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Psychoanalysis and religion are strange bedfellows. A strong belief in one may rattle our foundation in the other. An evening with my analyst friends reminded me of this uneasy coupling. That Friday night, challah and wine graced our friendship. Bonded together by our shared history in psychoanalysis, we offered news, professional development and then, perhaps incited by institute gossip, we debated about Israel. Now, our comfort with each other threatened, one of us suggested we think instead about our Jewish identity. Oddly, though all of us are Jewish, the very personal nature of this question, the depth and enormity of it, silenced us as we each retreated to ponder: What is our Jewish identity?
Freud, absorbed as he was with psychoanalytic discovery, grappled with the question of his Jewish identity throughout his life, as is made clear in the collection of essays The Jewish World of Sigmund Freud: Essays on Cultural Roots and the Problem of Religious Identity. Through an examination of his theories, autobiographical information, dreams, letters, and tidbits, the authors of these essays reveal the complexity of this issue for Freud. Like his theories, Freud's views on his Judaism at times contradict each other, at others elude us. The quotes cited in this book illustrate that towards his Judaism, Freud is fiercely devoted, on the one hand, and dismissive, on the other. Freud, in his inimitable way, has left us to do with his Judaism what he has left us to do with his theories: to delve, examine, question, argue, and posture, which, in Talmudic fashion, the authors of these essays do. To those interested in his Jewish identity, Freud left the body of information that made up his life for us to discover what his Jewish identity was.
As Salberg tells us in her essay, Freud's dreams and theories uncover aspects of Freud's Judaism that remain largely hidden. As Freud grew up, his parents began to assimilate to the Viennese culture, while maintaining Jewish heritage. Th