book reviews 265

Daniel Burston (2016) A forgotten Freudian: The passion of Karl Stern. Karnac Books: London, UK, 2016. 256 pp. ISBN: 9781782203469. $38.00 (Paper).

Karl Stern’s 1951 book, The Pillar of Fire, the story of his conversion from Judaism to Catholicism, was an international best seller and very likely the most wide- ly publicized book ever written by a psychiatrist practicing in Canada. It was praised by a range of notables, including Graham Greene, C. S. Lewis, Thomas Merton, and the philosophers Jacques Maritain and Gabriel Marcel. Stern was born in Germany where he received his medical education and train- ing in neurology and psychiatry; he fled from Hitler’s persecution of Jews to England in 1935, and then on to Montreal, Canada in 1939. Other of his books that reached large audiences include The Third Revolution (1954), in which he argued for a non-reductionistic and humanistic reinterpretation of psychiatry and psychoanalysis and presented them as compatible with religious and es- pecially Catholic faith, and The Flight from Woman (1965), a critique of Western overreliance on science and technology and the accompanying neglect of the poetic and intuitive. Stern was highly influential as an educator and researcher in the Canadian medical community and his publications were widely read and discussed outside of Canada. Yet when he died at the age of 69, the New York Times (November 8, 1975) published a brief obituary that did no more than list the books he had published and his professional appointments. Today all of his books are available for sale but not all are easily attainable, and, as I was dismayed to discover, only the first two are in the holdings of the Seattle University library, a Jesuit institution. In other words, Burston is right to de- scribe Stern as a “forgotten Freudian,” even as his biography does a wonderful job of showing why Stern and his work should not be forgotten. Writing a biography about Karl Stern is a challenging task. First, there is not a lot of secondary literature on him and it does not help matters that he was remarkably taciturn about important aspects of his life. He declared, “It is diffi- cult to trace the sequence of one’s own experiences. There is always a remainder one should leave untold” (Stern, 1951, p. 255). Unfortunately for his biographer, that reminder was fairly large and included specifics about his two years of being in psychoanalytic therapy while in Germany, which, he acknowledged, had a significant effect on his personal and religious development. Second, he was a complex person whose life seemed to be full of contradictions and para- doxes, that present a biographer with something of a dilemma. Should one simply present these gaps and contradictions or should one interpret them to create a least some semblance of coherence in Stern’s personality? Finally, how does one approach Stern’s account of his conversion to Catholicism? It

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/15691624-12341332 266 book reviews would be an understatement to say that for his contemporaries in the Jewish community, at a time when anti-Semitism was raging throughout Europe (and far from absent in North America), such a step was unfathomable and deeply disturbing. In addition, psychologists, by and large, are not at their best when discussing religious experience. They are wary of being seen as being “reli- gious,” and thereby not scientific. Religion and religious experience are are- nas with which most psychologists are unfamiliar and often uncomfortable. Since much of Stern’s thought centered on the relation between Judaism and Christianity, his biographer had to step into this controversial, important, and sensitive domain. Daniel Burston, an associate professor at Duquesne University, is eminently qualified as a biographer of prominent and controversial psychologists and psy- chiatrists. His biographies of Erich Fromm, Erik Erikson and R. D. Laing have been well received. Moreover, he has written extensively about topics such the history of psychoanalysis, psychology of religion, ethics and society, and cul- ture and alienation. He is also well qualified to write about things Canadian. Although he was born in Israel, his university education was at York University in Toronto, Canada, where he received his undergraduate education, as well as two PhDs, first in Social and Political Thought and then in Psychology. Finally, it is evident from this book, as well as other of his publications, that he has a strong moral compass and a firm commitment to fairness. At one point, I was reading Burston’s book while taking the train and be- came so gripped by it that I almost missed my stop. The story of Stern’s life, as he tells it (in the Pillar of Fire), and as Burston retells it, is compelling in its own right. Karl Stern was born in 1906 and grew up in Germany during an extremely tumultuous and frightening time. He was a very sensitive and creative man whose life was full of success as well as tragedy. The way in which Burston is present in the book as both narrator and appraiser of what he narrates is also striking. As author he is present in these pages as someone who works hard to make sense of Stern’s actions. For instance, Burston is obviously baffled by Stern’s apparent lack of enthusiasm, given his overall concern for social justice, overcoming anti-Semitism, and ecumenism, for the progressive approach of the Second Vatican Council. He is equally distressed by Stern’s failure to say anything about the Vietnam War. One can almost hear him speaking aloud as he discusses what Karl Stern did or did not do: “Seriously, Karl, what were you thinking,” or “How could you not say anything about that?” For the most part, I did not find this stylistic feature of Burston’s book distracting because it made the author’s perspective visible, showed his concern about the issues at hand, and created the impression of something like a dialogue between Stern and his biographer. Of course, Stern’s voice was restricted to those parts of his writings

Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 48 (2017) 259–274