Hate and the ‘Jewish Science’: Anti-Semitism, Nazism and Psychoanalysis

229 Pages·2005·0.63 MB·English

by  Stephen Frosh (auth.)

Hate and the ‘Jewish
Science’
Anti-Semitism, Nazism and Psychoanalysis
Stephen Frosh
Hate and the ‘Jewish Science’
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Hate and the ‘Jewish
Science’
Anti-Semitism, Nazism and Psychoanalysis
Stephen Frosh
© Stephen Frosh 2005
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2005 978-1-4039-2170-3
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Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction 1
Part I: Freud, Jews and Anti-Semitism
Chapter 1 Freud’s Jewish Identity 9
Chapter 2 A Hostile World: Facing Anti-Semitism 33
Part II: Nazism and the ‘Jewish Science’
Chapter 3 Psychoanalysis, Nazism and ‘Jewish Science’ 63
Chapter 4 A Non-Jewish Psychoanalysis 91
Chapter 5 The Repressed Returns 122
Part III: Anti-Semitism and the Other
Chapter 6 Psychoanalysis of Anti-Semitism I:
A Christian Disease? 151
Chapter 7 Psychoanalysis of Anti-Semitism II: Splitting
and Narcissism 169
Chapter 8 The Other 198
References 217
Index 222
v
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the Limmud organisation for stimulating my
thoughts on Freud and Jewish identity, with which the project that
turned into this book began. I am grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for
providing me with a Research Fellowship in 2003–4 to support the
writing of the book.
Some parts of this book have appeared in earlier and shorter versions
in the following journal articles.
Freud, Psychoanalysis and Anti-Semitism. The Psychoanalytic Review, 91
(2004), 309–330 (Permission for reprinting granted by The Psychoanalytic
Reviewand the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis.)
Psychoanalysis, Nazism and ‘Jewish Science’. International Journal of
Psychoanalysis, 84 (2003), 1315–1332.
The Other American Imago, 59 (2002), 389–407.
vi
Introduction
It has sometimes been suggested that books on psychoanalysis, rather
than being shelved in psychology sections in bookshops and libraries,
should instead be listed under ‘Jewish Studies’. This is not quite as
whimsical as it might seem: not only have psychoanalysts often been
Jewish, but those who are not Jewish are frequently thought of as if
they were. In addition, it can be argued that psychoanalysis is heavily
indebted to, and informed by, ‘Jewish’ perspectives, attitudes, ethics
and methodological approaches. Starting as it did with Freud, its
origins were deeply embedded in the secular Jewish culture of the late
nineteenth century, at a time in Europe when Jewish and other iden-
tities were being debated and were undergoing radical change. Anti-
Semitism was a powerful political and cultural force, science was
struggling with religion, romanticism was having its nostalgic last gasp,
and the revolutionary movements of the twentieth century – in pol-
itics, science and the arts – were being born. The Jews were both inside
and outside Western society: newly ‘emancipated’ and able to claim
influential positions, yet still victims of social exclusion, anti-Semitic
populism and new forms of ‘racial’ anti-Semitism that were gradually
replacing the old Christian anti-Judaism.
Psychoanalysis emerged from this background as one significant
expression of the ‘Jewish mind’, reflecting and analysing Western civil-
isation, revealing its irrational and intense underside. Subsequently,
psychoanalysis has become broader in its appeal and its personnel, yet
there is still an irresistible pull towards associating it with Jews and
Jewish culture, due partly to an inward-lookingness and fascination
with psychological ‘depths’ that is often thought of as character-
istically Jewish. In some ways this has been to psychoanalysis’ advan-
tage, giving it energy and a ready-made sense of collective and cultural
1
2 Hate and the ‘Jewish Science’
identity; in other ways, the association between psychoanalysis and
Jewishness has been costly. In particular, anti-Semitism has infiltrated
attitudes towards psychoanalysis, and there have been times when the
denigration of psychoanalysis as ‘Jewish science’ has been murderously
dangerous.
This book explores the intimate relationship between Jewish iden-
tity, psychoanalysis and anti-Semitism through what might be thought
of as three ‘case studies’. The first of these, as is common in books on
psychoanalysis, is concerned with Freud himself. Freud was absolutely
antagonistic to religion, including Judaism, and at times ambivalent
towards Jews. However, he not only acknowledged the influence of his
Jewish background on his work, but he also asserted or even celebrated
the significance of his Jewish identity and his continuing links with
the Jewish people – arguably, increasingly so as he got older. Much of
psychoanalysis was first outlined to Jewish audiences; the brilliant
examples of dreams and jokes peppering Freud’s early psychoanalytic
writings were largely Jewish in content and context; and in old age he
wrote a major study on the theme of the origins of Judaism. His friends
and colleagues were Jews; his way of thinking was Jewish, albeit
heavily inflected with European cultural values; and in the end his fate
– to be exiled from his homeland as a refugee from Nazism – was
Jewish.
As many historians of culture have shown, Freud’s Jewish connec-
tions were neither artificial nor trivial. Freud’s own account of the
meaning of his Jewish identity centred on three things: an emotional
but somewhat inexplicable attachment to, and identification with,
Jews and (to a lesser extent) Judaism; a sense of the value of being
sufficiently ‘outside’ Western culture to gain analytic distance from it;
and an appreciation of the extensive nature and effects of anti-
Semitism. These three aspects of Jewish identity are discussed in Part I
of this book, with the first chapter focusing on establishing the
significance to Freud of his Jewishness and on his understanding of its
emotional hold, whilst the second looks at his ideas on anti-Semitism,
particularly as formulated in the book Moses and Monotheism. What
emerges from this material is a view of psychoanalysis as founded on
both a positive valuation of the critical vision that comes from being
slightly outside the host culture, and as a response to – yet also a
‘carrier’ of – the hostility of that culture towards its outsiders, notably
embodied in the figure of the Jew.
If the Jewish heritage of psychoanalysis was something towards
which Freud himself felt ambivalence, it is not surprising that this
Introduction 3
feeling was shared by other early psychoanalysts, Jewish and non-
Jewish alike. Psychoanalysis strove to be a neutral science yet patently
demonstrated that its origins lay in a very specific set of historical and
social circumstances, and that these had a continuing impact on its
theories and practices. For Jewish analysts, living in a context in which
anti-Semitism was one of the most powerful political ideologies, and in
which assimilation to the surrounding culture was a tempting aspira-
tion for Jews as a way to escape it, this meant having to deal with pro-
fessional investments in something they might have been trying to
leave behind. For non-Jewish analysts, the situation was even more
stark: in a society in which to be a Jew was to be heavily derogated,
they chose to identify themselves with a discipline invented by a Jew
and dominated by Jews; they found themselves being analysed and
trained by Jews; and they discovered that they were seen more-or-less
as Jews by much of the surrounding culture. For them, being adherents
of ‘Jewish science’ would always have some uncomfortable aspects; but
once the external situation became one in which it could endanger
their careers and possibly their lives, they were faced with a set of very
difficult moral and practical choices.
The second ‘case study’, in Part II of this book, explores what hap-
pened when the psychoanalytic movement was brutally faced with the
requirement to defend or repudiate its Jewish identity. Psychoanalysis
grew up in German-speaking Europe and it was there that it met its
great political adversary, Nazism. After the Second World War, the
story of what happened was largely buried for about forty years, until a
succession of historical ‘recoveries’ and a new generation of German
analysts re-examined it. Historical work on the fate of psychoanalysis
in the Third Reich has continued to reveal important information,
without resolving all the controversies about the significance of the
events in question for psychoanalysis itself and for a broader under-
standing of what can happen when organisations are faced with the
demand to collaborate or die – a demand that, of course, is all-too-
often made of individuals in such circumstances as well. In Germany,
it is now clear, the decision was made to collaborate, but how and why
this happened and the impact of this decision after the war is a compli-
cated tale. Chapters 3, 4 and 5 draw on this historical work to offer a
psychosocial account of the collaborationist tendency in psychoana-
lysis at that time, in particular how it expressed not only personal fears
and ambitions and misguided strategies, but also something about
anti-Semitism on a psychological and political level. What becomes
apparent from this material is that the way German psychoanalysis