Freud's psychoanalytic theories
Sigmund Freud was born to Jewish parents in a heavily Roman Catholic town. Freud desired to understand religion and spirituality and deals with the nature of religious beliefs in many of his books and essays. He regards God as an illusion, based on the infantile need for a powerful father figure. Freud believed that religion was an expression of underlying psychological neuroses and distress. In some of his writing, he suggests that religion is an attempt to control the Oedipal complex, as he goes on to discuss in his book Totem and Taboo.