In so doing, the idea forces itself upon him that religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis, and he is optimistic enough to suppose that mankind will surmount this neurotic phase, just as so many children grow out of their similar neurosis.

This line comes from Freud’s late, explicitly cultural writings in which he applied psychoanalytic concepts to religion and civilization. In the late 1920s, after World War I and amid intense European debates about secularization, Freud argued that religious belief functions psychologically as a wish-fulfilling protection against helplessness and fear. In this work he contrasts a “scientific” worldview with religious explanations and frames religion as a developmental stage in humanity’s mental life. The remark appears in the course of assessing whether the consolations of religion are worth their costs, and whether modern societies might eventually replace religious authority with rational inquiry.

Freud likens religion to a “childhood neurosis” to emphasize his view that religious practices and doctrines resemble compulsive, anxiety-managing patterns: they provide comfort, impose rules, and offer a sense of protection, but at the price of dependence and inhibited maturity. By calling it a phase that humanity may “surmount,” he casts secular, scientific thinking as an analogue to psychological development—moving from magical or paternal reassurance toward reality-testing and autonomy. The passage is also rhetorically strategic: it presents disbelief not as mere negation but as a hopeful prognosis of collective maturation, while implying that religion persists because it satisfies deep emotional needs rather than because it is evidentially warranted.