Religious ideas are collective fantasies of normal people, not neurotic symptoms.

Evidence

Fromm’s social-psychological procedure was to conceive of ideas on the basis of the lives and destinies of human beings. He insisted that religious ideas could not be reduced to pathological symptoms by analogy with psychoanalytical individual psychology, but had to be seen as the collective fantasies of normal' peoplethat is, human beings on whose psychic situation reality has an incomparably greater influence than it does on those who are neurotic’. … Fromm was clearly guided by the following logic: the real infantile situation of childhood, which neurotic individuals are fixated on in one form or another, comes to an end at some point. A thorough elimination of the illness was therefore possible, and there was some purpose in helping the patient. Class society, however, which condemned the greater part of its members to be infantile, was a lasting reality against which rebellion was understandable but was in no way more rational than psychic acceptance of it, just as the child’s rebellion against its father was understandable but was in no sense more adapted to reality than respecting and valuing its parents. For this reason, rebellion did not deserve to be supported. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 223

Fromm’s social-psychological procedure was to conceive of ideas on the basis of the lives and destinies of human beings. He insisted that religious ideas could not be reduced to pathological symptoms by analogy with psychoanalytical individual psychology, but had to be seen as the collective fantasies of normal' peoplethat is, human beings on whose psychic situation reality has an incomparably greater influence than it does on those who are neurotic’. … While his inquiries seemed, on the surface, to be marked by insights deepened by indignation about the increasing self-denial and psychic alienation of the masses, Fromm nevertheless took with rigid seriousness the Marxist view that being determined consciousness. By way of a general assertion (not based on any more detailed examples) that, in any group, father-hate and father-love must dominate alternately in accordance with the group’s objective life-situation, Fromm asserted that religious ideas correspond exactly to objective life-situations, and only serve to reproduce them in an absolutely functional manner. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 223

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines Fromm’s social-psychological method as distinct from applying individual psychoanalytic pathology to groups.
• XREF: Connects to the Marxian base-superstructure thesis and its critical-theory internalization in the Frankfurt School project.
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 223