ABSTRACT

On January 29th, 1951, Father James Keller, director of The Christopher Award committee, sent Karl Stern a brief letter asking him to attend an award ceremony at New York's Astor Hotel on February 15th. Undeterred by the prevailing climate of opinion, Stern depicted Freud as a great humanist whose positivist leanings obscured the latent Christian meaning of his work. Stern valorized the simple and unvarnished faith of farmers, tradesmen, and servants, and tried to link this kind of unquestioning faith to an evolving metaphysical framework that combined elements of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Henri Bergson, Max Scheler, Jacques Maritain, and other specifically Catholic philosophers. There are numerous local accounts highlighting Stern's ability as an academic teacher: he seemed to have interested a whole new generation of medical students in Montreal and later in Ottawa in the histological study of the brain, psychopathology and the anthropological perspective of psychiatry.