A forgotten Freudian: The passion of Karl Stern by Daniel Burston

As a subject for biography, the psychoanalyst Karl Stern (1906–1975) presents some intriguing possibilities, and some daunting challenges. He converted

from his family's Judaism to a fervent embrace of Catholicism, and announced this conversion in a published spiritual autobiography, while insisting on his continued identity as both a Jew and a psychoanalyst, and he argued that, when properly understood, psychoanalysis and Catholicism were perfectly compatible. Furthermore, despite being widely hailed by some and sharply criticized by others in the period from the publication of his first book in 1950 to his death in 1975, he is largely unknown today. He thus offers some rich paradoxes to explore, and provides abundant material about his own psychic state to help with this exploration. In this volume, Daniel Burston tries to explain both how Stern arrived at his idiosyncratic views on psychoanalysis and religion, and how he came to be forgotten so quickly. These efforts are usually thought‐provoking, though not always successful.

Burston's work pursues several agendas simultaneously, and therein lie some difficulties. It can be read as a psychological biography, as a treatise on religious identity in general and on Jewish‐Catholic relations in particular, or as an endorsement of a particular strain in psychiatric and psychoanalytic theory. These efforts run concurrently for the most part, and the text does not integrate them as much as it simply alternates among them.

As a biography, this work might be expected to fit neatly in the genre of psychohistory; the author is a psychologist, the subject is a psychoanalyst who had two analyses of his own and who left extensive written accounts of his own psychology, and the theoretical sections draw heavily on the works of Erik Erikson. However, apart from the effort to explain Stern's religious conversion, the biography offers surprisingly little in the