The Jewish World of Sigmund Freud: Essays on Cultural Roots and the Problem of Religious Identity PDF
Preview The Jewish World of Sigmund Freud: Essays on Cultural Roots and the Problem of Religious Identity
The Jewish World of Sigmund Freud This page intentionally left blank 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 This page intentionally left blank 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- 1
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