Oskar Pfister is best known today for his long and amicable correspondence with Sigmund Freud (from 1909 until Freud’s death in 1939). Pfister initiated the correspondence in 1909 when he was 35. In an unpublished autobiographical sketch he wrote, “[w]hen I read Freud I felt as if old dreams and premonitions had suddenly become reality.” Writing to Pfister at the beginning of their correspondence, Freud stated (quite generously, considering his staunch atheism), “You know our eroticism includes what you call ‘love’ in your pastoral care – Seelsorge … in itself psychoanalysis is neither religious nor the opposite, but an impartial instrument which the minister may employ as much as the layman [provided that] the liberation of sufferers is the aim.”
Pfister likewise viewed the love found in liberal Protestantism “starting from its religious-ethical feeling” (and over against both Catholic and Calvinist repressiveness) to be a close parallel for the love made possible through enlightened...
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Cooper-White, P. (2020). Pfister, Oskar. In: Leeming, D.A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24348-7_200154
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