No. 2 - The First Numbers and the Five Stages of Periodical Publication

Summary

This chapter maps five stages of the founding history of the psychoanalytic periodical enterprise, beginning with Freud’s pre-analytic phantasies around a journal, its social form, and unavoidable emotional content. Freud later nurtured a small group of followers expressly to establish a periodical and found the discourse on religion critical to the enterprise. With the arrival of competing periodicals on the scene, the use of religious rhetoric editors utilized the discourse on religion to narrate group dynamics within the Freudian circle and to enact change in the periodical enterprise itself. In is only in 1912 that religious content became a charged site in Christian-Jewish debates for working out contemporary rivalries and for marking out one’s territory. Jung and his circle began to abandon the analogic treatment of religion for the evidence that the history of religion could provide as the basis for their theoretical differences with Freud.