The Therapy of the Neuroses and Religion1

In contributing to this discussion, it is only with reluctance that I have made up my mind to gainsay the views expressed, since we know ourselves to be at one in all fundamental questions of analytic theory and practice. Will you permit me, however, to start from a somewhat wider basis?

The dangers threatening analysis are twofold: it may be discussed as a therapeutic method in the appendix of clinical manuals, or it may appear as the shallow, rehashed Weltanschauung of journalistic philosophers or philosophic journalists. (I beg you to decide for yourselves in which of the two categories you wish to put Herr Prinzhorn2 and his 'second aspect of psycho-analysis, the one concerned with a general philosophy of life'.) I perceive a tendency in the direction of the first danger in those analytic writings which consist chiefly of physiological and neurological theories, many biological points of view, and even some psychological remarks. To continue the course in either of these two opposite directions—restricting the field, and reducing it to superficiality—would lead to the end of psycho-analysis, as we understand it. The continued existence and the deepening of psycho-analysis can only be safeguarded against these risks if its character as psychological science is set in the foreground. Over-emphasis of the therapeutic side leads with logical necessity to unjustified restrictions of the significance of psycho-analysis, and in its further consequences to loss of its deepest scientific achievements. He who falls a victim to therapeutic ambition must be ready to sacrifice to it a certain amount of possible knowledge; one has only to think of people who are otherwise as diverse in the character and motivation of their change of attitude to psycho-analysis as Jung, Adler, Rank and Stekel. The other side, which treats psycho-analysis as a special kind of Weltanschauung, makes it shallow and superficial, and leads away from everything empirical towards catchword-mon