Sigmund Freud

His theories about mythology and religion examined by Stefan Stenudd

My text on Sigmund Freud is quite extensive, so I divided it into six web pages. This is the first one, the introduction. Links to the other web pages follow below.

Archetypes of Mythology

by Stefan Stenudd
This book examines Jungian theories on myth and religion, from Carl G. Jung to Jordan B. Peterson. Click the image to see the book at Amazon (paid link).

Psychoanalysis of Mythology

by Stefan Stenudd
This book examines Freudian theories on myth and religion, from Sigmund Freud to Erich Fromm. Click the image to see the book at Amazon (paid link).

Sigmund Freud was born in Moravia in 1856, but his family moved to Vienna only a few years later. In 1881 he graduated as an MD and worked in the Vienna General Hospital for a few years, also researching the clinical uses of cocaine. In 1885-86 he studied in Paris under Jean-Martin Charcot, a French neurologist who made pioneering research into hysteria.

The same year Freud returned from Paris, he started his own practice, where he treated nervous diseases and focused increasingly on psychology. In 1902 he was appointed professor extraordinaire of neurology at the University of Vienna, a position he held until he left for England in 1938, to escape Nazism.

In 1896, the same year his father died, Freud used the term psychoanalysis for the first time in a printed text. It was in an article about neurosis in a French magazine on neurology.^[1] By the very end of the century, in November 1899, Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams) was published, but scarcely noticed for the first few years. An English translation was released in 1913.

The International Psychoanalytic Congress in Weimar 1911. Sigmund Freud stands in the very middle of the group.

In 1906 he befriended and started to cooperate with Carl G. Jung from Switzerland. Neither the friendship nor the cooperation would last, once their views on psychology started to differ.

There are three books in which Freud treated the subjects of myth and religion at depth. Totem and Taboo in 1913 presented theories that contradicted Jung's emerging models of explanation. In 1927 Freud published the essay The Future of an Illusion, where he discussed the origin of religion and clearly confessed to his own atheism. Moses and Monotheism, in which he persisted with the ideas presented in the previous texts, was published in 1939, the same year Freud died.

His book from 1930, Civilization and Its Discontents, is also discussed here although its topic is not mythology but the conflict between individual urges and social norms. Still, it treats religion, its emergence, and effects, which is why it should not be passed by.

Notes

Sigmund Freud, "L'Hérédité et l'étiologie des névroses" ("Heredity and the Aetiology of the Neuroses"), Revue neurologique, volume 4 (6), Paris, 1896, pp. 161-169. ↑

Sigmund Freud on Myth and Religion

Freudians on Myth and Religion

This text is an excerpt from my book Psychoanalysis of Mythology: Freudian Theories on Myth and Religion Examined from 2022. The excerpt was published on this website in February, 2026.

© Stefan Stenudd 2022, 2026