays of 1915 — the last of the four is one of those essays.
DE
1913 Spätere Schriften zu Dichtung und Mythos
Two essays from 1913 and 1917, gathered here in one volume, that show Freud the reader of Shakespeare and Goethe: the dream-book method applied to a stage motif and to the first page of a famous autobiography.
DE
1913 Totem and Taboo (Totem und Tabu)
The first of Freud's books on society and religion, where he moves from the patient to the human species; Group Psychology, The Future of an Illusion and his last book, on Moses, all build on its story of the murdered father.
DE
1914 On Narcissism: An Introduction (Zur Einführung des Narzißmus)
A short essay written as Jung was breaking with Freud, and the hinge between his early theory of the drives and the later picture of ego and super-ego.
DE
1915 Instincts and their Vicissitudes (Triebe und Triebschicksale)
The paper that opens Freud's 1915 theoretical series by defining its basic term; the companion essays on repression and on the unconscious build on it.
DE
1915 Schriften aus dem Weltkrieg
Freud's direct responses to the First World War, gathered in one volume on this site: a long essay of 1915 on disillusionment and death, and a short one of 1916 on transience and mourning.
DE
1915 The Unconscious (Das Unbewußte)
Freud's fullest account of what he meant by the unconscious, written in wartime Vienna eight years before The Ego and the Id redrew his map of the mind.
DE
1917 Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse)
Freud's own introduction to his work, and the closest thing he wrote to a textbook: his books on dreams and on everyday slips retold for listeners, then carried on into a general theory of neurosis.
DE
1919 The 'Uncanny' (Das Unheimliche)
A rare venture by Freud into aesthetics, a field he says psychoanalysts seldom feel drawn to, written in 1919 beside the first draft of Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
DE
1920 Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Jenseits des Lustprinzips)
The hinge of Freud's later work: the 1920 book that introduces the death drive, followed within three years by the new map of the mind in The Ego and the Id.
DE
1921 Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse)
The bridge between Freud's speculations on prehistory and his new model of the mind: its chapter on a "grade in the ego" sets out the ego ideal that The Ego and the Id would rename two years later.
DE
1923 The Ego and the Id (Das Ich und das Es)
The book in which Freud's later model of the mind takes its final shape; the essays and books that follow it, on anxiety, religion and civilisation, all speak its language of ego, id and super-ego.
DE
1924 Späte Schriften zur Ich-Psychologie
Three short papers of the mid-1920s, gathered here in one volume, in which Freud tests the model of The Ego and the Id on psychosis, on memory and on laughter.
DE
1926 Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (Hemmung, Symptom und Angst)
Written three years after The Ego and the Id, it rebuilds the theory of neurotic symptoms in that book's terms, starting from the difference between a symptom and an inhibition, a restriction the ego places on itself.
DE
1927 The Future of an Illusion (Die Zukunft einer Illusion)
Freud's most direct case against religion, written fourteen years after Totem and Taboo had traced it to the murdered father, and the opening of the late cultural writings that continue in Civilization and Its Discontents.
DE

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