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  • Freud’s Shylock
  • David Hillman (bio)

I am not Shylock and my daughter is not Jessica.

—Theodor Reik, “Jessica My Child,” 1951

The name “Shylock” never once shows up in all of Freud’s published writings. Yet amongst all Shakespeare’s characters, the compelling figure of the Jew of Venice is one who, for a number of reasons I shall outline, one might assume to be a particularly likely candidate to make his way into the psychoanalyst’s thinking. Perhaps it was merely the character’s unusual opacity—what William Hazlitt called the “hard, impenetrable, dark groundwork of the character of Shylock” (1980, p. 2)—that gave Freud pause in addressing this figure, who pushes, almost willfully, against the very bounds of explicability; but I am going to suggest here that the absence of Shylock from the psychoanalyst’s work may in fact be a function of the richly over-determined nature of the matters Shylock evokes. Shakespeare’s Jew, I argue in the first part of this essay, brings into too close a proximity a number of overlapping elements with which Freud was preoccupied, especially circa 1912, when he was writing “The Theme of the Three Caskets”—the place we might most obviously have expected to find some mention of Shylock.1 These include: possessiveness and paternity (especially his own, vis-à-vis daughters); anality and the concept of “character”; Jewishness and its relation to gentility, particularly (at this point) in regard to the psychoanalytic community; and more generally religion and its relationship to neurosis. These are all topics that, in isolation, Freud took on, often with daring insight; but the character of Shylock brought them into a [End Page 1] propinquity with one another that may have been uncomfortable. More significantly, as I will suggest in the latter part of this essay, the “occlusion” of Shylock might be attributed to Freud’s reluctance to limit his understanding of otherness to a particular cultural other, so that one could equally claim that the omission is strategic, an attempt to get beyond the particularities of religious, racial, or ethnic difference that this unique character usually serves to highlight. The strange “absence” of Shylock from the psychoanalyst’s work is thus indicative of a deeper strangeness at the heart of Freud’s understanding of selfhood: it reveals something of the complexity of the psychological, historical, religious, and dramatic aspects of Freud’s concept of self-integrity.

Freud’s Shakespeare

First then: why should we be surprised to find no mention of Shylock in Freud’s entire oeuvre? Freud, of course, knew Shakespeare’s works intimately, and referred to them constantly in his writing. Shakespeare was Freud’s favorite author throughout his life; from childhood, he could recite large swathes of the dramatist’s works by heart—in English (see Gay, 1988, p. 166). Amongst his psychoanalytic circle of colleagues, “Shakespeare was the most frequent topic of our discussions when they turned to literature” (Sachs, 1944, p. 108 n.7). It may be something of an overstatement to declare simply, as David Willbern does, that “Shakespeare dramatizes what psychoanalysis theorizes” (1986, p. 544), or as Harold Bloom contends—that Freud’s theories are, in essence, “prosified Shakespeare” (1994, p. 371). But there is more than a grain of truth in Bloom’s argument that “Freud’s vision of human psychology is derived, not altogether unconsciously, from his reading of the plays” (pp. 371–372), and it is certainly the case that, as Meredith Anne Skura puts it, “Freud internalized Shakespeare’s dramas” (1981, p. 37).2 André Green suggests that Shakespeare had:

a special significance for Freud—a significance that outweighed his interest in the plastic arts (despite Michelangelo’s ‘Moses’ or Leonardo’s ‘St Anne’), in [End Page 2] poetry (despite Goethe, Schiller or Heine), in the tale (despite Hoffmann), in the novel (despite Dostoievsky and Jensen). Sophocles and Shakespeare are in a class of their own, especially Shakespeare; Freud recognized in him a master whose texts he analyzes as if they were the discoveries of some illustrious precursor.

(1979, p. 1)

In a recent essay I suggested that the Renaissance playwright was so central to the psychoanalyst’s thinking, at a...

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