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The rather chilly reception that the majority of psychoanalysts have accorded the subject of religion is only recently beginning to undergo an alteration. Even so, only some 15-20% of psychiatrists and psychoanalysts harbor a lively interest in religion and, again, it is only in very recent times that they have been openly willing to aver and defend their interest. Certainly it was Freud's original condemnation of religion as a neurosis of the masses that resulted in the disdain of psychoanalysts for the study of the subject — surely an ironic situation when one considers the religious attitudes those very analysts displayed towards the Freudian gospel. But Freud too showed a more charitable attitude to religion as he grew older and lavished no small effort on the matter. Now we see a determined undertaking on the part of some analysts to undo the negative effect of Freud's early antipathy and to study the history and meaning of religion in the course of human evolution.
Judaism and Psychoanalysis, a collection of essays edited and enlarged on by Mortimer Ostow, is a series of contributions by some of the relatively small number of psychoanalysts who find the field worthy of their consideration. The quality of these essays is uniformly high and very interesting. We find herein some valuable technical points, e.g., that the analysis of a Jewish patient is not complete without a thorough investigation of how he deals with his Jewish identity. Those who have studied Theodore Reik's early book on Ritual will soon see how far psychoanalysis has advanced in its study of religion.
The contribution of Leonard R. Sillman, “Monotheism and the Sense of Reality,” may be of particular value to the skeptics, since Sillman “rejected Judaism as a religion early in life and … associated himself with what Freud called the scientific “Weltanschauung and its atheism.” It is striking to read his observations that “monotheism has unknowingly encouraged the development of the sense of reali