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Yerushalmi wishes to remind Freud(!) of his Jewishness and to persuade us of Freud's Jewish religious identity. The author culls every possible reference and allusion from writings and the memoirs of friends, family, and correspondents to affirm the case for Freud's Jewish education, literacy, sophistication and what he terms his 'psychological Jewishness' (p. 10). He locates the particular source of this identity in Freud's Galician Jewish father Jakob. He finds 'in Freud a sense of otherness vis-à-vis non-Jews which … seems to have been primal, inherited from his family and early milieu, and it remained with him throughout his life' (p. 39). Examples of the evidence Yerushalmi cites are Freud's marriage within 'the aristocracy of German-Jewish orthodoxy' (p. 10), and a letter to Martha Bernays in which he uses the term Gojim, noting 'the hand is the hand of Sigmund; the voice is the voice of Jakob' (p. 39). Freud named his chow Jofie, to which Yerushalmi comments: 'Of all the languages Freud knew or could have known there is only one in which the name makes sense. In Hebrew Yofi means—Beauty' (p. 70).
The most remarkable, and intellectually daring, section of the book is the author's twenty-page personal letter to Freud, reminiscent of Erikson's epistolary chapter to his subject in the middle of his study of Gandhi (Erikson, 1969, pp. 229–54). It is, as Yerushalmi tells us, a message he feels compelled to utter, the expression of 'an inner need', a 'compulsion … I cannot fully articulate even to myself' (p. 81). His purpose is 'to interrogate [Freud] on deep and weighty matters in which the stances you have taken are not clear to me, or are susceptible of alternative approaches which were available to you but which you did not choose to take' (p. 86). He has a grievance and an accusation against Freud and institutionalized psychoanalysis: there is an unspoken dogma that Jewishness and Judaism must be kept rigidly separate from clinical psychoanalysis.