On March 2, 1907 Freud presented a lecture on religion to the Vienna Psycho-Analytical Society. He had written it on February as his requested contribution to the new journal Zeitschrift fur Religonpsychologie, that published it in April of that year in the first issue of its first volume. It represented Freud's first approach to the psychology of religion based on the clinical observation that there were remarkable similarities between obsessive and religious ceremonies. He noted
The resemblance, however, seems to me to be more than a superficial one, so that an insight into the origin of neurotic ceremonial may embolden us to draw inferences by analogy about the psychological processes of religious life. (Freud, 1907, p. 117) (my italics)
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Rizzuto, AM. (2009). One Hundred Years After Freud Declared That Religion Was a Universal Obsessional Neurosis. In: Belzen, J.A. (eds) Changing the Scientific Study of Religion: Beyond Freud?. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-2540-1_2
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