Despite Sigmund Freud’s lack of religious belief, his psychoanalysis is deeply rooted in Jewish religious culture, the product of a hybrid, “Hellenistic” Judaism. Above all, his self-analysis, which is essentially inscribed in The Interpretation of Dreams, shows how, proceeding from an invented Egypt, an imagined Athens, and a dreamed-up Rome, Freud developed a theory in fin-de-siècle Vienna – a cosmopolitan city, his Jerusalem – that deeply sublimated the personal into theory. Religion, as an arsenal of symbols, played a considerable role in this work. The aim is to gain new insights into Freud’s theory, but beyond that into elements for a theory of religion—one that accounts for the dialectics of secularization between disenchantment and re-enchantment of the world.

Martin Treml is a senior research fellow at the Center for Literary and Cultural Research in Berlin and currently an IFK_Senior Fellow.