A FORGOTTEN FREUDIAN: THE PASSION OF KARL STERN

Excerpt

Daniel Burston has performed an extraordinarily important service in restoring Karl Stern (1906–1975) to the awareness of contemporary readers. This volume, an offering of Karnac’s The History of Psychoanalysis Series, explores the life and work of a figure whose 1951 memoir, The Pillar of Fire, was seen as a worthy successor to Thomas Merton’s The Seven Story Mountain, and became an international bestseller (p. 81). Merton himself, C.S. Lewis, and Reinhold Neibuhr, among others, all wrote to Stern to communicate the great impact and importance the book had for them (p. 82). Carl Jung wrote at length, and admiringly, in response to a later book, The Third Revolution, which Stern had sent to him (more on this in a moment). Yet The Pillar of Fire, which recounts Stern’s conversion from Judaism to Roman Catholicism, and was seen at the time as a remarkable treatment of the compatibility of science and religious faith, all from a psychoanalytic perspective, has disappeared almost entirely from view, as has the rest of Stern’s legacy. Burston notes that Stern, who lived and worked in Montreal from 1939 until his death, is remarkably not mentioned once in Alan Parkin’s History of Psychoanalysis in Canada (Parkin, 1987), nor in a more recent accounting of that same history by George Awad (Awad, 2002) (p. 159). Burston attributes Stern’s disappearance first to psychiatry’s shift away from psychoanalysis, second to the controversial matter of Stern’s conversion itself, third to the “air of old fashioned humanism” reflected in Stern’s “probing reflections on Goethe, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Ibsen, Thomas Mann, Eugene O’Neill, and others” (p. 160), and finally to Stern’s “firm belief in innate gender differences” (despite his important work on femininity, which “still strike[s] some feminists as sensible, if not prescient” (p. 160). Burston makes a compelling case that Stern’s disappearance is a major loss for the field of psychoanalysis “despite these impediments” (p. 160), and readers with a pastoral clinical orientation will find this to be particularly the case. Stern emerges as a figure that went out on a limb to hold for the importance of both a kind of psychoanalytic orthodoxy, and for a version of Christian orthodoxy, as well. While he certainly can give offense, his challenge to attend to both sides of the pastoral clinical integration without compromising either one is exciting and fresh. …