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There is a Talmudic saying, “No one is the owner of his instincts,” … but controlling them, that is civilization”
A dream unexamined is like a letter unopened.
The Torah, we are told, is both concealed and revealed, and so is the nature of all reality.
Sigmund Freud always affirmed his Jewish identity, although he was never able to quite define its components, only a “clear consciousness of an inner identity, the familiarity of the same psychological structures,” as quoted by Rozenblit in the book under review, hereafter cited as TJWSF. Yet this “godless,” “infidel Jew's” protestations and ambivalence regarding the Jewish and all other religions notwithstanding, there seems to be no doubt about the impact of his early education and Jewish family environment, his father Jakob having been a Talmud scholar. Jonathan Rosen, paraphrasing Harold Bloom, recently remarked, “To understand Freud … you had to understand the rabbis” (quoted in Herschthal, 2011, pp. 25-26). Indeed, the core of Freud's psychoanalytic principles, the search for meanings beyond and beneath the manifest words and behaviors, is rooted in Judaism. Both Judaism and psychoanalysis subscribe to “the principle that the meaning of a matter is not exhausted in its appearance or literal text, but … can be obtained only by a process of interpretation or exegesis” (Ostow, 1982, p. 8). Thus, the highly developed art of hermeneutics and exegesis enabled the extracting of “the most accurate interpretation of the text—[or a patient's] product of his mental function” (Ostow, 1982, p. 9).
Intent on assuring the survival of psychoanalysis after the Anschluss and just prior to emigrating from Austria to England in 1938, Freud demonstrated his Jewish identification and displayed his knowledge of