Relatively unknown, and resident of a strongly Catholic city, Freud dared take on belief in God at a meeting in early March 1907 of the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society. He presented a paper with the title of "Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices." Most of the observations were clinical—the work of a brilliant physician connecting instances from his practice into a narrative presentation meant to convey a theoretical point of view. But at the end, when Freud mentions "the sphere of religious life," a morally argumentative strain begins to appear. The reader is told that "complete backslidings into Sin are more common among pious people than among neurotics," an incautious generalization even then (despite the inhibitions Freud had noticed among "his" neurotics) and a quaintly unsupportable one now.

When Freud approaches "religious practices," he is intelligent and helpful to the kind of scholar who is not interested in debunking, but rather in understanding man's church-going history. The "petty ceremonials" of a given religion can, he points out, become tyrannical; they manage to "push aside the underlying thoughts." He suggests that historically various "reforms" have been intended to redress "the original balance"—rescue beliefs from arid pietism. But in his concluding paragraphs Freud again makes a sweeping generalization, tries to join an analysis of psychopathology to social criticism. "One might venture to regard obsessional neurosis as a pathological formation of a religion, and to describe that neurosis as an individual religiosity and religion as a universal obsessional neurosis."