The title of this book was inspired by Sigmund Freud's letter of October 9, 1918, to Oskar Pfister: “Quite by the way, why did none of the devout create psychoanalysis? Why did they have to wait for a completely godless Jew?” The book consists of a series of lectures Peter Gay delivered at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati in December 1986. The addition of extensive footnotes and an impressive bibliography makes this work a scholarly treatment of the enigmatic relationship between Freud and religion and an intriguing portrayal of Freud as the iconoclastic, atheistic Jew.

Gay's introduction, entitled “Science Against Religion: ‘Clericalism, There's the Enemy,’” is a studied presentation of the proponents of scientific theory and their encounters with organized religion, especially the formative debates. In subsequent chapters he richly illustrates the intense dialectic in the early brotherhood of psychoanalysis, the quiet—and not-so-quiet—metamorphosing of the early analysts, and finally, Freud's acceptance of his Jewishness.