Freud, Jung, and Jonah
Religion and the Birth of the Psychoanalytic Periodical

A multidisciplinary analysis of the Freud-Jung wars that still rage on the discursive territory of religion.

Maya Balakirsky Katz (Author)

9781009100007, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 22 December 2022

200 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 2.6 cm, 0.72 kg

Religion, more than sexuality, cast psychoanalysis in controversy and onto the world stage even as it threatened to dismantle the psychoanalytic collective. In the founding years of the first psychoanalytic periodicals, relational dynamics shaped the psychoanalytic corpus on religion. The psychoanalytic pioneers developed their ideas in tandem even if in protest to one another. Religion is a topic worthy of engagement, not least because the symbolized terrain in the history of religion was so often deployed as a vehicle for motivating, disciplining, or editing out a member of the psychoanalytic community in publication. This book offers an interdisciplinary approach to religion and psychology, including a compelling denouement that reveals new narratives about longstanding rumours in the early history of the psychoanalytic movement. Above all, this volume demonstrates that the first generation of psychoanalysts succeeded in writing themselves into the history of religious thought and sacralizing the origins of psychoanalysis.

1. Introduction: periodic religion and the psychoanalytic movement
2. The first numbers and the five stages of periodical publication
3. The religious rise and fall of the Zentralblatt
4. Jonah's journey across the nations: Zurich, Vienna, America, and Munich
5. Art, psychoanalytic interpretation, and the Holy Romanish Moses
6. Triangles: thoroughbreds, dray horses, and the 'dream problem'
7. Concluding remarks on 'the Christian Aeon' and 'us Jews'.

Subject Areas: Psychology [JM]