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The history of psychoanalysis is saturated with Judaic themes and images: purported traces of the Kabbalah in Freud's theory of dreams; the newly-emancipated circle of Jewish doctors and intellectuals that formed the early analytic milieu; Freud's desperate hope that Carl Jung could ‘save’ psychoanalysis from devolving into a ‘Jewish national affair’; the Nazis burning psychoanalytic works as ‘Jewish science’; Freud weeping when his daughter returned from a Gestapo interrogation; the emigration of 38 Jewish analysts from Vienna to London, Boston and New York; the protracted refusal of analysts to meet in post-war Germany; the creation of the world's first tenured professorship in psychoanalysis at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, an occasion at which Anna Freud proclaimed the term ‘Jewish science’ a title of honour; the British analyst Charles Rycroft sighing happily that ‘it had [finally] become possible for a gentile to criticize … psychoanalysis without being accused of being anti-Semitic’ (Rycroft 1985, pp. 31-4); Jacques Derrida and Yosef Yerushalmi arguing over whether Anna Freud ever really understood her father's relationship to Judaism; the British-Punjabi analyst Masud Khan complaining that the ‘Judaic-Yiddish-Jewish bias of psychoanalysis’ had cramped his ‘personal ethnic style’ (Khan 1989). Truly, we know a great deal - perhaps more than we want to know - about the influence of Judaism on psychoanalysis.
We know far less, however, about the influence of psychoanalysis on Judaism or, as I have put it in my title, the place occupied by psychoanalysis in the history of the Jews. Now, what exactly is meant by the place occupied by psychoanalysis in the history of the Jews? The phrase might refer to such matters as the spread of analytic ideas within the Reform, Conservative and