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The present enlarged edition of Freud and the Problem of God consists of the four essays in the original edition plus an additional chapter and a brief postscript. The original chapters were based on the Terry Lectures that Küng delivered at Yale in 1979. The added chapter comes from an address to the American Psychiatric Association in conjunction with the Oskar Pfister Award presented to Küng in 1986.
This edition is wisely designated “enlarged,” since it ambitions nothing in the way of a revision. The original text is left unaltered. Nonetheless, the new edition offers the opportunity to salute Rung's contribution to the debate between Freud's ideas and religion and to assess its validity in the decade following its original presentation. The value of the work rests largely on the fact that it remains the only authoritative statement to come from the pen of a leading Catholic theologian on the subject of the complex relationship between psychoanalysis and religion. As such, it carries unique weight and deserves serious consideration for its positive argument.
The first chapter is devoted to the genesis of Freud's atheism. The intellectual influence of Feuerbach and other German thinkers is traced, but the focus falls on Freud's early development and the various religious influences that played a role in his upbringing—not the least being his early education and interest in the Bible and Bible history, but also the rather strong influence of his Catholic nanny. This is by now an oft told story. One of the puzzles it involves centers on the quite devout dedication Freud's father inscribed in Hebrew, in the copy of the Phillipson Bible he gave to Freud on the occasion of his thirty-fifth birthday. The puzzle has to do with Freud's disclaimer that he knew no Hebrew, and with the picture of his family as religiously indifferent. Recent scholarship (Rice, 1990) has uncovered more details, leading to the impression that old Jacob Freud was not only a devout Jew, probably