Sigmund Freud was named after his grandfather, the Galician rabbi Schlomo Freud, who ensured that his own son, Jacob, received a yeshiva education. No small number of experts, biographers, and critics have made much of Sigmund’s Jewish extraction—although it was paired neither with belief nor with much knowledge of Jewish matters. Taking a hard look at the contested question of the relationship between the founder of psychoanalysis and the Jews, Adam Kirsch writes:
Freud was bemused by Jewish attempts to take pride in his achievements. “The Jews have celebrated me as a national hero,” he wrote after his seventieth birthday in 1926, “although my merit in the Jewish cause is confined to the single point that I have never denied my Judaism.” For Freud, it was important not to be thought of as a Jewish thinker, even though—or precisely because—his first followers and most of his early patients were Jewish. He was certain that psychoanalysis was a universal, objective science, and as he wrote, “There should be no distinct Jewish or Aryan science. Their results should be identical.”
On this view, the fact that a Jew discovered psychoanalysis didn’t mean it was a “Jewish science,” any more than Einstein’s E = mc2 was a Jewish equation. For Freud, the adherence of Carl Jung, the most prominent Gentile among early psychoanalysts, was especially important as proof of this point. The most Freud was willing to grant was that being Jewish facilitated his discoveries by setting him outside the scientific and medical establishment of his time. “Because I was a Jew,” he wrote, “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.”
The reality, of course, was always more complicated. . . . If Jacob Freud had been alive when The Interpretation of Dreams was published, he might have pointed out to his son that the same ratio of interpretation can be found in the Talmud, where a few lines of Mishnah often give rise to many pages of Gemara. Just as the meaning of a dream is far richer than can be guessed from the events alone, so the meanings of Torah, both Oral and Written, go far beyond what the text says explicitly. Freud’s distinction between the manifest content of a dream and its latent content parallels the rabbinic distinction between p’shat, the plain meaning of the Torah’s words, and d’rash, the meaning revealed by interpretation.
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More about: Midrash, Psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud