Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

consistently proclaimed atheism forms the hermeneutic principle with which Gay
understands all Freud’s writings. Gay sets his discussion in the context of debates between
science and religion, agreeing with Freud that religious answers were no longer “‘credible”
to the twentieth-century mind’ (Gay 1987: 4). Science no longer needed the metaphors of
‘faith’ or ‘belief’ to sustain its presence and impact in the world. He concludes ‘if Freud
had been a believer … he would not have developed psychoanalysis’ (Gay 1987: 31) and
while it ‘is possible to be devout and a disciple of Freud at the same time’ that was not the
case for Freud (Gay 1987: 34), ‘Freud became a psychoanalyst in large part because he was
an atheist’ (Gay 1987: 41). Gay then turns to discuss Freud as ‘godless’ through examining
his correspondence with Pfister 205 and later Christian and Jewish writers, particularly
Meissner. In the search for a dialogue between psychoanalysis and religion, 206 Gay
concludes ‘the common ground that some have discovered between psychoanalysis and
faith was a swampy, treacherous bog in which both must sink’ (Gay 1987: 111). Gay then
turns to the Jewish nature of psychoanalysis, as in keeping with his atheist paradigm Freud
could not be a religious Jew. Freud stated ‘I am as remote from Jewish religion as from all
others’ (Gay 1987: 122) yet acknowledged his cultural identity: ‘we carried that marvellous
thing in common, which – inaccessible to any analysis so far – makes the Jew’ (Gay 1987:
132f.). Gay surveys Jewish attempts to claim Freud as a religious Jew and psychoanalysis
as a Jewish science (a phrase used by Anna Freud) before concluding it ‘proved without
foundation’ (Gay 1987: 147).
205 Gay makes use of sources only available in the Freud archive held in the Library of Congress. In my search
of the Library’s Freud holdings I have not been able to trace these but they may be held with a time embargo
that Gay may have been able to overcome.
206 This list includes Tillich, Brierley, Lee, Zilboorg, Meissner, Katz, Liebman, and Fromm. While these are
the key figures mentioned in the text, there are others, and Gay offers a detailed briefly-annotated
bibliography, which shows he has widely surveyed the subject area.
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