Volume 2, Number 1 · February 20, 1964
Freud As Moralist
By Alasdair MacIntyre
The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Oskar Pfister
edited by Heinrich Meng, edited by Ernst L. Freud
Basic Books, 152 pp., $4.95
Those who are bored by moral simplicity will find these letters dull. They cover thirty years of unbroken friendship and mutual admiration, which was founded on deep agreement about the fundamentals of psychoanalysis, and disagreement about many other topics. As such they are an invaluable corrective to the view of Freud given by others who disagreed with him: Jung, Adler, Rank. What is clear about the others is that they were unable to disagree with Freud without exhibiting an anxiety about it. By contrast, the Swiss clergyman Pfister clearly had no particular inclination to agree with Freud and therefore experienced no stress when he disagreed: he just happened to believe that on certain important questions Freud was right. This attitude evoked from Freud a touching warmth and objectivity.
Review, 1226 words
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