In this article, I will discuss Freud's approach to Judaism, and particularly the key role of anti-Semitism in the context of Freud's life and work. Anti-Semitism colored Freud's life and work and provides their backdrop. From cradle to grave it provided the conditions that were a constant threat, always on the radar, sometimes more threatening, sometimes less, but always there. Whether Freud was among Jews constructing what could be labeled a ‘Jewish science’ or trying to promote a racially free universal method based upon reason, evidence, and critique, applicable across times and cultures, he was always beset by the Jewish Question. Carl Jung was unsuccessfully slotted to be the ‘Crown Prince’ of psychoanalysis not just because of his undoubted capabilities but because he was a noted Gentile who could help bring psychoanalysis into the intellectual, clinical and cultural mainstream.
Anti-Semitism was a major issue, no matter if he positively identified as a Jew (which he did) or kept it low profile, whether he was religious or not. It was a major issue for his work, given that freestanding psychoanalytic institutes were established and sustained in a context where Jews and a “Jewish Science,' in particular Freud and his theories, were not welcome in the University of Vienna nor across universities throughout the Empire. However, there was one university which welcomed Freud as a member of its first Board of Governors, along with Einstein, Martin Buber and Chaim Weitzman—the Hebrew University of Jerusalem when it opened in 1925.
What qualities made Freud identify as a Jew?
Ludwig Braun, friend to Sigmund Freud and vice president of the B'nai B'rith 1904-5 defined Jewishness, and thus Freud's Jewishness, as:
the spirit of independence—independence from religious dogma, conventional morality, and for that matter, from the rest of the world. The second dimension brought the Jew back into a relationship with the world. …The third Jewish characteristic was his wholeness (das Ganze). (Klein, 1985, p85)
With this definition, Freud identified himself as Jewish. He is also famously quoted as saying to Oskar Pfister, 1918,
Why did none of the devout create psychoanalysis? Why did one have to wait for a completely Godless Jew?
Freud stated that:
what bound me to Judaism…many obscure emotional forces…as well as a clear consciousness of inner identity, the safe privacy of a common psychological structure. (Geller, 2006, p 2)
In 1925 he wrote to the Jewish Press Centre in Zurich:
I have always had a strong feeling of belonging together with my people and have always nurtured it in my children as well. We have always remained in the Jewish denomination. (Geller, 2006, p 2)
The evidence is clear in Freud's Jewish background and identity; the Jewish origins of the psychoanalytic movement; Freud's identification with Moses; Freud's relation with the B'nai B'rith; Freud's dream theories parallel those of the Talmud; his hermeneutic theory of jokes, often Jewish ones; the psychoanalytic meanings of Jewish rituals; Freud and Rabbinic hermeneutics; psychoanalytic interpretations of stories from the Hebrew Bible; psychoanalytic memory and forgetting and Jewish memory and forgetting; Freud as embodiment of Jewish Viennese emancipatory universalist Enlightenment thinking; Freud and the Jewish mystical tradition, and even Freud's Jewish anxieties (Aron, 2004 p 444).
Freud's family came from Moravia. His grandfather and great-grandfather were Chasidic rabbis. His father was also a religious man. But in 1860 the family emigrated to Vienna, when Freud was 4; and assimilation into Viennese society meant that a public display of the Jewish religion was curtailed, and religion became a private matter. The family lived in the Jewish part of Vienna and, except for a notable few, all Freud's
colleagues and patients were Jewish. The Emperor Franz-Joseph held a benign attitude towards the Jews and there was hope for universalist, enlightenment liberation. For Freud, science was to provide a vehicle for this.
In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud recalls his memory of the humiliation of his father picking up his cap from the pavement after hooligans had struck it off his head. This spoke of his father as unheroic or of a time so anti-Semitic as to necessitate such behavior from Jews that held their feelings in, for fear of worse reprisals. Perhaps this indicated the other side of his positive identification with Judaism as his own shame.
After Germany's annexation of Austria in March, 1938, Freud left for London in June, to die in freedom from the Nazis before the beginning of World War II in 1939. As a Jew, Freud was an outsider in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The traumas of the Great War, followed by revolutions and hyperinflation, the rise of Nazism and Fascism, the Great Depression and the looming tragedies of World War II and the Holocaust, placed him right at the center of a context that demanded very special responses from members of a people that were targeted victims for so much of their lives.
Anti-Semitism has many faces—sociological, religious, biological—that Jews are hated because they have the wrong religious beliefs, run the world—what they do, or what they are, biologically in essence. Fin de siècle Vienna was a hotbed of creativity and of an anti-Semitism of a different hue from the sociological or religious versions. The emphasis was on how Jews were different in essence, feminized, and sexual addicts. As New York psychoanalyst Edgar Levenson suggests, Freud's proposal of sexual libido theory as a life force was especially courageous in this context (Levenson, 2001, p. 382).
Levenson wrote that although Freud's metapsychology was Apollonian reason, his actual psychotherapy praxis was midrash, interpretative. As an interpretative or hermeneutic approach, psychotherapy can be seen in this light as a ‘feminine’ pursuit.
In this vast territory about Freud and Judaism, I want to focus for a while on his involvement with the Jewish lodge, B'nai B'rith, of which he
was a member for much of his life. Although it is not apparent in reading Freud's scientific papers, his involvement played a crucial role in his life, certainly in the early years of psychoanalysis.
In 1926 he was invited to attend a meeting for an award but was unable to attend because of his illness. He sent a meaningful and heartfelt message to the meeting instead, from which I will quote. B'nai B'rith counted as an important part of his life in his time of need, given the ascent of the anti-Semitic demagogue Karl Lueger to Mayor of Vienna and the times of his early development of his new theories on dreams, and sexuality, neurosis and the unconscious.
There was considerable resistance to Lueger both from above and below, but he prevailed.
Freud identified as being a Jew at the hardest times: in 1873, during an anti-Semitic surge after an economic crisis, he wrote:
I have never understood why I should be ashamed of my descent or, as one began to say, my race.
In 1926 he told an interviewer in recognition of the political situation:
My language is German. My culture, my attainments are German. I considered myself German intellectually, until I noticed the growth of anti-Semitic prejudice in Germany and German Austria. Since that time, I prefer to call myself a Jew.
The B'nai B'rith order was established in New York in 1843 to unite immigrants in the spirit of humanism and American idealism and not take sides in religious disputes. It spread across the US and later into Europe. The Vienna chapter of B'nai B'rith was established in 1895 on a different basis, as an “ethical society on the basis and in the frame of Judaism. There were strict standards to become a member and attendance at lectures every second Tuesday was compulsory. Together with committee meetings and family social events, B'nai B'rith was an important part of each member's life, requiring considerable and consistent investment of time and money. It was very formally structured, and required formal attire. It was a haven at the time of the anti-Semitic activities of Karl Lueger and his associates.
At the time, Freud had no disciples or formal associates, and his first lecture to a lay audience on psychoanalysis took place in 1897 at B'nai B'rith, on the topic, ‘On Dream Interpretation’. He delivered eleven lectures to the Wien and was active on the Committee for Intellectual Interests, which planned the lectures. His illness prevented him going to meetings, for which he apologized in the 1926 letter. Still, in 1931, his 75th birthday was commemorated at the Lodge with a lecture. In 1937 his response to the Lodge President's congratulations on the 40th anniversary of his membership reflects his enduring commitment to the Lodge:
I am touched every time I hear that the association remembers me and wishes me well. I thank you, Mr. President and all my dear brothers, for your letter. That which has united us will surely not perish with the changing times.
But back to 1926, where he recalled to the Lodge:
It happened that in the years from 1895 onwards I was subjected to two powerful impressions which combined to produce the same effect on me.
On the one hand, I had gained my first insight into the depths of the life of the human instincts; I had seen some things that were sobering and even, at first, frightening.
On the other hand, the announcement of my unpleasing discoveries had as its result the severance of the greater part of my human contacts; I felt as though I were despised and universally shunned.
In my loneliness I was seized with a longing to find a circle of picked men of high character who would receive me in a friendly spirit in spite of my temerity. Your society was pointed out to me as the place where such men were to be found.
That you were Jews could only be agreeable to me; for I was myself a Jew, and it had always seemed to me not only unworthy but positively senseless to deny the fact.
What bound me to Jewry was (I am ashamed to admit) neither faith nor national pride, for I have always been an unbeliever and was
Page 389brought up without any religion though not without a respect for what are called the ‘ethical’ standards of human civilization.
The year after this note, Freud published ‘The future of an illusion’, his most well-known and devastating critique of religion. Religion was an illusion because it hadn't moved on from human infancy where the parent was our protector. We neurotically turn away from reality when our wishes for pleasure are not fulfilled.
In ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, Freud argued that the pleasure principle, which holds that we seek the immediate gratification of our drives, must be modified with the advent of civilization by the reality principle, which involves the subservience of the pleasure principle to the demands of reality (e.g., work is required to bring about future pleasure).
We cannot fulfill our desires because of our inherent vulnerability to nature, our bodies and one another. Religion is a response to civilization as inherently tragic for Freud. And it stops thought, according to Freud, and is the enemy of reason.
Freud's view of reason, which of course resides in the ego and not in the id (it), which was the driving force of our lives. But Freud at least granted the quality of insistence to reason:
‘The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest till it has gained a hearing. Finally, after a countless succession of rebuffs, it succeeds. This is one of the few points on which one may be optimistic about the future of mankind. … The primacy of the intellect lies, it is true, in a distant, distant future, but probably not an infinitely distant one’.1
The double negative of the ‘not infinitely distant’ demonstrates how little hope Freud had in the short or even medium term for mankind. He regarded ‘our best hope for the future’ as lying in the intellect or reason being able to establish in time ‘a dictatorship in the mental life of man’.
Freud was, understandably, a cultural pessimist. Against the dark forces at work at his doorstep for so much of his life, Freud still retained some
faith in reason to finally prevail.
He postulated the crucial role for ‘such a domain of reason’ that it would prove ‘the strongest uniting bond among men and lead the way to further unions.’ In contrasting this liberating role, which would bring people together with that of religion, Freud shows us why he saw religion in such a negative light.
‘Whatever, like religion's prohibition against thought, opposes such a development, is a danger for the future of mankind.’2
He declared to his B'nai B'rith brethren:
Whenever I felt an inclination to national enthusiasm I strove to suppress it as being harmful and wrong, alarmed by the warning examples of the peoples among whom we Jews live. But plenty of other things remained over to make the attraction of Jewry and Jews irresistible—many obscure emotional forces, which were the more powerful the less they could be expressed in words, as well as a clear consciousness of inner identity, the safe privacy of a common mental construction.
And beyond this there was a perception that it was to my Jewish nature alone that I owed two characteristics that had become indispensable to me in the difficult course of my life.
Because I was a Jew I found myself free from many prejudices which restricted others in the use of their intellect;
and as a Jew I was prepared to join the Opposition and to do without agreement with the ‘compact majority’.
Here Freud is referring to the protagonist in Henrik Ibsen's play, An enemy of the people, who was demonized by the people in the town he was trying to reveal the plague-infested sewers beneath the town. Ibsen has Stockmann proclaim,
“…the strongest man in the world is the man who stands most alone.” He also says: “A minority may be right; a majority is always wrong.” Freud early identified with Hannibal whose conflict with Rome, according to Freud, ‘symbolised the conflict between the tenacity of Jewry and the organization of the Catholic Church’. It is important to recognize that Freud's barbs against religion were not aimed at the Jewish religion but at the very established Catholicism that so dominated European societies during his life. His concerns were with the established religion of Catholicism rather than with the Judaism which he identified with as his tradition and ethnicity.
The organization of the Catholic Church was front and center in Freud's view of religion. Not Judaism. Bear in mind the context of the relatively small number of Jews in a hostile world together with the severe limits to their influence. Especially in view of the fact that most psychoanalysts were Jewish, Freud welcomed Jung with open arms, anointing him as the ‘crown prince’ of psychoanalysis because he could bring some appearance of objectivity beyond the ‘Jewish science’.
Science itself was an aim as a universal of the Enlightenment beyond the irrationalities of particularist approaches. That would allow for Jews to be neutral and pursue knowledge and truth for their own sake.
So religion was for Freud really the Catholic Church. But of course the other increasingly big form of irrationality was the rise of Nazism, which was a direct menace not only to humanity at large but targeted the Jews in particular.
Freud concluded Civilization and its Discontents with this paragraph:
The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction. It may be that in this respect precisely the present time deserves a special interest. Men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man. They know this, and hence comes a large part of their current unrest, their unhappiness and their mood of anxiety. And now it is to be expected that the other of the two ‘Heavenly Powers’ [p. 133],
Page 392eternal Eros, will make an effort to assert himself in the struggle with his equally immortal adversary.
Freud added this final sentence to in 1931 in recognition of what was by then the undeniable looming Nazi danger:
But who can foresee with what success and with what result?
The other major threat in the secular world was Bolshevism or Communism, against which Freud later argued though it wasn't at least overtly anti-Semitic.
Freud concluded his letter for the 1926 award to B'nai B'rith:
So it was that I became one of you, took my share in your humanitarian and national interests, gained friends among you and persuaded my own few remaining friends to join our society.
There was no question whatever of my convincing you of my new theories; but at a time when no one in Europe listened to me and I still had no disciples even in Vienna, you gave me your kindly attention. You were my first audience.
A much-neglected work of Freud's last years, Moses and Monotheism (1939, S.E., XXIII: 1-138), narrates Freud's long interest in Moses whom he postulates was an Egyptian prince and not Jewish. In Freud's speculations, Moses was murdered by some of his followers, who, years afterwards, regretted their action and created the idea of a messiah. According to Freud, their sense of guilt in recognizing they deserved punishment ended up creating more and more ethical commandments and regulations in an obsessive-compulsive reaction formation to the murderous deed that Freud saw as founding the Father religion (1939, S.E., XXIII: 134-5). Perhaps he was identifying with Moses in the movement aspect of psychoanalysis and the creation of a psychoanalytic Weltanschaung.
He was trying to understand the overwhelming longevity and extent of anti-Semitism in that work and during his life. It was something so enduring, irrational and powerful that defied reason and was at heart utter envy. It was clear in his life and work. He was shaped by it personally and culturally. His last years saw the force of anti-Semitism not just from Catholicism but from the Nazis. The soft voice of his reason in making
this such a significant issue to understand tried to see it as epochs old with the repetition and repression down the ages that like a good clinical psychoanalysis could only be changed through insight.
We know that Freud found the eternal question about the dark continent of ‘What is woman?’ very puzzling. But the troubling issue of the persistence and worsening of anti-Semitism was an issue that percolated throughout. Although some might say that Moses was an escape for him, an obsession, I suspect it went to the core of the importance and breadth of the problem of anti-Semitism, which was associated with the collective neurosis he portrayed religion to be. Until the end, it was an issue that impacted on him and which he was trying to solve, with good reason, throughout his whole life.
I conclude by citing what was probably Freud's last public comment. Arguably Freud's last public comment on anything, and certainly his last word on anti-Semitism was his sardonic response in 1939 to Lady Rhonnda, the editor of the British literary and political weekly review, Time and Tide, asking him to contribute to a special issue on anti-Semitism:
‘I came to Vienna as a child of 4 years from a small town in Moravia. After 78 years of assiduous work I had to leave my home, saw the Scientific Society I had founded, dissolved, our institutions destroyed, our Printing Press (‘Verlag’) taken over by the invaders, the books I had published confiscated or reduced to pulp, my children expelled from their professions. Don't you think you ought to reserve the columns of your special number for the utterances of non-Jewish people, less personally involved than myself?’