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Members of contiguous groups in society, during intervals of comfort and confidence, reach out to each other in interest and friendship, but at times of crisis withdraw again. Psychoanalysis and religion share a concern with cosmology, fraternity, community, salvation, and transcendence, each defined in its own terms. Yet the early psychoanalytic community, which can be viewed as a secular sect within Judaism (Ostow, 1982), set itself in opposition to the Jewish religion as well as to all others. And Freud's disparaging views of religion induced recirprocal disparagement of psychoanalysis by the religious. Mutual antagonism between related populations with common interests have occurred frequently in history, as Freud (1921) observed.
This situation of divisiveness between similar and related disciplines, and between the adherents of these disciplines who nevertheless resemble each other in many ways, invites boundary crossing. While in the early years of psychoanalytic history, few crossed this boundary—the best known was Oskar Pfister—recently there have been a number of religious individuals like Meissner who have made a full commitment to psychoanalysis. Currently an increasing number of members of both high and low cultural groups in our society have been approaching religion with interest and enthusiasm, many psychoanalysts among them. Presumably it is this situation that has prompted Dr. Meissner to write this book.
His first task was to deal with Freud's well-known hostility to religion. Meissner attributes this hostility to Freud's oedipal ambivalence and promises to treat Freud's personal views as irrelevant to his argument, a promise not completely fulfilled. The author claims that Freud's account of the origin of religious expression is too narrow, and that modern findings concerning narcissism and object relations permit us to appreciate "the integrative and self-sustaining aspects of religious phenomena."
He reviews Moses and Monotheism and ob