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Doctoral dissertations that are rewritten for a broader audience are not uncommon products of university presses. Quite often the scholarship they reflect is outstanding, especially when compared with the best sellers promoted in most American newspapers and bookstores. On the subject of Freud, Moshe Gresser's Dual Allegiance is the finest example of such a revision that I have seen to date. Originally written for the University of Chicago, he revised it not long before leaving Colgate University to return to his homeland, Israel.
Subtitled Freud as a Modern Jew, this book organizes an immense amount of detailed material that intimately reveals the father of modern psychology as a person as well as a theoretician. Gresser does a superlative job in showing how Freud's letters reflect a Jewish pride that complemented his exploration and incorporation of humanistic traditions. Arranged chronologically, this corpus of correspondence constructs a vivid tryptic of a “godless Jew” (Freud & Pfister, 1963; Gay, 1987) profoundly influenced by the humanitias Romana.
With frequent attention to the original German and its cultural context, Gresser produces a biographical account using the words of the Professor himself. Very reasonably, the story is neatly divided into three parts or periods that encompass nearly seven decades in the life of “one of the first of a new breed, the modern Jew” (p. x). From a biblical perspective, such a figure would naturally mirror the imago of Moses as an intrapsychic liberator, ethical navigator, and ethnic leader. According to Gresser, such a figure was Sigmund Freud.
The early period of Freud's Jewish identity covers three decades of metastasizing anti-Semitism, a social cancer that he