Editorial

Readers of this Journal will be familiar with the very wide range of questions in the history of psychoanalysis relating to Judaism - whether it is Freud's, other psychoanalysts, the cultural context of Vienna, the USA or the Soviet Union, or the multifarious forms of anti-Semitism that have had such an impact on the development of psychoanalysis. Estelle Roith advances a new and subtle argument concerning the sources of two key turning-points in Freud's professional and personal relationships, his warmth and subsequent frosty relations with Jean-Martin Charcot and Josef Breuer, which are, she argues, to be found in the contemporary debates on the hereditary sources of neurosis and the implications of Jews in these aetiologies. Roith argues that Freud turned away abruptly and forcefully from ‘the claim that the source of neurological illness, especially hysteria, lies in heredity, a claim that buttressed the prevailing scientific views of Jews and the popular negative stereotype’. It was this forceful repudiation that swept Freud into the abrupt cooling of personal relations with both of his admired teachers, from whom he had learned so much and to whom he owed so much.

When stranded in London at the outbreak of the First World War, Anna Freud anticipated the kind of background anti-Semitism to which she had obviously been made accustomed by growing up in Vienna. She did not find it. She did, however, have her photograph taken as an ‘Alien Enemy’. In another in his series of fine essays on photographs in the collections of the Freud Museum, London, Michael Molnar traces with delicacy and great acuity this portrait of an alien enemy - a meditation on the significance of the journey she undertook, always in suspense over whether it could be successfully accomplished, of returning to her father in Vienna.

The shimmering spectre of anti-Semitism intertwined itself at times into Freud's relationship with Jung, certainly another instance of a warm relationship of enormous i