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In his recent Mind, Medicine, and Man, Dr. Gregory Zilboorg brings all the resources of his brilliant mind and his great store of learning to the defense of Freud against those who have, wilfully or not, misread or misunderstood him. Only in the last chapter, entitled Psyche, Soul, and Religion, does his defense weaken, turning in fact into a criticism of Freud. The author asserts that Freud, when he discussed religion, abandoned the field of objective science and departed into the realm of value-judgments. In addition Dr. Zilboorg suggests a reconciliation between psychoanalysis and the theologians of the Church of Rome. To this writer it appears that the charge against Freud is ill founded and that the reconciliation is impossible.
Freud, Dr. Zilboorg's argument runs, the last of the great humanists, looked upon life and the world from the point of view of the individual only. Finding the individual fettered by the demands of civilization, he pitied him as he pitied all the unfree, and deprecated the fact that religion, the most restrictive of the aspects of civilization, needlessly added to the difficulties which opposed man's development into a free individual. Dr. Zilboorg thinks that in so doing Freud committed an error in method, because he evaluated both science and religion by the one standard of reason, which, as scientific and religious knowledge have no common denominator, is impossible.
What Freud pointed out in The Future of an Illusion was that religious knowledge was not knowledge properly speaking, that it was vouchsafed only to the few, that it depended on revelation rather than investigation, and that, not being a one-to-one correspondence of our ideas with reality, it was not verifiable. Only those who experience the religious emotion