Psychoanalytic Reflections on the Holocaust: Selected Essays: Edited by Stephen A. Luel and Paul Marcus. New York: Ktav Publishing House. 1984. Pp. 239.

The ideals of the eighteenth century Age of Enlightenment, faith in reason, love of humanity, belief in progress, brought a new freedom of thought to Europe. Jews who had been confined to ghettoes both physically and intellectually by the peoples amongst whom they lived embraced this new philosophy with fervour since it enabled them to struggle for emancipation from the oppression in which they had lived. The Jewish tradition of honouring scholarship and learning integrated well with the new ideals of 'Bildung', belief in the power of rational thought and culture. Schiller, writing on the aesthetic education of man, defined the cultured German's hope that education would bring about man's inner liberation from prejudice and ignorance. George Moss, in a book entitled German Jews beyond Judaism, writes that Bildung was 'an ideal ready-made for Jewish assimilation because it transscended all differences of nationality, faith and religion through the unfolding of the individual personality'. Yet in following these ideals the Jews were contributing in the long run not to their integration in German society but to their continued isolation. In his view the fact that the more the Jews came to resemble the Germans, the more they were rejected by them, is the theme of his book.

Sigmund Freud, a pupil of the classical Gymnasium of nineteenth century Vienna, became identified with this instituionalized faith in the power of rational thought and learning, which he strove to maintain throughout his life. Yet at the same time he was constantly aware of his dual identity, that of the Austrian Jew regarded by his fellow Europeans as a second-class citizen by the accident of birth, from which neither intellectual ability nor faith in his own professional merit could ever free him. Freud's personal predicament, on the one hand patriotism towards his country, admiration for German culture and learning which, as an assimilated Jew, he had internalized and identified with, and on