Psychoanalysis was started by a Jew, Sigmund Freud. He was born in Freiburg in Moravia and lived from the age of 2 in Vienna but his parents were born in Galicia his father Jakob in Tzimenitz and his mother Amalia in Brody. Freud, as a Jew and as the originator of psychoanalysis, was always apprehensive that psychoanalysis would itself be considered a Jewish science. He wrote that if his name had been Uberhauser psychoanalysis would have been given a more positive reception; and he went out of his way to select non-jews for leadership positions in this new field. In 1910, he wrote to his Viennese Jewish colleagues at the Second Psychoanalytic Congress: Most of you are Jews, and therefore incompetent to win friends for the new teaching. Jews must be content with the modest role of preparing the ground. It is absolutely essential that I form ties in the world of science... The Swiss will save us. It was in this spirit that Freud favored the Swiss non-jewish group at the second IPA Congress. And, to the displeasure of his Viennese Jewish followers, he made Carl Jung the first President of the IPA. He also supported Putnam, a non-jew over Brill, another Galicianer, as President of the newly formed American Psychoanalytic Association. Though Freud never denied his Galicianer family origins the attention he gave to reflections on his family history are not insignificant: "I have reason to believe that my father's family were for a long time in the Rhineland (later Cologne), that in the fourteenth or fifteenth century they fled east from anti-semitic persecution and that in the course of the nineteenth century they retraced their steps from Lithuania through Galicia to German Austria." 1 Freud's father Jakob had moved to Moravia after a decade spent traveling between Tzimenitz and Freiberg on his business as a wool merchant. Influenced by his grandfather, Siskind Hoffman, he became a Maskil, an enlightened Jew, more in sympathy with the German Jewish Reform movement than with traditional rabbinical Judaism. In 1855, the year that he married Amalie Nathanson, his second or third wife, Jakob began to wear Western dress and was already speaking and signing documents in German rather than Hebrew or Yiddish. Still, he continued to study the Talmud as well as the Bible, and his son Sigmund acquired two copies of an edition of the Talmud in German, Hebrew and Aramaic published in 1929. Jakob left Freiberg because once the new railway line bypassed the city he could no longer make a living there. By the time Sigmund was five, his parents were settled in Vienna and by language, education, and dress, Sigmund became part of Viennese society. According to the historian Oscar Handlin 2, Freud's parents generation was 1 1925, p. 7-8. 2 Handlin, O, (1951). The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made the American People. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002.
made up mostly of trades people and artisans who shared the ambition of providing their children with a secular education. Handlin points out that, as young Jews, Freud s contemporaries saw a university degree as the only way of earning respect. He maintains that for middle class, secular Jews in Austria and Germany, Bildung with its defined cultural symbols, among which a university degree was necessary was status and that this was in part a way of making up for belonging to a minority that had been discriminated against for centuries. Though Freud emphasized his humanistic education, always minimizing his knowledge of Jewish subjects, including Hebrew and Yiddish, some of his disclaimers are suspect. It is believed that Yiddish was Freud's mother's only spoken language, and that he must have spoken it with her as a child and even as an adult when he visited her every Sunday until she died. His father inscribed the Bible he gave his son on his thirty-fifth birthday in Hebrew, with a Melitza (an anagram compiled from Biblical quotes). Freud may not have been as completely assimilated as he would have liked to appear. He, like many Viennese Jews at the time, was clearly ambivalent about his Jewish roots and his connections to the Jews of the Galician shtetl. Freud shared with other Jews a high estimation of all things German. When a Nazi tried to convince Erich Maria Remarque to return to Germany with the comment "Aren't you homesick?" Remarque responded, "No. I am not Jewish." But Freud also identified strongly with Moses, the Jewish lawgiver and restrained leader, and with Joseph, the interpreter. He attributed a Jewish identity to Napoleon's general Massina, who in fact was not Jewish. And it was in no small measure because Freud was Jewish that he found himself a student at a Viennese gymnasium where the majority of students were Jews. The historian Sara Winter notes, in agreement with Handlin, that schooling was the main vehicle of acculturation for Jews in mid-nineteenth-century Vienna. Winter writes, By that time a gymnasium education had become a crucial element of upper-class and professional status in Germany and the German-speaking countries. And for those who did not come from economically and socially privileged backgrounds, the ideal of Bildung had the special benefit that it enabled them to claim their good taste as the basis for membership in a moral elite." 3 The acquisition of Bildung was the goal of the gymnasium education. Accordingly, Freud studied Latin and Greek extensively. He also studied Shakespeare, Cervantes, and the great figures of the German enlightenment, including Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, and Heine. The gebildet Mensch was educated in the classical ideals of order and harmony, and Freud's adult work shows clearly the effects of this education on his thinking, not only in specific allusions to Greek philosophy and mythology, but also in his devotion to the archaeological metaphor for psychoanalysis: the psychoanalyst uncovers layers of 3 1999, p. 41.
the mind as the archaeologist uncovers layers of a buried civilization by way of this metaphor psychoanalysis finds a place in the company of respected and intriguing scholarly and scientific endeavors. The past is understood through the study of remnants in the present, while the universal is grasped through study of the particular case history. But even as he welcomed the ideal of Bildung as his intellectual home ground, the necessary divergence from traditional Jewish society brought its own strains. In The Ordeal of Civility, John Murray Cuddihy (1974) examines what emancipation meant for Jewish intellectuals. He situates Freud's creation of psychoanalysis against this backdrop, and, like Handlin and Winter, he makes clear that the concept of Bildung had an expanded meaning for many of the early Jewish analysts; it was their chance to achieve conformity with the cultural mores that would allow them to be integrated into a society and a status that they had historically been excluded from. Yet each adoption of larger European cultural values was also a step away from the Jewish culture of their families. Cuddihy suggests that upwardly mobile urban Jews of the nineteenth century felt embarrassment toward their provincial parents, and "guilt for being thus ashamed. 4 In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud (1900) reports what many Freud scholars understand to be a defining experience. When he was fourteen, his father told him about an incident from his own past. He was walking down the street in Freiberg when a Gentile told him he should walk in the gutter, and then knocked the hat off Jakob Freud s head. And what did you do? Sigmund asked his father. His father answered that he had stepped into the gutter and picked up his hat. Freud was certainly aware of the presence within himself of the dynamic noted by Cuddihy. He was ashamed of his father's behavior, and he later described in himself an identification with the Carthaginian general Hannibal, who stood up to the Romans. Sara Winter (1999) points out that even before Freud made the trip he commemorated in "A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis, "he was uncomfortably aware that he had, as he put it, "surpassed" his father, who could not read Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus in Greek as Freud, with his classical education, could. Both the awareness and the discomfort are relevant. Freud himself writes in the Acropolis paper: Our father had been in business. He had no secondary education and Athens could not have meant much to him. Thus, what interfered with our enjoyment of the journey to Athens was a feeling of filial piety. 5 We have a less "pious" and more telling version of this theme from a Dr. M. Grinwald, a religious Jew from Buzhocz, the birthplace of Freud's paternal grandfather. In 1941 4 p. 58. 5 1936, pp. 247-248.
Grinwald contributed to Ha'aretz, the oldest Jewish periodical in Palestine, the story of an encounter with Freud in Vienna in the early years of the twentieth century. Grinwald had given a lecture on a controversial popular drama, Yohanan the Prophet, that many thought to be disparaging of Orthodox Jews. After the talk, while Grinwald and his audience were having a friendly lunch, Freud made several jokes related to religion, and pointed out how many Jews resembled Yohanan, the protagonist of the play, with his shaggy coat, unkempt hair, and mysterious face. Then he commented that he himself preferred the man in the elegant tuxedo to the one dressed like a prophet. Grinwald recalled thinking to himself, "How far this man has drifted from Jewish life! 6 " I believe that Grimwald s account of his encounter with Fried in the early years of the 20th Century can help us understand more about Freud s relation to his Jewish identity. How can we understand what Freud meant when he referred to himself as an essential Jew? I would contend that he had two things in mind. The Jewish commitment to morality which was impressed on Freud by his Hebrew teacher and mentor Samuel Hamerschag and was central to Buildung (sicherkeit) and the central importance of intellectuality Jews were the people of the book: they valued the interpretive mode and the interpretation of dreams and symbols is central to psychoanalysis in a way that resembles the central value of Talmudic interpretation in Judaism. In November 1938, Freud, newly arrived in London, received a request to help YIVO in its fund-raising effort with the following note to Jakob Melitis: We Jews have always known how to respect spiritual values. We preserved our unity through ideas and because of them we have survived to this day. The fact that Rabbi Jochanan ben Zakkai, immediately after the destruction of the Temple, obtained from the conqueror permission to establish the first academy for Jewish knowledge in Jabneh was for me always one of the most significant manifestations in our history. But what was not part of Freud s Jewish identity was the Jewish religion even though Jochanan ben Zakkai and his followers studied Torah at the Academy which so impressed Freud. Freud had no sympathy or understanding for Jewish religious rituals and practices. He even considered leaving Judaism and converting in order not to stand under the chupa at the marriage ceremony. He was dissuaded by another mentor and father figure Joseph Breuer (himself the son of a Hasidic Rabbi). Breuer told him that would be an extreme step that he should not take. Freud wrote two papers about religion the Future of an Illusion and Obsessive Acts and Religious Practices 7. In the second he understands religious rituals as similar to 6 Grinwald, M. (1941). Ha aretz. September 21st, 1941. 7 Freud, S. (1927). The Future of an Illusion. Standard Edition, 21. London: Hogarth Press, 1959, pp. 5-56.
neurotic symptoms. In the first he explains religious observance as deriving from childhood wishes. Although these papers may have some valid psychoanalytic underpinning they read more like polemical tracts and suggest that Freud had a strong need to disconnect himself from Orthodox Jewry. But why? I think it was in part because he was embarrassed by the shtel Jews ( dressed like a prophet ) who were emigrating from Galicia to Vienna. Freud was intent on becoming part of Viennese genteel society, whose members wore Tuxedos and did not speak Yiddish, have unkempt hair and wear shaggy coats. His relationship to Yiddish is of interest. The evidence is that he knew Yiddish, his mother s tongue but he denied fluency in Yiddish as well as Hebrew. Yet he was a collector of Jewish (Yiddish) jokes and his book on wit and the unconscious presented the case for the profound insights that could be gleaned from analyzing those jokes including a better understanding about how the mind works. I think the best word to characterize Freud s Jewish Identity is ambivalent. The matter of his Jewishness became more central to him as he grew older, although identification with the biblical figures of Jakob, Joseph, and Moses was important even early in his life. He spent hours in the church of St. Pietro in Vincole in Rome, looking at Michelangelo s sculpture of Moses; he wrote a paper about the sculpture which he published anonymously, again I think a reflection of his ambivalence about his Jewish identity. Moses of course became a major concern, almost an obsession in the last decades of his life. Hitler, when he came to power in the early thirties, made Freud more aware of his Jewish identity, but writing the paper (in three parts) he was, I would contend, trying to work out his conflicts about his Jewish identity. The ambivalence is clear. He makes Moses an Egyptian and deprives the Jews of having a prophet who is one of their own. He uses the knowledge he gained about ancient cultures in the Gymnasium to develop his thesis. Freud began collecting his antiquities right after his father died. Surrounding himself with graven images and thereby distancing himself from his father s Jewish world and his Galician roots. Freud s prejudice about religious ritual and observance was transmitted to his followers, including his daughter Anna. She resisted for some time having an IPA Congress in Freud, S. (1907), Obsessive acts and religious practices. Standard Edition, 9: 115-127. London: Hogarth Press, 1959.
Jerusalem but did object when it finally took place. However, I should note that none of Freud s sons were circumcised, all married Jews. Freud also made several positive statements about Zionism although he worried about the fate of a Jewish state in a land with a hostile native population. Freud s followers tried to bleach religion and Judaism from psychoanalysis. When I trained, interest in Judaism was viewed as neurotic. I remember the effort it took to convince those in charge not to have classes on Yom Kippur. However, times have changed, in part because Freud s Jewish identity has become more of an object of examination during the past decade. In Dec, 2006, a conference on Freud s Jewish World was sponsored by the Leo Baeck Institute, YIVO, and the Freud Museum. The proceedings will be published in 2009 but you can access an Audio and Video file on the Center for Jewish History website: www.cjh.org Bibliography Cuddihy, J. (1974). The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Levi-Strauss, and the Struggle with Jewish Modernity. New York: Basic Books. Freud, S. (1900). The interpretation of dreams. Standard Edition 4/5. (1907), Obsessive acts and religious practices. Standard Edition, 9: 115-127. London: Hogarth Press, 1959. (1925) An Autobiographical Study. Standard Edition 20:3-70. (1927). The Future of an Illusion. Standard Edition, Vol. 21. London: Hogarth Press, 1959, pp. 5-56. (1936). A disturbance of memory on the Acropolis. Standard Edition 22:239 248. Grinwald, M. (1941). Ha aretz. September 21st, 1941. Handlin, O, (1951). The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made the American People. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. Winter, S. (1999). Freud and the Institution of Psychoanalytic Knowledge. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.