Arnie Richards's paper, “The Need Not to Believe: Freud's Godlessness Reconsidered,” is simultaneously a careful textual analysis, a biographical essay, an intellectual history that looks at the importance for Freud's insistence on not believing in God. Although I cannot comment clinically or with extensive knowledge of Freudian scholarship, I feel that Freud's perspective is as important today as it was during his own life. In a post-Trump America, Freud's anti-Semitic world that controlled areas of his life, determined where he would live, who his colleagues would be, and deeply impacted his struggles with his family remind me of the world we find ourselves in today and evoke thoughts about my own experience of anti-Semitism and (dis)belief in God.
Freud has been part of my life since I was 16 when I first went to an analyst. I read The Interpretation of Dreams with an adolescent understanding, and because of my analyst—it was a start out of a depression—it gave me hope I had never dreamed of and Freud became my hero who has never lost that position with me. When my daughter entered Reed college, the enrollment form listed the question, Religion, and she wrote “Freud.” The school called me to clarify, and I said she is correct. Many years later, when I noticed my nine-year-old grandson was listening to our very adult conversation about Freud, I said to him, “Do you know who Freud is?” He said “No, but when I go to my grandma's house, she is obsessed with him.”
I am first-generation American. My parents came to America in 1921 from Poland from very different Jewish backgrounds. My mother's family, observant and religious, considered themselves modern and were stable and lived well and not in a shetel. My grandfather was the manager of a large estate owned for generations by a French family. He hired the peasants, managed the farm, and took over all aspects of making a large profit on the produce from the estate. His father and grandfather had done this before him. They had their own house and he could read,
write, speak several languages, and served as a leader for the Jews in the nearby shtetel, for news of WWI where the Germans were better to them than the Russians. He had 11 children, eight boys and three girls. My eight uncles all knew very well how to run a farm so when they came to America, they eventually left New York for the Midwest, where one had started a business repairing broken down tractors and he eventually brought his brothers to the mid-west, who worked for him early, and then started their own same business, so my uncles were all over the Midwest in tractor parts businesses and when I was five, because my father couldn't make a living, and it was the depression, we were sent by Uncle Irving to Newton, Iowa, and eventually moved to Des Moines, the capital, and then to Wisconsin. One Uncle started a sheep farm in North Dakota and was highlighted in a story about his life, in The Daily Forward, the Jewish newspaper of its time, entitled, “Yes, Virginia, there is a Jewish farmer.” The youngest had no choice. They had decided one was going to be a professional man, and it was decided that Daniel, the youngest would be a doctor. Money was put away for him, and that was his future. As he was the least religious, he was my favorite.
My father's family were religious fanatics. The Enlightenment never touched them. The oldest in that family, my father's only brother, escaped to America, illegally to avoid a second term in the army, and became a proselytizing ardent Communist. His grandchildren all became highly educated, doctors and scientists. His father, my grandfather, came alone to America a few years later, stayed seven years, decided this was the land of the Goyim and planned to go back to Poland, where he had abandoned his wife, five daughters and a six-year-old son, my father. My father grew up living in barns owned by religious men, where he was being harshly trained to become a Rabbi. My grandfather's friends pleaded with him not to go back, saying it was a certain death, so he sent for his family, my father, now 13 and the family came to the US except the oldest, 17, who was sent to London for an arranged marriage with an older widowed religious Pole who wanted a young Polish wife. It saved them the cost of another fare. My father graduated high school in America and worked at The Daily Worker, the communist newspaper where his brother got him a job. He had a life-long struggle with his father's religiosity and discarded all religious feeling but on the surface acted as if he was a pious Jew as that was his entire education.
My father and mother met at a dance for immigrants. Her parents were angry that she was not married at 24 and he was 21 with no interest in marriage or responsibility. They married, and ten months later, now 1931, I was born to a religious mother and an atheist father.
My husband was also born to an immigrant family, a Polish mother and a Russian father, 30 years older than his wife who was a widow with a two-year-old daughter at the time they married. Larry's father was illiterate, never learned English, spoke only Yiddish and Russian and washed street cars for the electric company. Larry told me from the time he was 10 that he wanted to be a surgeon. He worked in high school to save for the state college in Milwaukee. Living at home, he could pay the tuition and get a pre-med degree, but there was a strict Jewish quota for medical school, and he had a feeling he would never get in medical school, so he also took classes to be a history teacher. His parents had no interest in this at all and there was no support of any kind. His mother was very religious, and his father a bitter atheist who had four grown sons when he married Larry's mother. He didn't want more children, but his wife did and got pregnant. Larry loved his father, signed his name for him when he bought two houses, took care of his illiterate problems, and father and son loved each other, Larry becoming as atheistic as his father.
When he graduated college to his shock, he got into medical school. It was 1940 but one year later, after Pearl Harbor, America found itself involved in the Second World War. It was a very low year for Larry. He had four jobs to stay in medical school as his parents would not help him at all. He worked weekends for a construction company, nights as a night watchman at Montgomery Wards where he studied, and as a busboy for a girls' sorority for his meals, and handyman in an old apartment complex for a room in which to live.
His anti-Semitic anatomy professor told him repeatedly, this wasn't the place for him. His “kind” of people did better in a shop, as a Jew, he was a misfit for medical school. The professor gave him very low grades all year, and after the final test in anatomy, the professor said he would have to repeat the class. He couldn't flunk him out of medical school, his grades were too excellent, but he could put off proceeding for another year. Larry was exhausted and felt he couldn't keep up with the demands
of school and simultaneously support himself in Madison, Wisconsin. Medical students had a deferment from the draft, but he was so deeply depressed about losing a year because of anatomy, he wandered into an army recruitment center and enlisted. He felt his country was at war. Jews were having a hard time, why should he be in medical school? He was sent to officers training for a few days, but the war was going badly and they needed everyone at the front. He was sent to basic training and then to San Francisco to ship out with a thousand other GIs who were never told where they were going. Two weeks later, when they got off the ship, they saw small dark men shimming up trees and throwing coconuts down on the soldiers. They knew they were in the south seas. They were in Finchhaven, New Guinea, where he spent the next five years, assigned to a tent hospital in the jungle as an assistant to the surgeons. The group was following General McArthur and preparing to invade Japan, but the Atomic Bomb saved his life. They were about to invade and were told not to expect they would come back, but the next morning when Larry climbed out of his foxhole, he saw the officers' tent had been knocked down, and men were making alcohol out of grass. Someone said the war is over. Somewhere a bomb ended the war. “We don't know anything more about it,” they said.
He was not part of my life then. We were ten years apart so I was still a child. When the war was over, he was sent to Manila, but had malaria so he couldn't come into America. He was billeted with a family in an impoverished neighborhood, and was put in charge of vice in Manila and was there for months. Finally home, he returned to Wisconsin to medical school, but five years had passed, the new Dean was kind and welcoming, but said he had to start over from the beginning. The anti-Semitic professor was gone, and the GI Bill was in effect so he didn't have to work to afford medical school. He became a doctor.
On a free weekend from medical school he would hop on a freight train to La Crosse, to visit his half-sister who lived there. We met in LaCrosse when I was 17, still in high school, and we married when I turned 19. He was 29. In two months, he would graduate medical school.
Larry selected Milwaukee County General Hospital as his internship as he had hopes of getting into their surgical residency program a year later. Indigent people who could not afford a doctor in those years went to the
County Hospitals for free medical care if they could get it. If not, they just went without, and ended up in the emergency room at the county hospital. The surgical residents did most of the surgery which is why he wanted it. He would have a huge amount of experience. In private hospitals people paid for a surgeon and expected their surgeon to do the surgery. Milwaukee County was tied to Marquette University which was Catholic and was called St. County because all the doctors and department heads were almost all from Marquette. Surgical residents were on a pyramid system, eliminating them each of the four years until one was left by the 4th and senior year who became chief. It was amazing a Jew got in because very few Jews were allowed to become surgical residents. Larry became the only Jewish surgeon in the hospital but I knew he would never become the 4th year surgical resident. He planned to eventually have his own office in Milwaukee. I wanted to leave Milwaukee. Two religious mothers were upsetting me. Larry, a busy resident, was not home very much and I asked if I could write for positions out of Milwaukee, using his name and credentials and he said ok but his plan was an office in Milwaukee.
We got a reply from a man from Portland, Oregon who was going to Detroit to settle his father's estate and wanted to meet Larry because his New Guinea experience and county experience were what they wanted in a surgeon who could do everything in a new prepaid insurance plan. Larry was not interested but I was. I talked him into meeting the man if he came to the hospital cafeteria and if Larry was not in the OR. Larry said, “You got me into this, so you have to come too.”
Dr. F said Henry Kaiser was building ships in Vanport between Portland and Vancouver, Washington and were importing workers from the South who needed jobs. They needed medical care also and the doctors in Portland were not interested in them. Sidney Garfield, a surgeon in Walnut Creek, California, had created a new plan of prepaid insurance where the employer and the employee put money in an insurance so all their health needs would be met, from checkups to surgery. An interested group of doctors bargained with them for salaries and costs and would provide care only for them. It was unheard of in medicine at that time. It was a completely new system of health care in which the doctors took a lower salary for a normal lifestyle, and their salary paid for everything they did from office visits to high priced procedures. It was a huge
break with established medicine. They did everything they could in their specialty and sometimes just general medicine, but they worked regular hours, with a consistent even salary and a paid vacation every year. This was unheard of for doctors. They were not yet in Oregon as national Societies of Specialists said it was Communist, so they were allowed only in Washington. It was years before we got into Portland. I wanted to go to Oregon very much, and I said to Larry, “As a Jew you will never get the 4th year at County, and in Oregon working with a board surgeon in two years you will have board eligibility.” Finally, he agreed for just the two years and we left for Oregon— Larry, me and our 18 month-old daughter, Heidi.
I was so happy to leave our parents, to live my own life, noticing the change in me, within two weeks Larry decided we were never going back. He loved the workload which was always full, and he loved never having to say, “You need surgery but you can't afford it.” Whatever the patient needed he could do. It was a dream come true. After the two years preceptorship Larry became a Kaiser doctor.
We made friends, I was going to school, and was involved in theatre, acting, that I always wanted to do, and Larry was making a salary, our first. Life was very full and good. We had a second child, another daughter. In the next three years, Kaiser moved into Portland and they gave up insisting we were communists, as health insurance plans were becoming very popular.
My third pregnancy surprised us with a boy and a girl, twins, so we now had four children. The oldest was seven. We had outgrown our tiny house. We searched buying a house but none were what I wanted so we decided to build. The most important item to me was the school district. I wanted the best Portland public school district. I researched and decided on Riverdale school district. This was in a neighborhood called Dunthorpe. It was a Portland public school district, but the neighborhood was wealthy, and they put money into furnishings, equipment, school supplies that were the best and the school and its programs were outstanding, but it was an expensive area and I hunted intensely. I was shocked to actually find a Dunthorpe lot for us. It was at the very end of Dunthorpe at the intersection of two highways; across the street was not Riverdale school district but this side with a lot was. It had no sewer
and we would have to put one in, and it had a small creek, and was overgrown forest, but I didn't care. It was what I wanted. We bought it, told everyone about it, found a contractor we could afford and met with him to settle on a variety of plans that I could put together to have what I wanted. We got a mortgage loan from the bank and started to clear the land. None of this was a secret. I shared it with everyone. It was very exciting.
One day I came home from shopping to find Larry at home. “What happened?” I said, “Why are you home?” He said, “I am leaving Kaiser.” I was stunned. Larry loved Kaiser. “Why? Where are you going?” I said. “I don't know,” Larry said. “We have no money. Everything is tied up in the new house. What happened?” I said. Larry said, “Dr. F. (head of the surgical department) called me in his office and said, ‘Are you moving into Dunthorpe?’ I told him, ‘Yes, Selma found a lot we could afford and she likes the school district.’” Dr. F, who was from Detroit and trained at Henry Ford hospital, had many times said loudly to Larry, “You would never be allowed in Henry Ford. You would never have the kind of training, I did. Your kind are not allowed in that hospital. Henry Ford was a well-known anti-Semite. But this kind of anti-Semitism was everywhere, and we dismissed it.
He said now, “You don't belong in Dunthorpe. Dunthorpe is a place for landed gentry. You don't belong there. There are many neighborhoods where there are your kind. They live with their own kind. I will not have your children in school with my son.” His son was exactly Heidi's age, and I invited him to her birthday parties, a lonely withdrawn sad child. “If you persist in this move, you have no job at Kaiser, and that is effective immediately.”
I stared at him. We had made friends and were very social. We had a good life. I was in analysis, and by this time, had an active life as an actress. Everywhere we were engaged, we were a part of a community that we had help build. We also had a huge mortgage with the bank for our eventual house, we had no money for emergencies. What would we do? Larry said that Dr. F said if we found another lot, he would buy this lot from us at the cost of the new lot but Larry said he could not work with this man, and we were going to leave. But where?
I started to cry, so the children started to cry. “I can't talk about this here,
Larry.” I called a high school sitter, to come take care of the children, and we got in the car to discuss this privately.
We just drove aimlessly as I was crying. I loved my life. Larry might want to go back to Milwaukee but I made that break from a destructive past I needed to do for my marriage and independence. My five-times weekly analysis would have to end. There would be no money and we had four young children to raise.
I said, “If you go someplace else, anywhere, you will always meet this kind of person. Anti-semitism is everywhere. No different in another place than here. You need to make up your mind, that you are not going to let anti-Semites make the decisions for your life. We love Kaiser, we love Portland. Why should an evil person decide where we can live? Let's just get another lot.” Larry said it has to be now. We can't take the time to plan. We drove and talked and time passed. I don't know where we were. Finally, Larry said so painfully poignant as he always provided the best for me, “What do you want me to do, Selma?” My heart was breaking for him. Out the window at that moment, there was an empty lot, which had a sign that read, “Lot For Sale” and a number. I put my hand out the window and pointed, and crying I said there is a lot. I was crying and didn't notice but Larry wrote down the number.
We went home, and in the morning, Larry went to work, we didn't say anything, as I was busy with the children. He called me late in the afternoon, and said I bought the lot. Completely forgetting, I said, “What lot?” He said, “The one you wanted.” I said, “I didn't want any lot.” He said, “The one you pointed to. I called them. They are in Hawaii on vacation. I asked the price, and I said I will take it without having any discussion. Let Dr. F worry about that. I told F. and we made the exchange. I called the bank, and the construction guy, and tomorrow we will make the new adjustments.” “Where is the lot, Larry?” He said, “I don't know. I thought you knew.” “No,” I said, “I didn't know where we were. I just pointed to it because I was so angry.”
He came home, and we got in the car with the children, and tried to think where we had driven. I remembered we had driven to Council Crest Park but just sat in the car, and I thought it was shortly after that, so it must be somewhere around there. We found it. It was a one acre
steep hill, no even ground anywhere on it at all, with a lot of trees. It was an empty lot on the major street we were driving on, but the rest of it went into a cul de sac with houses, up the hill to a water tower at the top. We drove around, no bus stops anywhere, no grocery stores or shops, no school. I started to laugh. Then I was laughing and crying. I said to Larry, “Home, Larry, home.”
We built the house, the neighborhood were all contractors and business people, except for one elderly doctor. The comments were that the new neighbors are a Kaiser doctor, so must be communist, and he even painted the house pink, so it's a sure thing. The day we moved, our mailbox which was on the bottom of the hill, on the street, had a big black swastika painted on it. But we got it off, and I didn't even think any more about it. I had been there already.
I had always sent a Christmas gift to Dr. F's family since he was head of the department. That year I sent a large American flag, and wrote, “Happy New Year.” Six months later I got a proper short thank you.
Richards writes that Freud's response to anti-Semitism “was always one of defiance,” as well as affirmation. Richards observes, “I should note that Freud's response entailed a heightened sense of himself as a Jew combined with an enduring sense that the Jewish tradition is favorable to the development of intellectuality generally, and of scientific worldview particularly.” Upon reflection, I could say that I too felt both alienated from Jewish ritual and religiosity yet when confronted with anti-Semitism, I felt a heightened sense of being a Jew. For instance, when I was young, I was surrounded by Jewish traditions that I was expected to follow regardless of my feelings. In 1946, a cousin at the University of Iowa married a black man, and my pious Aunt and Uncle had funeral services for her. This was kept secret from me, as I wasn't supposed to know of such things but after I found out, I decided I was no longer a Jew and I would never marry a Jewish man. Everything about them repelled me, and I just wanted out. But life has many twists and turns. I met Larry when I was in my teens, but unknown to him I had already been a year with an analyst, taking the train every Tuesday and Thursday to Milwaukee, so on our first date all I talked about was Freud, and dreams, and analysis. I never mentioned high school. He had never heard conversation like this. In medical school at the University of Wisconsin, psychoanalysis was
regarded as a fraud and charlatan practice but he had made up his mind to marry me, and I was very intense and devoted to analysis and reading Freud who spoke for me. My analyst then, Dr. Black in Milwaukee, did not want me to marry as I was so young so I brought Larry to him, and they talked. Dr. Black said “Well, he's not much of a Jew which I felt was a good thing.” So I married a Jew and it was the best thing I had ever done for myself.
Through the years, I developed a respect for the scientific mind which certainly was the description of Larry and his view of life, but after such serious situations as Dr. F's and being far away from my religious Jewish relatives, my feeling about being Jewish now carried a definite pride. Richards's quote of Freud at 70, rings true for me. Freud writes, “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.”
Anti-semitism has been part of my life, but it hasn't been the greatest part. I had long considered this because I was sheltered by my husband, and anti-Semitism didn't have as much strength in the world of theatre as it did other places. But after having read Richards's piece on Freud's own shift from repudiating his Jewish past to solidifying his identity as a Jew, I've reconsidered my experience of anti-Semitism as one that has a particularly gendered bias. On reflection, I noticed that many of the incidents of anti-Semitism have been directed towards men and not me or other women. It made me curious.
What piqued my curiosity was that Larry, who didn't have what typically is called a semitic look, was the object of anti-Semitic attack, whereas I never encountered anything of the sort. Why? Larry was a calm man and loved with a child on his lap if one was in the room and yet he incurred great wrath from Jew haters again and again. Not only that, but Larry was also a non-believer, never wore a head covering, and never even spoke about religion as it had no place in his life. Not only that but the anti-Semitic professor didn't just give him a failing grade at the end of the year, he was openly and loudly hostile the entire year, publicly telling him he didn't belong in medical school. Similarly, Dr. F did not forbid our moving into Dunthorpe as a single issue, he berated him every
chance he had about not being allowed to step foot into Henry Ford hospital as a doctor.
Another example was that years later after Larry's death, I was having a dinner with a holocaust survivor, who was at least fifteen years older than me. He also was also not a terribly semitic looking man. He was well over six foot, totally white-haired. He had lost all of his family in Poland, and had survived because he was young and strong, and told his family in the ghetto would receive more food rations if he signed up to work for Hitler. He did, but they were all killed (as he learned after the war). He spent the war years building factories to look like hospitals and was found near death in a small concentration camp (Dora) no one had heard of, about seventy barely living men with piled up corpses all over. One night we were sitting in a booth at a sushi restaurant, and a man came up to him and said sarcastically that we must be having our own little Chanukah party. It was winter, close to Christmas, not Chanukah at all. He said it was nice of the restaurant to let us in, and we should check the bill carefully as Jews don't like to pay. The man I was with was 95 years old, and I was frightened and only wanted to leave immediately.
I've thought about these incidents, and reading Richards's paper made me see that these attacks on the Jewish man (rather than me or other women) could be a result of Oedipal conflict in which the Jewish victim represents the primal father and the attack is a disguised attempt to win over the woman (me). Also notably, the attacks were always when I was with them, not when they were alone.
Here is where Richards's insights are helpful. He writes that “parricide is the aboriginal source of the psychic institution of conscience … [and the Jew is] closer psychologically to the forgotten truth of the primal murder.” In other words, the anti-Semitism that I experienced was directed towards men both because of Oedipal conflict but also because the Jew is the representative of an older civilization, nearer to the original killing of the primal father. Jews maintain a close affiliation to the past and reliving and rethinking the past is also part of the project of psychoanalysis. The attack on the father is also a replay of the aboriginal source of “the psychic institution of conscience.” One of these anti-Semites said to me about my husband, “Is that your father?” It was meant to ridicule but it also implied that I was free and looking for someone. It was an attack on
my husband but it was also an attack on the “institution of conscience.”
Richards's paper is an oasis of truth in a desert of lies and untruths we are living in today as our country and the western (and eastern) world heads to more religion which I agree is based on fear. But I fear also. that this new terrible uprising will destroy us.
As I read the commentaries, I thank the writers for more insights and analysis does that. It stimulates and forward and deeper we move.