Scientific psychopathology and religious issues.
During the last few years it has become more and more apparent that there exists a considerable tension between traditional religious thought and certain assertions on the part of social sciences and psychology, which have been influenced to a great extent by psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis was born out of psychopathology, and both sociology and psychopathology joined hands to make friends with one another and with anthropology. The result has been the almost emphatic assertion that psychopathology and social sciences have become scientific disciplines, or that they have been more influenced by the scientific method than by philosophy. The conversion (if I may use this term here, rather conditionally) of social sciences and psychology to the scientific method has done an immeasurable amount of good. No one would deny the revolutionary and far-reaching contributions that have been made by psychopathology during the last fifty years. No one would question the new breadth and depth of our knowledge of man, which we owe to psychoanalysis and cultural anthropology. At the same time, there is sufficient evidence of a conflict between religion and those trends or systems of sociology and psychology which claim the distinction of being scientific. However, despite the very loudness and intensity of the voices, I would make bold to state from the very outset that this conflict is only a conflict between men who use either religion or science as a weapon of attack or defense. Freud's official attitude toward religion is well known. His book The Future of an Illusion ends with a positive denial that there can be any knowledge outside science: "Science is no illusion. But it would be an illusion to suppose that we could get anywhere else what it cannot give us."