We now observe that the stock of religious ideas contains not only wish-fulfilments, but also important historical memories. What matchless, what abundant power this combination of past and present must give to religion! But with the help of an analogy we may perhaps feel our way towards another view of the problem. It is not a good thing to transplant ideas far away from the soil in which they grew, but we cannot resist pointing out the resemblance which forms this analogy. We know that the human child cannot well complete its development towards culture without passing through a more or less distinct phase of neurosis. This is because the child is unable to suppress by rational mental effort so many of those instinctual impulsions which cannot later be turned to account, but has to check them by acts of repression, behind which there stands as a rule an anxiety motive. Most of these child neuroses are overcome spontaneously as one grows up, and especially is this the fate of the obsessional neuroses of childhood. The remainder can be cleared up still later by psycho-analytic treatment. In just the same way one might assume that in its development through the ages mankind as a whole experiences conditions that are analogous to the neuroses, and this for the same reasons, because in the ages of its ignorance and intellectual weakness it achieved by purely affective means the instinctual renunciations, indispensable for man’s communal existence. And the residue of these repression-like processes, which took place in antiquity, has long clung on to civilization. Thus religion would be the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity. It, like the child’s, originated in the Oedipus complex, the relation to the father. According to this conception one might prophesy that the abandoning of religion must take place with the fateful inexorability of a process of growth, and that we are just now in the middle of this phase of development. So we should form our behaviour after the model of a sensible teacher, who does not oppose the new development confronting him, but seeks to further it and to temper the force of its onset. To be sure this analogy does not exhaust the essence of religion. If on the one hand religion brings with it obsessional limitation, which can only be compared to an individual obsessional neurosis, it comprises on the other hand a system of wish-illusions, incompatible with reality, such as we find in an isolated form only in Meynert’s amentia, a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion. But these are only just comparisons, with whose help we can endeavour to understand social phenomena; individual psychology supplies us with no exact counterpart.