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==Freudian Dictionary==
<blockquote>The derivation of a need for religion from the child's feeling of helplessness and the longing it evokes for a father seems to me incontrovertible, especially since this feeling is not simply carried on from childhood days but is kept alive perpetually by the fear of what the superior power of fate will bring.<ref>{{C&D}} Ch. 1</ref></blockquote>
<blockquote>Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities. But it cannot achieve its end. Its doctrines carry with them the stamp of the times in which they originated the ignorant childhood days of the human race. Its con~olations deserve no trust. ... If one attempts to assign to religion its place in man's evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition, as a parallel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity.<ref>{{NILP}} Ch. 7</ref></blockquote>
===Religion and Neurosis===
<blockquote>Religious phenomena are to be understood only on the model of the neurotic symptoms of the individual, which are so familiar to us, as a return of longforgotten important happenings in the primeval history of the human family, that they owe their obsessive character to that very origin and therefore derive their effect on mankind from the historical truth they contain. <ref>{{M&M}} Part III, Section II</ref></blockquote>
<blockquote>One might venture to regard the obsessional neurosis as a pathological counterpart to the formation of a religion, to describe this neurosis as a private religious system, and religion lS a universal obsessional neurosis.<ref>{{OA}} & {{RL}} {{OA&RL}}</ref></blockquote>
<blockquote>It is easy to see wherein lies the resemblance between neurotic ceremonial and religious rites; it is in the fear of pangs of conscience after their omission, in the complete isolation of hem from all other activities (the feeling that one must not be listurbed), and in the conscientiousness with which the details are carried out.<ref>{{OA}} & {{RL}} {{OA&RL}}</ref></blockquote>
{{Freudian Dictionary}}
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