You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Against claims made by many of Freud's commentators, this essay suggests that Freud's Jewish identity bears no direct relation to the origins of psychoanalysis. A close reading of the passages in which Freud deals with the implications of his Jewishness shows that although he defiantly asserted his Jewishness in private communications, in published writings he inevitably pursued one of the following three stratagems: he presented himself as transgressing the boundaries of Judaism and pointed to the importance of overriding its claims to allegiance; he systematically undermined its particularist features; and he completely excluded ethnic identity as a variable from his writings on psychopathology. In adopting
Dr. Brunner is Lecturer at the Department of Political Science, Tel Aviv University.
Earlier drafts of this paper were presented at the Twenty-First Annual Conference of the Association for Jewish Studies, Boston, December, 1989; at the Center for European Studies, Harvard University, November 1990; and in the Program of Jewish Studies, Northwestern University, May 1991.
Acknowledgment. For their helpful comments the author would like to thank Omer Bartov, G. A. Cohen, John Forrester, Ernest Gellner, Moshe Gresser, Leszek Kolakowski, Maren Niehoff, Yoav Peled, Leah Rosen, Mel Scult, Daniel Strassberg, and David Vital.
this latter, exclusionary strategy, Freud's early clinical and theoretical writings on hysteria—which constitute what properly deserves to be called “the origins of psychoanalysis”—departed radically from both the then dominant racial paradigm and the Jewish response to its political implications. A comparison of Freud's approach to hysteria with the late-nineteenth-century medical discourse on nervous diseases and Jews shows that what is relevant to an understanding of the origins of psychoanalysis is, above all, Freud's silence on Jewishness, that is, his attempt to make his own and his patients' ethnicity irrelevant to his new science.