Freud as a Jew First, Psychoanalyst Second

Dr. James Anderson’s paper on the connection between Freud’s Jewishness and the creation of psychoanalysis is quite interesting. The paper points out that although Freud was not a religious Jew, he was immersed in Jewish culture and always surrounded by Jews.

Freud’s inner circle of psychoanalysts consisted of Jews with two exceptions: Carl Jung and Ernest Jones. Freud was a cultural Jew who was influenced by the Talmudic interpretation of the Torah. It was Karl Abraham, a Jewish disciple, who pointed out that the method of analysis used in the Talmud and by those who studied the Talmud had signal similarities to Freud’s method (David Bakan, Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition, 1958). Like the Talmud, psychoanalysis searches for hidden, discoverable meanings in dreams, jokes, and elsewhere.

Freud developed a theory of the unconscious by which behavior is essentially affected. It is the conscious mind that struggles to prevent the unconscious wishes and desires from coming to

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the surface. This theory of behavior is invariably related to sexuality, which plays a pivotal role in Freud’s theory. Anderson, I believe, correctly points out that Freud was influenced by the Jewish view of sexuality that differs sharply from the Christian attitude. In Judaism there is a general appreciation of sexuality and the sexual pleasure within marriage. The Christian attitude is somewhat negative, the general attitude toward sexuality in Christianity is that it is unclean and preferable avoided, except for purpose of procreation.

Anderson, in his paper, points out that Freud was able to see the importance of sexuality because he was influenced by the greater acceptance of sexuality within Jewish culture.

I can recall that as a second-year social work student at Rockland State Hospital, a psychiatrist with whom I consulted informed me that “one of the major sources of guilt among the Christian patients was sexual behavior that the Church frowned upon.” According to the psychiatrist, the Church frowns upon recreational sex, which is considered sinful.

In addition to what Anderson writes, it would appear that aside from Talmudic influence, I believe that Freud was affected by Hasidic teachings. Hassidism was a reaction to the extensive persecution of the Jews in Eastern Europe. Feelings of guilt around sexuality were minimized in that despite adversity, one could derive pleasure from the daily and mundane, including sexuality. Interestingly enough, the founder of the Hasidim, Israel Baal Shem Tov, was viewed as a “physician of the soul” and he formed a circle of devoted disciples (Max L. Margoles and Alexander Wock, History of the Jewish People, p. 582). Then we see an analogy, or perhaps a connection, between the birth of Hassidim and psychoanalysis.

Besides the Jewish variable in psychoanalysis, it should be noted that Freud was of the first generation of his family born outside Galicia, a territory that had been deeply stirred by the Cabala, Messianism, Hassidism, and ultimately the Enlightenment (Judd Teller, The Jews: Biography of A People, 1976, p. 270). I believe that Freud was influenced by Cabala mysticism and Hassidism, as well as his parents. His father, Jacob, was a self-taught free thinker with a sense of humor who was always pointing to a moral with a Yid-

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dish anecdote. His mother was a descendant of a famous Talmudic scholar (Henry Kagan, Six Who Changed the World, 1963, pp. 205-206).

In 1930, in a foreward to a Hebrew translation of Totem and Taboo, Freud made a significant remark that while he was himself not able to unravel the specifically Jewish in his personality, it is “probably its very essence… someday no doubt it will become accessible to the scientific minds” (Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, 1913). Ernst Simon, a Jewish scholar, notes of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams that it brings to mind the Talmud’s “combination of freedom of expression and a strictly anti-libertine attitude on sex which is precisely what characterized Freud’s standpoint toward sexuality.”

Freud concerned himself with the fact that he was a Jew not only in his analysis of himself but also in his struggle to free the psychoanalytical movement from being labeled a “Jewish affair.” However, it was not until the last 10 years of his life, which coincided with the growth of Nazism and the beginning of the horrifying program to commit genocide against the Jews, that Freud undertook a thorough analysis of the causes of anti-Semitism, and even of his ambivalence about being a Jew himself. The product of this combined effort was his last book, Moses and Monotheism.

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