This study will examine Sigmund Freud's relationship with his own religion, Judaism. The study will focus on the contradictory nature of Freud's attitude toward his own Jewishness, and will consider the context of his attitude toward religion in general in terms of the light that such a general attitude might shed on his Jewishness.
Freeman writes first that Freud's Jewishness had much to do with his having discovered psychoanalysis in the first place. He quotes Ernest Jones who declared that "It is doubtful if without certain traits inherited from his Jewish ancestry Freud would have been able to accomplish the work he did. I think here of a peculiar native shrewdness, a skeptical attitude toward illusion and deception, and a determined courage that made him impervious to hostile public opinion and the contumely of his professional colleagues" (Freeman 66).
Freeman at a number of points makes it clear that he feels Freud did not try to loosen himself from his Jewish ties, but his examples belie his conclusions.
Freeman writes that Freud "had a strong sense of Judaism as his ethnic identity" and, quotes Jones again when the latter writer says that Freud felt himself "Jewish to the core." In the same passage he says that Freud's boyhood idol was Hannibal, a Jew. He concludes that "Though Freud did not believe in God, he was proud of being a Jew and a staunch supporter of the Jews" (Freeman 66-67).
However, Freeman gives an example of Freud's practical view
which led him to turn his back on his Jewishness when it benefitted him or his profession. He was certainly not exercising anything like Jewish pride or activism when he argued against the appointment of a Jew as president of the newly established International Psychoanalytical Association.
Because of the anti-Semitism in Europe at the time (1910), and because of the resultant damage that such an appointment might have had on the growth and development of psychoa...