Arnold Richards approaches “Freud's Jewish Identity and Psychoanalysis as a Science” by recognizing three influences on Freud's Jewish identity: Bildung, or the cultivation of intellectual and moral character; the anti-Semitism of the times; and Freud's godlessness.
Bildung is the cultivation of an intellectual and moral character. Richards cites George Mosse, who noted that this cultivation of the intellect was a search for respectability. And Carl Schorske observed that German Jews, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were commonly stereotyped as less moral and more governed by their passions than “proper Germans.” Thus the motivations for cultivating an intellectual and moral character and for concealing one's passions was in some ways an effort to fit in. But it seems to me that Bildung was also a counterpoise to the religious traditions of orthodox Jews, with their taboos, rituals, prayers, customs, and costumes. Could Bildung have been a rebellion against the superstitions and magical thinking of Jewish religious life? Certainly. Richards cites the anecdote recalled by Dr. M. Grinwald, who gave a lecture on the play Jochanan the Prophet. Freud was in attendance and afterward made several jokes about religion, noting that many Jews resembled Jochanan in the play, with their “shaggy coat[s], unkempt hair, and mysterious face[s].” Freud reportedly said he would rather be the man in the elegant tuxedo than the one dressed like a prophet (Richards, 2014, p. 994).
So it seems the cultivation of an intellectual and moral character may well have been an effort to fit into broader German society by repudiating the contemporary Jewish religious traditions. But I'd like to suggest that Freud's position may have also been a repudiation of Jewish mysticism. If the traditional orthodox Jewish life was emotional, anxious, superstitious, and, frankly, obsessional, and Bildung was rational,
intellectual, and only somewhat obsessional, we might say that Jewish mysticism was emotional and intellectual with both its obsessional and histrionic aspects.
Mysticism is the very personal and immediate awareness of God's divine presence. It is a personal mystic union with God. Gershom Scholem (1941/1961) speaks of three stages of religious development. In the first stage, humanity is immersed in God with every step it takes. God is all around. It is a presence not recognized but lived. In the second stage, humanity is removed from God and religion comes about to span the gap. Humanity is separated from its mythical and primitive consciousness. Religion fills the space. The third stage is that of mysticism, which bridges the duality but not in a return to unconscious participation with God/nature. It is a revival of mythical thought that comes through an ecstatic encounter with the living presence of God (pp. 4-12).
The Kabbalistic mystical sphere is the meeting place of mythology and revelation (p. 22). Scholem says the Jewish philosophers had an intellectual approach that interpreted religion as allegory, but the mystical Kabbalists' essential mode of thinking was symbolic in the strictest sense (p. 26). The Kabbalists employ allegory as well, but the immediacy of the symbol goes to the heart of the mystical experience: “A hidden and inexpressible reality finds its expression in the symbol. If the symbol is thus also a sign or representation it is nevertheless more than that.” Scholem goes on to say, “The whole world is to the Kabbalist such a corpus symbolicum. … The infinite shines through the finite and makes it more and not less real” (pp. 27-28).
Kabbalism, Scholem says, “did not turn its back upon the primitive side of life, that all-important region where mortals are afraid of life and in fear of death, and derive scant wisdom from rational philosophy. Philosophy ignored these fears, out of whose substance man wove myths, and in turning its back upon the primitive side of man's existence, it paid a high price in losing touch with him altogether” (p. 35).
But they attempt to discover the hidden life beneath the external shapes of reality and to make visible that abyss in which the symbolic nature of all that exists reveals itself: this attempt is as important for us today as it was for those ancient mystics. For as long as nature and man are
conceived as his creations, and that is the indispensable condition of highly developed religious life, the quest for the hidden life of the transcendent element in such creation will always form one of the most important preoccupations of the human mind. (pp. 38-39)
Mystical states are like waking dreams in which one finds the world ensouled. It can be rapturous, illuminating, and spiritually uplifting in an experience of only a few minutes or hours, yet it can leave the psyche transformed and flooded with insights that might require a lifetime to integrate. But, of course, it also sounds a bit psychotic, now, doesn't it?
Silvano Arieti, speaking of those who experience hallucinations in mystical experiences, wrote:
The whole personalities and behavior of the people who experience these hallucinations are not such as to warrant the diagnosis of psychosis. Mystics are fanatical, but not in the same way as the paranoid. They lack the bitterness or resentment or the calm resignation and disdain of the unjustly accused. They show instead a serene and yet active optimism, like that of people who have been blessed by the love of a good mother. (Arieti, 1974, p. 277)
When Freud wrote of religion, it was about the obsessional aspects of religion, the totems and taboos, the projected parental imagoes, and the repression of primitive impulses with ritual formulas and acts. He also took up the phenomenon of the “oceanic feeling”—that is, the feeling of eternity, a oneness with the universe, limitless and unbounded. While he addressed this feeling far less than the defensive function of rituals, he was able to tie this oceanic feeling to infantile states such as the baby at the breast, who does “not distinguish his ego from the external world” (Standard Edition 21, pp. 66-67): “Originally the ego includes everything, later it separates off an external world from itself” (p. 68). Freud could certainly think about this phenomenon but noted, “I cannot discover this oceanic feeling in myself” (p. 65). Nonetheless, he related that he had a friend who was interested in these experiences and engaged in various practices, including yoga, to arrive at such states. Freud wrote, “He [the friend] sees in them a physiological basis, as it were, of much of the wisdom of mysticism” (p. 72).
So there you have it: Freud had not discovered the oceanic feeling in
himself, did not give himself over to the expression of strong feelings, did not much care for music, avoided religious rituals, and avoided attending funerals, including his mother's. And though I have no proof of it, I also doubt if he ever danced! He did allow himself the cocaine high, the nicotine rush of cigars, and a calming glass of wine. But other than that he kept his mind on a short leash and did not give in to strong emotions. We might also think of his approach to countertransference in this regard. All of these experiences—the oceanic feeling, countertransference experiences, and strong emotions—scream “danger,” from which Freud withdrew.
Thus, I suggest Freud's retreat from religiosity was not just the obsessional religiosity of orthodox Judaism but also the mysticism of the Kabbala, of which psychoanalysis has more than a little bit in common. Recall Gershom Scholem's description of the mystical stage, in which the mystic returns to the earlier mythological state, but does so consciously. Is that not similar to a regression in the service of the ego? I think so. However, in psychoanalysis it does not come in a state of rapture but rather through free associations and interpretations. Yielding to the feeling runs the risk of leading to confusion, psychosis, or sometimes even boundary violations.
One of the obsessional aspects of Jewish mysticism is the study of numerology, in which Freud dabbled from time to time and even went far enough to find some of its limits. In 1924 Freud and Karl Abraham had a lively correspondence concerning the mystical nature of the number seven. Abraham was very excited about it all, and Freud expressed a similar but more cautious enthusiasm. On August 22, 1924, Freud shared some of his ideas on the matter and in conclusion wrote, “The craziest things can be done with numbers, so be careful” (Abraham & E. L. Freud, 1965, p. 365). Even the Kabbalistic Golem story of the adept and master mentally creating a Golem, a mindless beast, to assist them in their spiritual work is laced with themes reminiscent of Freud's concept of transference.
Richards points out how Freud's behavior and attitudes suggest a desire to go beyond his father along with the sense that this was forbidden. Freud avoided Jewish ritual and saw himself more heroic than his father in facing down anti-Semites. I've always found Freud's critique of
his father unjust and his own claims of heroism as weak. These sorts of street conflicts are embedded in contexts that are not illuminated in the stories Freud told. Perhaps his father's judgment in not fighting the anti-Semites who knocked his hat off and into the street was wise under the circumstances, and Freud's bravado in standing up to some anti-Semites on a train may have been cheap bravado under the circumstances. Nonetheless, the stories amplify Freud's conflicts with his father and only secondarily with the anti-Semitic bullies.
We learn that while Freud was bogged down in his father's Judaism, he struggled to free himself, and his professional work was the key to his future. Richards explains that Freud's “analysis of his dreams would eventually give him a new authorial and professional self and so sublimate despair into inspiration” (Richards, 2014, p. 993). And, of course, many of Freud's dreams were about triumphing over the deaths of others or washing his hands clean of guilt for his mistreatment of others: his patient who died of cocaine addiction; his friends Joseph Paneth and Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow, who both died young; his son Martin, who disappeared for a time in the First World War, and more. And, of course, the original murder was the death of Freud's little brother Julius, who died when Freud was not yet two years old but old enough to wish him dead for stealing his mother's love.
When addressing Freud and anti-Semitism, Richards recalls Freud's heroic self-report of an incident in 1883 when a party of anti-Semites called him a “dirty Jew” on a train to Leipzig. To his sweetheart he wrote, “I do think I held my own quite well and used the means at my disposal courageously. In any case I didn't fall to their level” (E. Freud, 1960, p. 123). It certainly sounds heroic, but what happened? What did he do? He doesn't tell her. He just portrays himself as heroic.
Freud was not an observant Jew and was not even a theist, but he said, “There remained enough to make the attraction of Judaism and the Jew irresistible, many dark emotional powers all the stronger the less they could be expressed in words, as well as the clear consciousness of an inner identity, the familiarity of the same psychological structure. Because I was a Jew, I found myself free of many prejudices that restrict others in the use of the intellect; as a Jew I was prepared to be in the opposition
and to renounce agreement with the compact majority” (p. 366-67).
The reference to dark emotional powers reminds us again of Freud's avoidance of succumbing to strong feelings and preferring to stay close to the light of reason. And the reference to renouncing agreement with the compact majority shows us how anti-Semitism created a community of outsiders (specifically Jews) who became critics and innovators in art, literature, and science. Karl Marx stepped outside the economy in order to describe and critique it; Einstein stepped outside the contemporary view of physics in order to describe a new physics, Ludwig Fleck stepped outside the scientific movements of the day in order to describe the structure of thought collectives, how they create new disciplines, and how they change. And Freud, of course, stepped out of the then contemporary views of psychology and neurology and offered psychoanalysis as a theory of the mind and clinical technique for addressing psychological distress. It was once asked, “Who discovered water?” and the reply was, “I don't know, but I'm sure it wasn't a fish.” The outsider can see the water that the rest of us are just swimming in. The opportunity to free-associate outside the view of the analyst gives the patient a similar opportunity to self-reflect, to get out of the water one is swimming in and see oneself anew.
Freud spoke of the three narcissistic insults: Copernicus showed us we are not at the center of the universe but simply a satellite orbiting the sun; Darwin showed us we are not the pinnacle of God's creation but just another animal on the planet. And Freud, by demonstrating the nature of the unconscious, showed us we are not the masters of our souls and captains of our fates. We are decentered by the overwhelming power of unconscious motivations. My mentor, Nathan Adler, saw a deep relation between the Jew as outsider and psychoanalysis as an outsider psychology. He used to say that psychoanalysis decenters the person away from the narcissism of the ego by recognizing unconscious motivations; consequently, he would say quite playfully, “Psychoanalysis is the way that anyone can become Jewish!”
In the earliest years of psychoanalysis, all of Freud's colleagues were Jewish. With the appearance of Carl Jung on the scene in 1907, however, Freud's heart was lifted thinking that Jung would carry psychoanalysis over the obstacle of Austrian anti-Semitism and introduce it
to the world. To his colleagues in Vienna, Freud said, “Most of you are Jews and therefore incompetent to win friends for the new teaching. Jews must be content with the modest role of preparing the ground. The Swiss will save us” (Wittles, 1924 p. 140). Of course, the relationship between Freud and Jung would further elaborate themes of atheism and theism, the Jew and the Gentile, and also the theme of murder and guilt for murder.
In August 1909 Freud, Sándor Ferenczi, and Carl Jung were at lunch in Bremen just before their trip to the United States. Jung was talking at length about some prehistoric cemeteries that had been discovered nearby. Freud became impatient with Jung's way of talking about them and suggested that his interest in the prehistoric cemeteries was covering his unconscious death wishes. Jung disagreed and commented that Freud was just too eager to make such interpretations. Freud and Ferenczi then began to playfully argue with Jung in order to convince him to drink some wine with them, which he usually didn't do. Right after successfully convincing Jung to join in drinking a bottle of wine, Freud fainted. Three years later, in November 1912, at a meeting in Munich, there was a discussion of Karl Abraham's paper on Amenhotep, in which he asserted that his monotheistic revolution was tied to his deep hostility toward his father. Jung protested, saying that too much was being made of Amenhotep's removal of his father's name and inscriptions wherever they might be found and that the death wishes were of far less importance than his great feat of establishing monotheism. Suddenly Freud fainted again.
In his own analysis of the two incidents, Freud linked his fainting spells to the death of his brother Julius. Freud's death wishes, directed toward the younger Julius, who had stolen the love of his mother, had seemingly killed his little brother, leaving Sigmund victorious but perhaps guilty as well. And now another battle was taking place—a battle between Freud and the younger Jung. When he convinced Jung to drink the wine, Freud had won and, “wrecked by his success” or guilty for surviving, he had to “die”—to faint. It does not matter here whether Freud's interpretations of the presence of Jung's death wishes or Jung's denial of his death wishes are correct. What is important is that Freud interpreted his own fainting spells as related to death wishes (Freud's projected or Jung's denied) and his early childhood experience of the death of his baby brother Julius (Jones, 1955, pp. 55, 146-47).
While Freud intuited Jung's supposed death wishes, he also suffered survival guilt. Fortunately, he found a way to manage both his own death wishes and survival guilt by embracing a compromise in which he would eventually die but Jung would carry on his work. In 1909 Freud wrote to Jung, “We are certainly getting ahead; if I am Moses, then you are Joshua and will take possession of the promised land of psychiatry, which I shall only be able to glimpse from afar” (McGuire, 1974, pp. 196-97).
The theme of sibling rivalry is further elaborated in The Interpretation of Dreams, where Freud devotes several pages to the topic. “Many people … who love their brothers and sisters and would feel bereaved if they were to die, harbor evil wishes against them in their unconscious, dating from earlier times; and these are capable of being realized in dreams” (S. Freud, 1900/1953a, Standard Edition 4, p. 251).
Psychoanalysis has historically focused on the rivalry and death wishes of the child toward the parent, and yet the death wishes toward siblings and of parents toward children are not to be overlooked. In fact, we can wonder if it might be more than coincidence that Freud was revisiting, in 1897, his death wishes toward his brother Julius and his related survival guilt, exactly twelve months after his father's death , and at the same time that his youngest daughters, Sophie and Anna, ages four and two, respectively, were battling out their rivalry on the family stage.
It is well known that when Jung broke from Freud in 1914, Jung fell into a severe psychological crisis and had cataclysmic dreams of the end of the world. He interpreted these as premonitions of the onset of World War I. They were mostly dreams of earthquakes and floods but also a dream in which he murdered the German dragon-killing hero, Siegfried. When I conducted my own analysis of the dream, it was easy to see it as a dream of Jung's murder of Sigmund Freud and his guilt that followed (see Jung, 1961, p. 179-80).
Richards quotes Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi (1991), who concluded that “the very violence of Freud's recoil against Jewish religious belief in ritual … displays an aggressive intensity that normally accompanies a rebellion against an equally intense former attachment” (p. 68). I would suggest that in addition to a former attachment, it may well have been a
rebellion against an equally intense temptation or fascination with the mystical. Consequently, his rebellion took odd forms such as resisting to be married under a chuppah, refusing to observe the Sabbath, and avoidance of participating in any ritual life—even though his wife found comfort in such rituals and practiced them after Freud's death. Freud fainted in Jung's presence twice: first when discussing prehistoric cemeteries and later when discussing Amenhotep's death wishes toward his father. He didn't go to his mother's funeral, could not go to his daughter's (Sophie's) funeral, and didn't go to his grandson Heinerle's funeral either. Referring on murderous wishes and subsequent guilt Richards writes:
We can detect this dynamic in Freud's analysis of the psychological structure of conscience. I do not doubt that when he examined himself, he found precisely what he proposed: inherited guilt over an inherited murder. But what makes a man believe that parricide is in him, makes him know that he is not only capable of the deed, but has in some sense committed it? In Totem and Taboo, Freud argued that this belief is universal. But later, in Moses and Monotheism, he argued that it is archetypically Jewish. (p. 1000)
Freud saw religion and ritual as covering the guilt for the murder of the primal father, and he makes a strong case for it in Totem and Taboo and Moses and Monotheism. It is hard to disagree with his thinking, but one fact is difficult to overlook. The monster, slain by the hero in myths from around the world, was identified by Freud and Otto Rank as the father, but Lord Raglan more accurately described it as a “king and/or a giant, dragon, or wild beast” (Raglan, 1956, pp. 174-75). And Erich Neumann, one of Jung's most creative students, suggested that there were different monsters the hero must slay: a uroboric monster, a mother monster, and a father monster. Neumann did with the hero myth what Freud had done with birth trauma in relation to castration trauma: he recognized them both as points in a developmental progression. From this perspective I would suggest that the primal murder—which we are all guilty of, even before the murder of the mother and murder of the father—is the murder of the unitary (uroboric) psychic state, which results in a separation of consciousness from unconsciousness and marks expulsion from the Garden of Eden (Neumann, 1954, p. 153).
Freud's project was to both expose the murder of the father and demonstrate the attempt to resuscitate him in monotheism. But in recognizing the murderous wishes, the murderous deed, and humanity's remorse in resurrecting a God, Freud was killing God once more in order to arrive at the irony of human existence: the irony of being a symbolic creature that knows it will die without a God to welcome one on the other side of the River Styx. Nathan Adler once told me, “There is no ego, only egoing. There is no mind, only minding.” When I shared this with the comparative religion professor Frederic Spiegelberg, he said, “That's right, and there is no soul, only souling.” Since then I have suggested, “There is no God, only God-ing.” The question is not, Do you believe in God? or Is there a God? but rather Do you God? When do you God? Under what conditions do you God, or personify, the universe? Again, Nathan would say, “God is your narcissism.” And Freud would say, “I believe that a large part of the mythological view of the world, which extends a long way into the most modern religions, is nothing but psychology projected into the external world” (1901/1960, Standard Edition 6, p. 258).
Richards's analysis is not the first attempt to understand the relation between Freud and his Jewish identity, but it is a particularly creative attempt integrating the three factors of Bildung, anti-Semitism, and Freud's godlessness. In conclusion, my view is that it took Amenhotep and a line of Jewish patriarchs to do away with polytheism and establish monotheism, and it took an intellectually sophisticated secular Jew—Freud, that is—in anti-Semitic Vienna to look God in the eye and analyze “Him” as a psychic content projected onto the walls of the universe.