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Given that psychoanalysis is the discipline that specializes in reasons for forgetting things, it is intriguing and ironic to come across a book with this title. Why exactly might a ‘Freudian’ be ‘forgotten’? Moreover, why would the kind of Freudian that it is worth writing a book about be forgotten by other Freudians, be forgotten by those exploring the development of psychoanalysis, and indeed by most people who had no direct contact with him? In this examination of the life of Karl Stern, who died in 1975, Daniel Burston makes an attempt both to establish that there is something worth remembering, and to give an account of why the forgetting might have happened in the first place. Whilst these are separate issues - Stern's ideas about the value of psychoanalysis in public health systems or perhaps his advocacy of a ‘poetic’ and intuitive mode of understanding might in themselves be worthy of reprise, and his book The Pillar of Fire (1951) was much admired when it was published and is still read - the main reason both for the forgetting and for Burston's attempt to provoke remembrance is the same. This is that Stern, who might have been a Freudian but was not actually an affiliated psychoanalyst, was a major player in trying to reconcile Freudianism with religion. And whilst there have been others working along the same lines, Stern was especially deeply committed. In addition, he made the whole situation more complex by deciding that the religion of his birth, childhood and youth was not to be the one of his adulthood; instead - having escaped Nazi Germany into the safety first of England and then Montreal - he would express this religious urge through conversion away from Judaism and into Catholicism.
Burston's account of Stern's journey is a largely sympathetic one, despite the difficulties put in his way by some of the attributes of his subject. Stern seems to have gradually developed into an awkward, distant personality, both in his family life - where there w