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Among the psychoanalytic books that deal with outstanding historical personalities, the book under review is unique. A psychoanalytic study of the life of a saint has, to my knowledge, never been undertaken before. The psychoanalytic book that comes closest to the one under discussion is Erikson's (1958)Young Man Luther. Luther and Ignatius of Loyola were contemporaries, but on the opposite side of the great divide between the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation.
In the preface, Meissner, who is a training analyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society, as well as a member of the Society of Jesus, explains the autobiographical basis for this study.
Ignatius was one of the guiding spirits of my own life and career. Whatever spiritual substance and direction I have reflects my formative experience in the course of my Jesuit training—all based directly on the teachings and spiritual guidance of Ignatius. The other dominant influence in my life—this one more intellectual than spiritual—has been Sigmund Freud, the guiding spirit of my career as a psychoanalyst. My path through life has been to integrate these two disparate influences in some meaningful way—in both personal and intellectual sense [p. x].
This is the only self-referential statement in the book. Meissner never mentions the transference problem that Freud in 1930 insisted every biographer faces. We can only surmise that it was not easy for the author to accept the idea that in his psychiatric and psychoanalytic judgment the man who was his spiritual guide was near psychosis and suicidal for a significant part of his life. Nor would it have been easy to accept Freud even as an intellectual guide in view of Freud's militant atheism. The coexistence of a psychoanalytic and a deeply religious point of view is far from common (the only example known to me is that of the Protestant pastor Pfister, with whom Freud had an extensive