Oskar Pfister

His theories about mythology and religion examined by Stefan Stenudd

Oskar Pfister (1873-1956) was a Swiss priest and teacher who worked to incorporate psychoanalysis and its perspective into the religious context. He also applied it to education. Together with Eugen Bleuler in Zurich, he founded the Swiss Society for Psychoanalysis, which was dissolved in 1914 when Carl G. Jung and others turned away from the Freudian doctrine. Together with Emil Oberholzer, he founded the society anew in 1919.^[1]

Archetypes of Mythology

by Stefan Stenudd
This book examines Jungian theories on myth and religion, from Carl G. Jung to Jordan B. Peterson. Click the image to see the book at Amazon (paid link).

Psychoanalysis of Mythology

by Stefan Stenudd
This book examines Freudian theories on myth and religion, from Sigmund Freud to Erich Fromm. Click the image to see the book at Amazon (paid link).

In 1908, Pfister visited Sigmund Freud for the first time. They had an ongoing correspondence until 1937, two years before Freud's death. Many of those letters were published in the volume Psychoanalysis and Faith, 1963. As the title emphasizes, the subject in the letters was often, but not exclusively, religion. The atheist and the pastor certainly had their disagreements on this issue, but they remained close friends and Pfister stayed a supporter of Freud's theory of psychoanalysis all through.^[2]

Pfister had problems being accepted by some other psychoanalysts, though, since he had no formal medical education. This was regarded as a prerequisite — also initially by Freud, but he grew to change his mind. In the introduction to Pfister's book The Psychoanalytic Method from 1913, Freud wrote:

It may be asked whether the practice of psychoanalysis does not presuppose a medical education which must remain lacking to the educator and pastor, or whether other relations are not antagonistic to the purpose of placing the psychoanalytic technique in other than medical hands. I confess that I see no such obstacles. The practice of psychoanalysis demands much less medical education than psychological preparation and free human insight; the majority of physicians, however, are not fitted for the practice of psychoanalysis and have completely failed in placing a correct valuation on this method of treatment.^[3]

Psychoanalysis for Missionaries

In 1921, Oskar Pfister wrote an article for a German journal on missiology and religious studies (Zeitschrift für Missionskunde und Religionswissenschaft) on how to apply psychoanalysis in missionary work. The English translation of it was two years later included in his book Some Applications of Psycho-Analysis.

At that time, psychoanalysis was still new, and far from generally accepted as a science, whereas missionaries had been active around the world for centuries, which led Pfister to ask this rhetorical question:

Must mission work, in spite of its reverend age, sit at the feet of a science that is no older than yesterday?^[4]

He finds that the psychology of religion had been "hardly fruitful" for the missionary, but it was "fertilized" by the introduction of psychoanalysis. It gives the tools for understanding the religious process, comparable to what X-rays and other examinations bring to medicine.

He continues by describing what it can uncover about religion:

The aim of psycho-analysis as applied to religion is the research into the subliminal motives of pious consciousness and its effects, as well as its causal derivation and biological knowledge.^[5]

He is very confident about the curing power of psychoanalysis:

I have seen hundreds of mistaken people wandering in the paths of evil and religious perversity who had been treated by the traditional methods without success, but were saved (sometimes easily, and sometimes only with great difficulty) by psycho-analytical treatment.^[6]

The mistake and perversity are those of not having the true Christian faith. The truth is revealed to them: "Analysis helps us to grasp what is false and to destroy illusions." Accordingly, it can only be used to reach a Christian experience and conviction, since it is to Pfister the only truth. He regards other religions as neurotic and even calls Jesus the first psychoanalyst.^[7] Other religions don't stand a chance:

The Buddhist missionary cannot apply psycho-analysis because it would lay bare the pathological nature of his own religion.

Harsh words. His pick of Buddhism as an example is unfortunate, since it can be discussed if it strictly speaking is a religion, in the sense of worshipping a deity and other attributes Christians normally associate with it. The Buddhist process of self-cultivation might more accurately be described as a form of therapy.

Pfister's idea about the truth revealed by psychoanalysis is not only limited to Christianity, but to the form of it that is his: "Protestant religion, which is free from neurosis."^[8] Furthermore, it should be void of the pomp of dogma, and focus on what he regards as its essence: "The spirit of love is everything."^[9] He grieves how modern society has corrupted Christianity:

We have no right to imagine that our European Christianity is pure and authentic! We have made such a hateful pact between our Christianity and Mars and Mammon, between the spirit of caste and national self-esteem, between lying politics and expansion, that a pure evangelical mission is a bitter necessity for our churches and our hearts.

Psychoanalysis must be a tremendous tool to navigate through all those obstacles and reach salvation.

Neurotic Religion

Oskar Pfister's firm conviction of his own religion as the only true one, and the ultimate result of psychoanalysis, makes him a flawed theorist on the psychological causes and mechanisms of religion. That cannot be done when excluding his own religion from the study. Still, that is what he does, without even arguing for this omission.

He bases his theories on what he calls natural religions, by which he means primitive ones, and regards them as having originated in magic as a method against anxiety, which he separates from fear: "Fear appears only when there is real danger; anxiety without it." It is the fear of the unknown.^[10]

The theory of religion born out of magic was widespread at his time, explained as a will to control what was really uncontrollable. Anxiety was certainly part of it, but of course there was real danger involved. Life among so-called primitives was not safe. People had many reasons to be scared, and tried magic against both known and unknown threats.

As Pfister mentions, magic was also used in efforts to gain things, not just as protection.^[11] That has nothing to do with the anxiety of which he speaks. What he adds to the mix is that by time, this behavior became neurotic: "magic and obsessional neurotic rituals are one and the same." He concludes, stressing it with italics:

Obsessional neurosis is private magic; the magic of primitive peoples is a collective obsessional neurosis.

Not only is it lacking as an explanation to the origin of religion, but to the extent that it is valid it goes for Christianity as well. This religion, too, contains methods by which to control the uncontrollable, even beyond the moment of death. Prayer is a magic spell and the worship of a higher power is a measure by which to gain its benevolence.

But that is far from everything religion encompasses, neither Christianity nor any other one. Religions have many functions, which they all more or less share. Pfister is well aware of the complexity of his own faith, but presents nothing that fundamentally separates it from other religions, except his claim that it is the one that is true. He has the burden of proof on that statement, but never presents it. To him, that is just how it is.

An amusing example of his bias is found in what he calls the fixation to the father and its influence on religious worship. But what Jesus "in His capacity of profound psychologist" presented as an antidote was God in that role: "God as Father is the greatest help in the fight against the father as god."^[12]

That may be a different father, somehow, but it increases instead of lessens the father fixation. This is at the core of Freud's idea about how religion emerged: God was an image of the father, a product of the Oedipus complex. Pfister would have benefited from instead focusing on how Jesus transformed the image of that supreme deity from a stern and punishing father into a loving one.

The Illusion of a Future of an Illusion

In 1927, Sigmund Freud's The Future of an Illusion, discussed earlier, was released. To a significant extent, the book was the result of his correspondence with Oskar Pfister on the subject of religion.

In a letter to him a few weeks before the book was to be published, Freud expressed his hesitation about the book, as well as his respect for Pfister:

I had been wanting to write it for a long time, and postponed it out of regard for you, but the impulse became too strong. The subject-matter — as you will easily guess — is my completely negative attitude to religion, in any form and however attenuated, and, though there can be nothing new to you in this, I feared, and still fear, that such a public profession of my attitude will be painful to you. When you have read it you must let me know what measure of toleration and understanding you are able to preserve for the hopeless pagan.^[13]

He even encouraged Pfister to publish his objections to the book, which was done in Freud's journal Imago the following year.^[14]

In opposition to Freud's dismissal of religion, Pfister insists on its values — at least when it comes to Protestant Christianity, as it has developed, which is the one of his own conviction. He recognizes the element of neurotic compulsion in religion of which Freud speaks, but mainly in the primitive forms of it, lacking the structure of a church:

These compulsions are unmistakeable in many primitive religions, which as yet have nothing of a proper ecclesiastical structure as in the various orthodoxies.^[15]

With Jesus, Pfister states, religion evolved from this flawed original form, and here he repeats his comparison of Jesus to a psychoanalyst:

Jesus overcame the collective neurosis of his people according to good psychoanalytical practice in that he introduced love — morally complete love, to be sure — into the centre of life.^[16]

The extent to which he connects Jesus with psychoanalysis is baffling, calling his practice of it subtle, with the only reservation that it should not rob Freud of being the pioneer of the discipline:

Not that one should put Jesus forward as the first psychoanalyst in Freud's sense, as some saucy young know-it-alls would perhaps like to do! But his redemptive ministry, in its basic traits, so decisively points in the direction of analysis that Christians should be ashamed to have left it to a non-Christian to make use of these radiant footprints.^[17]

The teaching of Jesus changed the image of God, so that "God had to appear as loving and no longer as the strict, jealous God of the Old Testament."^[18]

There is no end to what good comes out of religion, according to Pfister, and he finds it mostly in Protestant Christianity. For the long listing below, he claims that these feelings are inaccessible to irreligious persons, and it is a lot of which they are deprived:

Religion concerns itself with the question of the meaning and value of life; with the unifying drive of the intellect toward a universal view that encompasses existence and obligation; with the longing for home and peace; with the drive toward a unio mystica with the absolute; with the spiritual bonds of guilt and with freedom's thirst for grace; with the need for a love that is removed from the unbearable insecurity of earthly life; with innumerable other matters that, in their resettled state, distress and choke the soul, yet through religious counterbalancing lift up human life to radiant mountain peaks with views into the distance that make one indescribably happy, strengthen the heart, and, through the imposition of very heavy moral obligations in the spirit of love, enhance the value of existence.^[19]

Depending on how those experiences would be defined, it can just as well be said that atheists can have them, too, and that being religious is no guarantee of having them.

Religion versus Science

Sigmund Freud's main theme in his book The Future of an Illusion is the conflict between religion and science as opposite approaches to understanding and relating to the world. A good part of Oskar Pfister's text deals with the same polarity.

It is a strange one. Comparing religion and science as if interchangeable is questionable, indeed. They are different concepts, different entities, with very little in common. Science is a process by which to explore and explain the world and all its components. It is a method of investigation. Religion, on the other hand, is a way to relate to the world, attaching meaning to it on a personal and social level. It is an attitude towards life. Science is pursued by reason, whereas religion is pursued by emotion.

It is possible to apply science to the phenomenon of religion, its manifestations and doctrines, in order to describe it. But it is not a method by which to discard religion, as if it were a scientific theory proven to be false. Religion is neither constructed by nor dependent on scientific validation. Its claims are held to be true among its devotees, which is not the same as establishing facts. It is admittedly subjective. That is, to a great extent, the point of it.

Judging religion by its scientific accuracy is as irrelevant as judging science from a religious standpoint. Not that it hasn't been done, repeatedly by both. That may be where they actually meet, since it is usually done by evaluating the consequences of them, what they lead to in people's minds and in society. It is also what both Freud and Pfister focus on in their texts.

What Freud means by the illusion is that of religious beliefs, whereas Pfister counters by stating that the blessing of science is just as much an illusion. He puts it rather bluntly, while at the same time showing respect for the pioneer of psychoanalysis:

One can forgive such a successful and brilliant pioneer if, at the moment when he attempts to smother religious illusion, he establishes the Messiahship of science, without noticing that in this belief illusion also struts.^[20]

Ergo his reversal of Freud's book title from The Future of an Illusion to The Illusion of a Future. Freud means that the illusion of religion is doomed to disappear in the future, while Pfister insists that it is an illusion to believe religion will perish as science advances and the latter will suffice for people to be content. To him, both are needed.

One of his arguments is that many famous scientists and other admired thinkers were in agreement with religion and science at the same time.^[21] He names several of them, such as Descartes, Newton, Darwin, Pasteur, Leibniz, Pascal, Gauss, and even Einstein. But most of those mentioned belonged to a time when Christianity was not only dominant in European culture, but practically compulsory. They may have expressed a different view if they felt at liberty to do so. Even Voltaire treaded quite carefully when speaking about things relating to the dogma of the church.

Pfister neglects the same aspect when discussing the arts. He calls religion the sun that pushes forth the most glorious blossom-life of art and goes on to claim: "All great and powerful art is prayer and an offering before God's throne."^[22] Among the artists inspired by Christian feeling he names Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo's Pietà.^[23]

Certainly, religious themes were very common in art works of past centuries, but that was not necessarily from piety of the artist. The church was simply a very wealthy and frequent buyer of art, with a particular taste. Artists could comply or starve, if they were not able to make a living solely from portraits and sculptures of royals and aristocrats.

As for Michelangelo's Pietà, its inspiration and sentiment may be any mother grieving her dead son, and Leonardo da Vinci was expressly driven by research into many fields, with the attitude of a scientist also when painting. This is clear in his notebooks, where he discusses many subjects of art and science, but not religion.

That does not mean he was an atheist. It would not only be dangerously blasphemous in his days, but also hard for him to fathom. Without a god, the existence of the world and all its creatures would be difficult to explain before the discoveries by Newton and Darwin. A supreme power was assumed.

On the other hand, it did not mean that artists worked by divine inspiration. Usually, they were not particularly pious. Leonardo had a practical rather than devotional attitude towards art and God's role in it: "Thou, O God, dost sell unto us all good things at the price of labour."^[24] That is comparable to the quote accredited to George Bernhard Shaw about artistic creativity being "ninety per cent perspiration, ten per cent inspiration,"^[25] as well as Thomas Edison's opinion about genius being 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.^[26]

Christianity as a Cure of Fear

In 1944, sixteen years after the above discussed text, Oskar Pfister published Das Christentum und die Angst, which was translated to English four years later as Christianity and Fear. The book, spanning almost 600 pages, returns to the same subject — that of Jesus as sort of a psychoanalyst and his doctrine one of freeing people from guilt-induced neurosis.

The English title's "fear" is somewhat misleading. The German word Angst can indeed be translated so, but as the text points out, the concept intended is closer to anxiety or for that matter the loanword angst as it is used in English. Simply put, it represents, as Pfister uses it, a persistent trepidation about something that is not a concrete or imminent threat. For the emotional response to a threat that is concrete and imminent, Pfister uses Furcht, which is translated to "dread" in the English version.^[27] Another possible translation would be "fright," emphasizing its imminence.

Pfister regards the two terms as describing different emotions, but that can be debated. What they indicate, as he uses them, are different causes or catalysts to an emotion that may essentially be one and the same — the adrenaline induced high-alert response to danger, real or imagined, taking us to the fight-or-flight mode. It is an essential resource for our survival, which is why it can be triggered when no real or imminent threat appears. As the saying goes: better safe than sorry.

The real and imminent threat awakens a response, and when that threat is overcome or avoided, we return to our normal mode. A remaining threat, then, keeps us in the alert mode we experience as trepidation, fear, dread, fright, or whatever we call it. So can the vague impression of a threat we are unable to sufficiently define and therefore also unable to end. If such senses of threat are persistent, according to Pfister, they can lead to neurosis. That is what he sees flawed religions cause. They keep people in a state of fear — fear of a vindictive god, fear of an eternal hell awaiting the deceased, and so on.

Love

Accordingly, his solution is another emotion, namely love. It is the antidote to fear. His primary argument for this is from the Bible, in the First Epistle of John 4:18: "There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love." Pfister explains, "fear is thus caused by disturbances of love."^[28]

But that is not what the Bible quote says. It does not state what is the cause of fear. It simply says that the presence of one excludes the other. Where there is fear there cannot be love, and vice versa. It also says that love is the stronger entity. Where it enters, fear dissolves. That means fear is unable to disturb love. It can only remain where love is absent.

Another thing to consider is what may be meant by love — in the Epistle as well as in Pfister's text. That is even more of an enigma than fear. Although it is to Pfister the elixir that can save mankind, he spends significantly less words on it than he does on the concept of fear. He refers to a previous text of his where he defined love, but adds that he wishes to alter it slightly:

I have defined love as a sensation resulting from a need and directed towards an object promising satisfaction, the sensation being one of attraction and devotion. To-day, I should prefer to substitute inclination for devotion.^[29]

He points out: "There is no such thing as love without an object." That may be true for what ignites it, but not for the emotion itself. When we love, we tend to expand the delight it inspires to all our surroundings, animate as well as inanimate objects. It is an intoxication without boundaries.

Considering the importance he gives this emotion, his perception of it is surprisingly limited. As an example, he mentions that children love sweet fruit and experience a desire to taste it. That is definitely not to love, but to like. Children know the difference.

He goes on to speak about a higher level love incorporating aesthetic, ethical, religious and intellectual values. Again, that is not relevant to the emotion itself, but rather to how it is defended.

Then he separates love directed to the subject from that to an object. The former is an instrument to increase personal pleasure, which Pfister labels narcissism. The latter is directed towards the interest of others and doing everything for them. Another terminology would be selfish and unselfish love.

This may seem like a dismissal of self-love, but in his book Pfister insists repeatedly — in accordance with the famous saying of Jesus to love one's neighbor as oneself — that this love, too, is essential. Rejecting it frequently leads to "a masochistic contraction of the personality."^[30]

There is also a third kind of love, again describing who or what is loved rather than the nature of the emotion: the love of God, by which he means the Christian devotion to God as Jesus portrayed him. This was a loving God, and his love was of its very own kind, "the sacred love and kindness which he apprehended to be God's innermost nature."^[31] This divine love goes beyond what is fathomable:

It cannot be adequately defined in abstract formulae, for it is the very essence, impulse and will of love tending towards the realization of kindness, justice and truth to the utmost of its ability.

As for the nature of the love possible to express by humans, Pfister discusses the Greek terms agape and eros. His starting point is the substantial writing on the subject by the Swedish theologist Anders Nygren, who regarded the two kinds of love quite similarly to Pfister — one being selfless and the other selfish, where only the former is the truly Christian kind.^[32]

Nygren and Pfister differ in that the latter would not condemn selfish love, and he regards the polarity argued by Nygren as exaggerated. He points out: "Frequently the Greek eros is a descending and selfless love." He finds support for it in Plato's Symposium, where it is said about the deity Eros: "He is the oldest of the gods and is for us the source of the highest values."^[33]

Indeed, Eros is a deity who represents something far beyond the mere lust that is often linked to him. In the creation story of Hesiod's Theogony, Eros is one of the first deities to appear and he is given remarkable traits:

Eros, who is the most beautiful among the immortal gods, the limb-melter — he overpowers the mind and the thoughtful counsel of all the gods and of all human beings in their breasts.^[34]

In the original Greek language text of the New Testament, the word eros is never used, but so is agape frequently, although it is quite rare in classical Greek literature. Therefore, the Christian ideas of the concept have come to dominate the understanding of it as an expression of unconditional love, in particular "the love of God for man and of man for God."^[35]

Pfister states that the blessing of love, as Jesus promoted it, surpasses the difference between wanting and giving it, so that the good outcome is still reached:

Giving and receiving, desire and attraction, merge together in love.^[36]

To Pfister, Christian love when properly understood as Jesus intended it will liberate people from neurotic fear and make them able to feel and act in accordance with agape. In a therapeutic term, it will cure them.

Hygiene

The curing of Christian minds through a proper understanding and committing to the love of which Jesus spoke, Pfister speaks of as a religious hygiene. The word hygiene has some complicated connotations, especially in the time and place of Pfister's book, which was 1944 in Europe.

That was the year before World War II ended and the concentration camps were displayed to a whole world aghast. They showed the monstrous Nazi application of eugenics, labeled racial hygiene. In 1944 the concentration camps were not yet well known, but the grotesque ideas of racial hygiene were.

Oskar Pfister must have been aware of them, but his use of the term hygiene cannot be interpreted as him agreeing with that dreadful application. It is just unfortunate, especially when used in a social setting and not just in the medical sense of personal preventive healthcare. He speaks of the hygiene of religion serving "the cause of social and national hygiene,"^[37] and points out that "in the schools too hygiene cannot be neglected."^[38] By the end of his book, he states:

The great problems of personality and civilization which must be solved if mankind is to be saved can be settled only by the aid of a scientifically applied hygiene fostering a vigorous way of life based on love in the Christian sense and making this, not in theory but in practice, its ultimate objective.^[39]

That attitude, though promoting love, has an uncompromising tone of justification not enough distanced from the rhetoric of eugenics. The idea that one solution would fit all mankind is in itself questionable, indeed, and not less so when "based on methods of depth psychology and mental hygiene."^[40]

In addition, Pfister's conviction that it has to be Christianity doing the job, no other religion being apt to it, and his interpretation of proper Christianity at that, makes the impression of intolerance pungent. In 1944, this narrow perspective might have been somewhat understandable, but the English translation was published – under his supervision — in 1948, when the dreadful consequences of intolerance were obvious to everyone.

What made him blind to this insensitivity was probably his conviction that his message dealt with the sacred, a divine perspective far above the turmoil of secular events. Conviction is known to cause loss of clear sight, and religious conviction is definitely no exception.

Much like his previous texts discussed above, Christianity and Fear incorporates psychoanalytical theories and methods, but its perspective is mainly theological. This is a man of the cloth trying his best to keep his religion relevant in a changing world, using novel theories of psychology to make his case. His major shortcoming is that he demands of his findings to propagate his own faith, which takes its toll on his reasoning.

Freud could have told him, and probably did as best he could in their correspondence, that religion and psychoanalysis are no perfect match. Already the fundamental principle of the Oedipus complex should have told him that. It presents religion as a consequence of guilt feelings, not at all a solution to them.

Notes

Alexander et al., 1966, p.170. ↑
Heinrich Meng & Ernst L. Freud (ed.), Psychoanalysis and Faith. The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Oskar Pfister, transl. Eric Mosbacher, New York 1963, pp. 7 and 9. ↑
Oskar Pfister, The Psychoanalytic Method, transl. Charles Rockwell Payne, New York 1917 (originally published in German 1913), p. vii. ↑
Oskar Pfister, Some Applications of Psycho-Analysis, unnamed translator, London 1923 (originally published in German 1920 and 1921), p. 316. ↑
Ibid., p. 319. ↑
Ibid., p. 321. ↑
Ibid., p. 328. ↑
Ibid., p. 336. ↑
Ibid., pp. 342f. ↑
Ibid., p. 330. ↑
Ibid., p. 331. ↑
Ibid., pp. 344f. ↑
Meng & Freud (ed.) 1963, pp. 109f. ↑
Oskar Pfister, "The Illusion of a Future: A Friendly Disagreement with Prof. Sigmund Freud," transl. Susan Abrams & Tom Taylor, ed. Paul Roazen, The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, vol. 74 issue 3, London 1993 (originally published in German in Imago, vol. XIV, 1928), pp. 559 and 557. ↑
Ibid., p. 560. ↑
Ibid., p. 561. ↑
Ibid., p. 562. ↑
Ibid., p. 564. ↑
Ibid., p. 576. ↑
Ibid., p. 570. ↑
Ibid., p. 568. ↑
Ibid., p. 575. ↑
Ibid., p. 574. ↑
Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, transl. Edward MacCurdy, New York 1955 (first published in 1939), p. 85. ↑
Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation, New York 1964, p. 120. ↑
quoteinvestigator.com/2012/12/14/genius-ratio/ ↑
Oskar Pfister, Christianity and Fear: A Study in History and in the Psychology and Hygiene of Religion, transl. W. H. Johnston, London 1948 (originally published in German 1944), p. 7. ↑
Ibid., 46. ↑
Ibid., p. 45. ↑
Ibid., p. 514. ↑
Ibid., p. 184. ↑
Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros, transl. Philip S. Watson, Philadelphia 1953 (originally published in Swedish as Den kristna kärlekstanken genom tiderna. Eros och Agape, part I 1930 and part II 1936). ↑
Pfister 1948, p. 517. ↑
Hesiod, Theogony, transl. Glenn W. Most, Loeb 57, Cambridge Massachusetts 2006, p. 13. ↑
"á¼€γÎ¬πη," Henry George Liddell & Robert Scott, An Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon, Oxford 1889, p. 4. ↑
Pfister 1948, p. 518. ↑
Ibid., p. 26. ↑
Ibid., p. 11. ↑
Ibid., p. 574. ↑
Ibid., p. 11. ↑

Freudians on Myth and Religion

This text is an excerpt from my book Psychoanalysis of Mythology: Freudian Theories on Myth and Religion Examined from 2022. The excerpt was published on this website in February, 2026.

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