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“Marthe Robert is not a professional psychologist,” runs the publisher's blurb to the English translation of her Revolution Psychanalytique, “but a literary scholar and a brilliant biographer…. She is the author of highly acclaimed biographies of Heinrich von Kleist and Franz Kafka.” Literary scholarship and biography are indeed the keys to her most recent venture into Freudian territory. With quite atypical Gallic lucidity, stylistically she does for psychoanalysis what Robert Ardrey has done for ethology. Untrammeled by the hagiolatry incumbent upon the psychoanalytically trained biographer—Ernest Jones is perhaps the most glaring example—she offers a reading of Freud's work with particular reference to the Traumdeutung (she argues that only the original German capture's Freud's deliberately unscientific and unpedantic cheap “dream book” connotation for the title—“Before. Freud the word had no other meaning,” she insists) and Moses and Monotheism as a covert biographical study of Jacob Freud. She quotes approvingly Franz Kafka's seminal insights that
Freud's work was… a chapter of Jewish history written for the present generation, in a sense the latest of Talmudic treatises, and though Freudian psychology might have other implications, this was at least its profoundest justification
and that
The Jews have always produced their joys and their sorrows at almost the same time as the Rashi commentary relating to them, and here again they have done so.
She goes on to suggest that one can see in that work Freud's personal family romance, which the translator somewhat puzzlingly insists on rendering as family novel.
Her approach is strongly reminiscent of John Murray Cuddihy's in his Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Lévi-Strauss, and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity in that she too asks Peter Berger's vulgar sociology-of-knowledge question Says who? of Freud's work. The answer she comes up with is that although on a conscious level Freud was exceedingly proud of being a Jew