On Freud's Jewish Body: Mitigating Circumcisions (review)

Jay Geller, who teaches at the Vanderbilt Divinity School, has collected and reshaped his contributions on Freud and his Jewish context, researched and writ-ten over the past twenty-five years, into a comprehensive and readable volume. On Freud's Jewish Body begins with a valuable stocktaking. Looking at the debates about Freud and his times in the historical and critical literature (including my own work) Geller teases out patterns of emphasis and strings of argument that range from Freud as a repressed religious Jew (Yosef Yerushalmi) to Freud as an atheist Jew alienated from all ritual practice (Peter Gay). He examines these debates as they structured the very idea of Freud's relationship to "Jewishness" that the historians and critics both wish to explicate but which they also use in their works.

After this important and focused analysis, Geller places his own work within postmodern theories about the social construction of embodiedness. In the first substantial chapter of the book, he examines slips of the tongue as examined in Freud's work and focuses on the rather specific Viennese question of "Jewish– Gentile" (Geller's terms) intermarriage in the late nineteenth century. The slips of the tongue examined reveal the anxiety in the culture about identity boundaries and the impact of Freud's own conflict about his Jewish identity in the time. In chapter 2, Geller turns to the origins of psychoanalysis as represented in Freud's Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and specifically, in the central dream interpreted in this volume: the "dream of Irma's injection." Here Geller builds on a range of existing interpretations of Freud's reading of this dream and shows the conflicted nature of the historical record in examining the representation of the origins of psychoanalysis. To resolve them, he relies on a rather interesting archival source, Max Schur's 1966 transcription of Freud's correspondence with Wilhelm Fliess (which provides our access to the "day residue" prominent in the dream of Irma's injection). Geller is a great reader of the "slips" and puns that result from multiple readings. In this chapter, he shows how Schur's misreading (a slip of the pen) provides a true insight in the one possible reading of this seminal text. Geller also discusses the importance of his discovery of the first review of Freud's Studies in Hysteria (1895) and its Viennese author to an understanding of Freud's later rethinking of the meaning of the "day residue" in his own interpretation of his dream in 1900.

In the third chapter, Geller looks at Freud's 1927 essay on "fetishism" and the reading of the "nose" in a number of Freud's published case studies, especially that of the "Wolf Man" (1918) and "Little Hans" (1909). Geller examines the question of the relationship between the genital and the nose postulated by Freud's confident Wilhelm Fleiss and the centrality of the debates about the difference of the Jewish male body that haunted Freud's Vienna, especially around the question of the ritual practice of circumcision and its implications for Jewish physical difference. In chapter 5, Geller looks at a further case study, that of Daniel Paul Schreber (1911), and Freud's own notes to Schreber's published memoir present in Freud's library in London. Since Freud's sole access to this patient was through his reading of this volume (it was suggested to him by C. G. Jung), Freud's notes, as Geller shows, are a major insight on his reading and on the importance that anti-Semitic rhetoric (present throughout Schreber's text in complex ways) had in his understanding of Schreber's psychosis.

In his sixth chapter, Geller examines Freud's mass psychology in the light of anti-Semitism of the time and then deals with Freud's Totem and Taboo (1913) and Freud's image of masculinity. Geller situates this image...