Sigmund Freud's Christian Unconscious.

Sigmund Freuds Christian Unconscious, by Paul C vitz (Guilford, 287 pp., $19.95)

'OF MAKING MANY books there is no end," Ecclesiastes tells us; but not many are as well made as Paul Vitz's new book on Freud. It is, in fact, a great book, enormously but unpretentiously learned, immensely judicious, and concerned with issues of the utmost importance.

It is Vitz's thesis that Freud was obsessed with religion and, more specifically, with Roman Catholic Christianity-largely and initially because of the devoutly Catholic Moravian nanny he had during the first three years of his life. Vitz shows that during these years Freud suffered neglect from his mother. He also argues that Freud's hatred and shame toward his weak, distant, and unsuccessful father-who was probably cuckolded by one of his own sons-may well have provided the stimulus for Freud's doctrine of the Oedipus complex.

It should not for a moment be thought that Vitz's book is a piece of crude Freud-bashing, however much its evidence and argument weaken any claims for the scientific status of Freud's system. Vitz has very considerable respect for what he calls Freud's "intellectual courage," if not for his consistency or authority as a scientist. "As the scientific pretensions of psychoanalysis are removed through criticism [as in books by Roazen, Szasz, Grunfeld, and Masson]," he writes, "perhaps its pervasive literary and religious character will be more widely understood and publicly acknowl edged." The scientistic, dogmatic aspect of Freudianism has been often noted, but Vitz states its implication with an impressive clarity: "In some respects psychoanalysis developed as a kind of anti-Christian gnostic cult."

Equally impressive are the detail and judiciousness of Vitz's demonstration that what Fromm called tbe "greatness and limitations of Freud's thought" were rooted in Freud's own biography. The young Freud's experience with the Moravian nanny and his painful separation from her left an indelible impression on him-an hypothesis Vitz illustrates in dramatic and cogent detail. Freud became obsessed with two major focal points of Christian consciousness: Rome and Easter. Freud loved Rome and visited it often; furthermore,

He wanted to go to Rome on Easternot at any old time, but at the quintessentially Christian season. He referred to his visits as making him into a pilgrim. While in Rome, he spent much of his time in Christian edifices admiring Christian art. He spoke of Rome with great fondness (indeed, as this "divine town"); he said he never felt himself to be a stranger in Rome; he told of its constant capacity to renew his zest for life.

Vitz documents this obsession with Rome and Easter in detail, and he applies Freud's own logic about "repression" in his discussion of Freud's conscious and explicit hostility to Christianity. He grants Thomas Szasz's point that "one of Freud's most powerful motives in life was the desire to inflict vengeance on Christianity for its traditional anti-Semitism," but even here he shows Freud's profound ambivalence. A major example is Freud's great, lifelong hostility to Judaism as a religion. This anti-Judaism gave intense pain to beleaguered, believing Jews when, in that ominous year 1939, Freud published Moses and Monotheism. As if to highlight its antagonism to Jewish belief, this book contains, Vitz shows, some of Freud's "most unequivocally pro-Christian" remarks.

Of course on the conscious level Freud was frequently and notoriously hostile to theism itself, seeing it as "a universal obsessional neurosis"; yet, describing himself, he wrote to Jung, "I must claim for myself the class 'obsessive.' " Here, as so often, Vitz shows Freud to be an almost archetypal "homo duplex." In Freud's speculations about the basis of ethics, eventually published in Totem and Taboo (1913), he wrote, again to Jung, "The source of taboo and hence also of conscience is ambivalence." Vitz narrates this ambivalence biographically, showing the prime importance in Freud's life of the Catholic nanny, but also of the Catholic philosopher Franz Brentano and of the Swiss Protestant pastor and psychoanalyst Oskar Pfister, Freud's lifelong friend. The Freud who emerges from these pages is a more complex and human figure than the standard atheistic, Olympian intellectual conquistador-successor to Feverbach and Nietzsche-who is loved, or loathed, according to one's point of view.

Along with Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death and Philip Rieff's Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, this book ought to take its place on the small shelf of great books treating of or inspired by Freud. If Vitz is not a member of the worshipful company of Freudians, neither is he a simplistic debunker. Modest and painstakingly judicious, his book is one of the most distinguished works of modern scholarship that I have ever read, and it deserves readers not only within but far beyond the university (and the church).