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This speculative undertaking in the social psychology of psychoanalytic knowledge examines the factors which may cast light on the circumstance that the originator of psychoanalysis belonged to the assimilative Jewish community of fin-de-siècle Germanic culture.
Freud (1925, p. 222) observed that it is not “entirely a matter of chance that the first advocate of psychoanalysis was a Jew.” He commented: “To profess belief in the new theory called for a certain degree of readiness to accept a situation of solitary opposition—a situation with which no one is more familiar than a Jew.” His pithy observation leans on the marginality of the Jew for explanation. The marginal state allows and/or compels the Jew to undergo distinctive experiences along with unique psychic structuring. Location at the fringes permits his viewing the basic assumptions of two contrasting cultures with some degree of detachment. At the same time, conflicts belonging to the marginal state raise the level of consciousness. While tending to contort the psyches of many in the Jewish populace, coping with the frustrations of marginality may forge some of its members into steel.
The contrapuntal thesis set forth here is that the secularized Jewish community of fin-de-siècle Central Europe had, in its eagerness to assimilate, denuded itself of supportive structures. Exposed to unbuffered psychic mutilation by the Gentile host, the group called for a hero to render assistance for its exigent psychological issues: to wrest from the Germanic host the power to sculpt the Jew's representation of him/herself, to supply Jews with resiliency to emerge from regressions that followed mortifications by the host, to resolve role conflicts without having recourse to dissociations