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Jill Salberg's paper is a sparkling, beautifully written synthesis (not psychosynthesis) of the situation of Freud's Jewish Vienna and the complicated relations to gender that obtained for Jews at that time and place. The paper, moreover, adds nuance and complexity where other scholars, notably me, have been perhaps crude. One of the major contributions of this paper is the refocus on Freud's affect in relation to his mother, this particular mother—powerful mother of Jewish culture of eastern Europe. Although gender is a system, previous work on this theme has not treated it generally as such but rather focused on Jewish masculinity. Some queries are advanced on the relation of historicistic to psychobiographical modes of research in the paper.
Let me begin by saying simply that it is a hard task to respond critically to a paper with which I agree so thoroughly. I think that Salberg has wonderfully captured and wonderfully presented so much of the cultural background and historical context within which Freud did his work and explored beautifully as well the ways that this background and context worked their way out in his texts.
I come at this work from perhaps an odd angle, because, although I have the warmest sympathy for psychoanalysis—a practice that changed, perhaps saved, my life—I am simply not a psychoanalytic theoretician, nor even a historian of psychoanalysis. Why, you may well ask, have I been invited then to respond to this paper? About 10 years ago, I published a book called Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (Boyarin, 1997). My main point in the book was to chart Jewish (actually Ashkenazi Jewish) ideals of masculinity historically, to argue that the dominant Ashkenazi ideal (modeled itself on at least some talmudic representations) was of a masculinity in which the values were nearly the