Fathers

Note: Last Updated 6/3/2025.

Paul Vitz:

…in the Freudian framework, atheism is an illusion caused by the Oedipal desire to kill the father (God) and replace him with oneself. To act as though God does not exist reveals a wish to kill Him, much in the same way as in a dream the image of a parent going away or disappearing can represent such a wish. The belief that “God is dead,” therefore, is simply an Oedipal wish fulfillment—the sign of seriously unresolved unconscious motivation.

(Paul Vitz, “Freud and the Psychology of Atheism”; In: Radical Claims in Freudian Psychoanalysis: Point/Counterpoint, ed. M. Andrew Holowchak, [Lanham: Jason Aronson, 2012], p. 137. Cf. Paul C. Vitz, Faith of the Fatherless: The Psychology of Atheism, [Dallas: Spence Publishing Company, 1999], p. 13.)

Cf. C. S. Lewis:

If Freud is right about the Oedipus complex, the universal pressure of the wish that God should not exist must be enormous, and atheism must be an admirable gratification to one of our strongest suppressed impulses. ‘This argument, in fact, could be used on the theistic side. But I have no intention of so using it. It will not really help either party. It is fatally ambivalent. Men wish on both sides: and again, there is fear-fulfilment as well as wish-fulfilment, and hypochondriac temperaments will always tend to think true what they most wish to be false. Thus instead of the one predicament on which our opponents sometimes concentrate there are in fact four. A man may be a Christian because he wants Christianity to be true. He may be an atheist because he wants atheism to be true. He may be an atheist because he wants Christianity to be true. He may be a Christian because he wants atheism to be true. Surely these possibilities cancel one another out? They may be of some use in analysing a particular instance of belief or disbelief, where we know the case history, but as a general explanation of either they will not help us.

(C. S. Lewis, “On Obstinacy in Belief”; In: C. S. Lewis, The World’s Last Night: And Other Essays, [New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1960], pp. 19-20.)

καὶ αὐτός ἐστιν πρὸ πάντων καὶ τὰ πάντα ἐν αὐτῷ συνέστηκεν ~ Soli Deo Gloria