Daniel Burston, A Forgotten Freudian: The Passion of Karl Stern. Karnac Books Ltd: London, 2016. xxiii, 256 pages. $41.09 paperback

Shortly before he died, Gregory Baum recommended this book for review to the Canadian Catholic Historical Association. Since Baum's letters about Stern to Burston are cited and quoted at some length, and the book is dedicated to Baum "for a lifetime of service to all humanity," our readers may understand that Baum had some influence in its writing. I accepted the task of reviewing a book that could be important not only to understanding Karl Stern (1906-1975), who has been neglected by historians of Catholicism in Canada, but also, to understanding Baum himself. I cannot recommend the book for either purpose.

The book is divided into nine chapters. The first four are a rough and lengthy summary of Karl Stern's autobiography The Pillar of Fire (1951). Clearly, the boundary between Judaism and Christianity in Stern's childhood was fluid (189). While conversion was not a radical step, it was still a conscious choice. Burston later speculates on the possible deep-seated resentments against Stern's family which brought on conversion. His "traitor complex" towards the Jewish people "was probably linked to guilt feelings about his unresolved (and belatedly consummated) adolescent rebellion against his father and family of "origin." (193).

The next three chapters are shorter summaries of Stern's other major works: The Third Revolution: A Study of Psychiatry and Religion (1954), Through Dooms of Love (1960), and The Flight from Woman (1965). Burston gives a credible explanation for Stern's disappearance from contemporary consciousness (158-160). As a psychiatrist, and a Freudian, Stern's humanism was dismissed by biological reductionism within psychiatry, which relied more and more on pharmacotherapy. Stern's impressive work in literary criticism, too, was dismissed by post-modernists. In feminist studies, his firm belief in innate gender differences "dooms him from the start for the vast majority of academic readers" (160). Burston shrewdly sees that I. McGilchrist (2009) The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World had supplanted Stern in academic debates.

Stern's last major work, a collection of essays, Love and Success (1975), only merits a few mentions as another of Stern's again unsuccessful attempts to harmonize Catholicism and Freudianism. Since "... Freud and his followers regarded Jews who converted to Christianity as deeply neurotic, and that many still do" (163), Stern was already deeply suspect to Freudians. The author accepts this negative assessment and adds that he was "in no position to deny that [Stern] suffered from severe neurotic difficulties, or that they played some part in his decision to convert" (187, repeated on 191). Burston narrowly avoids trivializing or ignoring Sterns "conscious experiences of doubt and transcendence" a phrase he takes from M. Hewitt (2014) "Rivary or difference? Contemporary psychospirituality and the psychoanalytic study of religion, Religious Studies Review, 40:4, 175-185. Thus, Burston writes, "Stern emerges not merely as an authoritarian and self-absorbed father, or as a miserable buffoon, but as a vulnerable, tragic figure" (157).

The most interesting chapter--at least to this reader--is the eighth, entitled "A Hebrew Catholic." It discusses Stern's conversion, his roller-coaster relationship with and then his departure from the Jewish community, and his later attempts to combat anti-Semitism, racism, and all forms of religious nationalism through inter-religious dialogue. This chapter goes farther in presenting the author, Stern, behind Stern's books. Unfortunately, even this chapter is padded with irrelevant descriptions and discussions of anti-Semitism among Lefebvrists long after Stern's death. Burston, however, shows profound insight in detailing how Stern's many statements about Judaism in his autobiography, The Pillar of Fire, were profoundly insulting to Jews and his later public work failed to move the Jewish community of North America.

The ninth chapter is purportedly a comparison and commentary on Judaism and Catholicism in Stern and in the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, but it is mainly an extended commentary on Lacan and has little of relevance to any knowledge of Stern and could have been jettisoned.

Burston was ill-served by his editors; aside from the long passages irrelevant to his purpose, there are over fifty minor mistakes in grammar, syntax and spelling, and awkward phrases, spread across 200 pages of text (including the misspelling of the name of one of Canada's Prime Ministers (62) as well as mistranslations into English of well-known Montreal place names and institutions that needed no translation.

Above all, the entire work engages with speculation, which in large doses is unsatisfying for historians. The summaries of Stern's works are accompanied by the author's more or less useful or interesting musings on the psychological reasons behind Stern's writings and a continuous comparison of Stern's insights with Stern's contemporaries or later writers.

Although Burston claims Stern has been forgotten, Stern's books are widely available, some have been re-issued, and there have been popular, and more recently, scholarly analyses, the latter by David Neuhaus (1988), Sherry Simon (1999) and Robert McFarland (2007). Members of the Canadian Catholic Historical Association would be better served by reading or rereading Stern's better writings rather than this biography. Still, Burston's work reinforces the point that Stern deserves to be known and mentioned in lectures on Post-World War II Catholicism in Canada.

Paul Laverdure

University of Sudbury