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Psychoanalysis and Religion is a collection of significant papers of the late Dr. Gregory Zilboorg which represent the author's efforts to reconcile Freudian psychoanalysis and traditional religious beliefs. Although there is some of the inevitable repetition involved in any book of collected papers by the same author, this repetition tends to reinforce the reader's grasp of Zilboorg's basic point of view.
Zilboorg contended that the data obtained by psychoanalysis are as significant scientific facts as the data obtained in physics, astronomy or any other science. Religion, in his view, should not reject the scientific data of psychoanalysis, but should absorb them within its overall framework as it has done with new knowledge gleaned from the physical sciences over the centuries. He felt there was much needless controversy between religion and psychoanalysis principally because of the failure of each to recognize that the other deals with an area of life and of subject matter that is separate and apart from it.
Although the title of the volume is Psychoanalysis and Religion the discussions deal more frequently with Catholicism than with religion from a generic point of view. Many of the papers were directed to Catholic lay and religious groups. Zilboorg himself had become a convert to Catholicism after a prior conversion from Judaism to Protestantism. However, many of the points made by Zilboorg with regard to the utilization by religion of the scientific data available from psychoanalysis would apply to any religion if one sees a religion in large measure as the end product of the particular experience of a given group.
An unconscious bias appears, in this reviewer's opinion, in the occasional implication that Freud himself—without realizing it—was very much in the stream of Christian ethics and thought. In fact, were one to limit oneself to the reading of only certain essays in the volume, one would assume Freud had grown up as a Christian child rather than as a Jew