Freud's Vienna Circle, Psychoanalysis, and Antisemitism

Freud's insistent atheism—and his somewhat contradictory, obsessional return to the topic of religion throughout his cultural writings—are both well documented. In a letter dated Oct. 9, 1918 to the Swiss pastor-analyst Oskar Pfister, he described himself as “a completely godless Jew.” (Meng & Freud, E., 1963, p. 63). This phrase was not merely a double negation (as both godless and Jew) of the dominant Roman Catholic religion of fin-de-siècle Vienna, but also served as a more complex signifier: in childhood an identity formed in a humanistic Judaism, and a growing identification with its intellectual and racial heritage against the backdrop of increasing antisemitism.1 Freud's cultural writings on religious themes are well known: first, the essay “Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices” in 1907 (Freud, 1959b), and then more famously, Totem and Taboo in 1913 (Freud, 1955b), The Future of an Illusion in 1927 (Freud, 1961b), and Moses and Monotheism (1964) in 1939 (Freud, 1964), as well as a host of lesser known essays, speeches, and correspondence mentioning both religion in general, and his own Jewish heritage in particular (e.g., Freud, 1959a/1926).2

Less well known, however, are the attitudes toward religion among the men—and eventually women—who joined him once a week to reflect on a wide range of implications of the new psychological science: psychoanalysis. There has been no in-depth exploration of the treatment of religion by this “Wednesday Night Psychological Society”—Freud's immediate circle of psychoanalysts in Vienna—with the exception of

Otto Rank and Theodor Reik whose work is still familiar to some specialists (e.g., Merkur, 2013). In general, there has been much less scholarly interest in Freud's Viennese circle as a whole than in Freud himself, and statements about the group have tended toward generalizations. (Mühlleitner & Reichmayr, 1997, pp. 73-74) Peter Gay (2006) in his comprehensive critical biography of Freud concluded that “Freud's view of religion as the enemy was wholly shared by the first generation of psychoanalysts. The attempts of some later psychoanalysts to reconcile psychoanalysis with religion would never have found the slightest sympathy in Freud and his colleagues.” (p. 533, emphasis added)

In my recent book, Old and Dirty Gods: Religion, Antisemitism, and the Origins of Psychoanalysis (2017; see also Richards, 2019), I investigate Gay's premise based on my research as a senior Fulbright scholar at the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna in 2013-14, beginning with the research question: What religious themes appear in discussions and writings of Freud's Wednesday Night Psychological Society? I began with the minutes of this group recorded by Otto Rank from 1906 until Rank's departure from Vienna in 1915 for military duty during WWI (Nunberg & Federn, 1962). In addition, rich sources included the journal Imago—the groups' journal for cultural or “applied” psychoanalytic writings—followed by an examination of other published works, correspondence, and memoirs from members of Freud's Viennese circle prior to World War II.

Freud and his circle often engaged in wide-ranging, interdisciplinary discussions during their Wednesday meetings, which then often were expanded into published writings—including forays into history, biography, anthropology, archaeology, philosophy, the paranormal, and—especially of interest for this project—the study of religion across time and culture. A number of early analysts who were either members of Freud's Vienna circle or had a close relationship to it, published monographs and volumes of collected essays on religion. The works of Ernest Jones, Oskar Pfister, Theodor Reik, Otto Rank, Geza Roheim, Sabina Spielrein, and of course C.G. Jung (before and especially after his famous split with Freud), are prime examples of this literary productivity in the realm of psychology and religion.

TWO THESES: The Expected Result and the Return of the Repressed

The First Thesis: Complexity in the Viennese Analysts' Views on Religion

So, I entered the project with one research question in mind: What religious themes appear in the discussions and writings of Freud's Wednesday Night Psychological Society? My hypothesis was that their views might be more complex and less strictly conforming to Freud's views than was assumed by previous scholars. The primary sources did, in fact, confirm a rich and often more complex view of the attitudes toward religion among Freud's early followers than has generally been recognized. I have detailed many examples of this in the book, but to summarize as briefly as possible, the members not only followed Freud's psychoanalytic-anthropological method of applying oedipal interpretations to ancient civilizations' ritual practices, as in Freud's (1955b/1913) Totem and Taboo, and his critique against the repressive moralistic teachings of the hegemonic Viennese Catholic Church. At times they also expressed quite original ideas about a positive role of religion in advancing the sublimations and compromise formations necessary for civilization—a modification from Freud's (1961a/1930) Civilization and Its Discontents, and quite different from his (1961b/1927) Future of an Illusion in which Freud had actually posited religion as an enemy. They believed that there was the inverse proportion of neuroses in devout believers vs. freethinking secularists, and even—in the case of the Pastor Oskar Pfister, making an argument for psychoanalysis as compatible with a liberal and non-repressive version of Protestant Christianity, freed from the constraints of moralizing dogma. Capturing well the mix of orthodoxy and creativity that characterized psychoanalysis from its beginnings with the Wednesday Night Psychological Society, Paul Federn—one of the earliest and most longstanding members of the Vienna Society—shared the following recollection in tribute to Freud at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute in 1948:

Freud…foresaw that many shades and deviations and derivations necessarily would develop…Only in this respect, are we “orthodox”; but we are open to every change which is progress without

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abandoning the established truth and the principles confirmed by our scientific method (Federn, 1948).

A Second Thesis: Antisemitism and the Return of the Repressed

These first findings would have been more than enough to say “mission accomplished” based on my initial research aims. A second, unanticipated thesis emerged, however, that I believe is even more significant as a result of this study: that the surrounding atmosphere of antisemitism, even before the rising horror of the Nazi movement, stands at the fons et origo of psychoanalysis. Antisemitism shaped the first analysts' ethical sense, and was formative in their theory as a desire to analyze (from the underside) what lay beneath every surface of the human psyche. Obviously there is no one impetus behind the development of psychoanalysis, and to claim antisemitism as a singular root cause would be reductionistic. Yet, with its curling tentacles, it is one of the most pervasive—as well as sometimes denied—social forces in 20th century Vienna, and could not have failed to suffuse the thinking of Freud's circle in some ways, both consciously and unconsciously.

I greatly appreciate Dr. Richards's stressing the importance of context as well as childhood antecedents in Freud's atheism, and the increasing animosity he felt toward religion throughout his life. At the same time, I view this animosity as bound up tightly with the repressive Austrian Catholicism that cast its shadow over everyone in Vienna, and was ineradicably intertwined with Habsburg power over political life, but also economics, careers, class, and education. This longstanding Austrian and eastern European antisemitism was made more virulent by the shift from a cultural and anti-Jewish religious hatred (the long history of which is well described in Dr. Terman's paper) to a pseudo-scientific racist ideology beginning in the late 19th century and accruing to itself the appearance of a modern professional “truth.” Antisemitism thus constituted an ancient and swelling ocean of hatred in which the first psychoanalysts, almost all of whom were Jewish (Mühlleitner & Reichmayr, 1997, pp. 85-88), had to swim throughout their entire lives. It took constant vigilance to survive, much less succeed, in its dangerous waters. My thesis, then, is that above and beyond all the other themes discovered in the Wednesday Night Society's discussions of religion,

then, antisemitism stands as a “total context,”3 an ineradicable, overarching reality that could not have failed to influence these firsts' analysts' discoveries and explorations—and without which their ideas, especially concerning religion itself, cannot be fully understood.

I came to this realization in a visceral way while walking from my apartment in Leopoldstadt to the Freud Museum in the more affluent neighborhood of Alsergrund. I became aware that symbolically I was tracing Freud's footsteps across the Danube Canal, from the eastern European Jewish ghetto to the upwardly mobile Ninth District. These two neighborhoods had contained two of the largest proportions of Jewish inhabitants in Vienna since the waves of immigration from Eastern Europe in the 19th century and before, but they were very different Jewish populations with differing cultural and spiritual lives.

Of course the Holocaust itself was the culminating event—or, more accurately process—by which longstanding religious and cultural hatred and envy toward the Jews as “Other” became systematized as a “science” of racial inferiority and ultimately extermination. Eliza Slavet (2009) has argued against the post-Holocaust inclination to downplay racial interpretations of Jewishness and antisemitism, making the case that the ways in which antisemitism operated by the twentieth century was (and is) indeed racism, and that the social construction of racial identity tends to reproduce what it indoctrinates. She writes, “Rather than repressing the racial elements of Jewish definition, Freud suggests that a vigilant scrutiny of these elements is crucial if there is to be any hope of controlling these ‘peculiar’ forces rather than being controlled by them.” (p. 191) Following Boyarin (1997), Geller (2006, 2007), Gilman (1991, 1993), and others, she points out that Jewishness, along with misogyny and homophobia as they were intertwined at the turn of the twentieth century, generated a racial representation of Jewishness and Judaism that could give rise “to both ethnic pride and racial hatred.” (p. 15) “[R] ather than focusing on only the racial, genealogical, and bodily elements of Jewish identity or on the intellectual and abstract concepts of

Judaism, Freud's work compels us to explore the relationship between the two.” (2013) In 1930, Freud himself declared in the preface to the Hebrew translation of Totem and Taboo that if a secular Jew were asked “what is left to you that is Jewish, he would reply, ‘A very great deal, and probably its very essence ()’.” (Freud, :)

Concentrated in the historically Jewish neighborhoods, one can find to-day—especially when looking for them—small brass plaques commemorating individuals and families who lived at a specific locale and then were deported to their deaths in the Holocaust. These plaques called “Stolpersteine” (“Stumbling Blocks”) were first created by German artist Gunter Demnig in 2009 as calls to remembrance. (Demnig, [n.d.]) Demnig quotes from the Talmud: “a person is only forgotten when his or her name is forgotten.” The engravings generally begin with the words “Hier wohnte.” (“Here lived.”) and end with “gemordet” (“murdered”), the place if known (usually a concentration camp) and year. The idea of stumbling stones is also a reminder of an old slur that if a person stumbled on the street, a Jew must be buried there. This slur has been re-appropriated to signify the importance of being stopped in our tracks, to notice, and to remember.

All over Vienna there are memorials to the victims of the Holocaust. Their sheer ubiquity is a statement of the horrific extent to which entire Viennese neighborhoods were impacted not only by the final genocidal months and years, but also by the centuries-old pervasiveness of the antisemitism that allowed the Nazis to flourish and the evil to spread like a wildfire through both Vienna and the Austrian countryside. Perhaps to walk the city as a foreigner myself allowed me to search out these many monuments with less ambivalence because my eyes not covered by blinders of familiarity—or (as much?) denial. Or perhaps because of the endemic racism in my own North American context, combined with personal observations of antisemitism in my childhood and young adulthood, I was primed as a Christian of partial German descent to see these visible memorials, and to seek them out, either as an act of righteous remembrance, an act of penance, or both. In any case, the palpable sense of Viennese antisemitism as a climate, an atmosphere, was something that I no longer just knew from reading about it books, but came to know (both anew and again, like Freud's “return of the repressed”) at a

visceral level. I had seen its not-so-subtle signs with my own eyes, and I felt its miasma on my own skin.

Nor is antisemitism unique to Austria; it is likely worse today in some other central and eastern European countries (as I observed during travels in 2013-14, 2015; cf., Mikanowski, 2012). But in keeping with my research focus on Vienna, it became clear to me (both through reading history but also reading the newspaper, the culture, and the comments of acquaintances), that the Holocaust is a memory which throughout Austria is still fraught with social denial, amid public calls for remembrance. Until as recently as 1991, when in a speech to Parliament Austrian Chancellor Franz Vranitzky publicly called the Austrian people to responsibility for the atrocities of the Holocaust, the official and popular view tended to coincide in a concerted effort to deflect all blame onto Germany. (Wise, 1991) Images of Austria as occupied state, and Austrians as victims themselves of Nazi aggression, were repeated, mantra-like, in an effort to absolve Austria from its own violence toward the Jews and other groups slated for expatriation—and then, extermination.

Today there are laws against a former Nazi party member serving in the government, and Holocaust denial speech, neo-Nazis, and hate crimes are officially banned. There have been official efforts at restitution and remembrance. However, a “soft” denial, coupled with ongoing antisemitism, persists in the general culture at large. I have met older Austrians whose families were in Vienna during the war, and the usual response to any query about the Nazis or the Holocaust is an acknowledgement that yes, the Austrians were complicit, but: “Not everyone approved. My family certainly did not!” If so many families “did not,” then who were all those people in the cheering throngs on the Heldenplatz giving Hitler a triumphal entry into Vienna? One sardonic (typically Viennese) joke that circulates about this rewriting of history is the saying, “Oh no, they weren't cheering. On that day on the Heldenplatz, they were just all waving their hands and shouting at Hitler ‘Go away!’”

A friend who moved to Vienna from Germany over 30 years ago commented that in those earlier days she sat next to an older woman on a park bench, and after exchanging polite greetings, the woman grumbled that there were too many “Ausländer” (“foreigners”). My friend

replied, “I'm actually an Ausländer—I'm from Germany.” The woman stated flatly, “Oh, I don't mean you. I mean the Jews.” While such comments may be made less readily to strangers these days, people I know and trust acknowledge that antisemitism and racism (mostly referred to as xenophobia) persist. There is a strong anti-immigration and anti-Islamic mood (as well as fairly small counter-protests which I saw around the university).

Following a scandal implicating leaders of the conservative coalition in 2019, the far right Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) has experienced some decline in popularity from its peak in 2016. The liberal president Alexander van der Bellen has a sizeable lead going into the upcoming election in October, 2022—however, the far-right today captures up to 1/5 to 1/4 of Austrians' popular support as of summer 2022, still stoked by anti-immigrant and ethnic nationalist appeals to “Heimat” (“homeland”).5 A slogan of this right-wing, anti-immigration movement, “Pummerin statt Muezzin” (“the cathedral bell, not the Islamic call to prayer”), echoes the sentiments expressed in the earlier nationalist movement at the turn of the 20th century that led to National Socialism: keep Austria white, German-speaking, and Catholic.

Memento Mori

My morning and evening walks took me past two contrasting monuments. One, planted in a narrow park along the east side of the canal, was a soot-darkened and apparently untended but very ornate miniature chapel dedicated to the memory of Johann Nepomok Hummel. A plaque indicates that it was placed there by the then Bürgermeister (mayor), Karl Lueger. Lueger was elected in 1895 by the first explicitly antisemitic political party, the Christian Socialists, and installed in 1897; Hitler regarded him as a model leader. He is considered a symbol of the rising antisemitism at the turn of the century in Vienna, and his name was (mostly) removed in 2012 from the portion of Vienna's most public street, the Ringstrasse. Once called the “Karl Lueger Ring,” it is now the Universitätsring. Yet at least one subway entrance to the busy

Schottentor station near the University still bore his name in January 2014, (while I was living in Vienna), and the University letterhead on my teaching contract retained the older street name. His statue still stands in the Dr. Karl-Lueger Platz on the other end of the Ring.6

In his desire to create a modern German city, Lueger planted over a dozen structures throughout Vienna, with his name prominently displayed. The largest monument is an enormous Baroque-style church, the Dr.-Karl-Lueger-Gedächtsniskirche (“commemoration church”) dedicated to St. Karl Borromäus, and still serving as an active Roman Catholic place of worship. It is planted squarely in the center of the Zentralfriedhof, or central cemetery, where numerous luminary Viennese musical, literary, and historic figures are buried. So Lueger casts a large shadow over Vienna to this day. His name and presence are still widely tolerated, without critical reflection on the antisemitism he represents. The little chapel I passed daily embodies the darkness and obscurity of this shadow. With its dingy stucco walls covered with graffiti, its interior locked behind heavy wrought iron gates and strewn with dirt and litter, it looks less like a monument to a saint or a statesman, than a haunted house: a memento mori.

Across the canal from Leopoldstadt, in the 9th district at the top of Berggasse, stands a very different monument in the small courtyard of a well-kept Catholic Church, the Servitenkirche. This monument commemorates all the victims of the Holocaust who lived on the adjoining street, Servitengasse. The memorial consists of a collection of skeleton keys, each with a name tag for one of the Servitengasse victims. The keys represent both the mundane business of daily life, and its violent disruption—as well as serving as symbols of homes inhabited and wrenched away.

Walking daily between Lueger's uncanny chapel and the Servitengasse memorial, as well as all the other Holocaust memorials throughout Vienna, it became utterly clear to me that even if the first analysts had never written a word about antisemism, their work, their sense of

identity, and their very lives, were marinated in this bitter reality, and it could not have failed to have an impact on their creative thinking. Although there is, in fact, very little actual discussion of antisemitism recorded in the minutes of their meetings, their writings and memoirs as a whole—taken together with historical accounts of Austrian political and cultural history—tell a more complete story.

My research at the Freud Museum and on the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society's early thoughts on religion, raised antisemitism and the Holocaust to the forefront of my own consciousness in new ways. Although I was raised in Episcopal and Methodist churches, and currently serve as an ordained Episcopal priest, my hometown on the north shore of Boston had and continues to have a large Jewish community. My friends' grandparents still bore tattooed numbers on their arms. For me, therefore, the Holocaust has never been abstract. I have perpetually been drawn to study Freud and his circle because the history of psychoanalysis is a perspective from which one can try to make sense of the irrational—both personally and in social and political movements. It is also a perspective haunted by religion as a much-contested subject. The rise of overt antisemitism and the fusion of church and state at the turn of the twentieth century in Austria, together with Freud's adamant embrace of his Jewish heritage while utterly rejecting religious belief, make for fascinating research. And it is research that troubles the waters.

Psychoanalysis, Antisemitism, and the Holocaust

The Holocaust was a shattering of history, and has been investigated in every generation since with ever-deepening insights about the multi-generational impact of trauma (e.g., Davoine & Gaueillière, 2004; Kuriloff, 2014; and Laub, 2015). Only recently have psychoanalysts begun to unpack the effects of the Holocaust on the analysts who escaped, on the institutes that received them, and even on the shaping (or mis-shaping) of postwar psychoanalytic theory (e.g., Harris, in press, 2022; Kuriloff, 2014; Fisher, 2009; and Prince, 2009). My project has been slightly different, though related. The impact of the Holocaust should never be underestimated, but it is my contention that because it was, in Bettelheim's words, such an “extreme situation” (Bettelheim, 1991), the long prior history of antisemitism in itself may become subsumed in its glare. I want to argue that in addition to the Holocaust itself, the decades—as

well as centuries—of antisemitism that led up to it, are not incidental but are central to the development of psychoanalysis.

Freud's Jewishness has already been well examined as a dynamic factor in the development of psychoanalysis. There was great complexity in the early analysts' unconscious dynamics of Jewish identity vs. the desire for assimilation into a culture that bore an indelible mark of Christianity—both as individuals and as a group. As the conspicuousness of antisemitism waxed and waned with various regime changes within the Habsburg monarchy and the Austrian state, the desire for assimilation or a distinctive identity also fluctuated. There was no single Jewish attitude or perspective. As Klein writes with regard to histories that tend to characterize “the Jews as a single, homogeneous whole, with characteristically Jewish experiences,” much complexity is lost in such generalizations. (Klein, 1985:xv) The Jews can become an abstraction which conceals and obscures the crucial differences among them, such as the diverse reactions to antisemitism that led some Jews anxiously to hasten their assimilationist efforts, and led others (fewer) to dissimilate and redefine their Jewishness. (Klein, 1985:xv)

Freud's and the early analysts' attitudes toward assimilation also changed over time. Their eventual assumption of a more isolationist stance, combined with a sense of intellectual and political superiority, was simultaneously a point of pride, a compromise formation between denial of the full extent of their oppression, and a posture of conscious defiance. As Klein (1985), Oxaal (1988), and Gilman (1993) have pointed out, historians have tended to fall in two camps regarding the influence of Judaism on the development of psychoanalysis. On one side of the divide, which Oxaal (1988) calls “ethnic minimalism,” there are those who see Judaism as a fact of life for the Freudians, but otherwise peripheral to their theorizing in contrast to their German intellectual identity—for example, Peter Gay, who wrote,

The claim for the Jewishness of psychoanalysis based on its materials or its intellectual inheritance have proved to be without foundation. The claim for an elusive Jewish quality that somehow, mysteriously, informed Freud's work, a claim he seems to have endorsed, is too insubstantial to carry the weight some of his biographers have put on it…[I]t remains an impassioned, wishful guess,

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nothing more.” (Gay, 1987, emphasis added)

Frank Sulloway (1992), in Freud, Biologist of the Mind, was explicit about demythologizing Freud in order to reach a “mythless history” (contra Klein, 1985:xvi; Gilman, 1993:5-6), and went to considerable lengths to debunk what he labeled as the prevailing “myth” of antisemitism in Freud's Vienna. (Sulloway, 1992: 6, 463–465, 491; cf., Ellenberger, 1970:418-464)

On the other side, “ethnic maximalism,” are those who emphasize the influence (direct or indirect) of Jewish intellectual thought, religious heritage, and social situation on Freud's ideas (e.g., Aron & Henik, 2010; Brickman, 2010; Cushman, 2007; Geller, 2007; Gilman, 1993; Klein, 1985; Reijzer, 2011; Robert, 1976; Said, 2003; Slavet, 2009, 2010; and Yerushalmi, 1991) including a hermeneutical disposition reflecting Talmudic scholarship and learned argumentation (Bloom 1987; Frosh, 2005; Ostow, 1982; Yerushalmi, 1991)—a trend that began even in Freud's lifetime (Roback, 1929). Others have exegeted vestiges of kabbalistic mysticism (Bakan, 1990/1958; Ostow, 1982; Eigen, 1998, 2012; Merkur, 2014; Aron & Starr 2010; Starr, 2008), identification with Moses as the heroic herald of a promised land of freedom wedded to Enlightenment rationalism and cultural assimilation (; ), and, as well, Freud's own frank rebellion against continual antisemitic obstacles (Frosh , ; ). Ostow points to ways in which Judaism and psychoanalysis share mutually reinforcing elements: a belief in the power of knowledge, a position of dual marginality (social marginality as Jews and academic marginality as psychoanalysts), a place to struggle with internal conflicts at the interface with a non-Jewish world, and finally psychoanalysis as a deepening approach to the understanding of Jewish religion. (pp. ) More recently, the late Philip Cushman has again likened the psychoanalysis to the Jewish method of midrash. (; ) Lewis Aron and Libby Henik go so far toward the realm of Jewish spirituality as to state, “[f]or psychoanalysts, the human being, created in the image

David Meghnagi (1993) views psychoanalysis as a product of and “event within” fin-de-siècle Judaism, contemporaneous with and influenced by the conflicts in vision between Zionists and the Jewish socialist reformers. Over against Kafka, who viewed psychoanalysis as relevant only for Jews caught in the political struggles of the early twentieth century, Meghnagi views psychoanalysis as a “third answer” between Zionism and socialism, a depth understanding of the dynamics, structures, and motivations that create injustice in the human condition.

John Murray Cuddihy (1974) viewed psychoanalysis as an outgrowth of the failed social assimilation of Jews within Gentile culture in finde-siècle Vienna. Cuddihy proposed that Freud's notion of the “importunate id” and, as well, the Oedipus complex, had their origins in the shame of the assimilated Jewish bourgeoisie toward the Ostjude (the “importunate Yid”) (p. 18)—and, more personally, Freud's shame and anger at his father's seeming cowardice over the incident with the antisemite in the street (Freud, 1953/1900:197)—an argument addressed by Richards in this volume.8 By transforming the moral opprobrium of social deviance, offensive behavior, and “kvetches” into a science of mental illness, Cuddihy claimed that Freud's theory, by pathologizing Jewish cultural differences, was an attempt to distance the cultured professional Jew from his eastern European counterpart—and his own pan-German identity from that of his Galician, Chasidic parents. (Cuddihy, 1974, pp.7-8, 19; Gilman, 1993)

Beller (1989) points out that scholars do not even agree on the degree of exposure to Jewish religious traditions Freud received in his childhood home. (p. 86) Freud himself later regretted not being trained to read Hebrew fluently as his father had been, and the household seems

to have been run mainly along secular Jewish lines (Rizzuto, 1998, p. 30).9 However, Freud's well documented fascination with and lifelong reference to Jewish figures in his writings and correspondence, as well as Rizzuto's detailed discussion of his relationship to his father, his father's Talmudic scholarship, and the family bible. Richards in this volume further challenges Freud's demurrals and affirms the admixture of bible, Talmud, and Enlightenment Haskalah10 Enlightenment values in his childhood home, existing side-by-side with his mother's suppressed Jewish piety and his grandmother's Galician Jewish heritage and Yiddish language. All the evidence points to a justification of the idea that Freud's thinking was influenced by his Jewish heritage and identity.

At minimum, as Beller affirms, the two major traditions of education and ethics that evolved from the earliest times within Judaism, and became life-sustaining in eastern European ghetto life, were central among Freud's lifelong values. Already in the late eighteenth-century the rabbi Moses Mendelssohn had created a rationalist Enlightenment movement within Judaism, called Haskalah, in which the study of science was encouraged as complementary rather than antithetical to religious belief (pp. 91-92; Salberg, 2007/2010, p. 7). Beller (1989) elaborates on the centrality of ethics in Judaism, and in particular the democracy and social justice that characterized European ghetto life, as a deep-rooted set of communal values that inspired Jewish involvement—and leadership—in the movements for social justice and in Marxism in Vienna in the twentieth century. (pp. 86-87) Enlightenment values of rationality and equality further strengthened this commitment to social justice among Jews in Europe after the seventeenth century. (pp. 104-143) The commitment to a comprehensive humanistic education set a distinctive stamp on all the analysts, and informed the deeply held Socratic assumption that the unexamined life is not worth living.

Klein (1985) further frames the question of the importance of Judaism and Jewishness to the early analysts in terms of a tension between the particular and the universal. As much as assimilation was an important social aim, there was also a countervailing impulse toward maintaining Jewish distinctiveness and establishing a Jewish intellectual subculture that was neither Ostjude nor German. Klein proposes that the Jews' position between full emancipation in the eighteenth century and the horrors of the twentieth century functioned as a liminal space, in which their particular situation simultaneously created both an impetus and a constraint to creativity. Psychoanalysis was a response to the particular situation of these socially ostracized but economically well-established Jewish intellectuals. It offered new insights for living their lives in a subculture of intellectual excitement and social reform, within the larger culture of antisemitism. These insights were fortifying for the members of their subculture—but also, generalizable to others: Klein writes, “The meaning of Jewish integration must be understood in both of the ways assimilated Jews of this period understood it: as a reconciliation of hostile social differences that would directly benefit Jews, and as a unifying, universal, moral ideal that would benefit all humanity” (p. xvi, emphasis added).

The picture is more complex, of course, than either a dismissal or an elevation of the Jewishness implicit in psychoanalysis as a theory or a movement. As much as assimilation was an important social aim for most educated Jewish professionals, there was also a countervailing impulse toward maintaining their distinctiveness and establishing a superior Jewish intellectual subculture. (Klein, 1985, p. xv) Through Bildung (“character building education”), they aspired to be German in their cultural ascent—not Austrian or Viennese. All bourgeois children, Jewish and Gentile, received a humanistic Gymnasium education and visited the museums, concert halls, and other great cultural landmarks along

the Ringstrasse. But for the Jews this was a matter of serious interest, not merely a social formality. (Beller, 1989:187).11

Yet Jewishness in itself is, of course, not identical with antisemitism. By 1902, the year the Wednesday Night Society was founded, Freud's inner circle had become more disillusioned about grand Enlightenment ideals, and more willing to join together under two interlocking bonds of distinctiveness: psychoanalysts against the psychiatric mainstream, and Jewish intellectuals against the hegemony of Catholicism and antisemitism. The fact that they were an oppressed minority contributed to a feeling of intellectual freedom, as Freud himself noted in his comment to the B'nai B'rith (also quoted by Richards in this volume): “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’ …” (Freud, 1959a/1926) The early analysts had less to lose in terms of power and prestige in the society at large, but also more to gain from the intellectual freedom which they had appropriated for themselves. On the other hand, the internecine conflicts among the Jewish members of the group before World War I were all the more intense because so much was at stake—other avenues to success had been relinquished by becoming a card-carrying member of Freud's inner circle due to the economic and political lid that was kept on Jewish advancement, and the growing public hatred (interlaced with fear and envy) toward Jewish professional success.

The very long shadow of antisemitism itself, and not just Jewish intellectual roots as the “ethnic maximalists” have argued, must therefore be located as a catalyst at the very origins of psychoanalytic theory and practice—both in terms of what the first analysts saw (that no one else was seeing), and what they failed to see. This is not to say, of course, that antisemitism was the only factor in the development of psychoanalysis. The emergence of a science and a hermeneutic of the unconscious was overdetermined like everything else. Psychoanalysis incorporates a rich, complicated tapestry of sources and influences. Yet the core realization of psychoanalytic thought—that there is always more beneath the surface appearances of reality, and that this “more” is among other things affective, memory-laden and psychological—cannot fail to have had something to do with the experiences of the first Jewish analysts in their position of marginality and oppression.

The Influence of Antisemitism

Antisemitism, as a belief system saturating the dominant culture of Western Europe, perforce delineated the Jew as “Other.” Jews in different contexts at various times embraced this outsider position as a safe enclave, or sought to escape it through assimilation. But their view was always one from the margins, a view that Gentiles did not share or even perceive. As postcolonial theory has taught us,12 the view from the margins is often more acute and penetrating than from the mountaintop of privilege. (Contra Gay, 1987, pp.146-147)13 Comparing Freud to other “great revolutionaries” of thought, Isaac Deutscher (1968) declared to the World Jewish Congress in 1968,

as Jews they dwelt on the borderlines of various civilizations, religions, and national cultures. Their mind matured where the most diverse cultural influences crossed and fertilized each other. They lived on the margins or in the nooks and crannies of their respective nations. Each of them was in society and yet not in it, of it and yet not of it. It was this that enabled them to rise in thought above their societies, above their nations, above their times and generations, and to strike out mentally into wide new horizons and far into the future. (pp. )

As Dutch psychoanalyst Hans Reijzer (2011) has observed, “When people live between two cultures, they think dialectically and see society dynamically.” (p. 25)14 The Jews of Austria could speak and understand

the language and culture of both oppressed and oppressor, and they also could not but view and judge themselves through the lens of the dominant culture. In his culture shock during his first visit to the Wednesday Night Society, the famous Swiss psychiatrist C.G. Jung viewed the Viennese analysts as “cynical” (Bair, p. 119), but in their own context that was simply what came of being awake to the societal dynamics into which they were born. It was part and parcel of surviving in a hostile climate.

Yearning for acceptance and assimilation was one psychic force, which sometimes engendered both denial and hope. Realism and the knowledge of danger was a countervailing force. The former—the assimilationist story that psychoanalysis is a western science—is the narrative told most often. The latter—the subversive knowledge of oppression—is the uncanny truth of trauma, which returns again and again in disguised form, but can never remain entirely repressed. (e.g., Freud, 1955c, p. 239) The total context of antisemitism, and the first analysts' efforts to resist its penetrating logic of denigration, could not have failed to inform and shape their ethical sensibilities and their vision of social justice. Moreover, this experience infused them with a psychic need to analyze what dark secrets lay beneath the human psyche—of which sex and aggression were perhaps the most powerful in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Vienna. Thus antisemitism had an indelible impact, not only on their personal and professional lives and aspirations, but on the very formation of psychoanalytic theory.

Social Implications for Psychoanalysis

Taking into consideration years of mounting fear, the eventual terror of forced migration, and an aftermath of often intense survivor guilt, psychoanalysis was riddled at its origins with an often repressed but uncanny return of an innumerable crowd of unlaid ghosts. Beginning with Freud's Viennese circle, and continuing on from the first generation of analysts in Europe across the globe, psychoanalysis bears a multi-generational wound—antisemitism and the Holocaust are its deepest scar and stain, a persistent, still largely unmetabolized trauma at the heart of the discipline.

One consequence of all this unmetabolized trauma may be that of all the psychotherapeutic disciplines, psychoanalysis has been among the slowest to recognize the impact of context on the psyche—both at the level of

individual patients' sufferings, and at the level of society. This has been accomplished in contemporary iterations of psychoanalysis, including the recuperation of formerly exiled thinkers such as Sándor Férenczi. Contemporary relational analysts (e.g., Aron and Starr, 2010; Altman, 2009; Benjamin, 1988, 2017; Cole, 2005; Cushman, 2007, 2015; Harris, 2009; Holmes, 2016, 2017; Leary (2000); Mitchell, 2004; Suchet, 2017, and White, 2002, 2004; among many others) have begun to bring to the attention of psychoanalysis as a field to issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, and politics. Increasing attention paid to race, gender, and power by the “Tavistock” school of unconscious group relations based originally in London on the work of Wilfred Bion (1961). This re-turn toward context begs the question how context really did matter to the first historic generation of psychoanalysts, and should recall that historic, immersive reality of antisemitism—and especially its slow but inexorable creep toward genocide in the 1920's and early 30's—into our present awareness. While cautioning against comparing contemporary events directly to the Holocaust, Jeffrey Goldberg (2015), Editor-in-Chief of , asked in the year prior to Donald Trump's election to the U.S. presidency, “It is not 1933. But could it be 1929?” There is much water now roiling under the bridge since Trump's presidency, and a foreboding, concomitant rise in antisemitic violence that continues escalating to this day. (Antidefamation League, ) Christian nationalism shares many of the same feverish cult beliefs as seen in the rise of the Nazis , and the very same group dynamics and blind adherence to a fanatical leader of which Freud forewarned in his still salient

The present volume of this journal is an important contribution to this movement to attend to social and political context as determinative of psychic life. It is certainly my belief that the social and the political infiltrates the earliest substrates of consciousness in childhood through both conscious and unconscious parental desires and anxieties, and is further reinforced (or at times contested) in the course of psychological development.

Conclusion

This has been my plea for a while now as I continue to study the early history of psychoanalysis, religion, and the ravages of antisemitism and the

Shoah: Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, who died just a little over a year ago, was known for his passionate exhortation that we must never forget the horrors of the Holocaust, lest we repeat them. Wiesel's words were powerful, but only a little over seventy-five years after Kristallnacht, few Americans, especially those outside the Jewish community, know or remember what that was, much less how it might still be relevant today. We appear to be immersed in a period of history in both the United States and Europe that feels eerily similar to the emergence of hate speech, violence, and demagoguery that preceded the Holocaust in Europe. (How) can psychoanalysis with its deep appreciation for the impact of history —especially buried history—help facilitate Wiesel's project of staying awake in the face of rising terror?