Old and Dirty Gods

Religion, Antisemitism, and the Origins of Psychoanalysis

Pamela Cooper-White

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351816410
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Freud's collection of antiquities—his "old and dirty gods"—stood as silent witnesses to the early analysts' paradoxical fascination and hostility toward religion. Pamela Cooper-White argues that antisemitism, reaching back centuries before the Holocaust, and the acute perspective from the margins that it engendered among the first analysts, stands at the very origins of psychoanalytic theory and practice.

The core insight of psychoanalytic thought— that there is always more beneath the surface appearances of reality, and that this "more" is among other things affective, memory-laden and psychological—cannot fail to have had something to do with the experiences of the first Jewish analysts in their position of marginality and oppression in Habsburg-Catholic Vienna of the 20th century. The book concludes with some parallels between the decades leading to the Holocaust and the current political situation in the U.S. and Europe, and their implications for psychoanalytic practice today.

Covering Pfister, Reik, Rank, and Spielrein as well as Freud, Cooper-White sets out how the first analysts' position as Europe's religious and racial "Other" shaped the development of psychoanalysis, and how these tensions continue to affect psychoanalysis today. Old and Dirty Gods will be of great interest to psychoanalysts as well as religious studies scholars.

Part I
Religion and Freud’s Vienna circle

Chapter 1
“So, you have seen the gang now”

The Wednesday Night Psychological Society

Freud’s Wednesday Night Psychological Society initially was comprised of four members in addition to Freud himself, all physicians: Alfred Adler, Max Kahane, Rudolf Reitler, and Wilhelm Stekel. They quickly grew in number, handpicked from the larger public circle around Freud—who regularly attended his lectures at the university and demonstrated a desire to study more deeply. These first analysts became a close-knit “circle of friends.”¹ Early members (prior to the reorganization of the Society in October, 1908) included physicians Paul Federn, Eduard Hitschmann, Rudolf Reitler, Maximilian Steiner, and Isidor Sadger (the latter two being the earliest to actually practice psychoanalysis). Freud was eager to expand the group to non-medical intellectuals as well, including the music critics David Bach and Max Graf (the father of “Little Hans”),² Hugo Heller (Freud’s publisher), and the anti-establishment columnist Fritz Wittels (Sadger’s nephew, and close associate of the acerbic cultural critic Karl Kraus).³

By 1910 the membership included Sándor Ferenczi (a brilliant Hungarian who straddled the worlds of Budapest and Vienna), Victor Tausk and Hanns Sachs (both lawyers who had turned to writing), Carl Furtmüller (a socialist city school inspector and friend of Adler’s),⁴ Margarete Hilferding (a general practitioner of medicine and the first woman analyst), and Baron Alfred von Winterstein (a philosopher).⁵ Distinguished international visitors included psychiatrists Carl (“C. G.”) Jung, Ludwig Binswanger, Max Eitingon, and Karl Abraham⁶ from Zürich; Ernest Jones from London; and Abraham (“A. A.”) Brill from the United States.⁷

For all of them, psychoanalysis had become “die Sache” (“the cause”).⁸ As Louis Rose points out, many of the early members had begun as students caught up in the Jung Wien movement—characterized by disillusionment and outrage toward the inertia of the Viennese establishment and its lip service to liberalism and democracy. Rose writes:

Moral outrage at the world provided them with a dissenting consciousness and a sense of mission. It did not, however, endow them with a critical method or a positive commitment. The psychoanalytic movement channeled their personal mission into a collective cause, and their moral rage into intellectual radicalism. At the furthest reaches of moral criticism, their explorations and questioning led to Freud’s circle, and the science of psychoanalysis.⁹

Therefore, culture—including religion—was from the beginning a subject of investigation, however counterintuitive it might seem now through a lens of twenty-first-century empirical psychology.

No topic was considered out of bounds: “biology, animal psychology, psychiatry, sociology, mythology, religion, art and literature, education and criminology, even the association and psychogalvanic experiments.”¹⁰ This had been Freud’s attitude from the beginning, and in his 1926 pamphlet The Question of Lay Analysis, he continued to view psychoanalysis as more than a clinical theory, but also as Kulturwissenschaft (a “science of culture”)¹¹: “[A]nalytic instruction would include branches of knowledge which are remote from medicine and which the doctor does not come across in his practice: the history of civilization, mythology, the psychology of religion and the science of literature.”¹²

While absolute conformity was not required, their discussions have the ring of a seminar of students who are all sparring to get the “right” interpretation of the teacher’s lecture. In his autobiography, Stekel referred to himself (following a brief analysis with Freud for some sexual difficulties)¹³ as “the apostle of Freud who was my Christ!”¹⁴ Graf compared the group’s reverence for Freud with religious devotion, and the early years as a period of unity and commitment:

There was an atmosphere of the foundation of a religion in that room. Freud himself was its new prophet who made the theretofore prevailing methods of psychological investigation appear superficial. Freud’s pupils—all inspired and convinced—were his apostles. Despite the fact that the contrast among the personalities of this circle of pupils was great, at that early period of Freudian investigation all of them were united in their respect for and inspiration with Freud.¹⁵

This was not hyperbole. Freud at least once referred to himself in a 1910 letter as a “Menschenfischer”—a “fisher of men” (echoing the Gospel of Matthew 4:19).¹⁶ Karl Abraham, also, after visiting the Vienna group for the first time in December, 1907, made a comparison to religious devotion in a letter to Max Eitingon: “Sadger is like a Talmud-disciple; he interprets and observes every rule of the Master with orthodox Jewish severity.”¹⁷ Freud himself attributed this to Sadger’s character, saying in a letter to Jung that Sadger was a “congenital fanatic of orthodoxy, who happened by mere accident to believe in psychoanalysis rather than in the law given by God on Sinai-Horeb.”¹⁸ Even Jones, for all his admiration of Freud, seems to have had the master’s authoritarian streak in mind when writing his article “The God Complex”—noting characteristics of aloofness and “solitary grandeur,” and concluding with the observation that “as a rule they are atheists, and naturally so because they cannot suffer the existence of any other God.”¹⁹

The impression of deference to Freud’s views is reinforced by the typical flow of the evening’s conversation.²⁰ The group would gather over coffee and cake, and have a smoke. There might be a brief business meeting. A speaker (either one of the group or a guest) would usually present a paper, and then the group would go after the speaker with hammer and tongs. As noted in the Introduction, the order of speakers was decided (until 1908) by drawing lots from an urn.²¹ Finally, after enough heat had been generated and the fog of cigar smoke was impenetrable,²² Freud would conclude the evening with his own remarks, evaluating both the speaker’s presentation and the other members’ comments. In Nunberg’s words, “It was a process of give-and-take which took place in these discussions. Naturally, Freud gave more than the others could take.”²³ Graf recalled that “the last and decisive word was always spoken by Freud himself.”²⁴ It was an atmosphere of devotion to the master, made tolerable for such professional men by the heady intellectual excitement of new and daring ideas.

Rising tensions: 1907–08

At the same time, there were also infamous ruptures in the group’s cohesion. Some quarrels, Freud, believed, were a result of resistance to the psychoanalytic ideas he proposed:

[T]hey could not breathe in the sticky atmosphere of the dark underground, of the “sewers,” as it were, but longed to bask in the bright sunshine on the surface. Of course, all of us would prefer to breathe fresh air, were it possible for the psychoanalyst to indulge in surface psychology. As was to be expected, those who preferred surface psychology soon abandoned psychoanalysis altogether.²⁵

The term “surface psychology” was leveled at Sadger (by Stekel),²⁶ and eventually at Adler and anyone else who did not strictly adhere to the Freudian shibboleths of unconscious conflict, infantile sexual development and the oedipal crisis, and the role of psychoanalysis in uncovering them. Around 1908, a combination of personal and theoretical disputes led to irreconcilable differences, beginning with Adler, and soon thereafter with Stekel.

All too often as fissures developed, members of the group, including Freud himself, would attribute the opposing point of view to that member’s psychopathology, using the tools of “wild analysis” as a weapon.²⁷ At the same time, there was some real pathology among the members, some of whom may have joined, at least in part, to seek their own therapy. As Nunberg wrote in his introduction to the minutes,

We have learned from our analyses that in order to heal inner conflicts it is necessary first to bare their sources and thus to understand them. We have also learned that we often project our own conflicts onto the external world. It seems safe to assume that the urge of these men to understand and heal their fellow men reflected to a great extent their own need for help.²⁸

And there were suicides.²⁹ This was not so uncommon among German-speaking European intellectuals, and in highly cultured circles suicide was not regarded with the same stigma that we often view it today.³⁰ Some of the suicides among the group were courageously taking the choice of when and how to die into their own hands as a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Permissions
• Introduction
• PART I Religion and Freud’s Vienna circle
• PART II The major contributors
• PART III The shadow of antisemitism
• Index