Freud, Race, and Gender (review)

94 SHOFAR Summer 1994 Vol. 12, No.4 Freud, Race, and Gender, by Sander L. Gilman. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. 277 pp. $24.95. Ostensibly, science strives for objectivity in pursuit of knowledge. In Freud, Race, and Gender, Sander Gilman highlights the myth of the scientist as neutral observer, part of a growing realization that scientific theories and theorists often are handmaidens to cultural assumptions which are not value-free. Freud, Race, and Gender builds on Professor Gilman's previous work, specifically The Jew's Body (Shofar, Vol. 10, No. 4 [Summer 1992], pp. 96-98). Once again the focus is on the defamation and denigration ofJews by the Western European medical and scientific establishment of a hundred years ago. Since this is the period when Freud's generative efforts gave rise to his special insights regarding psychological development and intrapsychic conflicts, Gilman researched the interactive dynamics between the cultural prejudices of that time and the creative response of the originator of psychoanalysis. Using a drumbeat recital of quotes from Freud's published and unpublished output, as well as those from his detractors and supporters, which touch on racial and gender issues, the author examines the roots of psychodynamic theorizing and constructs a psychohistorical context for Freud's discoveries. (A total of 64 pages of notes and references are appended to the corpus of the book, which may be taken as a measure of the author's scholarship.) In addition to an introductory and a concluding chapter, the book is divided into three thematic aspects of the turn-of-the-century biopsychosocial kulturkampf These themes purport to demonstrate how scientific biases of the time classified people along a race- and gender-based hierarchy of anatomy, behavior, intellect, and morality. What characterized this bias was a rampant devaluation of Jews in general and of Jewish physicians and scientists in particular. Freud, Race, and Gender is a study of one man's response to these attacks on both his personal and professional identities. In Freud's case, this took the form of a counter-argument, namely that the human psyche has universal characteristics which transcend differences. In looking more closely at this response, Gilman proposes that a culture or society's ethos shapes the scientist's perspective in line with generally held assumptions about the world and that Freud was no exception to this rule. A second theme expoundS the transmutation of the rhetoric of racial difference into gender difference, a psychological strategy from which Freud was not immune. Whereas the Aryan looked upon the Jewish male as feminized by dint of circumcision, Freud universalized castration anxiety in boys during Book Reviews 95 their so-called Oedipal period, thus neutralizing the image of the defective or feminine Jewish man. In Totem and Taboo Freud had postulated a theory of a prehistoric primal father's castration threat to his sons which remained repressed in the unconscious ofmankind. The concluding theme deals with the alleged predisposition of Jews to hysteria, neurasthenia, syphilis, cancer, and homosexuality which fin-de-siecle wisdom blamed on racial factors and Jewish sexual practices. Like many Jewish physicians of the time, Freud was uncomfortable with his Eastern European origin since the non-Westernized Jews of that region were considered under-civilized and of inferior cultured status. To escape the onus of his birth, Freud espoused the idea that hysteria and mental illness, to which Eastern Jewish men were thought to be especially prone, occurred in all races but that it is women who are particularly at risk for pathology, thus reflecting an aspect of a cultural prejudice of the day by shoring up the self at the expense of the other. Gilman also delves into an extensive critique of Freud's analysis of Memoirs of a Neuropath, the autobiographical account by Dr.' jur. Daniel Paul Schreber, who suffered from paranoid delusions. In Psycho-Analytic Notes Upon an AutobiographicalAccount ofa Case ofParanoia (Dementia Paranoides) Freud offers the explanation that paranoid delusions contradict underlying homosexual wish-fantasies. What Gilman discovers in reading the autobiography are Schreber's explicit revelations that he fears turning into an effeminate Jew, a reflection of the then current rhetoric about the gender-flexible Jewish male...