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other letters we find phrases such as “Your good shepherd’s optimism…”14; writing after a recovery from one of his operations for cancer, Freud gently chided Pfister, “[A]m I to miss the opportunity of seeing my old, but by God’s grace rejuvenated friend here?”15 In short, the frequency of such expressions gives these letters a kind of Christian coloring.
References to the New Testament include the following: “I hope you will be coming with a children’s train again. Let us alter the saying and say: Suffer me to come with the little children.”16 And a little later: “I very much liked your St. Paul [an article by Pfister]…I have always had a special sympathy for St. Paul as a genuinely Jewish character. Is he not the only one who stands completely in the light of history?”17 In another interesting passage, Freud said: “A few centuries ago we should have prescribed days of prayer for the fulfillment of our wishes [Freud would seem to be referring to the Catholic practice of saying novenas, or cycles of prayers] but nowadays all we can do is wait.”18 Here, as above, in Freud’s wording there was a sense of resignation to a loss. In a mood of greater and more concrete loss, Freud wrote to Pfister about the death of his daughter Sophie of influenza in January 1920. In the letter, he referred to her (as he did elsewhere) as his “Sunday child.”19 This reference to a child as a “Sunday child” comes out of central European Christian folk culture.20 Pfister wrote in 1922 to Freud about a book of his, a copy of which he was sending to Freud. (The book was Love in Children and Its Aberrations.) Freud replied: “…I suspect that it will be my favorite among the great creatures of your mind and, in spite of Jesus Christ and occasional obeisances to anagogics [i.e., spiritual interpretation of Scripture], the closest to my own way of thinking.”21 This is an interesting quotation, for although it was “in spite of Christ,” still Freud felt that he would find it the closest to him of Pfister’s works—or rather of Pfister’s “creatures,” a term assimilating the servant of God to God himself. A few sentences later in the same letter Freud referred to the “grim heavenly pair logos and ananke,” the two nouns being given in Greek. Logos is not of course an exclusively Christian word, but it does occur very prominently in John 1:1: “In the beginning was the Word” (Logos in the original Greek).22 Freud and Pfister discussed in their letters the relation of psychoanalysis to religion, and this is one of the most compelling aspects of their correspondence. Freud’s letter of October 9, 1918, concluded: As for the possibility of sublimation to religion, therapeutically I can only envy you. But the beauty of religion certainly does not belong to psychoanalysis. It is natural that at this point in therapy our ways should part, and so it can remain. |