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Drawing a relationship between the origins of psychoanalysis and the ethnic and religious identities of its discoverer, Sigmund Freud, is an idea whose time has apparently come. Even though of
enormous interest and significance, it was mostly ignored until 1976, when Robert's book was published. She suggested, with some highly suggestive evidence, that there was more Jewishness to Freud than he openly acknowledged. It had been the stated and unanimous position of all Freud's biographers that, although Jacob and Amalia Freud came from an Orthodox East European Jewish background, they soon shed nearly all their religious and ethnic trappings and became model assimilated or Reform Jews. Thus, Sigmund Freud was born into, and raised, in a family environment that was the paradigm of the Western and Central European Enlightenment tradition. This biographical position was continually reinforced by Freud himself, as well as by members of his immediate and extended families.
Bakan (1958) limited his study to the possible influence of the Jewish mystical tradition on Freud and the development of psychoanalysis. His conclusions, however, left much to be validated. Klein (1985) focused mostly on the effect of conflicts revolving around Jewish ethnicity and the pernicious and omnipresent Austrian anti-Semitism as motivating factors behind Freud's creativity. Gay (1987) accepted, in toto, all previous renditions of Freud's religious biography and declared Freud to be an aggressive atheist, a product of an assimilated Jewish background and, in essence, a “godless Jew.” In 1990, I demonstrated, through a reinterpretation of existing, as well as hitherto unknown, data, that the biographer's perception of Freud's ethnic and religious identities was mostly of a mythic nature, one created for the purpose of establishing a classical “Family Romance,” that is, an ennobled and exalted picture of Freud biography. My position was recently reinforced and corroborated by Yerushalmi (1991), w