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

Professor Peter Gay (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 10, 1989 | ISBN-10: 0300046081 | ISBN-13: 978-0300046083

"A concise, pointed historical inquiry into Freud's atheism and Jewish cultural identity and their role in his development of psychoanalysis."-Library Journal "A lucid, occasionally provocative close-up of Freud-as-nonbeliever, enhanced by Gay's suave, broadly allusive handling of the historical and theological contexts."-Kirkus Reviews "In this valuable essay, Gay . . . brings great sensitivity and insight to a debate that still persists in some quarters."-Publishers Weekly "Freud . . . would have enjoyed Peter Gay's book."-John C. Marshall, New York Times Book Review "Freud himself asked why psychoanalysis had to be created by a 'completely godless Jew.' Gay elegantly and convincingly answers his question."-Choice "It is an important and welcome contribution to the vast literature that already exists on Freud and the movement that he founded."-Lee Dembart, Los Angeles Times Published in association with the Hebrew Union College Press

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The notion that psychoanalysis is somehow a "Jewish science" has brought together strange bedfellows: gentiles eager to disparage Sigmund Freud, Jews eager to claim him and his daughter, Anna Freud. Gay (The Bourgeois Experience) reviews the various claims for the Jewishness of psychoanalysis and finds them to be wholly without merit. Paradoxically, he argues that Freud's position as an outsideran atheist and Jewenabled him to pierce the taboo topics of sexuality and the unconscious which led to his momentous discoveries. In this valuable essay, Gay, a professor of history at Yale, brings great sensitivity and insight to a debate that still persists in some quarters. He disputes the idea that psychoanalysis is a form of religion, tracing Freud's roots back to Enlightenment thinkers such as Locke and Newton.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

This is a concise, pointed historical inquiry into Freud's atheism and Jewish cultural identity and their role in his development of psychoanalysis. A fair-minded, careful scholar, Gay does not engage in the kind of "wild analysis" often associated with studies of Freud's personal psychology and motives in developing his theories. Unfortunately, though, the book is rather thin and unexciting in its conclusion. Essentially, Gay emphasizes Freud's identification with the scientific attitude and with scientist predecessors such as Darwin. While Freud's Jewishness was clearly very much a part of his personal identity, his firmly rooted skepticism and critical scrutiny of religion (his atheism) seems more central to the development of psychoanalysis. Paul Hymowitz, Cornell Medical Ctr., New York
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 182 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press (September 10, 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300046081
• ISBN-13: 978-0300046083
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,212,136 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #82 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > People, A-Z > ( F ) > Freud, Sigmund

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15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Freud the Scientist, the Atheist, the Jew, January 28, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: A Godless Jew: Freud, Atheism, and the Making of Psychoanalysis (Paperback)

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."

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Quite a good start on Freud and religion, October 13, 2009

By 

Dick Marti (Georgia, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: A Godless Jew: Freud, Atheism, and the Making of Psychoanalysis (Paperback)

I suppose that there are other more comprehensive books on Freud's views on religion, his atheism, and the effects of these on his life and on the development of psychoanalysis. But this volume provides a good start in case you need to get up to speed. The arrangement of the material is episodic by individual, in that the author more on less focuses on one of Freud's friends (or enemies, as the case may be) at a time and presents excerpts from correspondence to illustrate the relationship between the two. This results in the author having to jump back and forth thru the decades because Freud's association with his many acquaintances often lasted many decades. So, after covering one fellow from 1910 to 1930, we start with another from 1905 to 1925. This technique works on its own level because the author handles it well, but it makes it difficult for the reader to stay focused on the development of Freud's thought thru the decades. The emphasis seems to be on the other people, with Freud as the common denominator of everybody.