The Night

All through his lifetime, Sigmund Freud led a life filled with mysterious views on the subject of Religion. While Freud viewed religion as one means to face the cruelty of the world, he primarily considered religion to be a mass "delusion" that promised a wish for peace both in this world and in the afterlife that was irrational. Similar to Freud's lifestyle, we see evidence of this argument recurring in Night by Elie Wiesel. Throughout the novel, Wiesel consistently questions the presence and existence of God. Through his experiences noted in his journey for the sole authority and protection of god, Wiesel contradicts the view of accepting the existence of an omnipotent, all-loving God with the evidence of evil and suffering in the world. Elie Wiesel describes his battle for survival and his battle with God as a way to understand the brutality he witnessed each day. Religion as depicted in both writings is seen as impractical, idealistic yet somehow unreasonable.

As Freud experiences a life filled with discontent through family, situations and hardships he comes across, he sees the presence of God as "an infantile wish to have an all-powerful and all-knowing, protective father-figure in the universe." (Freud, 56) Even though he sees religion as a "mass delusion" his perception vitalizes the importance of the presence of god. In the development of Freud's thought about religion he rejects religion in his attempt to explain the emergence of the idea of a monotheistic God. During the last fifteen years of his life, he devoted effort to analyze religion and culture from a psychoanalytic point of view. Convinced of the truth of his psychoanalytic discoveries, he proceeds to test and apply them to questions that are of central concern to the existence of human beings. Freud interprets the formation of religions in terms of their function in this conflict between nature and culture, or between the ego and the drive.

According to him, religions allow the human being to admit their willingness to submit and at the same time retain a sense of superiority in relation to the surrounding reality. The price for the compromise is the belief to an "illusion". The strength of the illusion is mutual to the strength of the need. The central religious figure, a father-god, draws its material from the childhood experience of the human being: the child's vulnerability creates the need for protection; this need motivates its love and expectations towards the father and forces it to restrain the hostility towards. But since the real father cannot sympathize with the fragility of human life, and since it does not end with childhood, a stronger and more powerful father-figure is needed. In this way the father becomes idealized and projected into the image of God. The wish for protection, powered by the actually felt need, explains the strength of the religious belief.

Religion is a defense, a response to the experience of helplessness. It is a fantasy that makes life tolerable despite the hardships, and it even negates death as the final end of human life. Freud characterizes religion as an irrational neurosis; something which we can outgrow. Subsequently, his position is sharply critical towards religion, yet optimistic about the possibility to overcome it. Freud's acceptance of religion is born from resignation, but it opens the possibility for a shift in his view of religion. Civilization and its Discontents begins with an examination of the idea that religion is based on an "oceanic feeling of connectedness." He suggests that the selfishness that underlies this feeling is originally independent from religion, but gets utilized and interpreted by religious belief.

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