Religion and Psychoanalysis*

No one of us would be at this conference on religion and psychiatry if we believed that religion and psychoanalysis as we understand them were completely irreconcilable. We are assembled for subtler and deeper purposes than wholesale damnation or sanctification of religion or of psychoanalysis. But our topic candidly admits that the issue, as raised by the general public and by some segments of the professions we represent, needs a different kind of consideration from that which it has recently received in the public eye.

We may review some of the most prominent recent attacks on psychoanalysis in the name of religion. Following her conversion to Roman Catholicism, Clare Booth Luce published three articles entitled “The Real Reason” in McCall's magazine early in 1947. While asserting that she did not wish to attack the helpfulness of psychoanalysis, the tone of her treatment may be gathered from this sentence, “Above all, the profoundest mischief of the analyst is the notion he has spread abroad that God is a cowardly concept man invented to keep from giving himself that final pull at his bootstraps which will land him in the millenium.” Mrs. Luce's conversion to Roman Catholicism was in large measure through Msgr. Fulton J. Sheen.

During Lent a year ago Msgr. Sheen, preaching at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York, was reported in the New York Times and New York Herald-Tribune as having attacked psychoanalysis on religious and moral grounds. Apparently the text of the sermon was not released to the press. Numerous protests were then made, by psychoanalysts and psychiatrists, and by at least one group of Protestant clergy in New York.

In June of 1947 Cosmopolitan magazine published two articles on psychoanalysis and religion. That by Gretta Palmer admitted that psychiatry was all right but suggested that psychoanalysis was against God. The companion article, by Howard Whitman, asserted that there is no basic contradictio