The Need Not to Believe: Freud's Godlessness Reconsidered

The Psychoanalytic Review, 2004

Against claims made by many of Freud's commentators, this essay suggests that Freud's Jewish identity bears no direct relation to the origins of psychoanalysis. A close reading of the passages in which Freud deals with the implications of his Jewishness shows that although he defiantly asserted his Jewishness in private communications, in published writings he inevitably pursued one of the following three stratagems: he presented himself as transgressing the boundaries of Judaism and pointed to the importance of overriding its claims to allegiance; he systematically undermined its particularist features; and he completely excluded ethnic identity as a variable from his writings on psychopathology. In adopting -------------

Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 1971

Sigmund Freud had a strong and lifelong attachment to his Jewish heritage and an equally powerful ambivalence toward it. The attachment was to Jewish cultural values in a secularized late nineteenth century world. The ambivalence was due to his desire to have psychoanalysis, his creature and his "destiny",' thrive as a value free scientific movement unidentified with Judaism. Freud had a strong Jewish identification from his earliest years. In The Intel.pretation of Dreams, which he wrote when he was a man over 40, he tells us of a decisive event in his youth "whose power was still being shown in all these emotions and dreams." The event was a story related by his father: 'When I was a young man,' he said, 'I went for a walk one Saturday in the streets of your birthplace; I was well dressed, and had a new fur cap on my head. A Christian came up to me and with a single blow knocked off my cap into the mud and shouted: "Jew! get off the pavement!" ' 'And what did you do?' I asked. 'I went into the roadway and picked up my cap,' was his quiet reply. This struck me as unheroic conduct on the part of the big strong man who was holding the little boy by the hand. I contrasted this situation with another which fitted my feelings better: the scene on which Hannibal's father, Hamilcar Barca, made his boy swear before the household altar to take vengeance on the Romans. Ever since that time Hannibal had had a place in my phantasies.2

Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations

The year is 1902. Five men sit in a close circle on a red velvet upholstered couch and matching square-backed chairs, around a Victorian turn-legged table bearing papers and journals, black coffee and cake. The air is thick with tobacco smoke. There is an urn that contains ballots with all the members' names, so that speakers can-and must-speak, in random order. 2 A meticulously dressed, bearded man sits in a chair a few inches apart from the rest of the group, drawing on his cigar, appraising them all with gimlet eyes. He is biding his time to speak until all the others have weighed in. A floor-to-ceiling ceramic coal heater chuffs somewhat ineffectually in the corner; it is the discussion that is generating the heat. The topic is religion. The bearded man is Freud, of course, and this is his waiting room. Here and in the next room-his consulting room proper, with its carpet-draped couch-the walls are covered with pictures, and every surface is filled up with ancient archaeological figurines. With affectionate irony, he calls them "my old and dirty gods"-"meine. .. alten und dreckigen Götter." 3 These figures represent both an 1 This lecture was a summary preview of the main arguments in my book Old and Dirty Gods: Religion, Antisemitism, and the Origins of Psychoanalysis (London & New York: Routledge, 2017), and adapted from an article based on a plenary presentation to the Society for Pastoral Theology (Cooper

Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 1999

STUDIES OF SIGMUND FREUD'S Jewish identity trace a trajectory from the "ten-or-twelve-year-old" son's shame over his father's submissive response to an antisemitic assault that Freud recalls in his first major work, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900:197), to the opening filial gam bit of his last completed work, the only one devoted to an extensive analy sis of Judaism and antisemitism, Moses and Monotheism. 1 Often attemp ting to psychoanalyze the father of psychoanalysis, these works render that identity as symptomatic of a son dutifully acting out his own ambiva lent Oedipal scenario whether with Jacob Freud, Judaism, or European modernity (cf., inter alia, Cuddihy; Robert; Rice; Geller 1997). Unlike that vast literature, this article examines the impact of Freud's Jewishness from his position as a father and not as a son. The focus of this analysis is one of Freud's classic case histories, "Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy," popularly known as the Case of Little Hans. This case, with one notable exception-a footnote in which Freud speculates

The Journal of Pastoral Theology, 2019

Psychoanalytic Review, The, 2008

This work aims to portray the effects of Freud’s anxiety about antiSemitic violence on his political theory and metapsychology. Taking as its entry point Freud’s reorientation of anti-Semitism as aggressive action, I argue that Freud’s fear of the violent mob can be located in three interconnected dimensions of his work, all deeply informed by Hobbesian imagination. First, Freud accepted a Hobbesian vision of social antagonism into his political theory; second, he formulated a deeper, more efficient defence mechanism against mob violence with his notion of psychical guilt; third, Freud’s fears penetrated his metapsychology. Suffering from anti-Semitism, Freud was not only quick to accept a Hobbesian perspective – he also reconstructed it to a degree that radically changed its meaning. Freud’s third and most pervasive manoeuvre destabilized one of Hobbes’s fundamental theoretical tenets by suggesting that the Hobbesian State of Nature is inherently a non-human reality.

Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, 2011