Sigmund Freud thought that religion is not about people finding God but people creating God. God, he claimed, is a projection of our needs and insecurities. Commenting on the bleakness of this view Freud said “I can offer people no consolation: for at bottom that is what they are all demanding.” Whereas Freud’s most famous disciple, Karl Jung, had a completely opposite view. He said that amongst his clients who were in the second half of life there was not one who, in his opinion, was not in need of finding a religious outlook on life.
It reminds us that psychologists can be believers as much as they can be unbelievers. But one thing both Freud and Jung agreed on was, as the philosopher Pascal said, that there is still a God shaped hole in the human heart that nothing else in life can ever fully satisfy.