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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 a