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.
Peter Gay is a historian who, in order to chronicle the development of psychoanalysis, has undertaken psychoanalytic training so that he knows the subject well. His views, if one disagrees with them, cannot be dismissed as uninformed. In this book he addresses himself to the question that Sigmund Freud teasingly posed to his friend Oskar Pfister: 'Why did none of the devout create psychoanalysis? Why did one have to wait for a completely godless Jew?' Although Freud assumed that the point was made in asking the question, Gay sets himself the task of answering it.
Actually the author starts the book with an extensive discussion of the continuing struggle between science and religion, that started after the French Revolution, and he classes Freud with the last of the philosophers, 'a loyal son of the Enlightenment'. He then provides an account of the responses of the religious to psychoanalysis, some hostile, some conciliatory, and of the psychoanalytic critique of religion. The central concern of the book, the attempt to provide answers to Freud's questions, occupies no more than 50 pages of the text. Therefore, even if one doesn't accept the argument or value it, the reader can learn much from the sophisticated and learned discussion of the history of the confrontation between psychoanalysis and religion, and the background against which it took place.
Gay argues that psychoanalysis could have been discovered only by an atheist, that it was Freud's atheism that made the discovery possible. I find his argument less than persuasive. It consists essentially of demonstrating that Freud advertised himself as an uncompromising atheist, and – although earlier in the book he affirmed that parallels prove nothing – of comparing him with Darwin, a man whose atheism liberated him too from religious restraints to original thinking. Although Gay speaks of Newton earlier in the book, he does not adduce him here as a contrary example.
Just as troublesome is the fact that G