Freud, Race, and Gender by Sander L. Gilman (review)

616 Рецензии/Reviews The opening problem of the book, therefore, is the following: in order to understand the interconnectedness of Freud’s racial, gender, and professional identities, as well as what impact they had on his theory of psychoanalysis, one needs to reconstruct “the meaning of ‘race’ and its relationship to constructions of ideas of ‘gender’ at the turn of the [20th ] century” (p. xiii). Gilman embarks upon this task through a profound and fascinating analysis of the history of medical scholarship in the era of fin de siècle and in particular its appeal to the theory of the distinctiveness of races. In this context he traces the process in which the socio-medical representation of the male Jew became gradually singularized , feminized, alienated, and eventually securitized. The focus of three subsequent chapters is placed on, inter alia, the racial dimension attached to mental illness (primarily hysteria and neurosis), congenital syphilis, and cancer. The argument is not only that Jews were, for a variety of reasons, represented as more vulnerable to these diseases than other ethnic groups in Europe (p. 113), but also that associating these frightful, almost mythical ailments with a Semitic origin signified a certain disturbing racial distinctiveness, a state of disorder they brought about, or a stigmatic curse. This socio-medical image of the male Jew made him therefore an Magdalena ŻÓŁKOŚ Sander L. Gilman, Freud, Race, and Gender (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). 277 p. Index. ISBN: 0-691-02586-X. In his recent book Freud, Race, and Gender (1993), Sander L. Gilman sets off to interpret Freudian gender conceptualizations in the context of anti-Semitic inclinations in biology, medicine, and psychiatry in the late 19th and early 20th century . Having published previously on cultural and literary history, and holding positions of professor of Germanic studies and professor of psychiatry (University of Chicago), Gilman seems both professionally and linguistically competent to undertake this ambitious crossdisciplinary task. His analysis is informed by numerous other studies on Freud and his psychoanalytic theory in the fields of cultural and medical history, literary criticism, gender studies, and psychoanalysis itself. In this context, however, Gilman’s study claims to be innovative by refuting many of the common scholarly assumptions about Freudian work (especially what it regards as simplified connections between Freud’s Jewish origin and his ideas), and, more precisely, by identifying the importance of analyzing Freudian conceptualizations of gender and race in close relation to each other. 617 Ab Imperio, 3/2004 “exclusionary category” and an antithesis to theAryan race.As Gilman asserts “the Jew defined what the Aryan was not. It was that which the Aryan neither was nor ever would be. The Jew became the projection of all the anxieties about control present within the Aryan” (p. 9, emphasis in the original). One of the most interesting aspects of Gilman’s analysis here is that he presents that Semitic image-creation as an integral element of the broader transformation of modernity, namely from a religious Jewish identification to a secular one. These dichotomous racial categories, which began to dominate not only medicine and biology, but also social and political relations in Europe in the late 19th century, have important parallels in how the Church defined itself in opposition to the Jewish community as both its continuation and fulfillment. In other words, Christian identity was synonymous with accomplished (and discontinued) Jewishness, within which it was nevertheless deeply rooted both historically and spiritually. The difference is that the secularized, modern image of the Jew obliterated this intimate relationship and sense of interdependence – thus enabling the social othering of the Jew. In addition, Gilman’s book focuses in detail on different sociomedical representations of the Jewish practice of infant male circumcision , in which two elements are of crucial importance: that (i) circumcision “marked the Jewish body as unequal to that of the Aryan” and that (ii) it presented “the male Jew as the exemplary Jew” (p. 49, emphasis added). Very different meanings were attached to circumcision : symbolic, identity-giving, phallic (as an object of a ritual sacrifice ), and prophylactic (pp. 56-60); but their common denominator was the dominating social perception of stigmatic inferiority. This medical and ethno-psychological fascination...