Freud tells the story of a physician who wrote to him telling of a religious experience. The physician had been a believer, until one day the corpse of a 'sweet old woman' came into his surgery. In an instant, it seemed to him impossible to believe anymore. Except that later that day a voice in his head told him not to doubt God. And over the next few days, proof of God's existence seemed to come to him from all around. He wrote to his 'brother' physician, Freud, to ask him to pray fervently that he too might believe.

Freud analyses the letter thus. The 'sweet old woman' unconsciously reminded the physician of his mother (only this explains why for the horrors he would have seen as a doctor it was this relatively mild one that struck him with such force). That she is dead causes an Oedipal reaction, whereby he blames God/Father for the death and ceases to believe. The voice though is an Oedipal counter-current, a God/Father warning him against such a revolt. This precipitates his religious experience. That the cause is Oedipal is sealed for Freud by the fact that the physician referred to him as 'brother' (a lovely example of Freud noticing a detail that tells, as it were, all).

I have sometimes wondered why no enterprising journalist, as far as I know, hasn't had a dig around in Richard Dawkins' past in order to find the cause of his revolt against religion. But perhaps there is no need. It is all there in The God Delusion. A little analysis draws attention to three psychoanalytically significant things that stand out in the book.

The first, that one can be certain God does not exist. With science, Dawkins has killed him. This, of course, is for Freud an Oedipal slaying of the God/Father.

Second, that the book is written to convert people to atheism by 'consciousness raising', that is by encouraging them to leave their parents' religion, as Dawkins describes it, as indeed he has done. In other words, Dawkins envisages his sympathetic readers as brothers and sisters and his writing as a method of acquiring a new family.

Third - and this perhaps is the telling detail - in the preface Dawkins begins with a reference to his wife (the quote is 'As a child...' which is to say that, like the Mother, she is innocent of any actions of the God/Father); and ends by thanking her for coaxing him 'through all my hesitations and self-doubts, not just with moral support and witty suggestions for improvement, but by reading the entire book aloud to me, at two different stages in its development, so I could apprehend very directly how it might seem to a reader other than myself.' This excessive exercise (twice) in objective assurance ('a reader other than myself') from an innocent, consolatory female (his wife) is the maternal figure, and completes the picture in Dawkins' religio-psychic drama.

The analysis? Dawkins' atheism is grounded in a psychological murder of the God/Father. That much is not interesting. But he plays out the Oedipal ramifications of this act in a particularly striking way. The guilt is buried in the consolation he finds from his wife (had she only agree to read it through, say, once or had Dawkins not successful resolved his doubts in the transference between them during that process, then who knows: the book might never have been sent to his agent). That the book justifies such an Oedipal reading is sealed in the description of his envisaged audience, 'brothers and sisters', or in Oedipal terms, those with whom he shares his crime. For Dawkins, the Oedipal counter-current manifests itself not in hearing divine voices but in an unquestioning commitment to a new paternal figure/institution, namely modern science (note the element of trust in science that is necessary to make this commitment, since science alone does not disprove God/murder the Father, only makes God's existence/Father's survival improbable). Science is Dawkin's adoptive Father figure now that he has done away with the old one.

Thus, Dawkins has found a completely different resolution to the Oedipus complex compared with the physician who wrote to Freud. Freud notes that such analysis cannot account for the full variety of relationships that people have to religion/God/Father. But he thinks it works in the physician's case. Maybe in Dawkins' too - and the thought of it at least amused me for half an hour. But why? Hmm. No doubt another Oedipal story...