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himself whether the Freud who comes through fits the conventional understanding of him as a man for whom God and Christianity had no positive personal significance.
A few preliminary remarks may, however, be helpful. The Freud-Pfister relationship was both a personal friendship and a professional bond. Pfister was an active and outstanding psychoanalyst, whose character and contributions were admired not only by Freud, but by Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, and others who were frequently at serious odds with one another. Pfister remained loyal to Freud’s basic psychoanalytic ideas (as well as to Freud himself), although they did have a serious disagreement about the nature of religion. In spite of this disagreement, the mutual respect and affection between the two were never impaired, and their letters remain a tribute to the memory of each man. (The majority of the extant letters are from Freud; most of those from Pfister are missing.) As the remarks of Freud’s daughter Anna make clear, Pfister was not a friend only of Freud, but also of his family: In the totally non-religious Freud household Pfister, in his clerical garb and with the manners and behavior of a pastor, was like a visitor from another planet. In him there was nothing of the almost passionately impatient enthusiasm for science which caused other pioneers of analysis to regard time spent at the family table only as an unwelcome interruption of their theoretical and clinical discussions. On the contrary, his human warmth and enthusiasm, his capacity for taking a lively part in the minor events of the day, enchanted the children of the household, and made him at all times a most welcome guest, a uniquely human figure in his way.2 The happy evaluation was mutual. Pfister wrote Freud in 1923: It is now nearly fifteen years since I entered your house for the first time and quickly fell in love with your humanitarian character and the free and cheerful spirit of your whole family…. I felt as if I were in a divine, Olympian abode, and if I had been asked what was the most agreeable place in the world I would only have replied: ‘Find out at Professor Freud’s.’…3 In Freud’s second letter to Pfister, he wrote: In your case they [his patients] are young persons faced with conflicts of recent date, who are personally drawn towards you and are ready for sublimation in its most comfortable form, namely the religious… you are in the fortunate position of being able to lead them to God and bringing about what in this one respect was the happy state of earlier times when religious faith stifled the neuroses. For us this way of disposing of the matter does not exist.4 Let us just note that Freud spoke here of the nonreligious state as involving not a gain but a loss. |