Freud recognised “the poetry and promise in religion.”

Mark Edmundson writes in the New York Times that while remaining an atheist, Sigmund Freud in his last completed book, ‘Moses and Monotheism’, “began to see the Jewish faith that he was born into as a source of cultural progress in the past and of personal inspiration in the present. Close to his own death, Freud starts to recognize the poetry and promise in religion.”

“He argues that Judaism helped free humanity from bondage to the immediate empirical world, opening up fresh possibilities for human thought and action. He also suggests that faith in God facilitated a turn toward the life within, helping to make a rich life of introspection possible.”