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Zürich,
9.2.29
… Please allow me to return to your remark that the analysts you would like to see should not be priests. It seems to me that analysis as such must be a purely ‘lay’ affair. By its very nature it is essentially private and directly yields no higher values. In innumerable cases I have done nothing but this negative work, without ever mentioning a word about
religion. The Good Samaritan also preached no sermons, and it would be tasteless to have a successful treatment paid for in retrospect by religious obligations. Just as Protestantism abolished the difference between laity and clergy, so must the cure of souls be laicised and secularised. Even the most bigoted must admit that the love of God is not limited by the whiff of incense.
However, it seems to me that not only children but adults very frequently have an inner need of positive values of a spiritual nature, of ethics and a philosophy of life, and these, as Hartmann1 has recently so elegantly demonstrated, psychoanalysis cannot supply. Indeed, there are many who need ethical considerations, which they are not willing to modify merely by way of the transference, in order to be able to cope with their pathogenic moral conflicts. If no priest should analyse, neither should any Christian or any religious or morally deep-thinking individual, and you yourself emphasise that analysis is independent of philosophy of life. Disbelief is after all nothing but a negative belief. I do not believe that psycho-analysis eliminates art, philosophy, religion, but that it helps to purify and refine them. Forgive a long-standing enthusiast for art and humanitarianism and an old servant of God. Your marvellous life's work and your goodness and gentleness, which are somehow an incarnation of the meaning of existence, lead me to the deepest springs of life. I am not content to do scientific research on their banks, but have to drink and draw strength from them. Goethe's Wenn ihr's nicht fühlt, ihr könnt es nicht erjage