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This book is a scholarly exploration of the Jewish origins of the founder of psychoanalysis. By Jewish origins, the author means every aspect of Jewish life from formal teachings, and biblical and rabbinical texts, to the concrete experience of several generations of European Jews migrating from city to city in search of a better future.
Rice has followed every hint that may throw light on our understanding of the multiple and complex ways in which the Jewish practices of Freud's family, and its cultural circumstances may have influenced Freud's experience of himself, his ideals and ambitions, his wishes for himself and for psychoanalysis. Rice has found several documents to demonstrate Freud's exposure to the Jewish religion and to the Hebrew language, as well as his father's thoroughgoing knowledge of Hebrew and of the Scriptures.
Many authors have pondered Freud's great ambivalence toward his Jewish heritage and the obscurities and contradictions in his writings when they touch upon his knowledge of the Hebrew language and the Jewish religion. Rice's thesis is that the Jewish heritage was central to Freud's personal life, his identity and his relation to his father and to himself as the founder of a new movement. He concludes:
It is my contention that though one cannot in actuality go home again, one never really leaves it. Freud's childhood and adolescence home was typical of the East European Orthodox Jew in its transplanted character—first to Freiberg, Moravia and then to Vienna. Freud's attempt at emotional and external departure from his milieu began, rebelliously, in early adolescence. It was a long and arduous journey, but for him, most productive. The world too has been the better for it. Toward the end of his life, as so often happens, he began the return journey, first with a renewed interest in religion in general, and finally, in Judaism in
Page 244particular. Moses and Monotheism, one of the very last creative productions of his life, exemplifies the final st