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Appendix 3. Oskar Pfister and the unpublished Freud/Pfister correspondence
Pfister (1873-1956), while identified by Alexander as one of forty psychoanalytic pioneers,
is not well known and no biography of Pfister exists (Alexander, Eisenstein, and Grotjahn
1966). Lee is preparing to publish a biography drawing on his PhD thesis ‘Of the Spirit and
Of the Flesh: The Life and Work of Oskar Robert Pfister (1873-1956), Protestant Pastor,
Pedagogue, and Pioneer Psychoanalyst’ (Lee 2005).
Born in 1873 in Zurich and despite his father’s death when Pfister was three years old, he
was shaped by his father’s Christian background, his role as a Protestant pastor, and his
training as a physician to help his parishioners. Little is subsequently known until Pfister
began his academic and theological trainings. Pfister studied theology, philosophy,
psychology, pedagogy, and the history of religion at Basel (1891-1892, 1893-1894) and
Zürich (1892-1893, 1894-1895). In 1896 he also attended lectures in psychiatry in Berlin.
Pfister records breaking off an academic career to follow his vocation to meet the pastoral
needs of people through active service as a minister of religion, and in 1902 moved to the
prestigious Predigerkirche in Zurich, as part of the the Reformed Church of the Canton
Zurich. The Reformed Church was hugely influenced by the development of new
theological trends initiated by Schleiermacher and Ritschl. Pfister’s theology was
theologically liberal in focus. Here he had tenure, a fact that was to become significant in
his subsequent advocacy for psychoanalysis at a time when many in the wider church would
have utterly opposed such ideas.
Pfister found that ‘theology, whether historical, systematic or practical failed to meet my
burning need … to fill men with Christian love and make them instruments of Divine love’
(Pfister 1948: 21). Pfister turned his academic abilities to writing and was motivated by a
concern to recast theology in the light of God’s love. ‘Throughout I was aware that
essentially I was practising the psychiatry employed with so much genius by Jesus’ (Pfister
1948: 21). In 1908 ‘I became acquainted with Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis. I found
myself unable to agree with its philosophy and its at first materialist and later agnostic
background; but I felt powerfully attracted by many of its scientific aspects … I tried
forthwith to apply these discoveries in my Ministry’ (Pfister 1948: 23). They met in Vienna
in 1909 and out of this friendship Pfister began his pioneering role of applying
psychoanalysis to a theology based on love as the ultimate expression of God. They also
started their life-long correspondence.
Subsequent research in the archives of the Freud Museum, London, identified the dates of
the unpublished letters by comparing their list of dates with those in the published book.
The edited letters were identified by a close reading of the text and noting which letters
contained ellipses. Research at the Sigmund Freud collection at the University of Essex, 571
revealed correspondence between Ernst and Anna Freud about the Freud/Pfister letters and
the archive also contained some typed transliterations from Freud’s handwritten, and often
difficult to read, Gothic German script. The list of letters was still incomplete but
571 The Sigmund Freud collection is held at the Albert Sloman library, University of Essex, on behalf of
Sigmund Freud Copyrights, administered by the literary agents Marsh Patterson Ltd. In 1960 Ernst Freud had
selected and published 315 of Freud’s letters spanning 1873-1939, out of a possible 4,000 (Freud 1960). Many
of these remain under embargo in the Freud Archive, held at the American Library of Congress.
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