SOURCE: Kaye, Howard L. “Becoming Sigmund Freud.” Contemporary Sociology 17, no. 3 (May 1988): 372–75.

In the following positive review, Kaye describes A Godless Jew as an “elegant essay” which helps to clarify questions regarding Freud's attitudes about religion and Jewish identity in relation to his theories of psychology.

Writing in 1951, Parsons and Shils claimed that along with Weber and Durkheim, it was Freud who was the most significant theorist for the discipline of sociology. How times have changed! Even a cursory glance at contemporary sociological scholarship suggests that Freud has now fallen from the ranks of the living social theorists, whose works continue to animate the theoretical enterprise, and has apparently become largely of historical interest—an appropriate subject for the history of science or the sociology of knowledge and culture, but no longer a source of insight. Accordingly, much of the recent writing on Freud has come to focus on...