You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
EDITED, WITH AN INTRODUCTORY NOTE, BY PAUL ROAZEN, TORONTO, ONTARIO
Oskar Pfister (1873-1956) was a pastor in Zurich (Zulliger, 1966) when in 1928, while practising as an analyst, he published a respectful reply to Freud's The Future of an Illusion(Freud, 1927). According to one of the letters from Freud to Pfister that have so far appeared in print, Freud's The Future of an Illusion 'had a great deal to do with' Pfister. Freud also said that he 'had been wanting to write it for a long time, and postponed it out of regard for' Pfister (Freud, 1963, p. 109). Assuming that it remains true in all questions of intellectual history that in order to understand a text we must appreciate the opponents that a thinker had in mind, then to appreciate the context of Freud's argument in The Future of an Illusion we have to know more about Pfister's own position, against which Freud said he was reacting.
Pfister's reply to Freud has until now not appeared in English. This has to be striking, since so much attention in recent years has been devoted to the problem of psychoanalysis and religion, and to the issue of the ways in which Freud might have been unduly biased against religions convictions (Erikson, 1969); (Fromm, 1950); (Meissner, 1984). Pfister's 'The Illusion of a Future' appeared in Freud's journal Imago, and is a sign of Freud's willingness to tolerate disagreement within his movement.
Freud did not always stick to his thesis as eventually expressed in The Future of an Illusion. In his case history of the 'Wolf-Man', for example, Freud (1918) had sounded quite differently disposed:
Apart from these pathological phenomena, it may be said that in the present case religion achieved all the aims for the sake of which it is included in the education of the individual. It put a restraint on his sexual impulsions by affording them a sublimation and a safe mooring; it lowered the importance of his family relationships and, thus, protected him from the threa