A Godless Jew: Freud, Atheism and the Making of Psychoanalysis

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Summary: Freud the Scientist, the Atheist, the Jew
Review: In 1918, Sigmund Freud posed the following question in a letter to his unlikely Swiss friend, the Christian pastor and lay analyst Oskar Pfister: "Quite by the way, why did none of the devout create psychoanalysis? Why did one have to wait for a completely godless Jew?" It is this question that provides both the epigraph and the intellectual predicate for "A Godless Jew," Peter Gay's erudite, brief and readable exploration of the relationship between Freud's atheism and his seminal, world-changing innovations in how mankind came to view the human mind in the twentieth century.

Subtitled "Freud, Atheism, and the Making of Psychoanalysis," Gay's short book was originally embodied in three lectures delivered at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati in December 1986. It is an attempt, in Gay's words, "to translate [Freud's] two light-hearted rhetorical questions into three propositions." Gay states these propositions as follows:

"It was as an atheist that Freud developed psychoanalysis; it was from his atheist vantage point that he could dismiss as well-meaning but futile gestures all attempts to find common ground between faith and unbelief; it was, finally, as a particular kind of atheist, a Jewish atheist, that he was enabled to make his momentous discoveries."

After an introduction exploring the late nineteenth century intellectual milieu in which science and religion did battle ("Science Against Religion: 'Clericalism, There's the Enemy'"), wherein Gay succinctly draws a counterpoint between the thought of William James and Freud, "A Godless Jew" successively examines each of Gay's three propositions.

Chapter One ("The Last Philosophe: 'Our God Logos'") advances the notion that Freud was a child of the Enlightenment, a confirmed atheist who rejected all belief in supernatural faith as inconsistent with the scientific method. "Freud appropriated the whole range of the Enlightenment's agenda, its ideals and its methods, its very language." In doing so, Freud saw his mission, like that of the Philosophes who preceded him more than a century earlier, as one of "awaken[ing] the world from the enchantment in which the magicians and priests had held it imprisoned since pagan antiquity."

Chapter Two ("In Search of Common Ground: 'A Better Christian Never Was'") examines the antagonistic relationship between psychoanalysis and religion, an antagonism adumbrated by Freud himself: "Analysis produces no new world view. But it does not need one, for it rests on the general scientific world view with which the religious one remains incompatible." It also examines, however, the way in which many religious thinkers (including Freud's friend Pfister and the brilliant Paul Tillich) managed to absorb psychoanalysis into Christianity and Judaism through a syncretic legerdemain that simultaneously exasperates and amuses.

Chapter Three ("The Question of a Jewish Science") explores the relationship between Freud the Jew and Freud the scientist, for while Freud may have denied the existence of God, he never denied that he was a Jew. The question for Gay, then, is not one of Freud's Jewish identity, but "just what share that identity could have had in the making of psychoanalysis." In exploring the way in one may speak of the presence or absence of a "Jewish quality" in psychoanalysis, Gay examines the professional, intellectual, tribal, and sociological meanings of such a quality. It is an interesting, if at times unsatisfying, discussion that fails to provide the reader with a conclusion more definitive than Gay's statement that "Freud was a Jew, but not a Jewish scientist."