Speaking the Unspeakable: Religion, Misogyny, and the Uncanny Mother in Freud's Cultural Texts

3. Jewishness and the (Un)Canny: “Death and Us Jews”

Jewishness and the (Un)Canny “Death and Us Jews” Chapter 2 traced a “counterthesis” in Freud’s writings in three kinds of images, each associated with death, immortality, and the afterlife: images of dead mothers, images of mothers as instructors in death, and images of uncanny maternal bodies. Showing that Freud used similar terminology to describe the heavenly afterlife (a “home in the uncanny ”) and the genitals of the mother (“an uncanny home”), I suggested that Freud’s counterthesis hinted at a theory of unconscious associations of maternity, mortality, and immortality. This chapter will pursue this excavation of Freud’s notion of the uncanny at another set of sites: the counterthesis appears vividly in Freud’s descriptions of his own Jewish identity, particularly when he is speaking privately to fellow Jews. In these remarks, he initiates a fragmentary analysis of the attractions and dangers of Jewish assimilationism. An examination of recent literature on Freud’s Jewish identity will introduce a discussion of Judaism, gender, and psychoanalysis. Then, connections will be drawn between Freud’s Jewish identity and the notion of the “uncanny Jew,” showing that Freud attempted in “The Uncanny” to displace and reenvision this widespread trope. Finally, the complexities of Freud’s own sense of the (Un)Heimlichkeit of Jewish identity will be exposed through a discussion of two essays written for 74 chapter 3 the Viennese Jewish fellowship, the B’nai B’rith, one of which exists in both its original version and in a more public version stripped of its uniquely Jewish elements. FREUD’S JEWISH IDENTITY Freud’s own pronouncements regarding his Jewish identity are conXicted. Early letters reveal attempts to deWne himself as an educated, assimilated, Western European Jew, rather than an Ostjude, a Jew of Eastern Europe associated in the dominant ideologies with religious orthodoxy and shtetl origins. During the formative years of the psychoanalytic movement, concerned lest psychoanalysis be dismissed as “a Jewish science” or a “Jewish national aVair” (Abraham and Freud 1965: 34), he claimed an objective, impersonal, scientiWc provenance for his creation. Later, although he continued to proclaim himself “estranged” from all religions, he identiWed himself as a Jew “in his essential nature” (SE 13: xv). And he famously described himself as a “godless” and “inWdel Jew” (SE 21: 170), rhetorically asking his colleague, the Protestant pastor and psychoanalyst Oskar PWster, why the world had to wait for a “godless Jew” to discover psychoanalysis (Jones 1955: 507, Meng and Freud 1963: 63). Freud’s own diverse comments, both positive and negative, regarding his Jewish identity have become pieces of a shifting sense of Freud in the collective memory of our culture. In this Xuid remembrance or reconstruction, Freud has played a range of roles: he has been portrayed as a nonreligious secular scientist without a signiWcant Jewish identity, a faithful, although conXicted Jew, and a secular Jew struggling with assimilationist desires and anti-Semitic forces. These reconstructions reveal as much about variations in cultural concerns as they do about Freud himself (Miller 1981). Until midcentury , a Gentile or secularized intellectual culture, idealizing science and desiring to protect Freud from his anti-Semitic detractors, defended Freud as a great theorist whose Jewishness was merely incidental Jewishness and the (Un)Canny / 75 (Wittels 1924, Jones 1953, 1955, 1957, and, more recently, Gay 1987). Later scholars, less concerned about the dangers of anti-Semitism, some of whom were interested in reclaiming and legitimating Freud’s Jewishness, took the opposite view, arguing that Freud was essentially Jewish and that his Jewish origins were central in the development of psychoanalysis (Bakan 1958). A third group of predominantly secular or postreligious theorists began to ask complex questions about Freud’s Jewish identity and his cultural/historical context, arguing that psychoanalysis emerged as a sort of compromise between the conXicting demands of secular and scientiWc modernity and Jewish traditionalism (Miller 1981: 357, Homans 1989, RieV 1966, Ricoeur 1970). In the contemporary period, this concern with the eVect of modernity and traditionalism on Freud’s work has deepened as a group of scholars in Jewish studies concerned with an exploration of the eVects of anti-Semitism have begun to uncover in the background of psychoanalysis the forces of anti-Jewish ideologies (Geller 1997, Gilman 1993), Jewish traditionalism (Handelman 1982, Klein 1985, Rice 1990, Yerushalmi 1991, Roith 1987), assimilationism (Schorske 1973, McGrath 1986, Le Rider 1993), and the broader forces of secularization (Homans 1989, 1995 [1979]). In some...