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Pamela Cooper-White, the author of this well-researched and illuminating volume, is highly qualified to deal with her subject. Her background, interests, and training have prepared her well for writing what I believe is a landmark volume on psychoanalysis, religion, and anti-Semitism.
She is the Christiane Brooks Johnson Professor of Psychology and Religion at Union Theological Seminary in New York. An ordained priest in the Episcopal Church, she conducted the research for this volume as the Fulbright Freud Visiting Scholar in Vienna from 2013 to 2014. Her two doctorates are from Harvard University and the Institute for Clinical Social Work in Chicago (the latter a psychoanalytic, clinical, and research degree). Her interests and scholarship are wide-ranging: pastoral theology, postmodern psychoanalytic theory and practice, and intersubjectivity.
Cooper-White offers the reader two theses: First, that the views of Freud's Wednesday Night Circle were more complex and conformed less strictly to Freud's ideas than has often been assumed There was an “orthodox” tone set by Freud, a commitment to “established truth and the principles confirmed by our scientific method” (p. 32), but also a tolerance of deviations. The second thesis, unanticipated by the author, is that psychoanalysis, early on, was shaped by the anti-Semitism of the surrounding culture; “one of the most pervasive—as well as sometimes denied—social forces in twentieth century Vienna,” it inevitably suffused the thinking of Freud's circle, both consciously and unconsciously (p. 7).
Cooper-White's primary sources are (1) the minutes of Freud's Wednesday night group, which began in 1902, kept by Otto Rank from 1906 until his departure from Vienna in 1915 for military duty during World War I; and (2) the writings of psychoanalysts on the topic of religion in the journal Imago (founded in ) and other publications.