Sigmund Freud and Judaism

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

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his general rejection of all religions. In McGlashan and Reeve, then, we read that "For although Freud was always proud of being a Jew, he never at any time accepted the teachings of the Jewish religion" (McGlashan 42). With respect to Freud's Moses and Monotheism, McGlashan and Reeve write that it was so "uncharacteristically full of doubts, hesitations and retractions" that "One can only surmise that it was written in answer to the irrepressible impulses from his unconscious, which had succeeded in overcoming the censor, normally so vigilant, of his conscious mind" (McGlashan 119). The part of Moses and Monotheism relevant to this study is Freud's claim that Moses was not Jewish but Egyptian. Freud wrote that Moses "had brought to the Jews the monotheistic religion, later abandoned in Egypt, that had been introduced by the pharaoh Akhnaton . . . After his death, his religion was grafted onto the religion of the Midianites, who worshiped one god, Yahweh. Judaism was thus an amalgam of two religions, the Mosaic contribution being Egyptian, not Jewish, in origin" (McGlashan 119). So Freud might have been willing to accept his Jewishness as "proudly" as some writers claim, but he was not above going back to the roots of t
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Approximate Word count = 2474
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)

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