Dual Allegiance: Freud as a Modern Jew (review)

98 SHOFAR Spring 1995 Vol. 13, No.3 is that modern infant research does not suppon Mahler's Symbiotic or Autistic phases. Overall, Spero's book is challenging and thoughtful but not an easy read that seeks to construct bridges between Judaism, Halakhah, and psychoanalysis. He argues for the possibility (for him perhaps a cenainty) that if God really exists, and a person's developmentally determined God representations can be purified through analysis, then God-centered representations may develop within the person. The therapist or analyst who rejects the possibility of God's really existing and who conveys this to the patient will close off this possibility. The therapist who is willing to allow the patient to follow herlhis own path is clearly more desirable to Spero but falls shon of the therapist who is truly sensitive to these possibilities while yet preserving analytic neutrality. Roben J. Lovinger Depanment of Psychology Central Michigan University Dual Allegiance: Freud as a Modern Jew, by Moshe Gresser. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. 337 pp. $19.95 (P). How canJews living in modernity synchronize ethnoreligious tradition with a liberal humanist outlook? In DualAllegiance, Moshe Gresser probes the life of Sigmund Freud for an answer to this question in the belief that the founder of psychoanalysis is the quintessential representative of the assimilating, yet conflicted, modernJew. According to the author, the inner struggles and adaptive maneuvers of Freud are exposed in his self-analysis, his autobiography, his writings, and what remains of his considerable correspondence. Utilizing an analytic exegesis of this material, Gresser derives a formulation ofdichotomous mental existence which characterized Freud's identity formation and which, he believes, continues to bedevil modern Jews. Professor Gresser, who teaches in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at Colgate University, organizes his study along developmental lines, seeking to read the clues of maturational learning and the acquisition of coping strategies over Freud's life span. His growth is divided into an early (1872-1906), middle (1907-22), and late (1923-39) period, each focusing on a major aspect of personal development of understanding of what it means to be aJew. The author holds forth the premise that Freud's Jewishness was critical to his self-definition despite his perseverative Book Reviews 99 insistence on being an atheist and naysayer to ritual observances. Gresser's gloss of written detail, panicularly from private correspondence, is cenainly convincing of Freud's life-long attempt at threading his ethnocentric feelings through the eye of his universalist Weltanschauung, often in defiance against the pervasive antisemitism of the times. Freud's early period ofJewish identity, as described, evolved from his parental home where he studied Bible with his father and where he absorbed his mother's Yiddishkeit, although about the latter very little is revealed. The traditional observance of his family had to be inferred, sometimes on erroneous evidence. In the body of his work, Gresser assumed that the kiddush cups on display in Freud's office were given to him by his father and that the blessing over wine must have been pan of his childhood experience. In a postscript, however, the author had learned belatedly that the kiddush cups had been presented to Freud as gifts in 1917. They became part of a collection which featured artifacts almost exclusively ofthe ancient non-Jewish world. This interest in classical Kultur had blossomed already in his student days to draw him to an enlightenment -based humanism which fueled his rejection of religion and theistic beliefs. He could identify with biblical characters, panicularly Moses, who were historical models of both the fighting and the moral Jew. Through these dual attractions to ethnic pride and humanism, Gresser lays the groundwork for Freud's eventual espousal of a godless Judaism betrothed to a credo of humanism. The middle period is labelled recessive with regard to the ethnic identity issue in view of Freud's single-minded effort to bring psychoanalysis to the non-Jewish world. Indeed, he had hoped to groom Carl Jung, a Gentile, to be his heir in the leadership of his movement. This attempt to universalize a "Jewish Science" is rationalized as a subordination, if not renunciation, ofJewish creativeness in...