The Jewish World of Sigmund Freud: Essays on Cultural Roots and the Problem of Religious Identity

205 Pages·2010·0.84 MB·English

by  Arnold D. Richards

The Jewish World
of Sigmund Freud
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The Jewish World
of Sigmund Freud
Essays on Cultural Roots and
the Problem of Religious Identity
Edited by ARNOLD D. RICHARDS
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina, and London
“Hidden in Plain Sight: Freud’s Jewish Identity Revisited” originally
appeared in Psychoanalytic Dialogues17 (2): 197–217. Reprinted by
permission of the publisher, Taylor & Francis (http://www.informa
world.com).
“Freud’s Moses and Viennese Jewish Modernism” appeared in slightly
different form as chapter one of Abigail Gillman’s book Viennese Jewish
Modernism: Freud, Hofmannsthal, Beer-Hofmann, and Schnitzler
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009).
LIBRARYOFCONGRESSCATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATIONDATA
The Jewish world of Sigmund Freud : essays on cultural
roots and the problem of religious identity / edited by Arnold
D. Richards.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7864-4424-3
softcover : 50# alkaline paper
¡. Freud, Sigmund, 1856–1939. 2. Freud, Sigmund, 1856–
1939—Religion. 3. Jews—Identity. 4. Jews—Europe—
Intellectual life. 5. Judaism and psychoanalysis. I. Richards,
Arnold D.
BF109.F74J49 2010
200.92—dc22 2009047872
British Library cataloguing data are available
©2010 Arnold D. Richards. All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying
or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publisher.
Front cover: Sigmund Freud, 1926 (photograph by Ferdinand
Schmutzer)
Manufactured in the United States of America
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Box 6¡¡, Je›erson, North Carolina 28640
www.mcfarlandpub.com
To the staffs of the Leo Baeck Institute,
the YIVO Institute and the Freud Museum
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Table of Contents
Introduction 1
Hidden in Plain Sight: Freud’s Jewish Identity Revisited
Jill Salberg 5
Assimilation and Affirmation: The Jews of Freud’s Vienna
Marsha L. Rozenblit 22
BeingMr. Somebody: Freud and Classical Education
Richard H. Armstrong 35
The Neue Freie PresseNeurosis: Freud, Karl Kraus, and the
Newspaper as Daily Devotional
Leo A. Lensing 51
Sigmund Freud and Electrotherapy
Sander L. Gilman 66
Anti-Semitism in the Freud Case Histories
Harold P. Blum 78
Freud’s Theory of Jewishness: For Better and for Worse
Eliza Slavet 96
Freud and Levinas: Talmud and Psychoanalysis Before the Letter
Ethan Kleinberg 112
Freud’s Moses and Viennese Jewish Modernism
Abigail Gillman 126
Freud’s Michelangelo: The Sculptural Meditations of a Hellenized Jew
Mary Bergstein 136
Freud, Moses, and Akhenaten
Florence Dunn Friedman 144
Sigmund Freud in Exile: The End of an Illusion
Frank Mecklenburg 160
vii
viii TABLE OF CONTENTS
“Leaving This World with Decency”: Psychoanalytical Considerations
on Suicide in the Life and Work of Sigmund Freud
Benigna Gerisch 165
Freud’s Jewish World: A Historical Perspective
Steven Beller 175
About the Contributors 187
Index 191
Introduction
The essays in this book are based on papers presented at a conference held
in December 2006 at the Center for Jewish History in New York City. The con-
ference, Freud’s Jewish World, was mounted on the occasion of the one hun-
dred fiftieth anniversary of the year of Freud’s birth (1856). The sponsors of
the conference were the Leo Baeck Institute, the YIVO Institute for Jewish
Research and the Sigmund Freud Archives. The Leo Baeck Institute, founded
in 1938, is a research and archival center for the study of the German Jewish
world. The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research is the world’s preeminent
resource center for Eastern European Studies; Freud was one of its founding
trustees. The Sigmund Freud Archives is dedicated to the collection, conser-
vation, and collation of Freud’s papers, correspondence and photographs.
Together these three archives provided a significant amount of the primary
and secondary source material for many of the contributors to this volume.
Freud’s one hundred fiftieth birthday was celebrated all over the world by
conferences, exhibitions, and special journal issues and books. These events
and publications addressed many aspects of his work, especially his contribu-
tion to the culture of his time and to modern scientific, literary and historical
thought, but none focused specifically on Freud as a Jew—his Jewish roots, his
Jewish identity and his ambivalent attitude toward Judaism. Jerry Victor Diller
did a search in 1991of more than 100,000 thousand books and articles listed in
the Index of Psychoanalytic Writings and found that only forty or fifty dealt
directly with Freud’s Jewish identity or with the relationship between Jews and
psychoanalysis.
A more recent search of the Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing (PEP)
CD-Rom of the literature on Freud’s Jewishness called up only seventeen
entries. Clearly there has not been adequate attention given to the impact that
the experience of Freud and his followers growing up as Jews in the Hapsburg
Empire had on the creation and development of the discipline of psychoanaly-
sis. I think the matter has to be located in the larger context of the sociology
of scientific thought and the sociology of psychoanalytic thought in particu-
lar. We are indebted to another Hapsburg Jew, Ludwig Fleck, for the frame-
work of this sociology. Fleck’s landmark volume, The Genesis and Development
of Scientific Fact, in 1936 launched the discipline of the sociology of scientific
knowledge by making the case for the centrality of sociological, cultural, polit-
ical, psychological and personal determinants in the development of ground-
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