I am pleased to have been asked to discuss Arnie Richards's article, “The Need Not to Believe: Freud's Godlessness Reconsidered.” Not only is it a tour de force on Freud's relationship to his Jewish origins, but it also serves as a stimulus for many of us to consider the role of our religious and ethnic backgrounds in our development as psychoanalysts. Tip O'Neill, the formidable Speaker of the House for 10 years, used to say that all politics are local, an observation that seems relevant to this article and more specifically to what has motivated its author to research this detailed and gripping account of what he sees as Freud's fundamental tie to Judaism. This article, I believe, has been on and in Arnie Richards's mind for a long time. As he says, during his training, which took place during the time when psychoanalysis was synonymous with a disregard for all religious belief and a distancing from a reputation as a field dominated by psychoanalyst from Jewish backgrounds, he was deemed an outsider because of his determination to keep his involvement with Judaism alive in his psychoanalytic persona. Anyone who reads this article will absorb from him a sense of how important Judaism is to him and how determined he is to not allow Freud to escape from his background as an individual raised in Jewish traditions. I am writing this response to express my opposition to what Arnie wants to prove about Freud, the man, and Freud the originator of psychoanalysis. Arnie wants, in his own way, to describe Freud's assimilation as a desperate attempt to extricate himself from Jewish traditions by joining with the more cosmopolitan society that existed around him in Vienna as somehow not real. To me it's as if he wants to keep Freud within the fold of his, Arnie's, beloved Jewish tradition.
The idea that Freud was often if not always in a struggle to escape the grasp of Jewish rituals and beliefs seems not only plausible but proven by Arnie's scholarship. Where I differ with him comes from our personal differences; our lives as lived, his with an intense identification with
being Jewish and mine with an equally intense identification with being a thoroughly American atheist who has lived in a religious and ethnically free zone for his entire life. Arnie's description of Freud's assimilationist aspirations seems accurate; it could be a description he would make of me. I share with Freud a definite discomfort with Jewish rituals. Hebrew, Yiddish, keeping kosher, lighting candles on Friday evening, are all practices that I have never practiced and have felt no affiliation with them. I suspect that Arnie's position on all things Jewish is on the other end of the spectrum of Jewishness. When I read Arnie's account of Freud's struggle to free himself from Jewish traditions, I am struck not only with the similarity with my position on being liberated from them but with Arnie's desire or need to explain Freud's need not to believe as somehow a defensive escape on Freud's part. This is my central argument with Arnie's otherwise impressive scholarship in this paper.
Something strikes me in Arnie's perspective as simply missing the point about those individuals who are able to free themselves from a belief in the existence of God and the dominance of religious rituals. This is my deeply held personal value system. Unlike Arnie, I feel that this is a legitimate outcome for all those who attempt to face life without the support of a belief that softens the reality of life inevitably ending in death. Freud not only achieved this, but he also framed his personal belief in a brilliant argument proving that religious belief is based upon childhood fantasies. In The Future of an Illusion and Moses and Monotheism, Freud aggressively attacks all religious belief as a product of the infantile mind's fantasies. How is it possible that Arnie judges these contributions negatively, finally concluding that they are poorly written or strident in tone, when to me they rank among some of Freud's most important and incisive insights about humanity?
The answer involves the differences in background and orientation towards Jewishness between us. I do know that Arnie has retained a strong identification as a Jewish psychoanalyst. His involvement with Jewish organizations and his concern about Freud's attitude towards Jewish traditions seem all of a piece. His mission, as expressed in this article, is to anchor Freud's godlessness and hostility to Jewish traditions as somehow inauthentic, or, more precisely, as requiring analysis with a perspective of penetrating beyond the surface of its meaning. The purpose of this article is to establish that Freud was rebellious, but not really
able to assimilate fully. I maintain the very opposite; any individual like Freud can feel the imprisonment of religion and its traditions and rituals. Many people raised in one of the major religions can free themselves from that background by simply discontinuing attending religious services and declaring themselves no longer an observant Catholic or Mormon, for instance, but as Arnie Richards recognizes, this is different for Judaism. For Arnie, as for many Jewish individuals, Judaism is more than a religion, it is a culture that must be maintained. Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust may make it seem that people who assimilate and disavow the importance of their Jewish faith can be seen as a “self-hating Jew,” a label that is often attached when people of Jewish background insist that they have little or no use for Judaism or for any other religion. In the disavowal of Jewishness, it is particularly important that no other religion be embraced. The Jew who converts perhaps does feel an antagonism to one's Jewish background. Freud, however, was distancing himself from all religious beliefs; his aim was to break down the barriers of Jewish separatism while insisting on the importance of scientific knowledge as what should unite us as human beings. His search for a universal bond between those educated in science was basic to his invention of psychoanalysis. The incompatibility between psychoanalysis and religious belief of any sort has troubled many of Freud's followers in psychoanalytic communities. The appearance of anti-religious values in the United States has appeared to burden many analysts of Jewish backgrounds. It is far from unusual to find Jewish psychoanalysts who insist on circumcision and attend a synagogue regularly.
As a psychoanalyst with firm atheist values, I can testify to the hostility that announcing a distance from Judaism evokes not only in Jewish colleagues, but in patients, as well as non-Jewish friends. The insistence on keeping me Jewish as Arnie wants to keep Freud, can be obvious, and oppressive. The acknowledgment that I was never bar mitzphahed evokes wonderment in many when it is acknowledged as something to be proud of rather than it being a cultural loss.
My personal experience resonates with what facts Arnie brings to light about Freud's godlessness. His refusal to be married in a religious service, his not wanting to stand under the traditional Jewish wedding cover, and his frustrating his beloved wife about lighting sabbath candles on Friday evening, are all so close to my own experience in the United States, a
country far more accepting of freedom from religion than the Austria of Freud's, that I cannot help but feel my understanding of Freud's relationship to his Jewishness is closer to what Freud achieved than what Arnie is asserting in this article. There is so much valuable history in this paper. Arnie's research on Freud's personal life brings new material to our attention, but in the end his desire to place Freud as too angry, too rebellious to be considered a legitimate, simply enlightened individual, causes me rather profound discomfort. Is freedom from religion not possible for Freud, or for that matter for me, in the history that Arnie Richards constructs? That would seem to be the case and that is why I have crafted this lengthy protest against his arguments designed to make Freud's objection to all religious belief to be exaggerated, and in his view defensive. In my view there is nothing to analyze about such a decision on Freud's part and certainly not on mine. Arnie Richards has indeed reconsidered Freud's godlessness, but in his reconsideration I believe he does a disservice to Freud as a unique thinker and a brave human being.