Letter from Oskar Pfister to Sigmund Freud, February 18, 1909

Zürich,
18.2.1909

Dear Professor,

Your letter has made the pleasure I take in the science initiated by you even greater. It was a great satisfaction to me to gather from your remarks that basically I have correctly understood the application of psycho-analysis to pastoral work. The (ethical) difference between your outlook and mine is perhaps not so great as my calling might suggest. Protestant ethics … removed the odium of immorality from sexual relations. For the Reformation was fundamentally nothing but an analysis of Catholic sexual repression, unfortunately a totally inadequate one, hence the anxiety neurosis of church orthodoxy and the concomitant phenomena-the witch trials, political absolutism, the social rigidity of the guild system, etc. We modern Evangelical pastors feel ourselves to be completely Protestant, and we are sure1 that we are much too little reformed. We are searching for a new land. Our Church leaves us Zürichers complete liberty. In ethical matters we are able to be free thinkers without being heroes. Sexual conditions, particularly in our towns, are full of hypocrisy and therefore of uncleanness. The dreadful combination of monogamy and lies and the plague of prostitution are completely clear and intolerable to us. The ideal of free love glows in us too. But what we do not see is how really free love can be combined with marriage. The dividing line between ‘free' and ‘wild' love is very hard to draw….

We shall be freed from the mass misery of neurosis and vice, not by better theories about the marriage tie, but only by an improvement in social conditions, healthier education, and a healthier outlook on life. In the meantime my only recourse is to put forward the ideal of marriage and leave it to the individual and his conscience to decide how far he will depart from it. The more one abides by the doctrine of Jesus and refrains from judgment and confines oneself quietly and