letters reveal somehow more than just tolerance for Pfister’s position. They indicate a real admiration for this “true man of God,” and an envy,
almost a longing, for Pfister’s faith. Pfister, for his part, kept his great respect for his intellectual master throughout his life unblemished by jealousy, defensive resistance, and theoretical antagonism—attitudes that characterized so many of Freud’s other intellectual relationships. I would like to suggest that one of the reasons for this was Pfister’s intuitive sensing that somewhere deep in Freud there was a longing for God and a sympathy for Christianity. How else is one to account for Pfister’s bold claim that—if Freud would only look up, as it were—“A better Christian there never was.” I very much doubt that he would have dared to use such words if his psychological and, by then, psychoanalytic intuitions hadn’t given him some basis for thinking they would strike a responsive chord. Yet Pfister’s hope—that Freud would respond to this buried desire—remained unfulfilled.
The Freud-Jung Letters: 1906-1914Although the letters exchanged by Freud and Jung between 1906 and 1914 were often concerned with technical discussion of cases and theory, plus a good deal of business (e.g., about the various journal publications coming out during this time), there were interesting personal exchanges in them nonetheless. Of course, the personal components centered on the friendship, then the tension, and finally the unpleasant break between these two powerful psychological theorists. The amount of material directly relevant to Freud and religion in these letters is hence limited, but it is still of considerable interest. To begin with, as in so many of his other letters, Freud referred not infrequently to God, and in ways that were implicitly positive. These references were in casual expressions that might be considered slips of the pen: “How am I going to work on my many, absolutely necessary scientific projects, God only knows”33; “My week’s work leaves me numb. I would invent the seventh day if the Lord hadn’t done so long ago”34; and “Why in God’s name did I allow myself to follow you into this field?”35 Moreover, Freud used a very interesting Latin expression, “corpora vilia,” in one of his letters. This expression, meaning “vile bodies” comes from the Vulgate Bible and occurs in St. Paul’s letter to the Philippians in the following passage: “[W]e shall change our vile body that may be fashioned like unto his [Christ’s] glorious body”(3:20-21).36 Here is the context in which Freud used this expression: He had just acknowledged that Jung “acutely noticed” that Freud had not fully elucidated his own dreams in The Interpretation of Dreams. About his dreams, he continued: |