Freud and the Psychoanalysis of Obsession and Religion

It was Sigmund Freud who established obsessions as an autonomous and independent condition, a neurosis in the same way as hysteria or phobic neurosis. Throughout the first half of the 20th century, hysteria and obsessional neurosis, alongside phobic neurosis, remained the main categories of neurosis as opposed to psychosis, since Freud had established their structural and psychodynamic basis. Like hysteria, obsessional neurosis also reveals the major epistemological issues at work in Freud’s invention of the major concepts of psychoanalysis: ego, superego, anxiety, fantasy, sadism, masochism, opposition between neurosis and psychosis, to name but a few of the concepts that played a decisive role in the development of Freudian psychoanalytic theory. The psychoanalysis of the beliefs, fantasies and feelings of narcissistic omnipotence that characterize the functioning of the obsessive personality also gave Freud the opportunity to propose a psychoanalytic anthropology (or anthropo-analysis) of magical beliefs and religious ideas and behavior.