Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

Gay’s work is less than convincing in places. First, he fails to address the limitation of
Freud’s understanding of religion and remains within a Modernist reductive paradigm. Gay
thought Freud’s understanding of religion was correct therefore he saw no need to engage
with the nature of religious and spiritual experience and ‘treats religion as a caricature of
what it is’ (Ostow 1989: 119), continuing ‘a reductionist attitude to spiritual matters within
the discipline’ (Simmonds 2004: 953). Secondly, there is considerable variation in what
Freud said about religion, especially his early Jewish origins that are not as easily dismissed
as Gay suggests (Ostow 1989). This subject has been explored in detail from both Christian
and Jewish perspectives (Yerushalmi 1991; Rizzuto 1998; Halpern 1999). 207 Fine and
Collins (Fine and Collins 1991), reviewing Gay’s acclaimed biography of Freud,
demonstrate that Gay’s views in A Godless Jew are at variance with this later work. 208
Thirdly, following Freud, Gay’s rejection of religion on the basis of it being an illusion fails
to account for the vital role illusion plays in psychic development. Gay fails to
acknowledge or make reference to Winnicott (or Bion) despite citing Rizzuto and Meissner
in whose work Winnicott plays a crucial role. 209
The significance of Gay’s work is that it suggests that psychoanalysis in the mid to late
1980s had still not fully embraced concepts by Winnicott and Bion, which were to form the
backbone of the engagement between religion, spirituality and psychoanalysis. 210 Meissner
207 Loewenberg’s review of Yerushalmi’s work is perceptive, suggesting that he so wishes to persuade us of
Freud’s Jewish identity at the other extreme from Gay, that he misses key references. He suggests most
scholars are found within the spectrum established by Gay and Yerushalmi. ‘The truth is that we need and use
… the multiple Jewish and not-so-Jewish secular Freud’ (Loewenberg 1992: 511).
208 ‘How and why did a Godless Jew discover psychoanalysis? Perhaps the answer concerns his marginality –
a Jew examining his inner and outer being during the declining Hapsburg Empire … that had repression at its
core, hypocrisy at its roots, and anti-Semitism as its perverse élan vital’ (Fine and Collins 1991: 363).
209 Another critical review was produced by Roazen (Roazen 1989).
210 Rizzuto offered a generous review concluding, ‘As a historian, Gay has presented the analytic community
with a much-needed survey of Freud's relation to religion and to his Jewishness. As Freud's partisan and
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