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Figure 4. A personal dialectic interpretative framework
Pfister pioneered religious and psychoanalytic engagement holding together conflicting
paradigms through personal relationship with Freud. His work and letters reveal an
oscillation between the two in the form of a personal dialectic, as illustrated by the zig-zag
central section of figure 4. While Pfister’s work was pioneering and linked to his close
friendship with Freud, it does lack a critical dimension, the exception being his The Illusion
of a Future (Pfister 1993), his response to Freud’s provocative The Future of an Illusion
(Freud 1927). Fromm was a later pioneer that adopted such a dialectical approach, but who
added a breadth and depth of critical insight missing in Pfister (Fromm 1950, 1957, 1963,
1967; Suzuki, Fromm, and DeMartino 1960).
Many of the psychoanalysts identified in the chapters that form part B (as well as chapter
three, part A) adopted this approach. This dialectic framework was transitional and more
prevalent in the early history of psychoanalysis. The disadvantage of this approach was that
it allowed people to keep two aspects of the self, the psychoanalytic and the
religious/spiritual in separate compartments, with the potential to perpetuate an unhealthy
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