Freudian Dream Interpretation as a Shibboleth

Psychoanalysis began with Sigmund Freud and his conceptions of the new science of the unconscious. Scholars, who as human beings have their own projections, have fluctuated between maximizing and minimizing the Jewish roots of psychoanalysis. For some researchers, Freud has played the role of a gate opener to the hidden realm of childhood and to the invisible mental treasury, acting even as a guardian of Jewish memory, vitality, and tradition.

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On the other hand, there are good grounds to contradict the importance of the Jewish religion to the atheistically- and scientifically-oriented Freud.

Plausibly, James Anderson does not insist on any connections between Jewish mystical (Kabbalistic) tradition and Freud’s psychoanalytic contribution. Instead, he favors the view that Freud has a Jewish “mental construction” that “undergirded” the creation of psychoanalysis. Undoubtedly, such directly or ambiguously expressed constructions can be found and quoted in Freud’s works and letters. One of the most direct expressions of Freud’s Jewish self-understanding has been found in the preface to the Hebrew edition of Totem and Taboo (1930): “If the question were put to [me]: ‘Since you have abandoned all these common characteristics of your countrymen, what is there left in you that is Jewish?’ [I] would reply: ‘A very great deal, and probably its very essence.’” This statement, though, begs for a further question that Freud did not pose: “Is there such a thing as Jewish ‘essence?’” Except perhaps as something to be renegotiated, intellectually, morally and passionately?

Even when non-Jews started to become interested in psychoanalysis, supported by Freud partly so that psychoanalysis would not be labeled as a “Jewish science” but as a science with universal claims, there remained traces of sectarianism and tension between the Jewish specialty and universalism. As Anderson reminds us, in his letter to Freud (May 11, 1908), Karl Abraham wrote that “our Talmudic way of thinking cannot disappear just like that.” Anderson also aptly refers to Freud’s analysis of dreams and jokes being “like Talmudic analysis.” This claim, however, deserves closer scrutiny.

In his works, Freud himself did not consciously illustrate such links to Talmudic (rabbinic) tradition. It is instructive that The Interpretation of Dreams, the crucial founding text of psychoanalysis, does not include any clear, explicit links to the Talmudic tradition of dream interpretation. Still, it can be maintained that the Talmud (the “way of thinking” from ancient times concerning Jewish religion, its holy texts, and their interpretation) is an unconscious subtext even in Freud’s dream interpretation. It conceives of a “manifest dream” as a text molded by dream work and of “latent

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dream thoughts” with hidden meanings to be revealed by free association and psychoanalytic interpretation. Freud (in New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, 1933) called his dream theory a “shibboleth” that marked those who understood psychoanalysis and the opposition who did not.

Just as the manifest content of the dream can’t represent the entire dream’s meaning, Freud’s manifest commitment to scientific psychoanalysis cannot be taken literally to represent all of psychoanalysis. The shibboleth of manifest scientism has its “other”: the shibboleth of latent Talmudic heritage. Freudian dream interpretation is akin to rabbinic tradition in that holy texts are related to dreams and have literal, hinted, implicit, and esoteric meanings and their interpretation takes into account all kinds of details, omissions, distortions, repetitions, and contradictions—virtually all imaginable possibilities. The task of Freudian dream interpretation is to grasp meaning in every detail, to make sense of every absurdity. Likewise, the rabbinic tradition, including the Midrash (the investigative and interpretative process of the commentaries), is tuned to distill the deeper truth and wisdom from every detail and hint, and from the interdependence of holy texts.

In the early Semitic and Jewish traditions, dreaming was linked to health, vigor, and sexual pollution (masturbation). Dream interpretation had meanings connected with liberation from the evil inclination (“Yezer”) and solving and untying knots by translating the language of dreams. In his dream interpretation, Freud also spoke about unwinding knots and tangles and translations of symbols into a more understandable language.

Freud presented himself as a naturalizer and secularizer of holy dream texts. His magnum opus was meant to carry on the new mission of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis was not built to support any religion, since all religions were discarded as illusions.

The psychoanalytic house that Freud built was neither a synagogue nor a church. With his theories and metaphors, Freud tried to see and hear into the symptoms of psychic disorders and to reveal the compulsive rituals and obsessive doctrines of all religions. The Torah and the Talmud left out feminine qualities from the concept of God, and even Freud operated with his penetrating

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theories as a “conquistador” for whom the dark continent of femininity was still vaporous, but to which he was a sensitive listener.

When his house in Vienna was to be emptied, Freud had his association about an ancient hero. On March 13, 1938, a day after the German annexation of Austria, Freud told the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society that after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, Rabbi Jochanan ben Zakkai wanted to open a new school at Jabneh for the study of the Torah and that “we are going to do the same” (Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, 1957, vol. 3, p. 236). The treasure of psychoanalysis could no longer be located in Berggasse, the Freudian Home Temple. The Jewish ancient Temple had been destroyed twice (by the Babylonians and the Romans), but Jews had survived with their sacred texts and their tenacious mind. Freud wrote in Moses and Monotheism (1939; S. E., pp. 23, 115), “From that time on, the Holy Writ and intellectual concern with it were what held the scattered people together.” Psychoanalytic writing and research on the human mind could also go on living in exile, in future talking cures.

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