What’s in a Name: Who is Sigismund Schlomo Freud?

Given the history of the Jews in the post-diaspora world and the particular history of the Jews in Western and Central Europe, it would seem inevitable that the Jewishness of any creative person would be an important, or even major, influence in the development of that individual’s work. Sigmund Freud was born Sigismund Shlomo Freud in 1856 in Freiberg, Moravia, a town that was 3% Jewish, 3% Protestant, and 96% Catholic (%s are rounded off). His family moved to Vienna in 1860, a sophisticated Central European city that was also predominantly Catholic, but they lived in a Jewish neighborhood, referred to at the time as the slum. The Jews in Austria had been granted equal rights by Emperor Francis Joseph, and Freud went to public schools and excelled academically.

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What’s in a name? A Sigmund Freud by any name would be a seminal thinker and a genius. Yet—let us look at his name.

Sigmund is a variant of the name Sigismund. Sigmund is well known as the protagonist of Richard Wagner’s “Die Valkyrie”; in Norse mythology he is the hero of the Volsunga Saga. Sigmund also is the name of a Roman Catholic saint and many kings. The Norse name means protection through victory (Sieg means victory in German, as in Sieg Heil). There are parallels between the legend of Sigmund and the Anglo-Saxon legend of King Arthur. Odin, dressed like a beggar, thrust a magic sword into a tree, and only a hero—in this case, Sigmund—could pull the sword free. King Arthur also pulled a sword free—Excalibur, which he pulled from a stone. King Arthur’s father was Uther, but at one point Arthur thought his father was Ector, his companion Kay’s father. Arthur at one point, therefore, like Oedipus, did not know who his father was in actuality.

Shlomo is the Hebrew for Solomon. Shlomo, or Solomon, means peace. King Solomon was revered as a wise king, who also took sword in hand, in order to settle a dispute between two women who claimed one baby. He offered to cut the baby in half, and the real mother gave up her claim to preserve the baby’s life—and he awarded her the baby. This story is one of conflict and paradox: a sword in the hand of a peaceful man creates justice.

Thus Sigmund Freud grew up with a dual national identity, beginning with his name that was emblematic of a hero in each culture. What sword would young Sigismund Shlomo need to cut the Gordian knot of his identity, and his search for meaning, truth, and the unknown? First and foremost, he had his intellect.

A number of authors have discussed Freud’s Jewishness in terms of his identification with Moses, and his disavowal of Moses’ Jewishness, including Eliza Slavet, Racial Fever: Freud and the Jewish Question (Fordham University Press, 2009), and Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable (Yale University Press, 1991). Freud’s connection with Moses was overt. However, his connection with Joseph perhaps was even more compelling, though not acknowledged.

Freud’s second seminal writing, following “Studies in Hys-

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teria” (1895), was “The Interpretation of Dreams” (1899). Western civilization is rife with stories of dream interpretation, and one of the oldest and best known stories of dream interpretation is that of Joseph in the Pharaoh’s court. A Jewish boy, the second youngest of 12 brothers, is sold into slavery and becomes a court favorite in Egypt, where he interprets Pharaoh’s dreams. The Hebrew root of the name Joseph is twofold: it means “added to” and “taken away.” Is Moses/Freud Jewish and not Jewish? Freud, with his half-brothers from his father’s first marriage who were old enough to be his father, was a Jewish interpreter of dreams in Christian Europe. Dream interpreters search for hidden meaning. What hidden meanings was Freud searching for?

Anderson wonderfully sketches those hidden meanings. I would add to his discussion a few more “mysteries” asking to be interpreted. First, Freud was humiliated to learn that when his own father’s hat was knocked to the ground because his father was Jewish, his father did nothing. Second, in a story Freud’s son Martin told of his father responding to being harassed on the road while traveling together, Sigmund fought back using his walking stick. Third, Freud maintained a membership in the B’nai B’rith, which literally means Sons of the Covenant, an organization devoted to fighting anti-Semitism. He refused to accept royalties from any of his works translated into Yiddish or Hebrew.

Freud was hyper-aware of his status as a Jew, and therefore as an alien, a reversal of the non-Jewish Ruth being a “stranger in a strange land.” But, unlike Ruth, Freud not only was an alien, but a despised alien, an object of fear, contempt, and discrimination. Although most of his associates and patients were Jewish, he must have been acutely aware that he was pulling a sword from a stone or a tree in interpreting the mysteries of the mind, the mind with the alarming content of sexuality and aggression. Did he see himself as a hero, liberating others? Was he afraid that the mind he understood would be seen by non-Jews as a filthy, vile, dirty mind? Could he teach Western Europe to speak Yiddish?

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