Dual Allegiance: Freud as a Modern Jew

Preface

Preface At many points in the years I have worked on this book, people have asked me-indeed, I have asked myself-why I was writing it. The question could be either curious in a friendly sort of way, and sympathetic to the subject matter, or hostile and challenging, seeking a justification . The friendly ones seemed to assume that enough had already been written on the subject of Freud's Jewish identity-Freud was a Jew; so what? The unfriendly ones seemed to assume that the less said about such a self-hating Jew (if he really were a Jew, they hinted), the better. Both sorts of questions shared a common irritant: what's the point of all this? A fair question. But there was another reaction too, one that I shared, and one that I suspect lay at the heart ofmy puzzled amusement at the questions, namely, eager and engaged interest (its own justification), which appeared as a kind oflight in some people's faces when I mentioned my topic. I knew instinctively that the real motive for my book was related to this reaction, but I also knew that I would have to wait for an articulation of its basis. The answers I gave initially to the questions always seemed to leave me unsatisfied, either because they were too practical-namely, that the project had been a strategy for getting out of graduate school, after ten years, and publishing it in revised form would be a kind of "closure" on that period of my life-or because somehow they didn't touch the wellspring of my interest-for example, that Freud was much more Jewish than most people realized and there was a need to correct the false image. In fact, the reason Freud's Jewish identity engaged me so only became clear as I reflected in Jerusalem on the nature of modern Jewish identity, something given to and yet withheld from most Jews today. For it seems to me that authentic modern Jewish identity consists in a kind of positive dual allegiance, a balancing point between Jewishness (in all ix X DUAL ALLEGIANCE its forms) and gene:ral humanity (in both its political and cultural senses). I was attracted to and held by Freud's image and identity as a Jew because I sensed without even realizing it that Freud was one of the first of a new breed, the modern Jew, whose unwitting descendant I was. And it seems to me now that this descent-which is of course cultural and widespread, 21 function of changing social and intellectual conditions -triggered my interest, as well as that of others. That is, who I am as a Jew is bound up somehow with who Freud was as a Jew, at least in outline if not in substance. Freud's chthonic or genetic Jewishnessthat is, its nonnegotiable depth-in tandem with his thoroughly modern attitude-his psychological and developmental historicity-captured my attention because I recognized its authenticity as my own hope for the realization of an infrastructure, the crystal lattice of an identity that could only take shape in the future, as I learned more. Writing the book thus became a dual search for Jewish identity, both Freud's and my own. It is my hope that reading it can encourage a personal participation in a similar shared search, whether Jewish or not. I do not apologize for confessing so personal a motivation, since even so fine and objective a scholar as YosefYerushalmi in his brilliant book, Freud's Moses: Judaism Tenninable and Intenninable, finds it appropriate to conclude with a chapter addressed to Freud himself, utilizing a confessional mode and speaking as a Jew to a fellow Jew, to articulate some of his most insightful conclusions. And as he implies about the Jewishness of psychoanalysis, this particularity is what gives access to the human universals we seek: Judaeus sum, nihilhumani a mealienumputo.! I suspect that an unconscious perception of Freud as a structural paradigm for the modern Jew also triggered the hostile questions I encountered , for one: recognizes a competitor. In the modern environment of free choice with regard to Jewish identity (its voluntarism), Freud's example, one freed from halachic demands while affirming a deep loyalty to the Jewish people, threatens traditional Jewish identity with a newfound autonomy. The good news is that like Freud's, that autonomy can be brought into deeper relation with the Jewish tradition in such a way that both the...