To the Editor:

Freud’s problematic Jewishness is once again revived in David Aberbach’s article, “Freud’s Jewish Problem” [June], with its warmed-over biographical scraps and the by now familiar references to “those Oedipal dreams,” to the annoying pilpulism in Moses and Monotheism, and to several other purportedly tell-tale sources. . . .

I suspect that Freud’s Jewishness has persisted as a subject of speculation more as an intellectual pastime for Jewish analysts than as an effort to arrive at a definitive closure of the subject.

For those who argue for Freud’s unequivocal identification with the Jewish people, there is always his straightforward statement to the Vienna B’nai B’rith Lodge and his clear plaudits to Jewish exceptionalism in Moses and Monotheism. For others who doubt his Jewishness there are Mr. Aberbach’s sources and arguments ad infinitum.

That Freud suffered professionally because he was a Jew cannot be denied: that he condemned his Jewishness as a handicap must be denied. As a man of the Enlightenment he was expected to think as a universalist and to stand aloof from sectarian identifications, but at another level of existence, viscerally if you will, he knew he was a Jew and he felt as a Jew. . . .

Freud’s psychoanalysis, his unprecedented explorations into the unconscious and his later conceptualization of a comprehensive system to explain human development and its inevitable predisposition to abnormalities, was quintessentially Jewish in its courage to break from the stale orthodoxy of the psychological thought of his time.

A close reading of Freud’s several references to “my race,” as he called it, suggests the possibility that he was obsessed with the strange and complex heritage his Jewishness thrust on him.

Charles Ansell
Encino, California

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To the Editor:

David Aberbach is surely right when he points out that Ernest Jones, in his biography of Freud, does not give the influence of Freud’s Jewishness the attention it deserves. I believe this to be true of the majority of writers and critics in their analyses of the development of Freud’s thought and work. The problem of the first generation of assimilated Jews, caught up in the social and cultural changes of the time which propelled them out of the ghetto world and into modern, secular society, is, as Mr. Aberbach notes, a complex and difficult one.

I must take issue with him, however, on certain of his views. He appears to attribute the Oedipus complex mainly to Freud’s own individual pathology—the neurotic hostility towaruo;reflect[s] the peculiar conditions of being Jewish in antipad his father “which he generalizes into a universal human problem” but which “reflect[s] the peculiar conditions of being Jewish in antipathetic surroundings.”

I do not dispute for one moment that Freud was peculiarly placed as to be able to locate and formulate the Oedipus complex by means of his own personal experience. . . . But this fact by no means invalidates the theory or the universality of the Oedipus complex.

In remarking that Freud’s theories of fathers are “cruelly defamatory and obscene” (a somewhat naive accusation in psychoanalytic terms), Mr. Aberbach overlooks the fact that Freud exonerated fathers completely, including his own, when he perceived paternal seduction to be the product of the daughter’s fantasy. The father is also victim of his son’s fantasies, for while the small boy fears castration by him, it is the mother who threatens it. Moreover, it is the mother who is the original seducer by means of her care in cleaning and tending the child. There is a reversal of the “Totem and Taboo” theme in the clinical theory, for the aggression in the latter runs from son to father; in the former from the primal father to the sons. It is perhaps also worth pointing out that Freud’s remarkable reluctance to discuss his mother, the notable dearth of references to her, and his emphasis on father-hatred might, as Brierly (1957) has remarked, indicate some deeper conflict than any relating to his father, and one that could well have suggested the Oedipal formation to him.

Freud certainly found Jewish ritual and practice repugnant. It cannot be held, however, as Mr. Aberbach has it, that “he did not mention how much he owed to the educational tradition sustained by the Jewish religion.” He attributed his intellectuality to his Jewishness. Jones quotes him as commenting: “For various reasons the Jews have undergone a one-sided development and admire brains more than bodies. The Greek balance . . . is certainly preferable . . . but if I had to choose between the two, I should also put intellect first.” . . .

Certainly Freud was ambivalent about his Jewishness. There was resentment and bitterness as well as an indissoluble tie. . . . It is this very concept of ambivalence that is Freud’s discovery of genius. That we may love and hate the same persons and things; that conscious feelings are opposed in the unconscious by their contradictory counterparts has been his teaching and one that he first learned about himself. That he failed fully to work through its implications for himself is hardly surprising. He was, after all, his own analyst and this fallacy he recognized when he wrote to Fliess that to analyze oneself is not possible or “no one would be ill.”

Thus civilization began with patricide. Anthropological accuracy is irrelevant in the light of the psychological insight that crime begets guilt. The primal father was hated, envied, killed, and then mourned, for he was also loved. There are universal truths in Freud’s “just-so” story. Freud’s Jewishness, prized and resented, hated and loved, surely helped him to see them.

Estelle Roith
London, England

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To the Editor:

David Aberbach’s excellent article hints at the Jews’ real problem with Freud: his unconscious Catholicism, which he presented as scientific psychology, and which most Jews have accepted. . . . Most important in this connection are Freud’s beliefs about the relationship of husband to wife, and of man to society. Freud accepted the Catholic attitude toward sex and society, which in Vienna at that time was the civilized attitude, and completely ignored the Jewish attitude from which he himself had come.

In 1908, when Freud was fifty-two, he doubted whether individual sexual needs could ever be reconciled with societal requirements, and wondered “whether our ‘civilized’ sexual morality [as though there were but one] is worth the sacrifices it imposes on us, the more so if we are still so insufficiently purged of hedonism as to include a certain degree of individual happiness among the aims of our cultural development.”

Freud also insisted that “our civilized sexual morality also restricts sexual intercourse even in marriage itself, for it compels the married couple to be satisfied with a very small number of acts leading to conception. . . .”

Since Freud considered individual sexuality and societal authority incompatible, he argued that the latter’s impact upon an individual’s passion was suppressive rather than channeling. . . .

In Freud’s renunciation of all religion, which Mr. Aberbach depicts so well, he thus overlooked the fundamental differences between Jewish and Catholic sexual ethics. Judaism’s highest sexual ideal is marriage, with the sexual union of husband and wife being a mitzvah, a commandment to be fulfilled. . . .

That Freud took such an unconsciously Catholic position is less surprising when one realizes that at forty-one he wrote, “sexual excitation is no more use to a person like me,” which, to Erich Fromm, meant that “at this age, sexual life had more or less ended for him.” . . .

What is surprising is that almost three-quarters of a century after Freud espoused this Catholic position on sex—about which he was supposedly the expert—so many Jews still accept it as gospel.

[Dr.] Nathaniel S. Lehrman
Roslyn, New York

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David Aberbach writes:

Charles Ansell suggests that I “doubt [Freud’s] Jewishness.” Actually, Freud’s identity as a Jew is not in question. I did maintain in my article that his view of Judaism was ambivalent and distorted. One should beware of trivialization and onesidedness when writing of this subject. I stated, in fact, that Freud “greatly admired the heroic side of Jewish history,” and that, as his address to the B’nai B’rith exemplified, “he often admitted the general social and psychological importance of his Jewishness.” Unfortunately, the evidence tends to suggest that anti-Semitism, far more than the healthy and normative side of Jewish tradition, was what gave him a sense of identity as a Jew and largely accounted for his feeling that his Jewishness was a handicap. His statement, “If my name were Oberhüber, in spite of everything, my innovations would have met with far less resistance,” admits of no other interpretation. Assimilated Austrian Jews generally regarded their Jewish origin as an unwelcome burden preventing their acceptance and advancement in non-Jewish society. In this attitude, Freud was surely no exception.

With regard to Estelle Roith’s comments, I should like to mention that in my essay I did not deny the universality of the Oedipus complex. Rather, I gave evidence for the view that Freud’s emphasis upon the complex was, in part, a reflection of personal bias.