The introduction challenges the conventional modernist approach by tracing the development of psychoanalytic discourse as a network of cultural systems dependent on commercial interests and connected through various authors, editors, publishers, printers, and readers. I explore the discursive ground that religion provided for the establishment of the contemporary “rules” of engaging in the field of psychoanalysis. The prewar period may anticipate postwar psychoanalytic literature on religion, but the journal wars, and the rivalries between the various players for control of the key publications play a much more central role in these works than various views on the role of religion in the psyche.

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.