Sigmund Freud is nowadays recognized as the fundamental theorist – more influent than Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche – of the contemporary
atheism.
He has theorized that everything what concerns the psychic life of the individual – and also of the masses – can be explained through some more or less hidden mechanism of the subconscious. Subconscious operations can explain the cause of all our impulses, all our dreams and conscious desires.
According to Freud, a material effect has to be connected to a material cause. This is what is generally meant for “
materialism”. Freudian materialism is substantially different from the marxist one, but the form is the same. We would admit that materialism doctrine is reduced to a pure logics of connections between individuals; it’s a reduction of all the objects to their form, as well the substance is replaced of the form absumed by the object. Anyway, particular events require their own explication, and their cause is different from the cause of events who look similar on the surface. But materialist doctrines ignore the possibility that similar causes can produce different effects, as well they ignore that a similar effect can be the result of different causes.
Karl Marx had applied materialism on the economics field: he explained all the main socio-economics events with socio-economics material causes. Freud adopts the same dogmaticism, in explaining all the social and human facts with psychological material causes. A good example of the freudian
conception of the psychological material causes is provided by the Oedipus complex, that Freud spots in different pathological behaviours of his patients. According to Freud, peculiar cases where the patient shows an adversion agaings his own father (or a figure who covers the father role) can be explained by the unconscious desire of the patient, to have sexual relation with the mother. We see that this cause is psychological, but it's also material, because it concerns the concrete fulfillment of a desire.
After the definition of his psychoanalitic method, Freud enlarged soon his area of interests. So he applied his method in a rather rigorous way to all the facts concerning human and cultural life: to literature (offering interpretations of works like Jensen's
Gradiva), to art, and to religion.
Basically, about this last field of freudian interest, we notice that he treated religion like a psychopathology.
Freud analyzes simply the devotion feeling. Where does this very deep feeling, which is rooted in the deep of human heart, comes from? He answers: religious devotion is caused by a collective sense of guilt, originated by a primal violent and horrible fault, which included the whole community as responsible guilty subject. Notably, here we must refer to Freud ambitious book
Totem and Taboo.
But Freud offers here an example of a primitive form of religion, which can be accepted for men who live like animals, just following nature laws. It's rather far to imagine a community like the ones where the Christianism, the Islam and every other possible revealed religion may have appeared.
Anyway, here we have explained what must be meant for freudian materialism.
Contemporary atheist movement is supported by a similar conception of materialism. It declares that all the spiritual feelings are nothing else than the results of chains of material situations, and so, they are the direct consequences of causes which are historically and psychologically able to be determined. It's a totally deterministic conception of the human existence with all its accessories: culture, religion, faith, morality, ethics. According to Freud (and also according to his predecessors Darwin and Marx, and also to contemporary atheist opinion leaders) all the human events are strictly determined products, which find in themselves the same necessity of their being. There's no freedom, in the process that made these human "products" become what they are. According to Freud, man is not free to decide what to wish, what to desire. So, we must recognize that freudian materialism supposes also a naturalistic worlview, where all the facts have to be explained with the same rigid nature laws. As it's known, there's no freedom in nature; all the creatures and the vegetable organisms attend to universal material necessities.
Marzio Valdambrini