Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

1973) 10 ; the anti-Semitism of bourgeois Vienna (Schorske 1981; Frosh 2004); his marriage
to Martha (from an orthodox and religiously observant Jewish household) (Behling 2006);
his avid collection of religious, pagan and mythological antiquities (Gamwell and Wells
1989; Armstrong 2005; Burke 2006); his visits to Rome, the Acropolis and other sites of
religious importance (Breger 2000); his writings covering a wide range of religious topics,
demonstrating Freud’s knowledge of the Bible and use of biblical allusions, metaphors, and
illustrations (Rainey 1975); 11 his life-long friendship and correspondence with Pfister as a
Protestant minister of religion (Johannaber 1953; Irwin 1968, 1973a, 1973b; Brown 1981;
Lee 2005); his early fascination with occultism (Reik 1921; Ansell 1966; Cornell 1990); and
his final major book Moses and Monotheism (1939). 12 From the start of Freud’s life to the
very end, religious issues were vitally important and a puzzle he never solved, with his later
writings focusing on issues beyond the purely clinical domain. Freud always saw
psychoanalysis moving beyond scientific and medical disciplines ‘since it touches on other
spheres of knowledge and reveals unexpected relations between them’ (Freud 1913: 165).
He established Imago in 1921 13 as a journal to engage in dialogue with disciplines such as
anthropology, philosophy, literature, theology, and linguistics. 14
10
This features significantly in accounts of the Christian influences found in Freud’s thought (Vitz 1988;
Rizzuto 1998).
11
Although not part of this thesis, in my immersion into the subject I read all twenty-four volumes of Freud’s
Standard Edition and produced a commentary of his religious reference, metaphors, and allusions.
12
Also discussed in chapter eleven.
13
This lasted until 1937. A different journal American Imago was founded by Freud and Hanns Sachs in 1939,
subtitled ‘Psychoanalysis and the Human Sciences’.
14
Anna Freud continued with this vision. Kohut quotes from a letter by Anna Freud in reply to a question sent
by the son of an analytic colleague asking about the essential qualities of an analyst. ‘If you want to be a real
psychoanalyst you have to have a great love of the truth, scientific truth as well as personal truth, and you
have to place this appreciation of truth higher than any discomfort at meeting unpleasant facts, whether they
belong to the world outside or to your inner world. Further, I think that a psychoanalyst should have …
interests … beyond the limits of the medical world … in facts that belong to sociology, religion, literature,
[and] history, … [otherwise] his outlook on … his patient will remain too narrow’ (Kohut 1968: 553).
10