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In 2006, to mark the one-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of Freud's birth, a conference on “Freud's Jewish World” was held at the Center for Jewish History in New York. Judging by the papers published from that conference, it appears that Freud might not have welcomed this way of celebrating his birthday. It's not that Freud refused to acknowledge his Jewish origins. As Richard Armstrong observes in one of these essays, Freud “was too fiercely proud ever to deny his own Jewishness” (p. 36). Even if he had wanted to ignore these origins, anti-Semitism was too pervasive in Freud's Vienna to permit this course; and indeed, as many of the conference papers record, Freud saw on numerous occasions that social prejudice against Jews blocked his professional advancement. Even so, as these essays amply testify, Freud sought rigorously to exclude his Jewishness from his public self-presentation—and it is in this sense that Freud would not have been pleased that his birthday should be celebrated by placing him in a Jewish context.
The rigid secularism in Freud's public persona was clearly linked to his concern that psychoanalysis should not be seen as a “Jewish science.” Freud expressed this concern in a 1908 letter to Karl Abraham: “Our Aryan comrades are really completely indispensable to us, otherwise psychoanalysis would succumb to anti-Semitism” (p. 88). But more than social anti-Semitism was at stake in Freud's concern to attract Christian adherents. Freud insisted that there was nothing distinctively Jewish about psychoanalysis as such—that its premises were based on universal characteristics of human mentation, and that its status as a science depended on this universalism. In making this claim, Freud was combating what Sander Gilman describes as a “commonplace” view among the medical faculty in Vienna, that Jews were predisposed to “specific forms of mental illness”—a view held even by opponents of