Old and Dirty Gods

by Pamela Cooper-White

"Freud's collection of antiquities - his "old and dirty gods"--Stood as silent witnesses to the early analysts' paradoxical fascination and hostility toward religion. Pamela Cooper-White argues that antisemitism, reaching back centuries before the Holocaust, and the acute perspective from the margins that it engendered among the first analysts, stands at the very origins of psychoanalytic theory and practice. The core insight of psychoanalytic thought - that there is always more beneath the surface appearances of reality, and that this "more" is among other things affective, memory-laden...