Freud's Shylock

I am not Shylock and my daughter is not Jessica.

The name “Shylock” never once shows up in all of Freud's published writings. Yet amongst all Shakespeare's characters, the compelling figure of the Jew of Venice is one who, for a number of reasons I shall outline, one might assume to be a particularly likely candidate to make his way into the psychoanalyst's thinking. Perhaps it was merely the character's unusual opacity—what William Hazlitt called the “hard, impenetrable, dark groundwork of the character of Shylock” (1980, p. 2)—that gave Freud pause in addressing this figure, who pushes, almost willfully, against the very bounds of explicability; but I am going to suggest here that the absence of Shylock from the psychoanalyst's work may in fact be a function of the richly over-determined nature of the matters Shylock evokes. Shakespeare's Jew, I argue in the first part of this essay, brings into too close a proximity a number of overlapping elements with which Freud was preoccupied, especially circa 1912, when he was writing “The Theme of the Three Caskets”—the place we might most obviously have expected to find some mention of Shylock.1 These include: possessiveness and paternity (especially his own, vis-à-vis daughters); anality and the concept of “character”; Jewishness and its relation to gentility, particularly (at this point) in regard to the psychoanalytic community; and more generally religion and its relationship to neurosis. These are all topics that, in isolation, Freud took on, often with daring insight; but the character of Shylock brought them into a