| Psychology: The Collapse of Freudianism and The representative of nineteenth-century atheism in psychology was the Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). He proposed a psychological theory that rejected the soul's existence and tried to explain humanity's whole spiritual world in terms of sexual and similar hedonistic motivations. But Freud's greatest assault was against religion. In his The Future of an Illusion, originally published in 1927, Freud proposed that religious faith was a kind of mental illness (neurosis) that would disappear completely as humanity progressed. Due to the primitive scientific conditions of the time, his theory was proposed without either the requisite research and investigation or any scholarly literature or possibility of comparison. Therefore, its claims were extremely deficient.
After Freud, psychology developed on an atheist foundation. Moreover, the founders of other schools of psychology were passionate atheists. Two of these were B. F. Skinner (1904-90), founder of the behaviorist school, and Albert Ellis (1913- ), founder of rational-emotive therapy. The world of psychology gradually became the forum for atheism. A 1972 poll among the members of the American Psychological Association revealed that only 1.1 percent of psychologists in the country had any religious beliefs.25 But most psychologists who fell into this great deception were undone by their own psychological investigations. The basic suppositions of Freudianism were shown to have almost no scientific support. Moreover, religion was shown not to be a mental illness, as Freud and some other psychological theorists declared, but rather a basic element of mental health. Patrick Glynn summarizes these important developments: Yet the last quarter of the twentieth century has not been kind to the psychoanalytic vision. Most significant has been the exposure of Freud's views of religion as entirely fallacious. Ironically enough, scientific research in psychology over the past twenty-five years has demonstrated that, far from being a neurosis or source of neuroses as Freud and his disciples claimed, religious belief is one of the most consistent correlates of overall mental health and happiness. Study after study has shown a powerful relationship between religious belief and practice, on the one hand, and healthy behaviors with regard to such problems as suicide, alcohol and drug abuse, divorce, depression, even, perhaps surprisingly, levels of sexual satisfaction in marriage, on the other. In short, the empirical data run exactly contrary to the supposedly "scientific" consensus of the psychotherapeutic profession.26 Finally, as Glynn says, "modern psychology at the close of the twentieth century seems to be reacquainting itself with religion,"27 and "a purely secular view of human mental life has been shown to fail not just at the theoretical, but also at the practical, level."28 In other words, psychology also has routed atheism.
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