Psychoanalysis and Religion

It is an infelicitous duty sometimes to warn people about books and their problems, but in this case I do not mind doing so as the publisher in question is one that is notorious for charging some of the most outrageous prices of any academic publisher. In exchange for that, one might hope--indeed, one would rightfully expect--that any book such a publisher produced would be flawlessly edited and smartly presented, but neither is the case with Early Psychoanalytic Religious Writings, eds., H.N. Malony and E.P. Shafranske (Brill, 2021), ix+181pp.

The book is an anthology of excerpts from various first-generation analysts, including Freud, Karl Abraham, Fromm, Sandor Rado, Ernest Jones (whose chapter is sophomoric and supercilious and certainly does not bear reprinting), and Wilhelm Reich. The editors offer an opening and concluding chapter, the latter itself being a reprint of an earlier publication.

Apart from the Oskar Pfister chapter, which reproduces his reply to Freud's The Future of an Illusion, most of the other chapters are such truncated abbreviations of the originals that they offer very little substance. This is certainly true of the excerpts of Fromm and Abraham, inter alia.

The other really vexing and inexcusable problem is that Brill has clearly sacked all its copyeditors, and as a result this book is littered with the most embarrassing sorts of typos, grammatical solecisms, and formatting flaws. Just to give a few examples: in some places, references are made that do not show up in footnotes or the bibliography; in several places periods are missing, so that sentences are smashed together; and in too many places to count, spelling errors abound, including most egregiously on the same page where in at least one instance a name is repeated three times, each of those times in a different spelling! Other howlers could be noted. In short, this is intolerable for a slender book costing nearly $90--and not even containing much original content, either. 

That said, the one redeeming feature here--for those who have not encountered him earlier--is that Pfister is always a delight to read, and his chapter here reminds one of the close relationship he had with Freud and his family for nearly three decades. Pfister, for those who do not know, was a Swiss pastor who not only saw no opposition between Christianity and Freud, but praised the latter as an invaluable critic of the former, saying of Freud that "you fight religion out of religion" and in so doing engage in a "smashing of idols." 

On this latter point, Adam Phillips develops it to such effect in his superlative short collection of essays, On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life. And this point is not original to Phillips. Before him, in his Terry lectures at Yale in the 1960s, Paul Ricoeur had already highlighted the anti-idolatry uses of Freud which Christians should embrace and extend to their own tradition.

Oskar is not above twigging his friend Sigmund by noting that Freud's fellow Jew, Jesus of Nazareth, had "practiced psychoanalysis 1900 years before." But Pfister ends by noting that Freud is in fact following Jesus very closely when both of them are "united in a strong faith, the credo of which says: 'The truth will make you free'" (p.148), a quote from John's gospel that Erich Fromm will also use in the same way in his book Beyond the Chains of Illusion: My Encounter with Marx and Freud.