Freud and Said

Dear Editor

I read with interest Marco Chiesa's review of Freud and the Non-European by Edward Said in the BJP (21(1): 153-5). Unfortunately the reviewer uncritically repeats the many errors of fact, and distortions, which occur in Said's writings.

If Said queried Freud's Jewish identity, one might well query Said's Palestinian identity. Recent information shows he was born, not in Palestine (as he claimed), but in Egypt of a well-to-do family which did subsequently move to Palestine, but later chose to move to the USA. However, the Internet has him born in Jerusalem, moving to Cairo at a very young age, and then to the States.

Said always claimed he was an objective academic. On the contrary he was a Palestinian nationalist and activist, and an unaffiliated member of the Palestinian National Congress. Perhaps the truth of his position was evident a couple of years before he died when he was filmed throwing rocks into Israel (with other Palestinian militants) at the Lebanese border.

Said inhabited an ‘Alice in Wonderland’ universe where victimizers became victims, and projective processes took the place of political activism, in particular, with regard to Arab and Palestinian aggression. Significantly, Said's work has itself been thoroughly discredited by the historical scholar, Ephraim Karsh (1999, 2000).

One cannot go over the whole history of Arab-Jewish relations in a short letter. It is worthwhile pointing out, however, that Arab extremists were setting off bombs in the heart of Jerusalem as far back as the 1920s and 1930s with devastating consequences.

For any readers who might like to follow the facts more closely, I recommend The Complete Idiot's Guide to Middle East Conflict by the political scientist, Mitchell Bard (1999).

As for Freud's Jewish identity, this is an area which I, and my colleague, the psychoanalyst Professor Stanley Schneider of the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, have studied in considerable detail. It is unfortunate to base an argument on one of F