The Jewish World of Sigmund Freud: Essays on Cultural Roots and the Problem of Religious Identity (review)

Scholarship on Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) is rich and abundant, but countless dimensions still have to be studied. This impressive collection presents fourteen essays on Jewish identity, based on Freud’s writings on art, culture, history, myth, religions, and the unconscious. Most chapters quote from Freud’s essays, articles, and correspondence, with a clear preference for what would become his last book, Moses and Monotheism (1939), which is cited in almost every chapter. Like many studies on Freud’s works and ideas, this overlooked book is fascinating because it explores various facets within and outside psychoanalysis. Of course, this book is not the first to focus on Freud’s religious and cultural roots: the salient writings of Martin Bergmann on Freud’s Jewish identity are also mentioned (Salberg 6).

Topics are varied: the influence of classical Greek culture on the young Freud, modernism, antisemitism in Austria, the early critique of psychoanalysis in Austrian media, Freud’s introduction to “The Moses of Michelangelo,” the links between Freud and Lévinas, Freud’s exile in London (from June 5, 1938), and finally suicidality in Freud’s life and work (171). In a chapter dedicated to “Freud’s Theory of Jewishness,” Eliza Slavet argues that the main question in Moses and Monotheism was “how and why individuals have been regularly convinced that they are Jewish and that they should practice Jewish traditions even as the ‘Jewish tradition’ does not itself satisfy any ‘material needs’” (98).

The contributors’ approaches are often interdisciplinary, because Freud’s thoughts were in essence linked with an impressive number of domains. For example, Freud was aware that his own descriptive work on the psychoanalytic process during the cure was somewhat like writing a literary work in terms of narratives: according to Jill Salberg, “As early as the Studies in Hysteria, Freud writes that many of his case histories read like short stories, suggesting his awareness of the literary, associative, narrative quality of how people experience and speak about their lives” (5). Other chapters refer to Freud’s works on art, history, religion, and of course psychoanalysis.

In terms of group identity, many contributors seem to agree that “Freud was a typical Viennese Jew” (e.g. 22, 35). However, it is obvious that the Viennese social context with its Christian dominant culture and Jewish minority culture influenced Freud’s worldview, subjectivity, theories, and writings (Salberg 5). By developing theories through cases and examples inspired by his everyday life and his patients’ experiences, he testified as well about his society and his own intimate, inner life. In other words, “Freud offered his memories and dreams as data for his own theories” (Salberg 5).

The Jewish World of Sigmund Freud is an important book because it links science to culture and religion, even though Freud was not a “believer.” For readers unfamiliar with Freud’s method or with psychoanalysis in general these essays are a treat, and can be read without any prerequisites since there is very little discussion related to the unconscious and Freudian theory. On the other hand, students will find here some interesting discussions about German and Austrian culture and collective identity in the first half of the twentieth century. Even for those who are resistant to psychoanalysis, these essays will be instructive because they aptly illustrate the importance and the solid ground of Freud’s thinking outside the domain for which he was famous.