The Jewishness of Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud died on the Day of Atonement, 23 September 1939. It seems ironic that the founder of Psychoanalysis, a convinced atheist, should choose to bring his suffering from cancer to an end on the holiest day of the Jewish year. According to Jewish tradition, it is a special privilege to be called to the divine maker on this day. Is it possible, then, that Freud’s Connection to his Jewishness was far deeper than has generally been Acknowledged? I learned about Freud’s end several years ago from the Director of the British Institute for Psychohistory and assumed it was common knowledge among the psychoanalytic cognoscenti. I was surprised, then, that no-one brought it up in the course of the panel discussion on Freud and the Jewish Mind at this year’s Jewish Book Week, an event which attracted an audience of at least 1,000 and provoked vigorous, if not rigorous, debate on ‘how Jewish was Freud.’ I found myself pondering this question again as the debate continued in telephone calls and dinner party encounters. While barely anyone I spoke to seemed to know that Freud had died on Yom Kippur, I believed the fact to be a trump card to counter the assertion of so distinguished a figure as Jonathan Miller that Freud happened to be a Jew merely because antisemites defined him as such. But did Yom Kippur hold any significance for Freud, beyond some subliminal atavistic pull? Could it be that the unconscious instinct was impelling him to come to a final reckoning with the transcendent force had refused to recognise? The meaning of Yom Kippur includes being One’ with the Almighty and with one’s fellows, laying bare the soul, holding from oneself no truth, however uncomfortable. May this not also be seen as a paradigm of the healing process which is the goal of psychoanalysis? Both demand complete integrity from the individual, a commitment to facing up to the most painful characteristics of one’s being. Both seek to penetrate the darker recesses of man’s soul. Indeed, as Bruno Bettelheim has argued in Freud and Man’s Soul, Freud may have envisaged psychoanalysis as the engagement of man in search of his soul rather than a mere medical or scientific response to the frailties of human behaviour. Moreover, according to Bettelheim, many of Freud’s more ‘spiritual’ thoughts and interpretations were eliminated or mistranslated in the English version of his works. Yom Kippur influence It is impossible to deny that Freud’s attitude towards his Jewishness was fraught with ambivalence. This may have been rooted in an incident in his childhood when his father, head covered in traditional Jewish fashion, had his hat knocked off. It would appear that his father’s failiu-e to defend himself had a profound effect on the young Sigmund. Nevertheless, the fact that he remained in Vienna, seemingly impervious to the climate of anti-Jewish harassment, long after many of his Jewish colleagues had left, would indicate that he was reluctant to acknowledge the vulnerability of being a Jew. What finally prompted him to leave in 1938, I learnt from a psychotherapist friend, was the desperation of his daughter, Anna, who, at the time of the Nazi annexation, had proposed a suicide pact. Freud reacted violently against this. Suddenly, it may be surmised, he was transported back to the pain of his seminal childhood experience and forced to confront the vulnerability he had so long suppressed. Psychoanalysis as security I had been assured, nonetheless, that Freud took great pride in his Jewish identity. On my first visit to the Freud Museum, I was shown the few Jewish artefacts that could be found amid the extensive collection of Egyptology and other antiquities. There was, for example, an unusually shaped Chanukiah and a small table engraved with a Star of David. More intriguing for me was an excerpt from a letter Freud wrote to his future wife during their engagement which was prominently displayed: “… even if the form wherein the old Jews were happy no longer offers us any shelter, something of the love, the essence of this meaningful life affirming Judaism will not be absent from- our home.” How could such a statement be reconciled, I wondered, with the fact that he had forbidden his wife to light Sabbath candles from the outset of their marriage? I put this question to a prominent psychoanalyst. He speculated that, as a ‘scientist’, Freud might have regarded the candle ‘ritual’ as “something with many unconscious meanings and which was identified with honouring, rather than understanding, the irrational and the superstitious and the religious.” But cannot psychoanalysis itself be regarded as a form of religion? The answer I was given was that while psychoanalysis was not intended as a religion and was, in fact, not a religion, it did function as a religion in many ways with its own induction processes, hierarchies and defences. Moreover, for the traumatised refugees from Nazi Europe who kept alive the Freudian flame, psychoanalysis represented the certainty they needed in a world that had proved all too insecure. Was this equally true of Freud himself, I ask myself? Or was his sense of Jewish identity more robust? While the arguments for each possibility seem equally balanced, I believe the Yom Kippur connection provides the ultimate answer.