American Imago

Pamela Cooper-White, Christiane Brooks Johnson Professor of Psychology and Religion at Union Theological Seminary in New York, was the first person generously to suggest to me that I should apply for the Freud Fulbright she held in 2013-2014. Truly thankful, though scarcely a distant or objective reader, I learned that we had read many of the same sources, walked the same streets, been intrigued by many of the same enigmas in that strange and splendid city of Vienna. Probably we are both deeply grateful to have walked on the broken kitchen tiles and looked out the same windows Freud did when watching his children play. Cooper-White has made these experiences and questions, especially her investigation of two working hypotheses (about complexity of attitudes toward religion among Freud's earliest collaborators/disciples, and about the effects of antisemitism on these attitudes), into a story, both scholarly and engrossing, that has greatly enriched my understanding of the early years of psychoanalysis, and of course, created more questions. Freud referred to himself as a "godless Jew" and affectionately referred to his beloved collection of antiquities as his "old and dirty gods."

Cooper-White begins with the research she originally intended to do in Vienna and had expected would form the substance of her book. Her careful reading overwhelmed her original questions, transformed both her understandings of the origins of psychoanalysis, and of the whole project. First, she began to listen in on the meetings of the Wednesday Society¹, as it met first in Freud's waiting room at Berggasse 19—and later in the Café Arkaden—for its discussions of religion, her own central interest. Knowing already, as psychoanalysts and scholars of psychoanalysis usually do, of Freud's atheism, she found herself intrigued by the lively and varied discussions about religion among Freud's earliest interlocutors. She had to conclude that his infamous tendency to repress dissent came later, and always had exceptions. [End Page 279]

Cooper-White tells her story in three parts, of which the first and last hold most drama: 1) She tells the story of the early (1900-1913) Viennese/Jewish analysts around Freud, the spreading of psychoanalysis internationally, and the lively and sometimes acrimonious disputes about religion, given the dominant leadership of "a godless Jew"; 2) She tells the stories of four important figures in early psychoanalysis—specifically in relation to religion—Swiss pastor Oskar Pfister, Theodor Reik, Otto Rank, and Sabina Spielrein; and 3) she recounts the horror of Austrian anti-Semitism, with the destruction of Austria's Jews, including its psychoanalysts, after the Anschluß in 1938. She concludes with reflections on possible meanings of her story for the world to which she returned in the U.S. The four center chapters could each stand on their own, but here they make the case that religion has always been a crucial focus for many psychoanalysts.²

Cooper-White's first section, describing the early analysts from the Wednesday group meeting in Freud's waiting room at Berggasse 19 until the period of the secret ring group formed to protect the precious "movement" after the shocks of Stekel, Adler, and Jung, precipitates a large question. If religion remained such an open and mobile question in these years as it seems to have been, why did Freud take a position—religion is an infantile obsession—so unyielding, and ever more preoccupying to him? Not until the last chapters of the book do we really understand, nachträglich, as he might have said. Much as Freud claimed to be holding up psychoanalysis as science, not just as Wissenschaft, but as a method of determining truth and falsehood, Freud did not reject religion for being unscientific (in my opinion), nor for being illogical, nor even for being infantile.

Freud believed religion to be dangerous. Cooper-White makes this completely clear in the last two chapters of this important book. While his early colleagues...