Book Review: Old and Dirty Gods: Religion,Anti-Semitism,and the Origins of Psychoanalysis

Pamela Cooper-White, the author of this well-researched and illuminating volume, is highly qualified to deal with her subject. Her background, interests, and training have prepared her well for writing what I believe is a landmark volume on psychoanalysis, religion, and anti-Semitism.

She is the Christiane Brooks Johnson Professor of Psychology and Religion at Union Theological Seminary in New York. An ordained priest in the Episcopal Church, she conducted the research for this volume as the Fulbright Freud Visiting Scholar in Vienna from 2013 to 2014. Her two doctorates are from Harvard University and the Institute for Clinical Social Work in Chicago (the latter a psychoanalytic, clinical, and research degree). Her interests and scholarship are wide-ranging: pastoral theology, postmodern psychoanalytic theory and practice, and intersubjectivity.

Cooper-White offers the reader two theses: First, that the views of Freud’s Wednesday Night Circle were more complex and conformed less strictly to Freud’s ideas than has often been assumed There was an “orthodox” tone set by Freud, a commitment to “established truth and the principles confirmed by our scientific method” (p. 32), but also a tolerance of deviations. The second thesis, unanticipated by the author, is that psychoanalysis, early on, was shaped by the anti-Semitism of the surrounding culture; “one of the most pervasive—as well as sometimes denied—social forces in twentieth century Vienna,” it inevitably suffused the thinking of Freud’s circle, both consciously and unconsciously (p. 7).

Cooper-White’s primary sources are (1) the minutes of Freud’s Wednesday night group, which began in 1902, kept by Otto Rank from 1906 until his departure from Vienna in 1915 for military duty during World War I; and (2) the writings of psychoanalysts on the topic of religion in the journal Imago (founded in 1912) and other publications.

Part I of the book focuses on the intellectual goings-on in the Wednesday Night Psychological Society from its founding to its dissolution in 1938. Part II explores the contributions of the four figures in Freud’s inner circle who were most interested in religious themes and ideas—Pfister, Rank, Reik, and Spielrein. Part III, “The Shadow of Anti-Semitism,” examines anti-Semitism as the all-pervasive context for psychoanalysis and psychoanalysts from its inception to Freud’s death in 1939.

The content of the book’s last chapter, covering the war years and postwar developments, is discussed in detail by Emily Kuriloff in Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Legacy of the Third Reich: History, Memory, Tradition (2013) and by Dagmar Herzog in Cold War Freud: Psychoanalysis in an Age of Catastrophe (2017). I would offer these three books as a trilogy on anti-Semitism and its pervasive effect on psychoanalysis.

The encounter of Freud and psychoanalysis with anti-Semitism begins with the election of Karl Lueger as mayor of Vienna in 1895 and his installation in 1897. Cooper-White then fast-forwards us to the Austrian elections of October 2013, in which a far-right political party, Freedom Party of Austria, gained ground; more recently, in 2016, it captured close to 50 percent of Austrian voters. This party and far-right parties in other European countries, including Hungary and Poland, ran on a nationalist, anti-immigrant, openly anti-Muslim, and less openly anti-Semitic and Holocaust-denying platform.

In chapter 1, Cooper-White focuses on the rising tensions, beginning in 1907, with the Swiss/Viennese sibling rivalry between Jung and Abraham, in which Freud told Abraham that though Jung and the Swiss were not “one of us,” they were needed to ensure that psychoanalysis was not viewed, and rejected, as a “Jewish science.” Cooper-White quotes Freud, writing to Abraham as a fellow Jew: “I nurse a suspicion that the suppressed anti-Semitism of the Swiss that spares me is deflected in reinforced form upon you. But I think as Jews if we wish to join in anywhere we must develop a bit of masochism, be ready to suffer some wrong. Otherwise there is no hitting off” (p. 27).

When I read this I think about 1938, when Freud asked Sterba, who was not Jewish, to remain in the Viennese Psychoanalytic Society after the Jews were forced to leave. Freud and Jones saw this as a way to preserve some presence for psychoanalysis in Vienna. Sterba, to his credit, refused.

The main dissidents during this period were Jung, Adler, and Stekel—all of whom suffered the fate of heretics, excommunication, presaging the fate of the ring-bearers Rank and Ferenczi. In the earlier years dissent was tolerated, even encouraged, by Freud. Helene Deutsch wrote that Freud had no love of “yes men.” But as a general statement, in the end it would seem that oedipal dynamics and sibling rivalry prevailed, not all because of Freud’s doing. Kenneth Eisold, notes Cooper-White, has argued that casting Freud in “the unwelcome role of the aging despot who prevents young men from getting ahead—Freud’s own words in a letter to Jung—was as much the group’s responsibility and unconscious manipulation as it was due to Freud’s own failures as a leader” (p. 58).

It is very easy to be caught up in and fascinated by the goings-on of the early psychoanalysts (the “gang”), their rivalries and infighting. At times the differences are serious, at other times less so. But we should not lose sight of the monumental works produced by Freud in this period—Three Essays, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Papers on Technique—or of the contributions of other members of the Vienna Society, including Abraham. Nor should the contributions of Jung and Adler be ignored. For me what was central to all these contributions was the discovery of a new way to understand human motivation, which has in the main stood the test of time. Most people today agree that most forms of psychotherapy still use Freud’s original concepts and insights.

That is the positive side of Freud’s legacy from this period. The negative side, as Herbert Graf tells us, is that the gathering in Freud’s home could be viewed as the founding of a religion. “Within the space of a few years,” Cooper-White quotes him, “I lived through the whole development of church history from the first sermons to a group of apostles to the strife between Arius and Athanasius” (p. 45). I have long felt that our national and local regulatory bodies (APsaA’s Board on Professional Standards, institute Education Committees) tend to function like the elders of a church.

It is clear to me, and will be to the reader, that religion is Cooper-White’s main interest here. Religion in Freud’s Vienna circle is the foreground, and anti-Semitism, though considered important, is in the background (p. 59). ¹

Chapter 2 of Old and Dirty Gods, and the chapters on the major contributors Pfister, Reik, Rank, and Spielrein, are concerned with the take on religion by psychoanalysis and psychoanalysts. Cooper-White has determined that comments on religion in the minutes of the Vienna Society run sixty-one single-spaced typed pages. She notes that the analysts living in fin de siècle Vienna were living in a world “saturated with religion” (p. 45). She examines primary sources and concludes that the attitudes of the psychoanalysts, Freud and his followers, about religion were not homogeneous—they were complex and creative.

The early discussion of religion by Freud’s circle focused on religious practices and rituals—religion as an obsessional neurosis. However, religion was also viewed positively by Freud and others, including Federn and Stekel, in regard to personal mental health. Freud wrote in 1921 that religion was “the most powerful protection against the dangers of neurosis” (p. 59), and Stekel observed that “the absolutely devout and the typically moral” cannot fall ill from neurosis (p. 58). Federn felt that religion per se does not harm except when based on the “parental complex” (p. 59). Also, religion could be viewed “as a civilizing channel—much like art—for the sublimation of instinctual drives” (p. 61). But for Freud the bottom line was still the conflict between religion and objective science.

Religion uses the postulate of an afterlife to advance asceticism and the renunciation of pleasure. Science offers the pleasure of intellectual investigation and ways to have a happier life through rational actions. Oedipal interpretations were central to the connection between the father complex and religion (Reik). Cooper-White quotes Stekel: “It is not Christianity that has burdened sexuality with the sense of guilt. It is a sense of guilt that has created Christianity. In this sense the attitude toward the father must of course be taken into account” (p. 65). Federn saw Christianity as a reaction against the exaggeration of sexuality at the end of antiquity. Oedipus, guilt, and sexuality—all have a place in the psychoanalytic view of religion.

I can offer something from my own personal history here. I grew up as a secular Jew—my father was a Bolshevik and an atheist, but after puberty and my Bar Mitzvah, I became Orthodox and observed Orthodox Jewish rituals through high school and my first year of college, when I met my wife and had less need to suppress my sexuality. Cooper-White elaborates on religion in clinical material, including references to cases by Adler, Brill, Stekel, and Hartmann. She does not include the case of the Fifth Lubavitcher Rabbi, who was treated successfully by Freud for his depression, although some believe that it was Stekel, not Freud, who treated him (see my review of Joseph Berke’s The Hidden Freud: His Hassidic Roots [Richards 2016]).

Chapter 2 also considers the attitude of psychoanalysts toward their own Jewishness. Are Jews greedy, sexually repressed, more obsessional, more neurotic than others? The author does find a tendency for some to accept the prevailing anti-Semitic stereotypes and views the predisposition of Jews to mental illness as a scientific fact. However, she also writes this: “One explanation of the tendency of Jewish analysts to speak in derogatory terms about Jews was an effort to disidentify themselves with their own roots among the ost juden—poor immigrants who were still very visible on the streets of Vienna and a frequent subject of ridicule in ‘cultured’ Viennese circles” (p. 70).

It is the case that all of Freud’s first eighteen disciples had parents or grandparents who were from Galicia. In a paper on Freud’s need not to believe (Richards 2009), I described an encounter Freud had with someone giving a talk about Jewish mysticism. At lunch he is quoted as saying, “I would rather be the Jew in the tuxedo than the Jew in the caftan.”

Thankfully, Freud’s resistance soon gave way to a surprisingly candid tract of autobiography. “I was born on the 6th of May [18]56 in Freiberg, Moravia,” Freud wrote in a letter to Federn. “My father and mother came from Galicia. My mother, née Nathansohn, from Brody, of very distinguished ancestry (the Nathansohn-Kallir family), my father of the merchant class. According to tradition, as he once reported to me, the Freud family is said to sometime have left their hometown of Köln [Cologne] during a period of persecution of Jews and then to have migrated eastward” (Grisar 2018).

Of the chapters on the major contributors, the one on the analyst-pastor Oskar Pfister is the most relevant to the author’s subject of religion. Pfister was both a psychoanalyst and a theologian. Introduced to psychoanalysis by Jung in 1908, he arranged a visit to Freud on his own the following year. His psychoanalytic writings include his own case studies, as well as psychobiographical essays. Even though he was Swiss and a member of the Zurich Psychoanalytic Society, which he helped found, he sided with Freud in the break with Jung.

His loyalty to Freud alienated him from the rest of the Swiss analytic community. Sticking to his guns, he founded the Swiss Society for Psychoanalysis in 1919. Pfister can be credited with having initiated the practice of pastoral care, combining standard psychoanalytic techniques with a more active approach and the warm, loving attitude of a pastoral counselor.

How does a “godless Jew” (Freud’s term) relate to a Christian theologian? Pfister’s response was that “he who lives in the truth lives in God and whoever strives for the freeing of love ‘dwells in God’”; he concludes his assessment of Freud with, “A better Christian there never was” (p. 94).

But Pfister insisted that his Christianity as a worldview superseded Freud’s psychoanalysis as a worldview. When in 1927 Freud published The Future of an Illusion, Pfister responded with the article “The Illusion of a Future” (1928). Pfister attributed their different takes on religion to the fact Freud grew up “in proximity to pathological forms of religion . . . while I had the good fortune to be able to turn to a free form of religion” (p. 135).

In the article Pfister counters Freud’s critique of religion. He could accept the view of religion as a neurotic compulsion, but for him this was not central to religious feeling. He could also view religion as a “wishful construct” as Freud did, but did not see religion as hostile to thought and saw religion as a “guardian of civilization for the promotion of social change and the enrichment of human life” (p. 106). Pfister asserted that The Future of an Illusion and his response agree in that both express a strong belief in the credo, “The truth shall make you free” (p. 110). With this statement the pastor and the psychoanalyst could come together.

Cooper-White closes this chapter by attempting to answer the question, “Why didn’t Freud reject Pfister?” Her conclusion is that Freud didn’t do so because he couldn’t. In this relationship, it was Freud the boy speaking, the boy who could not “put away childish things.” Pfister represented “the rebirth of the loving father/God,” the God and father “who would admire him and love him and carry his name forward in the Book of Life” (Rizzuto 1998, quoted on p. 114). This is supported, I think, by some biographical facts in regard to Freud’s relationship with his father. He had two copies of the Talmud, one his and the other his father’s, and he chose to die on a day that was both Yom Kippur and the Sabbath.

Theodor Reik was one of the most prolific psychoanalyst writers on religion.The bibliography for this chapter lists more than twenty works of his on religious subjects. Cooper-White refers to Reik’s relationship to the “hateful New York Psychoanalytic Society,” which excluded him because he was not a physician. This was a replay of his earlier experience in Vienna in 1925, where at the behest of Wagner-Jauregg he was ordered by the city authorities to stop practicing psychoanalysis.

He was able with Freud’s help to have the proscription rescinded but then was sued for malpractice by an American physician. The upshot was Freud’s The Question of Lay Analysis (1926), which put Freud and Brill at odds, Freud for and Brill against lay analysis. It was Brill’s influence in the American Psychoanalytic Association and the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute that had caused Reik’s exclusion from the society. Cooper-White presents this episode in some detail, including how it led to Reik’s founding of NPAP. But she doesn’t mention that he quietly developed a very active private practice of psychoanalysis at NPAP and, further, that in a short while he was referring patients to NYPSI for treatment.

Reik’s interest in religion was very broad: pagan religion, Christianity, Catholicism, Protestantism, and Judaism. He thought that Protestantism meant the end of Christianity because “logically if one wishes to be religious one can only be orthodox or one is no longer religious” (1959, p. 136). Some would maintain that Reik’s emphasis on self-analysis makes him a forerunner of relational psychoanalysis, but note that Anna Aragno insists that Reik would not have approved of the relationalists because of their emphasis on “non-analytic self-disclosure” and their laxity of practice (quoted in Mills 2005, p. 266).

Reik shared Freud’s interest in Moses, but was not persuaded that Moses was an Egyptian or that the appearance of monotheism can be ascribed to the Egyptians. Reik shared Freud’s view about the primal horde, the primal crime, and the killing of the father by the sons, as well as Jung’s view of the collective unconscious and Lamarck’s view of cultural inheritance. He also shared Freud’s view of religious ritual as an obsessional neurosis. But he nevertheless emphasized that mankind needed religion, as a sort of insurance policy against damnation. He also argued for the value of studying religious psychology, since it had value for the therapy of neurosis and for the therapeutic understanding of individuals.

Reik’s interest in the study of Judaism was lifelong. He wrote a paper on Jewish ritual and Jewish wit. He was also concerned with Jewish identity and Jewish survival, especially after the Holocaust. Cooper-White cites the epilogue to Reik’s Mystery on the Mountain (1959), which summed up his deep sense (not unlike Freud’s) of a connection between ancient, even prehistoric Judaism and twentieth-century Jewish identity and pride post-Shoah.

The chapter on Otto Rank, “Soul, Will, and the Search for Immortality,” is of particular interest to me because of my recent paper on immortality and longevity wishes in dreams (Richards 2018). Rank’s place in the history of psychoanalysis and his relationship to Freud is well known. He began as Freud’s favorite student, entrusted to be the founding editor of Imago and the International Zeitschrift für Psychoanalysis, and to take the minutes of the Wednesday Night Society. The relationship ended in the 1920s after Rank published The Trauma of Birth (1924), which Freud first defended and then rejected upon accepting the criticism of Abraham and Jones, who viewed Rank’s ideas as heretical. Rank was “expelled” in 1926 shortly after a brief analysis with Freud, which was an effort to understand his depression, as well as to have a reconciliation with Freud.

Rank’s relationship to Judaism is less well known. He renounced Judaism in the early1900s, when he changed his name from Rosenfeld to Rank. He reconverted to Judaism at the end of World War I in order to have a Jewish wedding when he married for the first time. But in his theology he adhered more to Christianity than to Judaism, and had no hesitation in putting down Jews and Judaism (p. 169). He saw “a definite parallel between the psychology of the Jew and the woman”; the woman and the Jew were “enslaved, inferior, castrated and suffered suppression, slavery, confinement, and subsequent persecution” (p. 169). Strong stuff for someone who was born Jewish and identified as a Jew on and off during his life.

After publishing Truth and Reality in 1929, Rank embraced Christianity as a solution to the “will/guilt” problem (Cooper-White, p. 171). He made a claim that Cooper-White calls astonishing “for a Jew, even if a non-confessing one” (p. 171). Judaism, according to Rank, is based on self-hatred and self-depreciation, whereas Christianity is based on self-love and “leads to an optimistic philosophy of life grounded in the experience of grace which results in forgiveness toward others” (p. 171). Jewish culture, on the other hand, had a parasitic relationship to other cultures, starting with Jewish slavery in Egypt. Rank saw Judaism as a religion embodying division and hated (p. 163).

Cooper-White writes that this amounts to blaming Jews for their own persecution. Blaming Jews for anti-Semitism has been a frequent trope throughout the ages. Even Rudolf Loewenstein, in Christians and Jews: A Psychoanalytic Study of Anti-Semitism (1951), blames anti-Semitism on Jewish behavior and undesirable Jewish states.

In “Dreams and the Wish for Immortality” (Richards 2018), I note the absence of the wish for immortality in Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, which emphasizes sexual and aggressive wishes. Rank believed that the will to live and resist death, and the wish for immortality, were as much the primary motivation of human behavior as were the drives of sex and aggression, but he doesn’t make the case that it is an either/or question.

The wish for immortality for Rank is part of a larger quest “for an immortal soul: and beliefs in immortality are part of religious systems and unite social groups”; for Rank, immortality is a wish writ large on the human psyche, and he even saw totalitarianism as a “striving for immortality” (1929, p. 173). I think the fundamental difference between Freud and Rank in regard to religion, immortality, and the understanding of the human psyche and culture is that Rank opts for irrationality, while Freud opts for rationality and science, a position I share with Freud.

Sabina Spielrein is one of a long line of women who have contributed to Freud’s theory and practice. These include Anna O. (Bertha Pappenheim) for chimney sweeping, Frau Cecily and Elizabeth von R. for free association and the couch, Lou Andreas-Salomé for narcissism, and Barbara Low for Nirvana. Sabina Spielrein’s contribution was the death instinct, and Freud gave her credit for that concept, though one could argue that Spielrein’s death instinct and Freud’s are not the same.

Cooper-White asserts that the most creative approach to religion among the Viennese analysts is found in Spielrein’s early writings. Spielrein, interestingly, was connected with six of the most most important psychologists of the twentieth century: Bleuler, Jung, Freud, Piaget (her patient), and Vygotsky and Luria (her supervisors in the Soviet Union). The citation for her contribution to the death instinct idea is in a footnote to Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and Freud cited her as well in the Schreber case. Cooper-White notes that Jung cited her sixteen times. We might consider that this connection with famous men led to her undoing. It has been said that she moved to the Soviet Union to treat and cure Lenin. (He died before her arrival.) She and her two children were murdered by German soldiers in Rostov-on-Don.

From early on she believed that she had a higher calling, inherited from her Rabbi forebears. She had a solid Jewish identity but saw it as her duty to unite the Aryan and Jewish races, her relationship with Jung being her first effort in that direction. In this regard she was different from Rank, who gave up Judaism and embraced Christianity, but like Rank she chose Freud rather than Jung when the two split. In her paper of 1911, “Destruction as a Coming into Being,” she outlined a death instinct different from that of Freud or Jung. Stated simply, her view was that “for life to come into being life as it is must die,” since new life requires the death of the old. She believed that the reproductive drive includes both a destructive drive and a drive for coming into being. Her take on immortality is very different from the views of Rank, who wrote that “eternal life is sterile, a life of the walking dead” (p. 197). This is an idea that periodically finds literary expression, in works like H. Rider Haggard’s She (1886), Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928), and Dara Horn’s Eternal Life (2018).

Cooper-White writes that for Spielrein, unlike for Freud, “death and destruction were not opposed to life but were inherent in both sexual pleasure and in all personality growth and development” (p. 198). Spielrein like Freud remained a Jew, but was taken by the symbolization of Christian sacrifice and the Resurrection.

Cooper-White believes that Spielrein tried to mediate between Freud and Jung and save their relationship, but that that turned out to be impossible. Just as she could not treat and cure Lenin, she could not convince the German who led her and her children to their deaths to save them, simply because he spoke the German of Goethe. This story, probably apocryphal, is nonetheless consistent with her personality and grandiose rescue fantasies. The final irony of her life, according to the author, is that although she saw that destruction is inherent in the life force, she could not recognize the approaching Nazi threat and like many other analysts “clung to the myth of German civility to their peril” (p. 205).

The final section of the book is titled “The Shadow of Anti-Semitism.” Although I learned a lot from the sections focusing on religion and its place in psychoanalysis and psychoanalysts, anti-Semitism is of greater interest to me. That may be because I am not a theologian, as is the author. She begins chapter 7 by referring to the dream of the burning child from chapter 7 of the Interpretation of Dreams (Freud 1900). She refers to the religious overtones of the dream and connects the watchman sitting next to the body to the Shomer, the guard who according to Jewish ritual accompanies the body “from death until burial,” an example of Jill Salberg’s concept of “hidden in plain sight.” Freud’s vignettes include half-disguised Jewish customs, which would be recognized by his Jewish readers and Jewish colleagues but not by gentiles.

The author’s theme, hidden in not-so-plain sight in Freud’s case and in the Wednesday Night Society, is anti-Semitism, the overarching context and reality even when left unspoken. This chapter is in my view the most important contribution of the volume, and certainly the contribution of most interest to me. Cooper-White presents an historical and conceptual overview of anti-Semitism using many sources. I would note especially Steven Beller’s Antisemitism: A Very Short Introduction (2007). He takes us from antiquity and early Christianity to twentieth-century Vienna.

The chapter’s “Brief History of Jews in Vienna” is in-depth and detailed, and is essential to our understanding of the situation of the Vienna analysts, their relationship to the ost juden, on whom these cultured Viennese Jews looked down, and the conflict between ethnic pride and assimilation, where Freud came down strongly on the side of pride, unlike Rank and Adler, as did Reik, the most Jewish of Freud’s group. Freud wrote to Spielrein, who wavered between Christian and Jewish identity: “I am as you know cured of the last predilection for the Aryan cause and would like to take it that if [your] child turns out to be a boy, he will develop into a stalwart Zionist. We are and remain Jews. The others will try to exploit us and will never understand or appreciate us” (p. 76).

But also consider his response to the German-American poet George Viereck: “My language is German. My culture, my attainments, are German. I considered myself German intellectually, until I noticed the growth of anti-Semitic prejudice in Germany and German Austria. Since that time, I prefer to call myself a Jew” (in Gay 1987, p. 139).

The narrative in the chapter ends with the disbanding of the Vienna Society in 1938, Freud finally overcoming his denial of the Nazi threat, and with the help of others escaping to London with all his family except his four sisters, who remained and were murdered by the Germans after the war began. Cooper-White tells the poignant story of one of the sisters, Rosa, who arrives in Treblinka and shows the guard a paper saying she is Freud’s sister. Asking to be assigned to light office work, she is instead sent to the shower, the gas chamber, and cremation, a fate shared with many compatriots, including psychoanalysts.

In the U.S. we celebrate the rescue of forty European analysts from the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society by the Kubie and Warburg Committee. It had always been my understanding that only two or three perished, including Alfred Bass and Kurt Landauer, who died of starvation in Bergen-Belsen. His daughter Eva survived and immigrated to New York, where she became a psychoanalyst and a member of NYPSI. But Cooper-White tells us there were others: Margaret Hilferding (the first woman admitted to the Vienna Society), Bukowina Czernowitz, Adolf Deutsch, Alfred Meisl, David Ernst Oppenheim, Isidore Sadger, Nicola Sugar, and Salomea Kempner. I believe many of them were not members of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and were therefore were missed by Kubie-Warburg. I also believe that they didn’t rescue the society’s candidates because they too were not on the roster. Graduation was a matter of life or death.

In her final chapter, the author considers the rigidity of the postwar psychoanalytic community, a rigidity of which many of my friends and colleagues have firsthand knowledge from their experience in institutes, societies, and national bodies. She writes that this rigidity permeated the “classical Freudian” theory brought to our shores by the emigré analysts. But I would submit that similar rigidity has been evident in other theoretical schools, certainly in Kleinian psychoanalysis, but also in self psychology and relational and interpersonal analysis. That would deserve a separate discussion, but I would cite the critiques of Jon Mills (2005) and Jay Greenberg (2001) on relational psychoanalysis. Entrenched groups always show a tendency to develop a mafia-like mentality in which dissent is not tolerated.

Cooper-White cites Kuriloff (2013), who believes the rigidity of the emigrés served their need to cling to what they had lost. The emigrés, Cooper-White says, “had to preserve psychoanalysis as they learned it at the feet of Freud” (p. 263). But the emigrés did not preserve their political Austro-Marxist affiliations and sensitivities when they came to the U.S. Most dropped their politics in the Atlantic Ocean. But this was understandable given what they found in the U.S. Someone wrote that even FDR’s dog became an icon for them.

Cooper-White does not shrink from comparing Germany between the war and the rise of Hitler to the current political situation in the United States. She refers to American extremists who wrap themselves in swastikas and the alt-right connections of some in Trump’s entourage. Anti-Semitism is on the rise worldwide, most observers agree, and certainly right-wing parties have ascended to power in Hungary and Austria. In Poland, the downgrading of the role Poles played in the killing of Jews and the spread of Holocaust narratives that do not specifically mention Jews are causes for concern, as is the anti-Semitism of the U.K. Labor left. It is ironic that Germany today seems to be the country least infected with the disease of anti-Semitism.

Cooper-White contends that anti-Semitism and the Holocaust constiute “an unmetabolized trauma,” and as a result psychoanalysis was slow to recognize “the impact and context on the psyche—both at the level of the individual patient’s suffering and at the level of society” (p. 267). I certainly experienced this firsthand during my training in the 1960s and into the 1990s. An exception in the last century was related to the Vietnam War. When Charles Brenner wrote a letter to the New York Times against the war, Phyllis Greenacre admonished him that he had ruined the transference by making public his political views. After that a group of more than a hundred analysts took out a full-page ad in the Times condemning the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.

My final take on this important book is that psychoanalysis started out as a subversive discipline, a discipline that could offer new insights into human experience because it functioned on the margins. Psychoanalysis in the U.S. became less subversive as it became more mainstream. W. H. Auden (1939) famously wrote that psychoanalysis had become part of the climate of opinion. Now that psychoanalysis is again consigned more to the margins, we may feel freer to restore our subversive legacy, beginning with our organizational policies and procedures.

I once wrote that the theory of psychoanalysis is a science, while the technique of psychoanalysis is an art. I would add now that psychoanalysis has aspects in common with religion, namely, the relationship between its leader Freud and his disciples and his organization, his church, the IPA. But this book raises the larger question about the place of religion in psychoanalysis and in mental life. Religion does have a place, I think, when not presented as dogma and when stripped of magical prohibitions like “thou shalt not,” and instead promotes positive human values. Co-religionists can be part of a community who share ethical values and strive to make a better world for all. Would Freud agree?