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not just eating fish that is obligatory; so is marital love,” he wrote. He was alluding to a rabbinic recommendation that couples have sex on the Sabbath. What really disturbed his patient, Ferenczi said, was that as a boy he had overheard his parents acting on that suggestion and made himself sick to quash the thought that his beloved mother could do
that
with his father.
    When I first read Ferenczi’s Oedipal explanation, it struck me as crude, even ludicrous. How could the depth and complexity of the boy’s Friday-night experience be reduced to a groan overheard by chance? But, given how prescient Ferenczi is in other respects, I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt. I also decided to look into how he came to write that essay.
    Most of what is known about Ferenczi comes from two decades’ worth of letters to and from Freud. From them we learn that although Ferenczi, like Freud, was the kind of assimilated Jew whose idea of Sabbath rest meant Sunday sociability, he would have been perfectly well aware of the difference between Saturday and Sunday. Ferenczi grew up in a Jewish community in Miskolcz, a town in Hungary, where his mother probably lit Sabbath candles on Friday night. Both of Ferenczi’s parents came from Poland, a country whose pious Jews made Hungary’s less strict Jewish community look practically Christian. His mother was the president of a local organization of Jewish women and probably observant. His father, an ardent Hungarian nationalist and pamphleteer who changed his name from Fraenkel, probably wasn’t.
    By the time Ferenczi got to Budapest, at the turn of the twentieth century, it had grown into a gleaming metropolis on whose elegant boulevards promenaded writers, artists, and intellectuals, whose ranks soon included Ferenczi himself. They considered their city a Central European Paris where Sundays were for wrapping your arm around a lover’s waist and strolling through a park; drinking and listening to bands in one of Budapest’s big, gilded cafés; gathering with your family for a rich, desultory Sunday dinner; fleeing the heat with a trip to the nearby mountains. It was not a day of solemn prayer. Ferenczi saw patients on Saturdays. On Sundays, he usually took the train to Vienna to talk things over with Freud. He would not have wanted his diagnosis to reek of a parochial Jewishness. He wanted it to express the human condition. So maybe when he turned this Saturday neurosis into a Sunday one, he was, like the early Christian thinkers, universalizing. This is not to say that Ferenczi was anti-Jewish. On the contrary, he was a Jewish chauvinist, often bragging about the accomplishments of fellow members of the tribe. But he recoiled from everything having to do with Jewish ritual. So did Freud.
    It’s hard to remember now, but a century ago psychoanalysts like Freud and Ferenczi were going to rid the world of superstition and replace it with a fearless science of the self. They were going to forge the personality the sociologist Philip Rieff would later call “psychologicalman,” the self-scrutinizing figure whose quest for individual self-improvement banished the more community-minded soul of previous eras. Psychological men and women had liberated their “I”s. They had no time for the “we” cultivated by believers. Religion was a sickness, and Freud had come to cure it.
    When Ferenczi blurred Saturday into Sunday, he may also have been worrying about anti-Semitism, which he and Freud feared would damn their new science to oblivion. In November 1917, less than six months before he sent Freud a finished draft of “Sunday Neurotics,” Ferenczi dropped him a note announcing with relief that he was finally starting to see non-Jewish patients. He and Freud would both have interpreted this as a sign that psychoanalysis was becoming respectable in Hungary. On the other hand, this wouldn’t have left Ferenczi time to psychoanalyze many Christians before sending his article to