Psychoanalytic Knowledge, Jewish Identity, and Germanic Anti-Semitic Legends

The secular diaspora Jew faces special obstacles in securing the conditions conducive to psychological development. The capacity for resilient recovery from the repeated regressions provoked by peril, threat, and denigration becomes a prized value. Freud's psychoanalytic system was tailor-cut to aid the Jew primitivized or stymied in his psychological functioning. Especially could the psychoanalytic approach help the exilic Jew, removed from traditional moorings, wrest power from a hostile host population and define for himself who he was. Anti-Semitic legends still current in the Germanic cultural setting in which Freud lived illustrate the host society's blighting portrayals of Jews. Scrutiny of some of the legends demonstrates ways by which Freud's concepts could abet the vilified Jew in redeeming his identity.

Many social and psychological variables determined the conceptualization of psychoanalysis by Freud. Freud sought to address several distinct groups on different vital issues. This essay postulates that in the heroic, work-oriented, rather abstinent way that Freud led his life, and in the system of psychoanalysis that he constructed, he was making, if in measure and if not fully consciously, a paradigmatic communication to the newly un-anchored, secular diaspora Jew.

Throughout his life Freud was preoccupied with the often wretched and insecure plight of the exilic Jew. When Freud was 3 years old, the family moved from Moravia, partly to escape ongoing pogroms. Here began Freud's train phobia.1

It seems a reasonable guess that the later disillusionment with the father, when he heard the story of how the father passively accepted his hat being