567 - Psychoanalysis and Religion

Psychoanalysis and Religion
By Gregory Zilboorg
243 pp. New York, Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1962. $4.50.

This posthumous volume contains eleven essays written between 1939 and 1958, nearly all of them published before but in journals now difficult for the general reader to find. They have been collected by Mrs. Zilboorg, who has also written an illuminating preface.

568 - Psychoanalysis and Religion

Zilboorg was born a Russian Orthodox Jew in 1890, and he died in New York a Roman Catholic in 1959. In his twenties, he took part in the social democratic revolution in Russia, but left after Lenin came into power. He was nearly thirty when lie came to this country, knew no English, and was penniless. But he went through the long and arduous course of medical school, psychiatric training, and psychoanalytic education, and practiced psychiatry in New York until his death. He had a brilliant linguistic and historical mind, shown best in his respected works on the history of psychiatry.

Although this book does not set forth a single direct fact about himself personally, it does reveal the line of formal thought taken by Zilboorg from about the time he evinced interest in Roman Catholicism until well after the date, 1954, when lie joined that Church. Not long after coming to this country, Zilboorg had become a Quaker. It is interesting that not one reference to George Fox or any other Friend is to be found in this volume.

A clear-cut and often repeated thesis runs throughout these essays. It is that, rightly understood, psychoanalysis and religion do not conflict but are complementary, because they deal With different realms. A subsidiary thesis, also stated often, is that the reliability of Freud's views on the "psychic apparatus" does not extend to his views on. religion, which are felt to be confused, wrong, and projections of unresolved personal conflict.

Zilboorg never tires of saying that religion needs to learn about the "psychic apparatus" from Freud, but that psychoanalysis can contribute nothing to understanding the "soul." This may be a slightly too simple way to read St. Thomas but its thrust is clear enough; and it provides an amazingly subtle basis for considering the respective contributions and realms of religion and psychoanalysis.

As to the content that may be at issue, Zilboorg discusses Freud's general anti-religious views, various moral matters including sex, love, and guilt, asceticism, and "scientism." But it is interesting to note some such issues he does not discuss at all: revelation, authority, incarnation, the Holy Spirit, faith, Christian hope, eschatology (although he appears to see this Wholly in terms of immortality), and many others. Even the religious dimensions of anxiety are unmentioned. To What extent lie was aware of the high selectivity of the issues lie considered important, is not evident from the book itself. The discussion of the issues considered is competent, well-informed, and with a conciliatory intent throughout. The one exception to the latter is the negation of Freud's views on religion (radically separated from his psychological views), in which Zilboorg analyzes everything he knows about Freud including Freud's childhood.

569 - Psychoanalysis and Religion

This volume should certainly be read carefully by any serious student of the two subjects in the title. In reading, I found it not always easy to reconcile its irenic performance with the aggressive Zilboorg on a platform. Perhaps the latter is represented, in the writing, by the people he does not quote. No other psychoanalyst with views favorable to religion is cited by Zilboorg except Karl Stern, and him only incidentally. There ire some unique and original points in Zilboorg's account, but they would stand out much more sharply if other reconciling efforts by members of his own group had been acknowledged.

Seward Hiltner
Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, New Jersey