Couching the Transference, Transferring the Couch: Immigrant Psychoanalysts and Jewish Intellectual Culture in America

Immigrant Psychoanalysts and Jewish Intellectual Culture in America Couching the Transference, Transferring the Couch: Immigrant Psychoanalysts and Jewish Intellectual Culture in America Rael Meyerowitz Rael Meyerowitz is Assistant Professor of Humanities in the College of General Studies at Boston University. He has written on American literature, modern poetry, literary theory, Jewish studies, and psychoanalysis; his recent book is Transferring to America: Jewish Interpretations of American Dreams (SUNY, 1995). Dr. Meyerowitz will begin psychoanalytic training at the British Institute for Psycho-Analysis in September 1997. 101 This paper will serve as a prolegomenon ofsorts to a more detailed project of my own. However, it is also intended to appeal to and encourage other scholars of American Jewish culture to devote more oftheir critical attention than they have heretofore to the work of the immigrant psychoanalysts who arrived in the United States in the middle decades of this century. These figures are usually credited by fellow analysts and scholars of psychoanalysis as having helped to consolidate the psychoanalytic movement both here and worldwide, but they have not received the attention they deserve for their contributions to Jewish intellectual life in this country; indeed, their roles as Jewish Americans have gone largely unappraised. At the risk of needlessly revisiting familiar territory, I begin by recalling two moments in Jewish history and a well-worn analogic relationship between two famous Jewish personae, so as to emphasize a particular characteristic of the comparison and to remedy the inadvertent neglect of some of its implications. There has probably been no more striking repetition of the biblical tale of Joseph in Egypt than the one that took place only a century ago in Central Europe, where again there arose a Jewish interpreter of dreams purporting to cure a civilization's malaise and thus to stave off-in vain, it turned out-a looming future ofcultural famine or disaster. This affInity between Joseph and Sigmund Freud has been remarked upon often enough by various scholars interested in the historical and conceptual intersection of Judaism and psychoanalysis.' Though, as all ofthem note, Freud identified most obviously and ISee, amongst others, David Bakan, Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958); Marthe Robert, From Oedipus to Moses: Freud's Jewish Identity, trans. Ralph Mannheim (London: Routledge, 1976); William J. McGrath, Freud's Discovery ofPsychoanalysis: The Politics ofHysteria (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986); Estelle Roith, The Riddle ofFreud: Jewish Influences on His Theory ofFemale Sexuality (London: 102 SHOFAR Fall 1997 Vol. 16, No. I manifestly with Moses, he nevertheless recognized and acknowledged the connection with Joseph, particularly in The Interpretation 0/Dreams, for example in this footnote: "It will be noticed that the name Josefplays a great part in my dreams.... My own ego [mds it very easy to hide behind people of that name, since Joseph was the name of a man famous in the Bible as an interpreter of dreams."2 Freud must, of course, have been alert to the Jewish filial resonances-in addition to the oedipal echoes-in his readiness to adopt this hidden or alter-ego name: his father, after all, was called Jacob. His words remind us that both he and Joseph were themselves not only great interpreters, they were also, perhaps fIrst and foremost, great dreamers, and both received their fIrst training as interpreters of their own dreams, wishes, and desires. Moreover, as perhaps the very earliest exemplar of Jewish readerly intelligence per se, Joseph is an entirely appropriate biblical forerunner for Freud, especially considering that, as Cynthia Ozick has remarked, Jewish life in the biblical period does not yet abound with characters for whom the epithet "intellectual" would be apt.3 More specifIcally, Joseph is the precursor of the general Jewish penchant, as well as the more particular psychoanalytic predilection, for scholarliness in existentially relevant contexts, and hence interpretation not merely for its own sake-not, that is, as a purely intellectual or disinterested enterprise-but working in the interests of understanding and change, toward therapeutic as well as exegetical ends. One further model for the Jewish future is established by the fact that Joseph practices this brand of intelligent and empathic analysis most effectively when he is...