Did Freud Invent a Jewish Science?

...Freud, I conclude, was a Jew but not a Jewish scientist...

...A believer, whether Jew or Christian, could never have founded psychoanalysis...

...Freud, though far from persuaded, was not unimpressed...

...Freud never hesitated to make his pro-Zionist feelings public...

...This miraculous thing had been on his mind for some years...

...That founder had to be too iconoclastic to accommodate religious faith...

...But marginality is a mixed blessing...

...I considered myself German intellectually, until I noticed the growth of anti-Semitic prejudice in Germany and German Austria...

...Leib Jafie was co-director of Keren Hayesod in 1926 endeavor to found a new home in the old fatherland...

...So was the founding patient of psychoanalysis, Josef Breuer's famous Anna O. But these proportions drastically shifted as Freud's practice expanded...

...For Freud himself the joke had its serious ingredient...

...We may dismiss as frivolous the observation that psychoanalysis is typically Jewish because in the clinical hour the analyst answers a question with a question...

...In Vienna it was obviously easier for Jewish doctors to share Freud's ostracism, which was only an exacerbation of the life they were accustomed to, and the same was true of Berlin and Budapest, where anti-Semitism was almost equally pronounced...

...This was the Jew as psychoanalyst: he treated his feeling of Jewish identity as a psychological phenomenon open, in principle, to investigation, but still enigmatic, still beyond science...

...Nor did Freud grant them entry to his own household...

...Tale University Press, in association with Hebrew Union College Press, Cincinnati, 1987...

...But we know—Freud has taught us— that jokes are rarely just funny...

...And the merit of that argument, too, is limited, compromised as it is by the plethora of counterexamples...

...My survey has produced mainly negative results...

...In 1930, he described himself, in the preface to the Hebrew translation of his book Totem and Taboo, as "wholly estranged from the religion of his fathers—as from every other...

...In fact, living on the margin leads as easily to conformism as to unconven-tionality...

...ethnic and racial qualities—and psychoanalysis was a science...

...Freud gravely nodded and agreed...

...He had acquired this secularism at home, at an early age...

...It remains true, though, that he was ready to offend Jews when science called...

...A brief juxtaposition of Freud with Darwin may offer an escape from this maze...

...Freud described himself as particularly close to Abraham because of their "racial kinship— Rassenverwandtschaft," and soon after added: "May I say that it is kindred Jewish traits in you that attract me...

...The claim for an elusive Jewish quality that somehow, mysteriously, informed Freud's work, a claim he seems to have endorsed, is too insubstantial to carry the weight put upon it by some of his biographers...

...In 1926, acknowledging the greetings of his brethren at B'nai B'rith on his 70th birthday, he described himself, as he had so often before, as an "unbeliever" who had been "brought up without religion" though not without "respect for the demands, called 'ethical,' of human culture...

...I do not know if you are right in your judgment," Freud wrote to Enrico Morselli* in 1926, "which wants to see psychoanalysis as a direct product of the Jewish spirit, but if it were so, I would not feel ashamed...

...In 1873, when there was a surge of popular anti-Semitism in the wake of an economic collapse in Austria, and when, upon entering the university, he was "expected to feel inferior" as a Jew, he refused to comply...

...In the same way, he believed, the Jews have borne through the centuries the burden of killing Moses and of the harsh, obsessive, self-punishing religion they developed after committing that murder...

...It invites the intriguing conjecture that in a society less virulently anti-Semitic than Freud's own— say, Britain or France, where most psychoanalysts were not Jewish—a gentile might have become the founder of Freud's science...

...During the years that Freud's friendship with Jung was going sour and his relations with his gentile supporters in Zurich were strained and uncertain, Freud freely asserted the existence of such racial kinship...

...When he told an interviewer that, though by language and culture a German, he now preferred to call himself a Jew, he rather misrepresented the history of his identifications...

...When the English psychoanalyst M. D. Eder, one of his earliest if not most consistent followers, died in 1936, Freud mournfully dwelt on that mystery: "I can easily imagine how he, too, must have suffered under the bitterness of these times," he wrote to a common friend...

...It includes writers from seven countries: Mark Twain, Lord Thomas Macau-lay, Anatole France, Emile Zola, Dmitri Merezhkovski, Gottfried Keller and Conrad Ferdinand Meyer...

...This slap at Freud's Viennese Jewish followers had been Freud's own idea...

...It was only that he could not express "this essence" in words, at least not for the present...

...Freud's goal in cultivating the gentile psychiatrists in Zurich, Switzerland, he once wrote to a Jewish colleague, had been "to amalgamate Jews and goyim in the service of Psa [psychoanalysis...

...Politely but firmly, Freud replied that God had not done that much for him and had sent him no inner voices...

...Darwin was satisfied with revising his work after further reflection and absorbing palpable hits by rational critics, and he trusted the passage of time and the weight of his argumentation...

...This impressionistic sense of what he took to be recognizably Jewish long enjoyed a certain popularity within the psychoanalytic fraternity...

...Moses and Monotheism, he warned, when a Hebrew translation seemed in the offing, "is a continuation of the theme of Totem and Taboo in application to Jewish religious history...

...But, as was his habit, he chose to generalize a parochial point to all of humanity...

...On a Friday afternoon in the summer of 1938, in London, not long after Freud had been rescued from Nazified Vienna, a young Oxford philosopher came to call...

...Darwin, at home in his society, unlike Freud, could afford to sit and wait...

...He called himself a shabby old Israelite, an "old Semite...

...Freud's collection of faulty actions—slips of tongue or pen (called "Freudian slips"), forgetting names, dates, or poems—offers no evidence of being particularly Jewish...

...That person had to be deeply immersed in religion as a phenomenon to be studied rather than a promise to pray for or a supreme reality to worship...

...As a stranger to the faith of his ancestors and less than welcome in the non-Jewish culture that surrounded him, he felt doubly alienated and saw himself as a marginal man...

...Our festivals," his son Martin recalled, ' 'were Christmas, with presents under a candle-lit tree, and Easter, with gaily painted Easter eggs...

...He emigrated to Palestine in 1933, and founded the Palestine Psychoanalytical Institute, which now bears his name...

...Freud had no difficulty, however, with the notion that there are palpable differences between Jews and "Aryans...

...He was most Jewish when times were hardest for Jews...

...In his letter to B'nai B'rith, he expanded on this self-appraisal: He had discovered early "that I owe only to my Jewish nature the two characteristics that had become indispensable on my difficult life's way...

...Later, Ernest Jones, too, subscribed to the dubious notion that Jews have a peculiar "aptness for psychological intuition...

...Telling one of these jokes in his book, he comments that only its superficial details are Jewish...

...Freud made Moses the sole shaper of the Jewish character, the giver of monotheism to his people, that he might identify himself with such a mighty lawgiver...

...Again, in 1897, when the persuasive, popular anti-Semitic demagogue Karl Lueger became mayor of Vienna, at the very time that Freud was developing his subversive theories, Freud felt desperately alone and joined a newly formed B'nai B'rith lodge to be with his fellows...

...Struck by the surprising resemblance between the first scene of Shakespeare's King Lear, Portia's choice among three caskets in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, and the judgment of Paris, he worried it through until the answer stood before him, lucid and obvious after the fact...

...We have all remained in the Jewish confession...

...His exclusion from "Austrianness" at the university in the early 1870s, he later recalled, had made him familiar in his youth with being in opposition and thus prepared the way for "certain independence of judgment...

...hence, he was likely to remain what he had been, "an infidel Jew...

...After all, Josef Breuer, whose patient, Anna O., started it all, did not have the courage of his own discoveries and shied away from the sexual roots of her spectacular hysteria...

...Their exchange ofletters was published in 1965, in a book called A Psychoanalytic Dialogue...

...A pious American physician told Freud of a religious vision and invited him to study such experiences so that he, too, might find God...

...But enough else remained to make the attraction of Judaism and of Jews so irresistible, many dark emotional powers— Gefuhbmachte—all the mightier the less they allow themselves to be grasped in words, as well as the clear consciousness of inner identity, the secrecy of the same mental construction...

...It was only as a mature man, he added, that he had thought badly of this neglect...

...Freud never concealed or prevaricated about his Jewish origins and allegiances...

...Charles Darwin was Freud's only real competitor as a modern cultural conquistador...

...Whatever authority Freud's sociological argument for the Jewishness of psychoanalysis may claim rests on this bellicose stance and on his justifications for it...

...Hence it does not follow that only a marginal man, and in particular a marginal Jew, could have done Freud's life's work...

...Freud gave expression to this solidarity in sober and playful moments alike...

...But he insisted at the same time that "there should be no distinct Aryan or Jewish science...

...To accept and profess his theory, Freud wrote in 1925, "called for a certain measure of readiness to accept a situation of solitary opposition—a situation with which nobody is more familiar than a Jew...

...obsessive neuroses, Freud published his first paper on religion in which he likened the obsessive ceremonials of neurotics to the rituals of the devout...

...that is to say, they are highly significant to me as a subject of scientific interest...

...But just what is the Jewish spirit...

...Thanking the Hebrew University in Jerusalem for its greetings to him on his 80th birthday, he once again confessed himself "one of yours...

...Our youth will continue to carry on the fight...

...But the illusory escape route of baptism (one that many of his contemporaries like Alfred Adler would follow), whether taken from conviction or policy, struck him as contemptible...

...Freud made Moses an Egyptian so that he, Freud, could be the first true Moses to his people...

...There can be little question that, in face of professional skepticism compounded by bigotry, a measure of toughness was a highly adaptive quality for the early psychoanalysts, not excluding Freud...

...He had his son circumcised, yet there is no evidence that Freud had even a trace of religious instruction at home, or a Bar Mitzvah...

...Moses, as he put it himself, "tormented me like an unlaid ghost...

...Ernest Jones, for one, accepted this sociological hypothesis without reserve...

...It was all of religion he was analyzing...

...I have never understood," he wrote, "why I should be ashamed of my descent or, as one began to say: my race...

...But what can I do about it...

...Its core is general-human...

...We were both Jews and knew of each other that we carried that miraculous thing in common, which—inaccessible to any analysis so far—makes the Jew...

...Yes," he said, "it is a superstition," to which the Frau Professor, addressing her visitor, rejoined: "You see...

...In a time of terrible travail, with the Nazi persecution of the Jews in Germany and Austria intensifying beyond the bounds of the most vicious czarist pogroms, Freud had dared to call Moses an Egyptian and to claim that the Jews had murdered him...

...Freud's material was more elusive, harder to duplicate or rediscover...

...Like Freud, too, Darwin fully appreciated the scandal of his ideas and, despite occasional bouts of nerve at his daring, rather enjoyed it...

...To be sure, the needs of Darwin and Freud as organizers of opinion were not the same...

...If natural selection were true, it must have in the long run the most drastic consequences for the way people looked at the world, read sacred texts, conducted their business, thought about politics, even ordered their moral and marital lives...

...This, Freud was convinced, had secured him an inestimable advantage...

...His Judaism was, to use his own term, "inessential": wesensfrernd...

...For many even today, the issue remains open...

...Certainly a disproportionate number of patients, especially in his early days, were Jews...

...But he insisted at the same time that he had "never denied his affiliation with his people...

...Only the notion that the Jews' ambiguous social location in Freud's time and culture may have prodded them to distinguish themselves and stand out boldly against the "compact majority" has any shadow of merit...

...As it came to be around five in the afternoon, Martha Freud joined them and said to the visitor, "You must know that on Friday evenings good Jewish women light candles for the approach of the Sabbath...

...in England, for example, only two analysts have been Jews (apart from refugee immigrants...

...Yet Freud believed his Jewishness to be an indefinable, elusive element at work within him...

...The claims for the Jewishness of psychoanalysis based on its materials or its intellectual inheritance have proved to be without foundation...

...The sociological argument, then, has a certain show of reason on its side...

...I have filled my whole life with standing up for what I considered to be the scientific truth, even when it was uncomfortable and disagreeable to my fellowmen...

...Freud himself labored all his life to frustrate such an identification...

...On the other side, Charles Darwin, whose work was as subversive as Freud's, was born, brought up, and lived securely within the English establishment...

...Darwin and Freud had a good deal in common as well in their manner of enlisting support and encouraging their loyal troops...

...But Freud's thesis is far from complete and, when all is said, less than compelling...

...The origins of psychoanalysis, though, are untouched by his historical situation...

...I was a Jew myself, and it has always seemed to me not only undignified, but quite nonsensical, to deny it...

...Yes, religion was a superstition, and one does not make a science with a superstition...

...I cannot close it with an act of disavowal...

...How may one sensibly speak of a Jewish quality in—or absence from—psychoanalysis...

...But an illusion it would be to believe that we could get anywhere else what it cannot give us...

...Some of these were realistic enough...

...Confronting malevolent priests, unre'ceptive physicians, intrusive journalists, timid ex-psychoanalysts, and implacable anti-Semites, Freud felt compelled, much like the philosophes two centuries before him, to stand ready for battle...

...He continued to celebrate Passover and to read the Bible—in Hebrew— but that was all...

...Darwin, as Freud would do later, thanked friends, acquaintances, and strangers, for appreciative reviews and alerted his followers to valuable recruits or unforeseen antagonists...

...No doubt, one quality conspicuous in Freud's affirmation of his Jewishness is a brooding air of defiance...

...Darwin had originated a radical theory in biology that public debate might refine and modify...

...In the spring of 1908, Freud urged Karl Abraham,* who had worked with Jung for some years and did not trust him, to be tolerant of Jung and to remember that it was easier for Abraham, as a Jew, than for Jung, "as a Christian and the son of a pastor," to overcome his resistances to Freudian ideas...

...Scholars like Martin Buber were openly disdainful...

...He had in fact always called himself a Jew...

...what had been happening in the 1920s, with the emergence of Hitler in Germany and only marginally less revolting right-wing politicians in Austria, was that he had chosen to deny, in fact discard, the German facets of his selfhood...

...By and large, they showed themselves to be no more intelligent or original than anyone else...

...Sadger offered the study of the Talmud in evidence...

...It is important but difficult to be precise...

...Zionism," he recalled in 1930, "awakened my strongest sympathies, which are still faithfully attached to it today...

...Freud's list is remarkable for its catholicity...

...He and Freud corresponded with one another after meeting in 1907...

...Freud's Jewish inheritance remained, for him, an enigma, and remains for us too weak a reed to support the complex and sprawling structure of psychoanalytic theory...

...and Taboo, he tells us that he had given up a great deal he might have in common with other Jews, yet what remained of his Jewishness was "still a great deal, probably the main thing...

...While the essence of his Jewish identity continued to resist Freud's analysis, he saw no obscurities in the contribution sociology could make to clarifying whether psychoanalysis was in at least one sense a Jewish science...

...In the same year, thinking of the contemporary political situation, he told an interviewer: "My language is German...

...Freud, Buber held, had based his conjectures on feeble, uncertain evidence and failed to consult relevant authorities...

...The results of such an investigation are thin, however...

...Austrian society at the end of the nineteenth century was just anti-Semitic enough to deny Jews full social equality and frank, unbigoted acceptance, but not anti-Semitic enough to keep them out of the universities and research institutes...

...When an enigma took hold of him, he was plunged into torment...

...He was even willing to speak of "racial" differences, as people did so easily in those innocent days...

...A formula suggests itself: when Freud's loyalties to Judaism and to science clashed, Judaism would have to give way...

...The example he offered was Emile Zola—not a Jew, of course— who, as a fanatic for truth, had been an obsessional neurotic...

...What matters here is the dazzling light that Freud's brooding about Moses throws on his approach to scientific problems and on his priorities...

...emotionally I am not involved in them...

...Freud's principal influences, which he acknowledged often and publicly, were to German and English culture-—to German and English poets no less than German and English scientists—to Goethe and Shakespeare, Ernst Brucke and Charles Darwin...

...In early 1907, at a meeting of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, Isidor Sadger, one of Freud's first followers, suggested that "the disposition of Jews to obsessive neuroses is perhaps connected with the addiction to brooding—Grubelsucht—characteristic of them for thousands of years...

...But there is a militancy about Freud's quest for general acceptance that was far less marked in Darwin...

...Hence he could never have accepted the description of psychoanalysis as a Jewish science, on intellectual as much as on political grounds...

...The unconscious, the libido, acts of repression and sublimation are, as Freud thought them to be, universal...

...For Freud, science was color-blind, indifferent to national, * Karl Abraham was Germany's first psychoanalyst...

...Freud's Jewish identity, then, is not in question...

...Freud believed his Jewishness to bean indefinable, elusive element at work within him...

...After all, other Jews, just as marginal as Freud, had themselves baptized or went into business with their nominal Judaism intact...

...Ernest Jones was Freud's biographer, he also edited Freud's complete works...

...An incongruous alliance of partisans of this contention embraces not only Jews eager to claim Sigmund Freud, but also grudging gentiles just as eager to disparage him...

...In Totem and 'Taboo (1913) he argued that all mankind must forever labor under the primal crime—the killing and eating of the father—which constituted the founding act of civilization...

...Freud remembered in oH age, "let me grow up in complete ignorance of everything that concerned Judaism...

...Gomperz, a cultivated scholar and essayist, was wholly secular, wholly identified with the values of the European Enlightenment—in short, a Jew very much like Freud himself...

...At the second International Congress of Psychoanalysts meeting in Nurnberg, Germany, March 1910, the newly formed association chose the Swiss C. G. Jung as its president and Jung's relative Franz Riklin as its secretary...

...In the poisonous atmosphere of modern anti-Semitism in Central Europe, it was a natural question to arise...

...The question of what, or who, had made the Jews Jewish was such a riddle for Freud...

...I have no intention of imitating him by trying to take Freud away from his people as he tried to take away Moses...

...Freud's father, Jacob, knew Hebrew, but he was no more religious for that...

...Xew Haien...

...He was also an eminent Yiddish scholar...

...None * Enrico Morselli, a contemporary of Freud's, wrote on psychology, clinical psychiatric methods and other subjects...

...My father...

...In his preface to the Hebrew translation of Totem * Freud, in Moses and Alonotheism, put forth the idea that Moses was an Egyptian and that the Jews killed him...

...Jewish and gentile patient alike taught Freud the same lessons about the workings of the mind...

...Surely it will someday be accessible to scientific insight...

...Freud did not want psychoanalysis to be— or to be known as—a Jewish science...

...And Freud's letters to correspondents in Palestine testify to his marked interest in their enterprise...

...The effort to attribute to Freud a specifically Jewish intellectual bent is no more productive than searching for his Jewishness in the religion of his patients or his jokes...

...He was deluged by reviews and by a veritable avalanche of letters, most of them from strangers, calling him to account for the enormity he had committed...

...My father," Freud remembered in old age, ' 'let me grow up in complete ignorance of everything that concerned Judaism...

...But Freud orchestrated his wooing of the public mind through a loyal cadre of adherents...

...Not all of these probes into the recesses of Freud's psyche are necessarily wide of the mark...

...But this supposed handicap had schooled him to accept, and profit from, solitude...

...But if Freud came to regret the ignorance in which his father had left him about Judaism, that was not because he felt emotionally starved for religious beliefs, festivals, or ceremonies...

...But neither the roots of Moses and Monotheism in Freud's repressed past, nor, for that matter, its merits or defects, is at issue here...

...Because I was a Jew, I found myself free from many prejudices which limited others in the employment of their intellects, and as a Jew I was prepared to go into opposition and to do without the agreement of the 'compact majority.' " Freud's thesis is interesting and plausible, and it is buttressed by the obtrusive, much-noted fact that all the first psychoanalysts in Vienna were Jews...

...He could not, after all, escape or deny the anger, irritation and dismay he was arousing among his fellow Jews...

...Freud was aware that to be and remain a Jew was a hard lot...

...More serious is the argument of A. A. Roback,* who describes his effort "to look for the actual causes of the Jewish birth and nursing of psychoanalysis in the peculiar make-up of the Jew, who is analytical in a psychological sense, and who is constantly reflecting on the Why and Wherefore of everything, as exemplified in the style of Ecclesiastes...

...Anxious scholars visited him in London to talk him out of publishing the book...

...Freud, the world's first and most embattled psychoanalyst, was willing to maintain that Moses had been murdered by his superstitious and rebellious Jewish followers to reenact his own fate at the hand of his renegade disciples and destructive critics...

...Since glimpsing the Moses of Michelangelo on his first visit to Rome in 1901, Freud had been fascinated with this superhuman figure and identified with Moses' great mission, volcanic temper, and splendid efforts at self-control...

...Not surprisingly, Freud's prolonged and intense preoccupation with Moses in the mid-1930s has called forth diverse, sometimes contradictory, psychoanalytic readings of his mind...

...The Sigmund Freuds studiously ignored even such companionable, domestic Jewish holidays as Passover...

...He professed distress at the response of his fellow Jews...

...But the decisive distinction between personal identity and scientific allegiance remains intact...

...What is more, Freud was practicing and propagating a therapy that could only benefit from conclaves of like-minded practitioners...

...My culture, my attainments, are German...

...Five years later, he sent a letter to L. Jaffe** in Jerusalem to help celebrate the 15th anniversary of Keren Hayesod (Palestine Foundation Fund), dedicated to the resettlement of Jews in Palestine: "I want to assure you that I know full well how powerfully and beneficently effective an instrument this foundation has become for our people in the * Max Eitingon, a Russian-born Jewish psychoanalyst, helped found the Berlin Institute for Psychoanalysis...

...Some years before, he had told a correspondent who had inquired about his relations to Judaism, "I can say that I am as remote from the Jewish religion as from all others...

...He proposed as one crucial reason for the widespread, obstructive, often venomous resistance to psychoanalysis that he, its founder, was a Jew—a Jew, moreover, who had never made a secret of his origins...

...Freud was more ambivalent: there were times when he grew weary of contention, times when he professed to hate it...

...igi Adapted from A Godless Jew: Freud, Atheism, and the Making of Psychoanalysis by Peter Gay...

...But, like most formulas, this one would gravely oversimplify the ma'tter...

...He had said it all in 1927, concluding his Future of an Illusion, in the stirring passage I have quoted before: "No, our science is no illusion...

...It gave Jews an opportunity to study, invent and imagine with the rest of the educated population, but it forced them to intensify their search for cohesion, their rage to excel, their sheer need for success...

...Almost none of Morselli's writing has been translated from Italian into English...

...But it is hard to ward off the suspicion that once he had the enemy in his gunsight, he thrived on intellectual warfare...

...He felt surrounded by a hostile, uncomprehending medical and psychiatric establishment, viciously slandered by Jew-haters, exasperated and exhausted by devious and troublesome deserters...

...Naturally," he wrote, he did not enjoy offending them...

...Freud made Moses an Egyptian and stressed his principal role in the Exodus, that flight from persecution, to dramatize his own independence from both his Jewish heritage and his German culture...

...Keren Hayesod was, he noted in his characteristic defiant tone, ' 'a sign of our invincible will to live which has so far successfully braved two thousand years of burdensome oppression...

...Psychoanalysis might be said to show certain Jewish characteristics if it were principally Jewish in its materials—in its patients, or in such documentation as the slips or the jokes Freud enlisted as evidence...

...of them obeys specifically Jewish imperatives...

...But far from providing evidence for the Jewish qualities in Freud's psychoanalytic thought, these jokes rather attest to its universality...

...And Breuer was a Jew...

...His theories proved, like Freud's, profoundly offensive to reigning pieties and hence anxiety-producing in the extreme...

...In the very year he thus tersely deprived Jews of a monopoly on * A A Roback, a Russian-born Jew, became an American psychologist whose work includes writings on the history of psychology...

...What is in question is what share that identity could have had in the development of psychoanalysis...

...The only thing that gave him peace when he was in the grip of a riddle was to find its solution...

...But I ask you to consider that its contents are particularly suitable to wound Jewish feelings, in so far as they do not want to subordinate themselves to science...

...It was the core that mattered...

...he founded periodicals and wrote popularizations that would spread the authorized word, and he dominated international congresses of analysts until he felt too frail to attend them and after that through surrogates like his daughter Anna...

...On the other hand, I have always had a strong feeling of solidarity with my people and have also fostered it in my children...

...I imagine," he wrote, reflecting on the Jewish phenomenon in psychoanalysis, "the reasons for this were mainly local ones in Austria and Germany, since, except to some slight extent in the United States, it is a feature that has not been repeated in any other country...

...That you are Jews could only be welcome to me," he told the brethren in 1926, recalling those early days...

...The most cursory glance at one of Freud's pages reveals a master of the German language, a stylist who has absorbed the precision, wit and felicity of German critic Gotthold Lessing and poets Heinrich Heine and Wilhelm Busch...

...During his engagement, Freud firmly insisted that his fiancee give up her cherished orthodox beliefs and practices...

...It remained adaptive in Freud's later years...

...I had never been in a synagogue, nor to my knowledge had my brother or sisters...

...If the results reached by a Jewish scientist and a gentile scientist differ, there must be something wrong somewhere...

...Whatever the historians' verdict on Freud's plight as a revolutionary, however, he behaved more like a general marshaling his forces and mapping his movements than a scientist willing to let his ideas carry their own conviction...

...He liked to speak of them with pride and a certain truculent tone, and not just to fellow Jews...

...still others joined the Communist party, emigrated to the United States, or became Zionists...

...it may inhibit the spirit of invention rather than nourish it...

...This conviction governed his life, always...

...Growing dissatisfied in the early 1920s with psychoanalytic ideas on female sexuality, he inquired and reasoned and argued until he had developed propositions that, to his mind, at least addressed the mystery that is woman...

...Freud was glad to delineate the contours of his Jewishness to anyone curious enough to inquire...

...In part, it was, of course, a jest...

...With their mixture of self-denigration and self-respect, submissiveness and rebelliousness, their way of establishing intimacy in a hostile world, they strongly appealed to Freud...

...In early October 1913, as he was preparing to resume his psychoanalytic practice in Vienna after a long, refreshing summer holiday, Max Eitin-gon* sent him the "old Jewish New Year's greeting, I'shana tova" with which, Eitingon recalled, Freud had once, "years ago, closed one of our congresses...

...It is no coincidence that Darwin, too, was an atheist...

...It was more grudging than fostering but not without its smiling prospects...

...Besides, while the implications of Darwin's views were threatening and unsettling, they were not quite so directly abrasive, not quite so unrespectable, as Freud's views on infantile sexuality, the ubiquity of perversions, and the dynamic power of unconscious urges...

...Freud saw his Jewishness as somehow part of his phylogenic endowment...

...There is only one Jew in Freud's catalogue of ten: the classical philologist Theodor Gomperz who wrote a history of Greek thought...

...Freud had written what Freud himself had called a "novel," and the result was, his correspondents bluntly informed him, a disaster, an act of betrayal...

...Freud lived, in company with his Jewish followers, in a bewildering atmosphere...

...Freud was an investigator haunted by ideas...

...Since that time, I prefer to call myself a Jew...

...The "profound Jewish stories" he cherished, began to collect in the late 1890s, and scattered through his book on the relation of jokes to the unconscious seem intriguing at first...

...In 1907, replying to a questionnaire about ten "good books" sent around by his publisher Hugo Heller, he chose to report on his favorites—comfortable literary companions rather than the imperishable classics or the scientific treatises that had most influenced him...

...believer, whether Jew or Christian, could never hove founded psychoanalysis...

...I do so hate controversy," Darwin wrote in 1871, when he had had more than a decade of it...

...For the tactics and strategies of the psychoanalytic movement, then, Freud's being a Jew in an anti-Semitic culture is of real interest...

...Unequivocal as it was, Freud s identification with Judaism was aggressively secular...

...This attitude emerges forcefully, if rather poignantly, in Freud's last sustained and perhaps most controversial work, Moses and Monotheism, in which he published three linked essays that aroused a storm of protest in Jewish circles everywhere...

...In the unsettled atmosphere of postwar Europe, with racial political anti-Semitism a frightening and growing menace, this was a conscious, deliberate declaration of allegiance, not lacking civic courage...

...It was not what made them Jewish, but the human nature of the joking Jews that engaged Freud's attention...

...He had married his third wife, Amalia Nathansohn, who was to become Freud's mother, in a Reform ceremony and had, in the course of years, shed virtually all traces of religious observance...

...I would suggest that Freud's undefined sense of Jewishness represents a special case of his obstinate belief in the inheritance of acquired characteristics...

...He deprecated any Jewish national pride, which he thought an unjust, downright pernicious attitude...

...We find obsessive neuroses among the normally most highly developed people," he commented on Sadger's speculation about Jewish compulsiveness...

...But this monster—Unmensch—will not allow this, because he says that religion is a superstition...

...It is, moreover, an issue electric with emotion...

...Under its pressure all other considerations had to be set aside...

...others wrote no less anxious letters to the same purpose...

...In his short self-portrait, An Autobiographical Study, published in 1925, he said plainly that his ancestors had been Jewish and that he, too, had remained a Jew...