Riddle Freud

The Riddle of Freud

The New Library of Psychoanalysis is published in association with the Institute of Psycho-Analysis. The New Library has been launched to facilitate a greater and more widespread appreciation of what psychoanalysis is really about and to provide a forum for increasing mutual understanding between psychoanalysts and those working in other disciplines like history, linguistics, literature, medicine, philosophy, psychology, and the social sciences. It is planned to publish a limited number of books each year in an accessible form and to select those contributions which deepen and develop psychoanalytic thinking and technique, contribute to psychoanalysis from outside, or contribute to other disciplines from a psychoanalytical perspective. The Institute, together with the British Psycho-Analytical Society, runs a low-fee psychoanalytic clinic, organizes lectures and scientific events concerned with psychoanalysis, publishes the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis and the International Review of Psycho-Analysis, and runs the only training course in the UK in psychoanalysis leading to membership of the International Psychoanalytical Association—the body which preserves internationally agreed standards of training, of professional entry, and of professional ethics and practice for psychoanalysis as initiated and developed by Sigmund Freud. Distinguished members of the Institute have included Wilfred Bion, Anna Freud, Ernest Jones, Melanie Klein, John Rickman, and Donald Winnicott. IN THE SAME SERIES 1. Impasse and Interpretation Herbert Rosenfeld 2. Psychoanalysis and Discourse Patrick Mahony 3. The Suppressed Madness of Sane Men Marion Milner 5. Thinking, Feeling, and Being Ignacio Matte-Blanco 6. The Theatre of the Dream Salomon Resnik

NEW LIBRARY OF PSYCHOANALYSIS 4 General editor: David Tuckett

The Riddle of Freud JEWISH INFLUENCES ON HIS THEORY OF FEMALE SEXUALITY

ESTELLE ROITH

London and New York

First published in 1987 by Tavistock Publications Ltd First published in the USA by Tavistock Publications in association with Methuen, Inc. 29 West 35th Street, New York NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledges’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” © 1987 Estelle Roith Set by Hope Services, Abingdon All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Roith, Estelle The riddle of Freud: his Jewish background and his theories of female sexuality.— (The new library of psychoanalysis; 4). 1. Freud, Sigmund 2. Femininity (Psychology). I. Title II. Series 155.3′33′0924 BF175 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Roith, Estelle. The riddle of Freud. (New library of psychoanalysis; 4) Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Freud, Sigmund, 1856–1939—Views on female sexuality. 2. Freud, Sigmund, 1856–1939—Relations with women. 3. Oedipus complex. 4. Judaism—Influence. 5. Judaism and psychoanalysis. I. Title. II. Series. BF173.F85R64 1987 153.3′33 87–9967

ISBN 0-203-01398-0 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-415-21487-4(pbk)

For David Roith

Contents

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

The scope of the enquiry Freud’s theory of female sexuality Freud’s women disciples Freud’s Vienna Jewish family psychodynamics Freudian and rabbinic sexual doctrines If Oedipus was an Egyptian

1 14 27 47 68 95 115

Bibliography Indexes

133 144

‘Throughout history people have knocked their heads against the riddle of the nature of femininity.’ (Freud 1933, SE 22:113)

1 The scope of the enquiry Freud’s theories about women have proved highly controversial from the earliest days of psychoanalysis. With his insistence on penis envy as the central motivating force in the female’s development and character, he defined femininity entirely in relation to masculinity. Consequently he saw female sexuality in terms of a deficiency as opposed to assigning to it any intrinsic value of its own. Freud believed that as a result of this deficiency women tended to be intellectually handicapped, morally deficient, envious, and vain. They were also more passive and masochistic than men, had weaker sexual drives, and less self-esteem. At the same time, he emphasized the paternal power within the Oedipus complex in a way that neglected to an important extent the influence of the mother’s role in the development of the infant and young child. The theories have aroused a great deal of opposition on various grounds. Criticism has come from different sources, including many psychoanalysts, not least because they neglect important areas of male psychology, for example that of male, or indeed female, envy of and identification with feminine attributes. Various reasons have been invoked to explain what is usually seen as a strong bias on Freud’s part. It has been alleged that he persistently took behaviour acquired through experience, as well as sexual attributes, to be the function of biology and genetics, equating them with the respective activity and passivity of sperm and ova, penis and vagina. This attitude has been variously ascribed, by early and more recent critics, to the fact that he was a male product of patriarchal culture and, more particularly, to the fact that he was a Victorian who adhered to the popular stereotype (Horney 1924; Thompson 1941; Moulton 1974; Jahoda 1977). Another view accusing Freud of biologism looks to his early training and starting-point in neurology and Helmholtzian physics and the need to establish for psychoanalysis the biological and physiological infrastructure that he deemed would qualify it as a ‘science’. This latter view was given some support by Freud himself at different points in his work. Ernest Jones writes that it was in the Brücke Institute in Vienna, ‘an important part indeed of that far-reaching scientific movement best known as Helmholtz’s School of Medicine’ (E.Jones 1956, vol. 1:45) that Freud spent what he termed the happiest years of his youth. ‘It was there that he developed the particular physiological framework into which he tried later to cast his discoveries in psychology’ (E.Jones 1956, vol. 1:48). None of these arguments seems plausible when we consider the extent to which Freud was able to reject so many conventional scientific views of his day. Indeed explanations in terms of his Zeitgeist simply beg the question. In this book I shall try to show that Freud was profoundly influenced in his views by themes and conflicts surrounding certain aspects of his Jewish consciousness which, while frequently acknowledged and affirmed, were also often repressed and denied and

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have not been linked by him or by others to his theories of femininity. I believe that Freud clung to what was indeed the popular, stereotypical view of women but that he did this by virtue of a powerful, unconscious need on his part that was closely related to these themes and conflicts. This factor helped determine his preferences with regard to both the data on which he focused and his resulting theories. Thus Freud’s perception of women and femininity will be seen to be a function of a complex bias in which personal, social, and cultural factors are interrelated and in which certain overt and covert elements of his culture survived. It seems clear then that for any systematic understanding of the history of Freud’s theories of women we must take into account his familial and subcultural origins which, of course, were not those of the fin-de-siècle Viennese Christian bourgeoisie, as is so often assumed. Freud was a man of great cultivation and scholarship, a brilliant classicist and scientist, a spiritual son of Helmholtz, Brücke, and Charcot as well as Darwin and Frazer, and, he would himself have said, of Goethe and Schiller. But his first experience was that of the son of Jewish parents, both of whom were born in the kind of provincial ghetto or hamlet of Eastern Europe where Jews had lived, in the main, in isolated communities and in a state of strict religious orthodoxy for hundreds of years. Of the many studies made so far both of Freud’s background and origins and of his theories of sex and gender, none seems to have come to grips with the complex relationship between the two or to have looked at them together in any systematic way, an omission which Freud would probably have been the first to note in the case of another. The omission is one which is particularly remarkable in the case of the psychoanalytic profession since, as well as having important implications for the theories themselves, the internal relationship between the two areas—that of Freud’s Jewish origins and his theories of women—has implications for the history of the development of psychoanalysis as a whole. First, let us review some of the studies dealing with the influences and effects of a Jewish background on Freud (and on other Jews of his time) and a few of the many interpretations of his theories of female personality. It is not intended to provide here a detailed summary of these works but merely to indicate some of the views and interpretations that have guided my reading of Freud’s texts while, at the same time, introducing the ideas central to this study. Marthe Robert’s book, From Oedipus to Moses: Freud’s Jewish Identity, puts forward a powerful argument in favour of the Jewish influences in Freud’s background and thought. While his debts to science and to the classical and humanistic ideals of his education are apparent and acknowledged, Robert emphasizes that the primordial murdered father in Freud’s Oedipean drama was not a legendary Greek king but a gentle, unsuccessful Hasidic merchant from Galicia. She suggests that Freud’s professed disappointment and resentment concerning his father were not only to do with infantile sexual motives—that is the Oedipus complex—but also to do with his own situation of ‘perpetual material and moral insecurity’ poised as he was between cultures and communities (Robert 1977:117). Robert finds the relationship between the Jewish ‘spirit’ and the principles of psychoanalysis to be one so intimate that the latter could, as Freud himself hinted, only have been invented by a Jew (Robert 1977:5). But it seems that it had to be an ‘irreligious

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Jew’, that is one who was marginal to and, to a certain crucial extent, alienated from both his Jewish roots and the wider Gentile culture. It was by means of this position that Freud was able to devise psychoanalysis and establish in the process a new and distinct order of knowledge as well as bridging the conscious and unconscious parts of the mind (Robert 1977:134). One drawback of Robert’s affectionate and scholarly study is the insistence that Freud’s psychic drama was a consequence only of his intensely ambivalent feelings for his father. ‘Since his father was the main and perhaps the only source of his psychic difficulties, it was with his father that he had to begin’ (1977:122). I think that with this view, Robert falls victim to Freud’s own propaganda for, as I shall try to show, it was his unwillingness to confront the issues surrounding his relationship with his mother that led both to his neglect of the importance of the mother in his theoretical account of infantile development and to his subsequent failure to achieve a satisfactory theory of women. The idea of psychoanalysis as the product of an encounter between two cultures is one that John Murray Cuddihy has explored in great depth. His thesis is that Freud’s lifework was to make sense out of the trauma experienced by Jewish intellectuals in the process of emancipation who found themselves increasingly involved in Gentile society in political, economic, and cultural spheres while remaining excluded from the social sphere. Cuddihy believes that Freudianism—like Marxism and Reform Judaism a postEmancipation ideology—was designed to transform the ‘normative “social conflicts”’ of the awkward, modernizing Eastern European Jew into ‘cognitive, “scientific problems”’ (Cuddihy 1974:6). Psychoanalysis was concerned to show that behind the civility required by the rules of Gentile society, all men, like the uncouth upstart Jew, were pariahs since all were motivated by the untamed forces of the id. From this viewpoint, psychoanalysis is seen not only as documenting the process whereby the unsuitable affect ‘passes’ or fails to ‘pass’ the psychic censor but also in terms of the unruly Jews’ difficult domestication in the bourgeois-Christian West. Freud’s interest in the ‘discontents of civility’, Cuddihy writes, ‘preceded his concern with Civilization and its Discontents’ (1974:19). While I find that this represents an overemphasis of the social and political factors motivating the development of Freud’s thought, Cuddihy is one of very few writers to do more than remark on the significance of the fact that the psychoanalytic sexual doctrine originated in a meeting between two cultures whose sexual ideologies differed radically from each other in their most important respects. Nothing could be further removed from the spirit of any of the Christian Romantic movements than the attitude of suspicion and cynicism with which Judaism has traditionally regarded the aesthetic ideals of courtship and love and the ascetic ideal of Christian chastity. The whole phenomenon devolves on delayed consummation, Cuddihy argues, which Freud consistently deplored (1974:69). On the other hand, the Jewish sexual ethos has been described by Max Weber as being characterized by ‘the marked diminution of secular lyricism and especially of the erotic sublimation of sexuality’ (Weber 1964:257), whose basis he finds in the ‘naturalism of the Jewish ethical treatment of sexuality’. This, I suggest, is closely related to the ancient Jewish perception of women as spiritually and intellectually inferior. These features should be seen as important contributing factors to Freud’s sexual doctrine notwithstanding the undeniably important influence on him of classical, Romantic, and

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scientific currents of thought. The whole question of pleasure and the price to be paid for it by civilized man constitutes a moral as well as a physical and psychological problem that is of great doctrinal importance to Freud, and it is one that he confronts at many different levels in his individual and group psychologies and in his theories of culture. I believe that there is a difficulty on Freud’s part to comprehend eroticism in adult sexuality which is connected with a similar and closely related problem wtih the idea of pleasure. Thus there is a profound critique of romantic love embodied in his work and these attitudes, combined with his insistence on both the need for sexual gratification and the destructive potential of sexuality, are fundamental to his thought. Together they suggest that the main source of his sexual ethic lies in that of traditional Judaism. Some of these Jewish attitudes, particularly those surrounding women and romantic love, are illuminated by Theodor Reik in his book analysing Jewish humour (Reik 1962). This is a rare account of Jewish dispositions and traits employing a classical psychoanalytic framework. Its additional value lies in the fact that it also presents, sometimes inadvertently, the viewpoint of an Eastern European male who was also a member of Freud’s circle. Reik’s accounts of Jewish attitudes to women and to romantic love and his depiction of the Jewish mother’s relationship to her son add a great deal of support to my arguments. They emphasize the need—particularly in relation to what we know about Freud’s mother—to question the usual view of Freud as a ‘Victorian’ who merely addresses the contemporary female stereotype. The centuries-long Jewish emphasis on intellectual and spiritual values and the curious relationship that the Jew, partly as a result, has had with the body and its expressions, have important implications for Freud’s doctrines, especially for his theories of sex and gender. These values, some of which were both acknowledged and prized by him (Freud 1939, SE 23:115), are intimately bound up with the differential perception and treatment of the sexes in Judaism and with patterns of child-rearing in Jewish families, a topic that I shall explore in some detail. The problem of pleasure in the Jewish sexual ethic is also discussed by Ernest van den Haag, who explains that while the body is not seen as being in conflict with the spirit—an attitude that is often seen as positive compared with the Christian—neither is it thought to be in harmony with the intellect and this is an idea which is central to the understanding of Freud. In an important and longstanding tradition of Judaism, sexual needs were to be gratified at an early age and the body’s tensions thus defused, so that, it is claimed by some writers, sex became ritualized and a certain ‘joylessness’ ensued. Within this tradition physical pleasure for its own sake was always subordinate to that derived from study and prayer (van den Haag 1977:148–49). Thomas Szasz, Roslyn Lacks, and JeanPaul Sartre all find important implications in this quality of joylessness. Szasz argues that Jews have ‘spoiled eroticism’ by making marriage and procreation compulsory and that the prescribed and systematic nature of sexual pleasure in Juadaism finds its counterpart in the Christian reaction of voluntary chastity (Szasz 1981:111–12). Lacks also finds that the Jewish sexual regulations suggest and contribute to the proscription of sexual pleasure (Lacks 1980) while Sartre writes of the Jewish tendency to treat the body ‘rationally… without joy’ (Sartre 1965:121–23). The question of pleasure is also important to the study of Freud’s views of women because his theories of gender-differentiation rest on the issues of renunciation or

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gratification of instinctual impulses. Judith van Herik argues that the theories of gender and those of religion form the two parts of the Freudian theory of culture and are linked by this relationship to the question of illusionary wishes and thus to the pleasure and reality principles. The development of an objective super-ego and the capacity for sublimation—both prerequisites for social and cultural achievement—are traced, in Freud’s schema, to their source in the renunciation of Oedipal desires and, thus, to thinking according to the reality principle. This is possible and capable of achievement for the boy but not for the girl. Her orientation remains closer to pleasure and to wish than to reality, closer to fulfilment than to renunciation. She is less able to transcend infantile narcissism and the passive libidinal tie to paternal authority. Since Freud’s entire cultural endeavour, including the moral sense and the capacity for scientific achievement as well as his individual psychology, is dependent on the qualities and achievements that define ideal masculinity, his theories of gender are inseparable from his total system (van Herik 1982). In his celebrated book Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, Philip Rieff also notes the problem that Freud has with the idea of sexual pleasure. ‘Pleasure is defined, after the manner of Schopenhauer, as a negative phenomenon, the struggle to release oneself from unpleasure, or tension’ (Rieff 1979:155). Rieff points to a basic opposition between sex and intellect in Freud’s doctrine of human nature and to a ‘muffled aversion’ towards the former. This view of the Freudian idea of love as inherently subversive, with women represented as an anti-cultural force (148–85), is particularly significant in the light of some Eastern European rabbinic attitudes in Freud’s background. However, while Rieff allows that many of Freud’s most important qualities had their source in his ‘perennial Jewish character’, finding him to be so ‘intensely Jewish’ as to retain even more ‘loyalty to his Jewishness than his doctrine permits’ (258–62), in seeking for an explanation of Freud’s ‘misogyny’, he construes him as a representative of the ‘Russo-German’ type. This type of misogyny, Rieff explains, is based on the intellectual deficiency of women and on their anti-cultural and sensual role as opposed to the ‘Franco-British’ version in which women are idealized as innocent and high-minded and seen as sexually deficient (182). Rieff’s account of Freud’s attitude to femininity is detailed and illuminating but he neglects his own wealth of evidence in attributing it to an idiosyncratic nineteenth-century moral attitude. There is another reason why it is a mistake to attribute to Freud the ‘Russo-German’ type of misogyny. For while he assigns women an anti-cultural and even anarchic role as enemies of civilization (Freud 1930, SE 21:103–04), he also declares them to be sexually deficient. Women are characterized by a poor libidinal endowment (1908, SE 9:192); Freud writes, ‘it is our impression that more constraint has been applied to the libido when it is pressed into the service of the feminine function’ (1933, SE 22:131). Moreover, the curious mixture of aversion and respect, the punitive construction of woman’s existence and the phallic and patriarchal strains in the Freudian doctrine, seem to me to be far more evocative of certain influential rabbinic attitudes than of any nineteenth-century European movement. Of course, the viewpoints of these rabbis represents just one aspect of traditional Judaism’s orientation to women and sex. Also, they are, as usual, mediated by conscious and unconscious checks and balances so that the actual role and function of women

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within Judaism is a far more complex matter. Judaism, like most religions of antiquity, has oscillated between the idealization of women and the feminine and their designation as inferior in the order of creation and society. This ambivalence represents an important strand in the history of Jewish attitudes to women. I will explore this topic in later chapters and give some account of the differential treatment of the sexes in the Eastern European Jewish family. Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog’s unique study, and the somewhat less idealized and nostalgic one by Landes and Zborowski, furnished invaluable data on the culture of the now-destroyed shtetl (ghetto or hamlet), the kind in which both Freud’s parents were born and raised (Zborowski and Herzog 1962). Freud’s position as the first-born son of a Jewish mother, who was herself raised along conventional Eastern European Jewish lines, must be deeply significant for his perception of parent—child relationships and sex and gender roles. Thus the Jewish family structure must have played a far more important role in the formulation of the Oedipus complex than Freud himself appears to have appreciated. Indeed his idealization of the mother-son relationship, in comparison with that between husband and wife, resembles a typical Jewish pattern far more closely than that of the patriarchal German family (Meadow and Vetter 1967:151–65). It is surely ironic that, although Freud was able to reconstitute the universal drama of childhood only by means of his own typically Jewish one, psychoanalysis has nevertheless retained so little understanding of the situation that gave it birth (Robert 1977:134–35). One reason for this, according to Mortimer Ostow, is that in the psychoanalytic movement, religious belief was traditionally considered as evidence of neurosis, and dedication to universalistic humanitarian as opposed to sectarian beliefs became the ‘unspoken convention’ among Jewish analysts. Judaism was also regarded as a political impediment to the advancement of psychoanalysis, as is clear from Freud’s conviction that without Jung, it would become ‘a Jewish national affair’. There is no doubt as to the strength of his feelings on this matter: ‘Rest assured’, he wrote to Karl Abraham, ‘that if my name were Oberhuber, in spite of everything my innovations would have met with far less resistance’ (Ostow 1982:12–19). The rationale for ‘playing down’ the Jewish elements was a part of the earliest psychoanalytic ideology and it is one that may have been inherited, albeit often unconsciously, by successive generations of psychoanalysts. Ostow, for example, writes of an ‘unspoken gentleman’s agreement’ at his training institute in New York not to discuss Jewishness, ‘except to demonstrate to an occasional religious patient that his piety is a sign of neurosis’ (1982:150). It is probably no coincidence, therefore, that Ernest Jones’s monumental biography presents a singularly two-dimensional view of Freud the Jew in spite of the fact that Jones was well-acquainted with members of Freud’s family including his mother. For example he makes the surprising observation that the Torah, which Jacob Freud was ‘fond of reading’, was a ‘book of Jewish philosophy rather than of religion’ and this is taken as evidence that Freud was brought up in ‘an almost entirely secular home atmosphere’ (E.Jones 1974, vol. 3:375). And, although Jones notes that ‘Freud himself was certainly conversant with all Jewish customs and festivals’ (1956, vol. 1:21), he finds Freud’s claim not to be able to recognize a Menorah—the seven-branch candelabrum that is the oldest and most used motif in Jewish ritual art and furnishing—in a Roman

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catacomb evidence of his ‘unfamiliarity with synagogues’ (1958, vol. 2:40). Jones was, of course, himself involved in the movement’s early struggles for recognition. He may also have been so closely identified with the biography that, as Veszy-Wagner suggests, it partly served as his own (Sulloway 1980:484), for his acceptance of some of the contradictory aspects of Freud’s self-representations is often striking. Rieff comments on this topic that ‘although a Jew, and therefore one for whom, as son, the relation to the mother must have been especially fraught with meaning, Freud achieved a notable repression of it in his own self-analysis—a repression which Ernest Jones accepts without question in his life of Freud’ (Rieff 1979:185 n.). Freud’s relationship with his ‘typical Polish Jewess’ mother (M.Freud in Fraenkel 1967:202) was especially fraught with meaning and the reasons for Jones’s choosing to accept its repression are probably related to certain qualities and overtones that Freud himself wished not to emphasize. Clearly there are mysteries surrounding the whole issue and Jones’s rather reverential account does nothing to clear them up. I have proposed that Freud’s conflicting feelings towards his Jewish identity, in which essential traces of his native culture survived, could not be surmounted by him in his perception of women. These feelings were partly a function of certain phenomena, not at all confined to Freud, that devolved on the experience of social and cultural marginality, both to the Jewish and to the wider, dominant culture of that day. The peculiar historical position in the modern secular world of the Jewish intellectual, in the process of emancipation, rejecting sectarian rituals and beliefs has been described by Hannah Arendt in several works. While she does not focus specifically on Freud, her understanding of these conflicts and also of the creative potential engendered by the marginal status of these ‘conscious pariahs’ whose intelligence is interested enough to start an ‘emancipation of their own’ (Arendt 1978:68), is as indispensable to my account of Freud as it is to those of Kafka and Proust. It was this ‘pariah’ Jew who, since he was not bound by Gentile society’s rules of discretion and decency, could say aloud what was forbidden by— in Freud’s own phrase to Pastor Pfister—the ‘vice of…virtue’ (quoted in Cuddihy 1974:93). Another feature of Jewish emancipation which is crucial to this study of the conflicting elements in Freud’s personality is the hostility of many assimilated Germanspeaking Jews towards their Yiddish-speaking counterparts from the ghettos and hamlets of Eastern Europe, a hostility that involved attempts to deny and disavow essential aspects of their own personalities (Benjamin 1970:30–7). Some of the more puzzling and contradictory features about Freud, such as the controversial nature of his commitment to Zionism and the question of his knowledge of Yiddish and Hebrew, must be seen in this context. The question of Freud’s social and cultural marginality is also important for reasons that are more directly concerned with his theories of sex and gender difference. It has been suggested that the whole question of masculine gender identity is likely to be problematic in populations and communities that have become marginal and that the traditional Jewish emphasis on scholarship and prayer might have posed additional and specific problems for the emancipating Jewish male. Percy S.Cohen has proposed that this emphasis on the ‘culture of learning’ enabled Jewish males to sustain a cultural identity as well as permitting a sense of superiority that effectively complemented and compensated for their sense of vulnerability. Thus the values and status inherent in the

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physically passive, scholar ideal safeguarded the pre-emancipation Jew’s sense of masculinity (P.S.Cohen 1979, personal interview). The Jew aiming at citizenship of the world outside ghetto and shtetl, however, found that he lacked a tradition or cultural stereotype for the model of masculinity employed by that world. The idea that the ancient Jewish emphasis on spiritual and intellectual values might be problematic in this way has a long history that may be traced through an extremely wide range of sources spanning writers as far apart as Spinoza (quoted in Strauss 1965:4–5), Haim Nachman Bialik (quoted in Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz 1980:330–32), Otto Weininger (quoted in Himmelfarb 1973:10–11), Mary McCarthy (quoted in Ellmann 1979:56–7), Ernest Hemingway (1976:43), and Philip Roth (1977), among others. I shall have less to say on the responses to and the interpretations of the Freudian theories themselves. They have generated a vast literature for, as I’ve already noted, they proved from the beginning to be the most controversial part of the Freudian canon. My concern is not so much with their rights or wrongs, although I do not agree with them in important respects, nor with their clinical or theoretical utility, but with the links between them and Freud’s background and personality. However, I shall examine some of the more controversial aspects of the theories of femininity and the early opposition to them as well as some recent criticisms and interpretations. While these theories remain the most controversial part of Freud’s work, they nevertheless continue to be reflected in the standard psychoanalytic literature. Yet many psychoanalysts convey the impression that they do not accurately reflect their views. Thus contemporary attitudes seem to be significantly at odds with the standard literature (Fliegel 1973) and it is therefore interesting to note the seemingly paradoxical position occupied by a radical feminist such as Juliet Mitchell. (Mitchell is now a practising analyst but was not when her book Psychoanalysis and Feminism was first published, in 1974.) Mitchell argues for an acceptance of the Freudian theories of women virtually in their entirety. At the same time, she accuses other feminists of distorting these theories, primarily by implicitly denying unconscious processes. In rejecting Freud’s theories on the grounds of patrocentric bias, Mitchell claims, feminists are rejecting the only effective tool for the analysis and understanding of that bias and of the social organization of sexuality; ‘if psychoanalysis is phallocentric, it is because the human social order…is patrocentric’ (in Mitchell and Rose 1982:23). Thus ‘the myth that Freud re-wrote as the Oedipus complex epitomizes man’s entry’ into what he regarded as the order of all human culture (Mitchell 1975:377). The Oedipus complex, which for Mitchell as for Freud is the nucleus of neurosis, assumes its form from exchange relationships and incest taboos as expressed in our particular society within the ‘specific context of the nuclear family’. She argues that man enters into his humanity with the dissolution of the complex, that is with the renunciation of his incestuous desires. In western industrialized society and particularly within the middle classes, the proximity and centrality of the nuclear family puts a special load on those desires. The relationships between two parents and children assume a dominant role unknown in previous, less complex kinship systems. For this reason, Mitchell finds, the myth for western man takes on its own special shades of meaning which Freud was investigating within the Viennese bourgeoisie when

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he discovered its universality (1975:380). The law that he discovered was the one by means of which all boys and girls take their place in the world. For the girl this law dictates the permanent deference to the paternal phallic power; for the boy, a temporary deference while he awaits his own phallic majority. In this way, Mitchell reiterates and reinforces the elements in Freud’s theory most commonly found controversial. She emphasizes Freud’s great discovery that the achievement of gender as opposed to sexual identity in humans of either sex cannot be taken for granted. She goes on to support his view that femininity is, in fact, never satisfactorily constructed. Since it is always a secondary acquisition it remains essentially unachieved; its implications repudiated by both sexes, for since the girl is not ‘heir to the phallus’ she cannot aspire to take the father’s place and must submit to his law (404–05). One of Mitchell’s objections to the ‘object relations’ modification of Freud’s theory is that it not only assigns the infant girl her femininity as a primary formation but that it does so, as it logically must in this model, at a stage of development before Oedipal events could have occurred (Rossdale 1984, public lecture).1 Mitchell stresses that Freud’s theory is always a social one with the various formations of the Oedipus complex seen as symbolic representations of the patriarchal form of social organization. She consistently objects to what she sees as the reduction of his theories to biologism and she emphasizes instead a linguistic construction of the psyche. In this, as in the views described above, she employs a reading of Freud that has been influenced by the French school of Jacques Lacan. Consistent with this position, she dismisses the theory of instincts as insignificant, arguing that its inadequacy testifies to the contempt that Freud himself felt for it and for the whole idea of the order of libidinal stages (Mitchell 1975:27). One difficulty with this interpretation is that it ignores the fact that Freud himself attached a great deal of significance to biological and physiological factors even expressing the ‘urgent need’ for future research in these fields on which psychoanalysis would be able to build further (Freud 1925, SE 20:56–7). Indeed Freud saw biology as ‘truly a land of unlimited possibilities’ and expected from it ‘the most surprising information’ bringing answers that could ‘blow away the whole of our artificial structure of hypothesis’ (1920, SE 18:60). Nor did he, as can be inferred from this, ever distinguish entirely between anatomical and psychic sexual characteristics. For Freud, biology provided the ‘bedrock’ for the psyche: the Oedipus complex was always a psychobiological given from its beginnings in the days of his friendship with Wilhelm Fliess, while ‘the repudiation of femininity’ was a ‘biological fact’ (1937, SE 23:252). Since for Mitchell, however, 1 The

term ‘object relations’ is now used in both a confused and a confusing way in psychoanalysis. In this context it designates the individual’s subjective mode of relation to his world, that is the way in which the individual, from earliest infancy, apprehends and relates both consciously and unconsciously to the objects within his internal and external worlds.

Freud’s unconscious is solely ‘a concept of mankind’s transmission and inheritance of his social (cultural) laws’ (Mitchell 1975:403), she is able to look to a political solution to the problem of the human entry into culture and the establishment of distinctions. The

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overthrow of capitalism together with a separate and essential feminist revolution will eventually permit ‘new structures’ to be represented in the unconscious, she writes (413– 15). Another problem here is Mitchell’s repeated insistence that dissenters from Freud’s theory are unconsciously denying the unconscious. A considerable number of them are certainly doing that, and Mitchell’s analysis of them is impressive; but many critics of Freud, both inside and outside the field of psychoanalysis, accept, as she does, the existence, the mode of operation, and the power over human beings of unconscious mental processes. To cry ‘resistance’ at all such opposition—something that Freud himself often resorted to—reduces psychoanalysis to the level of dogma. One final point in this discussion of Mitchell’s work concerns her remark addressed to feminist dissidents that Freud’s observations about the nature of femininity relate to ‘how femininity is lived in the mind’ (Mitchell 1975:7). If the unconscious is only conceded, Mitchell strongly implies, then Freud’s formulations will be seen to be correct. Some objectors to Freud’s theory, however, feel that he was only sometimes describing how femininity was lived in the mind. In this book I try to show that some of Freud’s views arise from some unexamined assumptions on his part and from a highly defensive stance in relation to women that helped direct and shape them; in other words from how females and femininity were experienced in his mind. In marked contrast to Mitchell, Donald Meltzer, from a Kleinian perspective, finds that Freud ‘does not allow sufficiently for the possibility of the little girl’s positive motivation of identification with her mother’. The child may turn lovingly to a father who is the object loved by mother, Meltzer observes, as well as with feelings of disappointment, envy, and revenge (Meltzer 1978:135). He also finds in Freud the related ‘preconception that femininity is essentially passive and derivative’, which he sees as being characteristic of ‘Hellenic, Judaic and Christian thought’ (74). This is an interesting observation in our context since it highlights the vagueness of the ideas surrounding the similarities between the Jewish and the Christian sexual ethics and their relationship to the Freudian doctrine. Of Freud’s attitude towards sexuality in general, Meltzer finds that it remained ‘instinct-bound’ to the end. ‘Its essential function was the relief of sexual tension, upon which biological function and meaningful object relations might be superimposed.’ Meltzer’s point that the great limitation of Freud’s model of sexuality is the reduction of affects or feelings to quantitative rather than qualitative factors (1978:42–4) is one that I find to be of central importance in the study of the Jewish influences on Freud, since the Eastern European Jewish sexual tradition often makes a similar emphasis. From a quite different psychoanalytic viewpoint, Roy Schafer brings a similar objection to the Freudian theory of femininity. Schafer emphasizes the unlikelihood that the girl’s feminine motivation is constituted entirely from negative and hostile factors. He notes that Freud did not seem to be able to conceive of the possibility of an example of an ‘active, nurturant mother who has her own sources of pride and consolation’ (Schafer 1974:464). Indeed Freud could not conceive of such a mother for, in his model, motherhood is, at best, compensatory for previous disappointments. Moreover, a mother’s main source of pride and consolation, he thought, must be her son, for it is in relation to a male child that she ideally achieves the longed-for penis. From this viewpoint, the daughter would seem to be characterized and motivated by negative

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factors. Schafer points out that Freud’s attention was so fixed on the implications of the missing penis that he defined female personality entirely in terms of the phallic phase to the neglect of pre-phallic development. In Freud’s theory, there is paradoxically an ‘implicit but powerful evolutionary value system’ in which the procreative and therefore genital pleasures are valued yet it is precisely those values whose inevitability Freud has taught us to question. For Freud’s revolutionary insight was that human sexuality is ‘psychosexuality’, a concept that ‘excludes a sexuality of blind instincts culminating in propagating the species’. Schafer believes that this contradiction explains the unsatisfactory nature of the theory: ‘anatomy had become Freud’s destiny’, he writes (1974:468–76). Perhaps the most contentious feature of this most contentious of theories is one that we have already seen introduced in the discussion of Mitchell and it concerns the issue of vaginal awareness in children that is crucial to the classical theory of sexual development of both boy and girl. Writers such as Ernest Jones, Karen Horney, Melanie Klein, and Karl Abraham have argued for the presence in the young child of an awareness of the vagina. I shall discuss some of their theories in the following chapter. Here I shall follow a discussion by Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel (1976) to show one example of what is clearly an inconsistency in Freud’s thinking by virtue of which he ignores, indeed he appears to repress, his own clinical evidence in order to cling to theories that are contradictory to it. The issue is a crucial one for if the infant and young girl does experience vaginal sensations and if she has—albeit an unconscious-awareness of her vagina, then her Oedipal wish for the penis of her father and for his child would be a primary, heterosexual one and her femininity too would be primary. The girl would be ‘born’ and not ‘made’ and her sexuality would be based not on a sequence of lacks but on a primary unconscious representation of herself as female. Therefore penis envy would be a secondary formation. At the same time, awareness of the vagina’s existence in the boy would upset the theory that the fear of castration, which derives from the sight of the female genital, is all the more powerful because the child is ignorant of it, for the missing, lost genital rather than a different one is at the root of this fear. It should be emphasized that Freud was referring to unconscious as well as conscious awareness in both sexes. For the girl, ‘the vagina is virtually non-existent…until puberty’ (Freud 1931, SE 21:228), he wrote, whereas since the boy imagines that all people have penises, fantasies of penetration cannot be present. Chasseguet-Smirgel examines Freud’s case history of Little Hans and finds support for the view that Hans knew unconsciously and, at times, consciously about the existence of vaginas, uteruses, and penetration. What is remarkable, however, is that Freud himself seems to be on the verge of recognizing this awareness and manages to avoid it only by using contradictory and conflicting conjectures and conclusions. He writes: ‘Some kind of vague notion was struggling in the child’s mind of something he might do with his mother by means of which his taking possession of her would be consummated;…he found certain pictorial representations…violent and

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forbidden… fitting in most remarkably well with the hidden truth. We can only say that they were symbolic phantasies of intercourse…. The widdler must have something to do with it, for his own grew excited whenever he thought of these things and it must be a big widdler too, bigger than Hans’ own…he could only suppose that it was a question of…smashing something, of making an opening into something, of forcing a way into an enclosed space.’ (quoted in Chasseguet-Smirgel 1976:278) Freud’s conclusion here is surprising: ‘yet he could not solve the problem, for within his experience, no such thing existed as his widdler required.’ Freud’s conjecture of Hans’s wish for penetration, and of his ‘obscure’ and ‘premonitory’ awareness of the vagina, probably represents a far too literal and specific idea of a child’s experience of sexuality but what Chasseguet-Smirgel draws attention to is the fact that it contradicts his own theory of infantile sexuality. Freud refuses to draw the logical conclusion from his evidence—yet elsewhere, he attributes to the power of the dream the ability to discover and anticipate all organic states (the dream’s ‘diagnostic aptitude’) and he also postulates the existence of innate primary fantasies. It seems illogical and inconsistent that the unconscious should be blocked with reference to the vagina. One might ask even more pertinently why the girl’s unconscious in particular should be blocked in this way? Little Hans does, however, deny conscious knowledge of the female genital and this ‘sexual phallic monism’—the belief in one kind of genital—should be seen, according to Chasseguet-Smirgel, as a child’s defence against his overwhelming helplessness and dependence on the early mother imago. However Freud himself seems to be utilizing a similar defence. Sexual phallic monism seems to be employed in the whole Freudian concept of the penis as the ‘only proper genital’ as well as in the theory that the clitoris must be renounced as a sexual organ. Karen Horney said of children’s repression of the knowledge of the vagina: ‘the undiscovered vagina is a vagina denied’ (Horney 1933:57– 70). Chasseguet-Smirgel writes that Freud attributes to man a ‘natural scorn’ for women for their lack of a penis. In her clinical experience, she says, she finds that underlying such scorn there is invariably a powerful unconscious maternal imago that is envied and terrifying (Chasseguet-Smirgel 1976:283). Jones has suggested that ‘in Freud’s earliest years there had been extremely strong motives for concealing some important phase of his development—perhaps even from himself. I would venture to surmise’, he writes, ‘it was his deep love for his mother’ (E.Jones 1958, vol. 2:456). This assessment is questioned by Marjorie Brierley, among others, who wonders if Freud’s discovery of the Oedipus complex, with its hatred of the father and love for the mother, was not facilitated by the need to defend against ‘earlier and more intolerable conflicts relating to the beloved mother herself?’ (Brierley 1956:480). Of course, since Freud analysed himself, ‘the source of the core’ of the psychoanalytic theories of infantile sexuality are ‘at the mercy of his resistances’ (Cioffi 1979) and he himself was aware of some of the inherent problems. Indeed the truly astonishing thing about Freud’s heroic ‘voyage into the underworld’ is that he was able to progress as far as he did in spite of the fact that certain lines of thought were blocked for him in this way (Chasseguet-Smirgel 1976:281).

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Nevertheless, considering the fact that the psychoanalytic enterprise began with the problems of women, Freud’s lack of curiosity about them (Schafer 1974:474), in that he failed to ask more and different questions, is remarkable. Indeed, it seems reasonable to ask why he so assiduously averted his gaze from some of these questions. What did he have to gain from this conscientious avoidance? A most persuasive answer is suggested by Chasseguet-Smirgel. She proposes that the woman depicted in Freud’s model is ‘exactly the opposite of the primal maternal imago’ in clinical findings, the opposite of the mother known to the unconscious (Chasseguet-Smirgel 1976:281). The theory of sexual phallic monism and ignorance of the vagina originate in the need to ease the pain of the universal narcissistic wound derived from infantile helplessness and inadequacy in relation to both the archaic and the Oedipal mothers. Thus Freud’s model—and his theory as a whole—systematically reverses an intolerable human reality. In this book I shall try to show that the ‘natural scorn’ for women that Freud attributed to all men was indeed accompanied by a terrifying, envied, and seductive maternal image of his own and that his devaluation of women was partly a function of this formation. However, the evidence as a whole reveals that, as his parents’ son and as a firstgeneration Viennese Jew, Freud’s theories about women were influenced to an important extent by a complex bias in which social as well as personal factors are interrelated. I believe that they should be seen and assessed in this light.

2 Freud’s theory of female sexuality In his final major essay on female sexuality, Freud complains that his knowledge is ‘incomplete and fragmentary (1933, SE 22:135) yet he was quite adamant about certain of his postulates. The most notable of these as we’ve already seen concerned the fundamental question of whether femininity—the female’s own sense of sexual identity—was innate and therefore present at the outset, or whether it was acquired secondarily. The issue of vaginal awareness in the infant girl was therefore a central one since its presence would indicate a primary psychological sexual distinction. Freud believed that no such awareness existed and that any sensations perceived derived from the clitoris or from the anus and not from the vagina: ‘the vagina is virtually non-existent and possibly does not produce sensations until puberty’ (1931, SE 21:228). He continued, ‘the main genital occurences of childhood must take place in relation to the clitoris’. Since the clitoris was regarded by him as an organ that was inherently masculine in both its psychological and biological representations, the small girl was seen by him as intrinsically masculine. ‘We are now obliged to recognise that the little girl is a little man’, Freud wrote (1933, SE 22:118). ‘At the following stage of infantile genital organisation, which we now know about, maleness exists, but not femaleness. The antithesis here is between having a male genital and being castrated’ (1923, SE 19:145). The central question for Freud therefore is how does the girl go about changing her erotogenic zone and object in order to ‘pass from her masculine phase to the feminine one to which she is biologically destined?’ (1933, SE 22:119). Some writers from within the psychoanalytic profession have observed that a curious situation obtains in relation to the theories of female sexuality. For example Fliegel notes (1973:385) that while major propositions of the theory are now often found to be untenable, the theory itself has remained dominant and is often employed in practice and in clinical literature. Irene Fast writes that ‘as recently as 1977, the editor of the… Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association begins a paper with, “Models of female development can be surveyed from a number of vantage points, e.g. masochism, passivity, penis envy. I have chosen masochism …as a route to exploring the psychology of women”.’ (Fast 1979:444) The Freudian theories of femininity were found by Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel to ‘have endured in spite of the opposing clinical material which has come to light, in spite of the undeniable contradictions these theories reveal, and finally in

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spite of those theories which have lent a completely different dimension to female sexuality.’ (Chasseguet-Smirgel 1976:275) We have already noted Chasseguet-Smirgel’s explanation for this situation in Chapter 1. Another reason for it is suggested by the following statement on this topic by Heinz Kohut and this represents an example of what appears to be a refusal on the part of many psychoanalysts to confront the possibility of Freudian bias. Kohut writes: ‘The obvious biological truth seems to be that the female must have primary female tendencies and that femaleness cannot possibly be explained as a retreat from disappointed maleness. It is yet improbable that Freud’s opinion was due to a circumscribed blindspot that limited his powers of observation. His refusal to change his view on female sexuality was much more likely due to his reliance on clinical evidence—as it was then open to him.’ (Kohut 1959:479) Fliegel, commenting on this statement writes, ‘Thus we have a… forceful disavowal of Freud’s formulation, associated with defending Freud from accusations of antifeminist bias on the grounds of his commitment to empiricism’ (1973:398n.). However, Freud himself admits, on occasion, that empiricism was not always his guide: ‘But now everything has changed’, he wrote in 1925 when critically ill with cancer, ‘The time before me is limited…my opportunities for making fresh observations are not so numerous. If I think I see something new, I am uncertain whether I can wait for it to be confirmed’ (1925, SE 19:249). One consequence of this situation is that since the 1930s there has never been a fully comprehensive debate within the profession on Freud’s theories of femininity although there have been revisions, reformulations, and criticisms; nor has a coherent alternative theory been produced. A leading American analyst has said, in a discussion of Freud’s psychology of women, that while major theoretical and technical advances ‘beyond Freud have been made by his psychoanalytic descendants, his basic assumptions, indeed the very mode of his thought, are still very much with us in modern psychoanalysis’ (Schafer in Blum 1977:333). Yet this analyst finds that Freud’s theories of women do ‘injustice to both his psychoanalytic method and his clinical findings’ (359). On the other hand, exhaustive attention has been devoted by psychoanalysts to other theoretical issues. Major shifts have ensued; emphases have changed and have been faithfully and continuously reflected in the standard literature. The reasons for this strange state of affairs within the psychoanalytic community are extremely complex and factors connected with both the history of the psychoanalytic movement and Freud’s personal life are involved. However, following Fliegel’s reconstruction of the original controversy, as well as Juliet Mitchell’s lucid account (1975), I intend in this chapter to explore briefly the history and context of two central aspects of the original controversy—those of penis envy and vaginal awareness in the young girl—for their shadow lies over most of the subsequent work. Because he defined pre-pubertal sexuality in girls as being ‘of a wholly masculine character’, Freud originally thought that it was a masculine sexuality that was ‘overtaken

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by repression’ during that time. At puberty the girl must ‘successfully’ transfer her erotogenic focus from the clitoris to the vagina. This period of repression, not shared by boys, enables the girl to discard part of her infantile masculinity and prepares her for the change of genital zones. A period of anaesthesia characterizes this phase of vaginal insensitivity, which ‘may become permanent’ if the clitoris remains libidinized. The vagina becomes fully libidinized through the experience of coital sex when the clitoris continues to function but only as transmitter of excitation to the vagina. Thus ‘pine shavings can be kindled in order to set a log of harder wood on fire’, Freud wrote. It is this necessary renunciation, he thought, with its concomitant repression which is responsible for women’s ‘greater proneness…to neurosis’ (1905, SE 7:219–21). In 1908 Freud postulated the girl’s envy of the penis. The little girl’s interest in the penis soon ‘falls under the sway of envy. They feel themselves unfairly treated…and when a girl declares that “she would rather be a boy”, we know what deficiency her wish is intended to put right’ (1908, SE 9:218). Here Freud describes the primary stimulus for the child’s sexual interest as being aroused by the problem of where babies come from and he also maintains this view in his Introductory Lectures in 1917 (1917, SE 16:318). However, in 1907 this question was placed second to that of the distinction between the sexes (1907, SE 9:135), and in 1925 he finally abandoned the ‘curiosity about babies’ formula entirely in the case of girls, in favour of the castration complex as the stimulus for the girl’s feminine development. In the 1908 paper, however, Freud finds that erotic urethral fantasies are an attempt to compensate for the ‘deficiency’ on the part of the girl. The boy’s castration complex is mentioned here for the first time, in relation to the fear of the punishment threatened for masturbation, a fear that is recalled upon seeing the female genital. The castration complex was to undergo some crucial changes over the following years but at this stage, as defined in relation to the boy, it is grounded in that theory of children that consists ‘in attributing to everyone, including females, the possession of a penis,…the penis is the leading erotogenic zone…little girls fully share their brother’s opinion of it’ (1908, SE 9:215–18). Freud’s conviction as to ignorance of the vagina in both sexes prepares the way for his later elaboration of the castration complex into the focal point for the development of human sexuality, psychology, and indeed of culture. It becomes the ‘primal phantasy’ when finally located within the Oedipus complex as well as the source and motive force behind neurosis: ‘I could not name any neurosis in which this complex is not to be met with’, he wrote in 1926 (SE 14:93n.). In 1914, however, penis envy is simply the female counterpart of the castration complex on whose ‘narrow basis’, Freud states, he refuses to ground ‘the genesis of neurosis’ (1914, SE 14:92). In 1916 he takes Shakespeare’s crippled Richard III’s opening soliloquy

‘I that am rudely stamp’d… I, that am curtail’d of this fair proportion, Cheated of feature…by dissembling Nature.’ as the basic human paradigm (Freud 1916, SE 14:314–15). Woman’s sense of ‘having

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been damaged in infancy’, and her subsequent reproach against her mother, is simply the female version of the eternal human demand made against nature for ‘reparation’ for the inevitable narcissistic wounds of infancy. A year later, in the Transformation of Instinct’, penis envy is more closely specified. Thus ‘we not infrequently meet with the repressed wish to possess a penis…. We call this wish “envy for a penis” and include it in the castration complex’. Here Freud extends the concept to cover the symbolic equation of faeces=penis=baby but accidental factors such as the birth of siblings are also involved. The outcome is the wish to take a ‘man as an appendage to the penis’ and thus to fulfil the female function (1917, SE 17:129). In his essay, ‘The Taboo of Virginity’, Freud writes that envy of the penis is also ‘included’ in the castration complex. The girl experiences narcissistic, urethral, erotic fantasies and hostility towards her brothers preceding her Oedipal object-choice. In this paper Freud describes the unconscious wish on the part of a newly married woman to castrate her husband during intercourse so as to retain the penis. Behind penis envy here, Freud detects that primal resentment of men that he invokes at intervals throughout his work, often as in this case, in the context of the women’s emancipation movement. The classical Oedipus constellation is loosely delineated: ‘The husband is almost always so to speak only a substitute, never the right man; it is another man—in typical cases the father—’ on to whom the infantile fixation of libido is allocated (1917, SE 11:203–05). In 1924 the castration complex is assigned its central role within the Oedipus complex, initiating the girl’s entry into it through the wish for the father’s penis. Only now does the term ‘penis envy’ gain its full Freudian meaning. The heterosexual orientation takes place and the feminine position is established, Freud finds, when the girl changes her erotogenic zones from clitoris to vagina and her love object from mother to father. She must accept her castration and the desire for the paternal penis in place of one of her own (1924, SE 19:173–79). Later she will accept it from her husband; ultimately and ideally, from her infant son. The editorial note to the 1924 essay (172) indicates that this is the first of Freud’s works to emphasize the differences in the psychosexual development of the sexes. By 1919, however, in the paper ‘A Child is Being Beaten’, he had expressed some dissatisfaction with the ‘precise analogy’ of the Oedipus complex in girls and boys: ‘the expectation of there being a complete parallel was mistaken’, he wrote (SE 17:196), although in 1921 (SE 18:106) and as late as 1923 in ‘The Ego and the Id’ (SE 19:32), the parallel formulation was repeated. In 1924, however, although the early genital organization in girls is phallic ‘these things cannot be the same as they are in boys’ (SE 19:177–78). While complaining that the material in relation to girls ‘for some incomprehensible reason is far more obscure and full of gaps’ (a fact that he later ascribed to the difficulties for male analysts in eliciting the maternal transference), castration is seen here by Freud to be ‘accepted as an accomplished fact’. Although it is not extrapolated by the small girl to women and, therefore, not seen by her as a sexual characteristic it is firmly welded at this stage to her Oedipus complex and culminates in her desire to bear her father the compensatory child. The girl ‘has “come off badly” and she feels this as a wrong done to her and as a ground for inferiority’, Freud writes, but having accepted castration and aspiring to replace her mother with her father, her Oedipus complex ‘is much simpler

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than that of the small bearer of the penis’ (1924, SE 19:178). The boy, on the other hand, is trapped on the horns of his Oedipal dilemma: he must deal with the threat of castration if he pursues his masculine libidinal aim for his mother or if he takes her place with his father. Since he has, by now, recognized the fact of female castration, he sees that either alternative would cost him his penis and he ‘turns away’ from the Oedipus complex and from his love-relations with both parents in favour of a masculine identification with his father. At this stage of his work Freud also finds that the girl’s Oedipus complex may be ‘gradually given up’ for lack of fulfilment. However, certain resulting character traits are deemed inevitable for, with castration ‘an accomplished fact’, there is less motive both for super-ego formation and for the abandonment of the infantile genital organization. (By this stage, the super-ego’s functions include those of conscience, as well as the formation of ideals and, therefore, its strength and independence determine the motivation for cultural achievement.) However, Freud is notably lacking in dogmatism here compared with the position he is soon to adopt. Feminine development is more the product of the girl’s ‘upbringing and of intimidation from outside’ than is that of the boy. He allows that these relations and events, while typical, are not invariable; that there might be normal variations for both sexes and is even willing to re-examine his theories in the light of Otto Rank’s ‘interesting study’ on birth trauma (1924, SE 19:179). This summary represents the bare bones of Freud’s theory of sexual difference up to 1925. Emendations, revisions, and additions were introduced arising both from Freud’s own researches and reformulations and from other analytical findings. I have deliberately refrained from using the addenda, often contained in footnotes and additional sections, that were employed by Freud when subsequent editions of his early works were published, in order to show the chronological progression of his ideas. Moreover, it is important to recognize that many of these ideas, notably the major case histories, were either formed or confirmed during clinical work and were subsequently developed and reformulated. The Little Hans case, for example (1909), was discussed, in part, in the essay on ‘The Sexual Enlightenment of Children’ (1907), and forms the basis of the paper ‘On the Sexual Theories of Children’ (1908), as well as featuring in other major works. Little Hans’s successful resolution of his castration complex came to assume a more important role in the theories of sexuality when located within the final structure of the Oedipus complex. Likewise, the idea of bisexuaiity, which originated with Wilhelm Fliess, was being mooted in 1899 (Bonaparte, A.Freud, and Kris 1977:289), acknowledged as a factor that might be significant in the Dora case in 1901 (Freud 1905, SE 7:114), and seen as essential to any ‘understanding of the sexual manifestations…in men and women’ in 1905 (SE 7:220). It was worked through further from 1910 to 1914 during the analysis of the Wolf Man whose waverings between masculine and feminine positions and active and passive aims (1918, SE 17:118) prompted insights into the ‘inverted’ or ‘negative’ Oedipus complex. The idea of the universality of bisexuality led to the later elaboration of the ‘more complete Oedipus complex, which is twofold, positive and negative’ (1923, SE 19:33). By 1924, although the processes of the different Oedipus complexes in the two sexes were still held to be ‘precisely analogous’ (1923, SE 19:32), the way was paved for the realization of early differences between the two sexes, the investigations of

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the pre-Oedipal phase and the jettisoning of the masculine Oedipal model for the girl. In his 1925 essay Freud noted that he was ‘no longer alone’. There was ‘now an eager crowd of fellow-workers’. This paper is described by Freud’s editors as presenting a ‘first complete re-assessment of Freud’s views on the psychological development of women (SE 19:243). What were the factors contributing to this reassessment? Freud’s formulations on women had been coming under vigorous attack from other analysts. Indeed, they were at the centre of an intense and heated controversy that was inaugurated in the early 1920s with a paper by Karl Abraham (Mitchell 1975:122) and which I shall consider in a moment. In the forefront of the opposition were Ernest Jones and Karen Horney, and Fliegel has shown in her review of the debate that Freud’s 1925 paper is quite clearly a reaction to one delivered by Horney at the 1922 Berlin Congress. Fliegel emphasizes that, in his 1925 essay, Freud only cursorily acknowledged Horney’s contribution and appears to have misunderstood her (1925, SE 19:258). Yet certain fundamental changes in his theories have been made and Fliegel shows by a ‘juxtaposition of relevant passages…that some of the formulations…presented constitute a direct reversal, an almost faithful mirror image of Horney’s thesis’ (Fliegel 1973:389). Likewise, her later and more polemical views published in ‘The Flight from Womanhood’ (1926), soon to be strongly supported by Ernest Jones (1927), received no response from Freud until his 1931 paper, ‘Female Sexuality’, where he very briefly discusses his differences with Horney in his final paragraphs while rather summarily dismissing both her and Jones (1931, SE 21:243). Freud’s editors point out that the above essay contained a feature most uncharacteristic in Freud’s writings, ‘some criticisms of a number of papers. And it is a curious thing’, they remark, ‘that he seems to treat them as though these papers had arisen spontaneously and not, as was clearly the case, as a reaction to his own somewhat revolutionary paper of 1925—to which, indeed, he here makes no reference whatever’ (SE 21:223). The point that I wish to make here and which I hope to demonstrate in the following chapters is illuminated by the above editorial comment. It is that where his views about female sexuality were concerned, Freud, ‘this most imaginative writer, was not helped by his imagination’ (Fliegel 1973:400). Despite a general awareness of his limited understanding in this area, he was so uncharacteristically dogmatic on the subject of women as to suggest a strong emotional investment in his theories and a need to defend against opposing views. However, before going any further, let us briefly examine the issue of penis envy as it was treated by Karl Abraham in his 1920 paper, ‘Manifestations of the Female Castration Complex’, for Horney’s controversial essay was a response to it. This article was later described by Freud as ‘unsurpassed’ (quoted in Mitchell 1975:123), although there are important differences in the two men’s ideas of femininity and these were to diverge even further before Abraham’s untimely death in 1925. Freud refers to the ‘fact’ of castration in women (1931, SE 21:229), sometimes seeming to suggest that it is the anatomical lack alone which provides the sole motive for feminine development. However, his idea of the castration complex is, on the whole, a more complicated and subtle affair that might seem to involve other traumatic losses and separations. Abraham, on the other hand, has no qualms about assigning both feminine and masculine destiny to anatomical discovery. The small girl does not at first perceive

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her ‘defect’ for she is not capable of ‘recognizing a primary defect in her body’ (author’s italics) and only later comes to see her own genital as a wound resulting from castration. Elizabeth Janeway has suggested that Freud meant penis envy to be taken symbolically; the woman has been deprived of the freedom and privileges which the male organ has come to represent (Janeway 1977:310–11). While I do not agree with this reading of Freud, the matter is in no doubt in the case of Abraham. He speaks of the girl’s ‘primary defect’ and this is a statement of what he sees as the female’s actual anatomical lack. He is not referring just to the psychological representations of the girl; in fact this lack is one that is, originally, wrongly perceived by her as only a ‘secondary loss’. Abraham finds the designation ‘the castration complex’ justified because there is in the female sex a lifelong ‘tendency to represent a painfully perceived and primary defect as a secondary loss’ (K.Abraham 1920:110–11). Since the penis has been ‘lost’, the female genital, Abraham finds, is experienced as a wound and menstruation, defloration, and childbirth all serve to confirm and keep alive the castration complex. Its existence is, therefore, universal; only the degree is a matter for individual difference and this is also the case with fantasies of revenge against men. In this essay there is a subtle and complex account of the way in which envy occurs in all children in the narcissistic phase of development, at a time when the child is preoccupied with its own possessions and jealous of others. As Mitchell notes, Abraham calls attention here to the roots of human vulnerability and also makes the first complete psychoanalytic play with the idea of the gift and the metaphorical equation of faeces=gift=penis (Mitchell 1975:123–24). The small girl, at this time, believes she can make a penis or be given one as a gift in the way that faeces are given up to the mother. Where Freud struggled valiantly, albeit unsuccessfully, in his attempt to avoid the simplistic equation of femininity-passivity, Abraham is quite unequivocal on the subject: ‘We must keep in view the fact that sexual activity is essentially associated with the male organ, that the women is only in the position to excite the man’s libido or respond to it, and that otherwise she is compelled to adopt a waiting attitude’, he wrote. ‘In some [normal] women we find a readiness to admit the activity of the male and their own passivity’ (K.Abraham 1920:132). Abraham’s concern with the claims of the women’s movement is, like Freud’s, apparent throughout his work; as Mitchell observes (1975:123). He sees the castration complex as the active force informing a reversion to original, primal bisexuality and which is behind the claim for intellectual parity made by ‘the woman’s movement of to-day.’ Intellectual, professional, and ‘other allied interests’ are, by definition, masculine pursuits and represent a sublimated wish to be male (K.Abraham 1920:116). The neurotic solutions to the castration complex fall into two groups: those involving the unconscious desire to be male, with the fantasy of having a penis, and the unconscious refusal to be female with the repressed desire for revenge on the male for possessing it. The non-neurotic solution for the girl lies in the sublimation of her envy of her mother and desire for her father, the retention of her desire for a child and the cultivation of passive and ‘expectant’ attitudes towards the man (109–35). Horney’s response to Abraham came at the 1922 Berlin Congress where she delivered her paper ‘On the Genesis of the Castration Complex in Women’ (Horney 1924). This paper (her later work was to become more polemical) exerted so major an influence on Ernest Jones and others during the ensuing debate that I shall consider it in some detail.

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Horney challenged the classical Freudian tenet that held that women feel inferior because they are women, rather than seeing this feeling of disadvantage as ‘constituting a problem in itself’. She suggested that ‘masculine narcissism’ lay behind the assumption that ‘one half of the human race is discontented with the sex assigned to it’, finding this assumption questionable not only in terms of feminine narcissism but also in terms of biology. She asked whether the castration complex, in all its forms, was due to a dissatisfaction with ‘the fact of womanhood’—to penis envy—or whether it had other origins. Horney posited a ‘primary’, pre-genital penis envy in girls which arises in relation to a genuine disadvantage in three respects: (1) erotic urethral omnipotent fantasies; (2) active and passive exhibitionistic scotophiliac urges in relation to the boy’s visible genital; (3) the boy’s freedom to handle his genital which is taken by the girl for permission, denied her, to masturbate. Thus Horney finds that little girls are at an actual, anatomical disadvantage, and pregenital penis envy is inevitable. The castration complex, in its more lasting forms, however, is not. A ‘specially powerful’ penis envy may predispose the woman to the castration complex but, notwithstanding the primal feminine Oedipal fantasy, this will only survive when a ‘profound disappointment’ (author’s italics) causes the sense of reality to be disturbed so that the necessary denial and resolution is not effected. This disappointment results in the fantasy of having been castrated through intercourse with the desired penis: ‘it is wounded womanhood that gives rise to the castration complex…it is this complex that injures…feminine development’ (Horney 1924:63). Seen from this point of view, the castration complex is a regressive formation in which primary penis envy is revived and in which identification with the disappointing father takes place and the feminine role is rejected. Oedipal identification, a secondary and defensive penis envy, feelings of anger and revenge and guilt (for incestuous fantasies) will characterize the complex. Pre-genital penis envy, on the other hand, need carry with it no guilt nor other lasting injury in its primary form. In 1925 Freud’s essay, ‘Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes’, was published. The only reference to Horney’s paper is a comment in the final paragraph to the effect that her work, like that of the other writers in the field, does not coincide completely with his own (Freud 1925, SE 19:258). Fliegel considers that Freud might have found Horney’s paper unacceptable because of her charge of narcissism on the part of male analysts, combined with her thesis of an intrinsic, pleasure-oriented feminine sexuality: an idea that Freud, as we have seen, always resisted with some force (Fliegel 1973:388). Horney makes other implications, however, that were likely to have upset Freud. In particular she implies that psychoanalytic orthodoxy has proved inadequate and reductionist in inferring the castration complex from penis envy: ‘an analysis of deeper strata of the mind’ reveals more complex material. She hammers this point home: ‘Of course, in psycho-analysis the “penis-envy” is more readily exposed than is the far more deeply repressed phantasy which ascribes the loss of the male genital to a sexual act with the father as partner’ (Horney 1924:50–65). I have mentioned the uncharacteristic way in which Freud greeted Horney’s contribution and also that part of Ernest Jones’s work in which he supported her theories. As we have seen, Freud’s manner in relation to these issues was later noted as being

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‘curious’ by his editors (SE 21:223). I have also pointed to the unaccountable gap in the ‘debate’ which followed on Freud’s last papers on femininity in the 1930s. Fliegel suggests that the historical setting is relevant. Freud’s illness with cancer has been described as being responsible for a wave of anxiety that overcame many members of the psychoanalytic community at this time. ‘Some of the others grew intensely anxious because of the threatened loss, and became very eager to establish a solid dam against heterodoxy, as they now felt themselves responsible for the future of psychoanalysis’ (Bernfeld 1962, cited by Fliegel 1973:406). Irene Fast suggests that while certain central tenets of Freud are now rejected by psychoanalysts, the implications have not been recognized. She observes that if femininity is primary, if the clitoris is not masculine, if the girl is not physiologically predisposed to masculinity, and if her genital experience and her experience with her mother are intrinsically feminine, then Freud’s postulates for both pre-Oedipal and genital development are undermined: ‘the subsequent development of femininity cannot be reactive to her earlier maleness’ (Fast 1979:444). In later chapters I shall have more to say on the emotional and psychological interests that Freud and some of his most loyal supporters had vested in his theories of women. At the time, those holding the Freudian position continued to emphasize the decisive effect on the girl of finding that she is ‘castrated’. Likewise, that her pre-Oedipal sexuality is clitoral, phallic, and therefore masculine. The girl turns in hostility from her negative Oedipal phase, that has her mother as love-object, to her father, thus taking up the feminine Oedipal position. It is clear that vaginal awareness in the pre-Oedipal girl can have no place in this scheme of things. However, shortly before his death in December 1925 Abraham had started to speculate about the matter. In a letter to Freud in 1924, he suggested ‘an early vaginal awakening for the female libido’, subsequently repressed until puberty and followed by clitoral primacy. The Oedipus complex would thus be a much earlier formation—the result of ‘an early vaginal reaction to the father’s penis’. With what appears to be some anxiety, he assures Freud that ‘It could be fitted into our present theory which it does not contradict in any way and to which it might make a small addition’ (H.C.Abraham and E.L.Freud 1965:375–76). Abraham’s anxiety can be attributed to the fact that he sensed that his new findings carried important, indeed radical implications for the psychoanalytic theory of femininity, although he agreed to Freud’s response that any vaginal sensation would have cloacal origins. Freud’s stance at that point seems both open-minded and encouraging. He wrote, ‘your latest theme,…interests me greatly. I do not know anything about it. As I gladly admit, the female side of the problem is extraordinarily obscure to me… I should very much like to hear [more]…but I can wait’ (376–77). Abraham wrote again on the matter noting ‘the tendency to vaginal masturbation’ in small girls (377). ‘I am eager to learn,… and have no preconceived ideas’ (379), Freud replied. Abraham still appears reluctant to recognize that his new observations threatened to upset the entire theory. Freud, however, soon does so and I believe that this is one reason for his adopting so dogmatic and unyielding a position from his 1925 essay onwards. Freud’s 1925 paper, ‘Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes’ (SE 19:248–58), was the first one to study the female predominantly, that is to take the girl as the model. It also broke new ground in establishing the

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importance of the pre-Oedipal phase in girls as well as—and distinct from—boys. As early as 1905, in the ‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality’ (SE 7:222), and again, in 1916–17 in his Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (SE 16:328), Freud had noted that the first sexual object for both sexes is the mother’s breast—‘the prototype’ of the love relation. He was always uncertain enough about the symmetrical nature of female development to reject the term ‘Electra complex’ on the grounds that it was irrelevant (1920, SE 18:155n.). Yet he had often spoken of the parallel or analogous sexual development of the two sexes. In 1925 he sees that differentiation takes place not at puberty, as in the earliest formulations, nor in the Oedipal stage, but in the pre-Oedipal situation. Since all children love their mothers first, the girl must make a twofold change in her sexual object and organ, and a far more complex prehistory is thus recognized. The Oedipus complex in girls is now seen to be a ‘secondary formation’ (1925, SE 19:251). In boys it shatters the castration complex, in girls it is initiated by it. With this difference clearly defined, the path was open for the controversial distinctions in ‘character traits’ devolving on the differences in super-ego construction, that are now carefully delineated. Freud’s tone in this 1925 paper is, as Fliegel notes, markedly different from that of previous works. Written only a few months after confessing to being baffled by female sexual development, he is now ‘inclined to set some value on the considerations I have brought forward upon the psychical consequences of the anatomical distinction between the sexes’ (1925, SE 19:258). Horney’s thesis, as we have seen, was that the girl’s Oedipal attachment develops out of a primary, innate femininity. Freud finds that the girl acknowledges her castration, after recognizing in the penis the ‘superior counterpart’ to her own genital, renounces clitoral masturbation and turns from an active masculine orientation to a passive, feminine one; ‘she develops, like a scar, a sense of inferiority’ (253). It is disappointment in her mother whom she blames for her deficiency that causes her to turn to her father and the heterosexual position. Whereas Horney had suggested that the castration complex is the consequence of a profound disappointment and disturbance on the part of the girl, Freud refers in 1925 to his 1908 statement about the original stimulus for the child’s sexual interest being the question of ‘where babies come from’. This might be true for boys, he now insists, but not for girls. The developmental process begins when the girl first encounters penis envy and of course this formulation is necessary, as Fliegel observes, for the inner consistency of the theory. In this essay Freud tells us, with commendable candour, that he felt himself unable to wait for clinical confirmation of his observations. Stricken at this time by his painful and debilitating cancer, he wrote, ‘The time before me is limited…. On this occasion,… I feel justified in publishing something which stands in urgent need of confirmation’ (249). The fact that he also chose to buttress the characterological statements in this essay by invoking traits ‘which critics of every epoch have brought up against women’ suggests a far more defensive attitude. Clearly this reflects a conflict that has been further stimulated by the opposition to his views. His appeal to ‘critics of every epoch’ is particularly significant when we recall that Freud felt strongly enough about this kind of argument to write of Leonardo da Vinci. ‘He dared to utter the bold assertion which contains within itself the justification for all independent research: “He who appeals to authority when there is a difference of opinion works with his memory rather than with his reason”’ (author’s italics) (1910, SE 11:122).

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Freud’s illness is quite likely to have exerted a more specific effect on his ideas about women. The extensive mutilations that he was obliged to undergo in the attempts to arrest the cancerous growths, as well as evoking primitive anxieties of helplessness, must have been profoundly disturbing in an immediate, day-to-day sense. With cruel irony the cancer was located in Freud’s mouth and jaw and progressively impeded his speech. Helle Munro has observed that, for the inventor of the ‘talking cure’, the resulting distortions of his language must have represented a devastating loss of potency and that he might have felt particularly defensive in the vulnerable area of these theories (Munro 1985, personal interview). Juliet Mitchell has also observed, in a more general way, of three of Freud’s ‘speculative’ works—Civilization and its Discontents, The Future of an Illusion, and Moses and Monotheism—that they were all written within the ‘period and scope of what he regarded as his intellectual self-indulgence’ and that this period postdates the confirmation of his illness. Mitchell links the illness here with the speculative nature of these works (Mitchell 1975:329) and with Freud’s own rather ingenuous statement that he made no further contributions to psychoanalysis after 1923. But the three major essays on the psychology of women were also written during these years so that the illness may have had more of an influence on them than Mitchell elsewhere allows. I have proposed that Freud was strongly influenced in his theories of women by the fact that he was unable to confront and resolve his own complex relationship with his mother and by the ambivalent feelings that he experienced in relation to his own sexual identity. I believe that this is why, in spite of the professions of ignorance and uncertainty so often cited by his followers, he was more dogmatic and allowed fewer ambiguities than in any other area of his thought. This is not to say that Freud’s views on women were consistent. On the contrary, he is in self-contradiction on some fundamental issues. One example can be seen in his idealized concept of the mother-son relationship which ‘is altogether the most perfect, the most free from ambivalence of all human relationships’ (1933, SE 22:133). The idea that any human relationship can be so unaffected, let alone one between a parent and child, is, in Freud’s own terms, astonishingly simplistic and should itself alert us to the possibility of a defensive stance in its author. It is, in any case, contradicted by the entire theory of penis envy as constituting the unconscious ‘bedrock’ of the female’s psychological motivation throughout her life (1937, SE 23:252). For while penis envy certainly represents a possible and indeed important formation in the development of females, an attitude of envy so implacable, deriving from feelings of deprivation and mortification of the kind described by Freud, would be likely to exclude not merely so idyllic a relationship but also a more realistically positive one. To represent it as the central motivating force in normal female development is to take a dogmatic as well as a deeply pessimistic view. To return now to what came to be known as the ‘Freud-Jones debate’, it is impossible to glean from the standard literature that Freud’s 1925 essay became the focal point of a heated controversy to which his next two papers on the subject of female development added further fuel (1931, SE 21:225–43; 1933, SE 22:112–35). Much of this debate was conducted in oral discussions (Fliegel 1973:386) and in private correspondence. Jones himself was centrally involved in the controversy yet, in his biography of Freud, he comments of the 1925 essay: ‘the content of the paper…gave general

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pleasure’ (E.Jones 1974, vol. 3:119). However, Horney, whose early work Jones was shortly to support strongly, published a second paper in 1926 whose tone is both forceful and polemical. She emphasized the resemblance of the psychoanalytic formulations to the small boy’s fantasied perception of the girl and attributes this to the general masculine orientation of culture. The dread and envy of motherhood is blamed for the male need to deprecate women and it is this concept for which she is most often remembered (Horney 1926:324–39). Later still, Horney came to reject the importance of the role of infantile sexual experience in the psychology of the individual and to attribute the neuroses of women to the realities of their social subordination. With this formulation she laid the ground work for the socio-cultural school of Freudian criticism. In 1927 Ernest Jones addressed the controversy directly with his paper, ‘The Early Development of Female Sexuality’. Jones’s opening statement noted that Horney had ‘justly’ pointed to the ‘bias’ that exists on the subject of early femininity, in both sexes. Jones warned of the need for workers to keep this factor in mind and suggested that one of the functions of psychoanalysis should be to investigate the ‘prejudice in question’. He talked of ‘an unduly phallo-centric view’ and a corresponding underestimation of the female organs (1927:438–51). Jones’s arguments cannot be dealt with in detail here. For our purpose, his view that the penis envy encountered clinically is a pathological formation and that ‘the mouth, anus and vagina…form an equivalent series for the female organ’, so that ‘Freud’s phallic phase in girls is probably a secondary, defensive construction’, indicates his explicit disagreement with the Freudian theories. This paper was read at the 1927 Innsbruck Congress where Melanie Klein, who by now was established in England and beginning to be strongly championed by Ernest Jones, also gave her view of a primary, unorganized ego, a much earlier vaginal awareness in the infant girl and Oedipal wishes following the turning away from the mother’s frustrating breast. We cannot follow the course of the debate much further. In the next few years, a great deal of support for Freud’s theories came from Lampl-de-Groot (1927), Helene Deutsch (1930), and Ruth Mack Brunswick (1940, in ‘collaboration with Freud’) in particular. It is interesting to note that Freud’s main supporters in this context were women, and in the next chapter I shall examine this particular feature of psychoanalytic history. Jones’s concern with what is clearly the growing acrimony of the controversy, as well as what he regards as a worrying tendency to suppress divergent views, was expressed by him in his essay, ‘The Phallic Phase’ first published in 1933, where he wrote, ‘one perceives an unmistakable disharmony among the various writers…. Most of these writers have been laudably concerned to lay stress on the points of agreement with their colleagues, so that the tendency to divergence of opinion has not always come to full expression’ (E.Jones 1933:452–84). This is a serious charge indeed coming from so loyal a devotee and lends considerable credence to Siegfried Bernfeld’s account of anxiety within the movement and its effects on members in relation to potential heterodoxy. Jones also makes an uncharacteristically blunt reference in this essay to Freud’s 1931 response to his own part in the disagreement. He writes, ‘last year Professor Freud declared this suggestion [of a primary femininity] to be quite untenable’. Jones goes on to agree with Horney that the ‘undiscovered vagina is a denied vagina’ (E.Jones 1933:456), and to propound a view of femininity which emphasizes, among other things, that the clitoris is, after all, an integral

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part of the female genitals. This observation, Fliegel points out, could have helped avert the confusion surrounding the clitoral-vaginal orgasm issue and the theory of genital primacy (Fliegel 1973:400). Jones made a final attempt to bridge the gap between the now polarized Vienna and London ‘schools’, with a lecture in Vienna in 1935 by which time, of course, political and social events were also causing considerable anxiety. Jones protested that ‘new work and ideas in London have not yet…been adequately considered in Vienna’ (1935:485). Once again he claimed phallocentricism on the part of classical psychoanalysis and postulated an original femininity in girls with early vaginal awareness. Employing Kleinian concepts that were, by now, extremely influential in London and which had brought him into serious personal conflict with both Freud and his daughter, Anna, Jones spoke of oral dissatisfactions ushering in the Oedipus complex at a much earlier stage of infancy. He concluded, ‘I do not see a woman…as un homme manqué, as a permanently disappointed creature…. The ultimate question is whether a woman is born or made’ (1935:495). There are just two brief references by Jones to his own part in the controversy. One ends with the words: ‘Several of the disputed questions are even yet not satisfactorily solved’ (1974, vol. 3:284). The other concludes, ‘Freud never agreed with my views, and perhaps they were wrong; I do not think the matter has been entirely cleared up even yet’ (quoted in Fliegel 1973:401).

3 Freud’s Women Disciples It is clear from accounts of the prevailing opinion in Freud’s own time that his model of femininity, while far more complex, did not essentially deviate from the conventional one. The theory of penis envy reinforced the traditional view and it drew considerable support as well as opposition from both within and without the psychoanalytic movement. Yet when Freud’s radical achievements in the study of human motivation and emotion are taken into account, it seems clear that a much more daring model of femininity might have been expected of him. Why could he not achieve this? Why was he able to surmount conventional and scientific wisdom in so many areas but not in others? On the other hand, if Freud was biased against women, the prominence that he accorded his female disciples and his respect and admiration for their work needs to be explained. As K.R.Eissler writes in defence of Freud, ‘If it should turn out that Freud really harboured degrading views of women, which I seriously doubt, this would be an example of a discrepancy between theory and practice’ (1977:70). There does seem to be a contradiction in the fact that Freud admired and welcomed the contributions and friendship of female analysts while holding a biased view of femininity, but the key to this paradox lies in the nature of their contributions and the special quality of those friendships. A small but significant slip made by Freud as a young man illuminates the matter further. Two months into his long engagement with Martha Bernays, Freud, whose relationship with his fiancée’s family was for a time filled with disagreements and hostility (E.Jones 1956, vol. 1:128–36), wrote to Martha in an attempt to win her support: ‘For has it not been laid down since time immemorial that the woman shall leave father and mother and follow the man she has chosen?’ (E.L.Freud 1975:23). Freud was, of course, quoting from Genesis 2:24, from the Bible story that engrossed him so deeply as a young child. But he has reversed the injunction and it is inconceivable, in his own terms, that the slip lacks important unconscious meaning. It is the man, in Genesis, who is commanded to leave his parents and ‘cleave unto his wife’. In an important sense what Freud required of his woman disciples was that, having shown the independence and strength of mind necessary to find their way to him, they should then adhere to his ideas and where they extend them that this be strictly in line with his formulations. The fact that Freud had close friends who were women and that he welcomed them as analysts in no way contradicts my argument. For Freud’s was a ‘polite and profound misogyny’ (Rieff 1979:184) and Jones is clearly correct when he asserts that women often found ‘irresistible his…unfailing considerateness and tenderness’ (1958, vol. 2:469). Freud reprimanded Fritz Wittels for discourtesy as well as immaturity for deploring the fact that women were becoming physicians, although he agreed that it was

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a waste of time for women to study at all. He criticized the three members of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, who in 1910 opposed the admission of women to their meetings (Mitchell 1975:429–30). He himself was to welcome them although even Jones, whose biographical account of Freud, as we saw in the last chapter, is far less questioning than his theoretical position on these matters, observes, ‘it might perhaps be fair to describe his view of the female sex as having as their main function to be ministering angels to the needs and comforts of men’ (E.Jones 1958, vol. 2:468). However, Freud does have a problem explaining the intellectuality of his female colleagues but he believes this to be merely one of politeness—of how not to be rude to them—a problem that he unconvincingly sidesteps by invoking bisexuality. In his New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis, referring to these colleagues’ ‘unfavourable’ findings about women, he tells them, ‘We…had no difficulty in avoiding impoliteness…. This doesn’t apply to you. You’re the exception; on this point you’re more masculine than feminine’, thus presumably exempting them from possible charges of penis envy (1933, SE 22:116–17). Freud was strongly drawn towards women who were ‘of a more intellectual and perhaps masculine cast’ (E.Jones 1958, vol. 2:469) and many of his closest supporters were of this type. They were also frequently strong-willed, brilliant, and innovative thinkers but, as I hope will become clear a little later, they too within their own respective spheres, became ‘ministering angels’ catering to Freud’s need for corroboration. Freud’s efforts to avoid ‘impoliteness’ to women (1933, SE 22:116) raises an issue of great importance to the study of the ways in which emancipating Jews of Freud’s time, newly released from ghetto and shtetl, confronted and dealt with the culture of the ‘outside’. In contrast to Germany, no substantial Jewish intelligentsia emerged in Austria before the end of the nineteenth century when it immediately felt the impact of antiJewish pressures (Arendt 1951:65–6). Freud was the first member of his family to become an ‘educated’ Jew in a society in which education was thought to be the sole route to emancipation. Indeed at the turn of the century, J.G. Herder had proposed education rather than mercantile concessions as the road to assimilation so that Jews could become ‘purely humanized’. ‘Jews were depicted as a “principle” of philistine and upstart society’, Hanna Arendt writes, and she points to the parallels between the assimilation of Jews into society and the educational precepts Goethe had proposed in Wilhelm Meister: ‘a novel which was to become the great model of middle-class education’ (57–61). John Murray Cuddihy, describing how differentiations of private from public relations characterize the entry of the provincial into civil society, writes, ‘his “urbanization process” requires urbanity his entry into civil society civility’. Niceness, gentility, civility—‘the very medium of Western social interaction’—became the shibboleth of the Jew seeking admission to a ‘world of strangers’ (Cuddihy 1974:12–14). It was for discourtesy that Freud reprimanded Wittels for his objections to women doctors; it was for inconsistency that he criticized his Vienna Psychoanalytic Society members for their wish to exclude women. He did not find them in substance wrong. Freud realized from the very start of the psychoanalytic movement that he needed the outside world of the ‘others’, that is the Gentiles, if psychoanalysis was not to become a ‘Jewish national affair’ (H.C. Abraham and E.L.Freud 1965:34). And in western bourgeois society gentlemen are polite to ladies. Freud’s gallantry with women had

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nothing to do with his theories about them. Indeed gallantry may not only be consistent with male dominance, but also is often a reflection of it. Moreover, apart from the obvious consideration that he clearly enjoyed and was flattered by the company of clever, sympathetic women, he was perfectly willing to employ them as propagandists and missionaries. ‘The politeness which I practise every day’, he wrote in The Interpretation of Dreams, ‘is to a large extent dissimulation’ (quoted in Cuddihy 1974:17). Civility, after all, was an essential part of the ticket to the outside. It was one that Freud had the genius to recognize is often fraught with consequences whose price was discontent and illness. Some sixty years later, Alexander Portnoy—that stereotypical Jewish son— agonizing over his frayed ‘nice Jewish boy’s libido’ laments the uneasy fit: ‘Ma, Ma, … Where did you get the idea that the most wonderful thing I could be in life was…a little gentleman?’ (Roth 1971:140). Freud’s mother, of whom, strangely, we hear so little from Freud himself, was a Galician shtetl-born Jewess and by her grandson Martin Freud’s account these women ‘were certainly not what we should call “ladies”’. He writes, ‘Galician Jews had little grace and no manners’. Amalie Freud was a ‘tornado’ (M.Freud 1957:11). Another grandchild has called her ‘shrill and domineering’ (Heller 1956:419). If Freud’s views on women do reflect early conflicting feelings towards his mother, as I have proposed, such feelings might well have been compounded by later, probably repressed, embarrassment at the volatile Yiddish-accented Amalie Freud. I shall return to this topic in later chapters. Meanwhile it is worth noting the fact that this transitional generation of immigrant Jews—and indeed many of its descendants—experienced considerable tension in relation to each other as well as in their relation to the outside host culture and that the use of a Yiddish accent or Yiddishisms—the mark of the ‘primitive’ Eastern Jew—posed a threat to the cultural status of ‘assimilated’, German-speaking Jews. Freud went to the Sperl Gymnasium when he was 9 years old and by the age of 13 he was already steeped in the German classics (E. Jones 1956, vol. 1:22–4). The sensitive and scholarly boy could well have felt a kind of social shame for his ‘tornado’ mother even before he experienced it for his more gentle father at the well-known ‘hat-in-thegutter’ episode which he describes in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900 SE 4:197). Indeed the insistence on the conflict with the paternal, phallic power is so pivotal in Freud’s Oedipal drama that Jocasta’s fate as well as her motivation is generally overlooked. Cuddihy suggests that somewhere, between the time the little Sigismund left his ‘rather emotional household’ (Heller 1956:419) to start the humanist education so prized by the late-nineteenth-century middle-European intelligentsia, and his emergence into the adult world as a scientist and classicist, he underwent that process of ‘conversion’, described by Peter Berger, in which children in a socially mobile society may move into worlds ‘utterly beyond the comprehension of their parents’, and out of shame commit a kind of ‘moral parricide’ of the father (Berger 1966:74, cited by Cuddihy 1974:58). However, there seems no good reason why the mother should be exempted as an object of this kind of shame. Significantly this period of Freud’s life—that of boyhood and adolescence—is the one about which we know the least. He was not drawn to investigate or write about it, according to Jones (1956, vol. 1:17). We know a little more than Jones was able to elicit thanks to the discovery of some

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unpublished letters from Freud to his friend Silberstein spanning those years. At 16 Freud describes a Leidenschaft—an overpowering emotion—for the mother of Gisela Flüss. The latter, he told his fiancée later, was his ‘first love’ (cited in Clark 1980:23). To Silberstein he wrote that he had ‘translated esteem for the mother into friendship for the daughter’ (Clark 1980:25). This esteem for the mother devolved on Frau Flüss’s selfacquired ‘culture’, breadth of reading including the ‘classical authors’, knowledge of politics, and the love which she inspired in her children. ‘I…have never seen her vent her bad mood on an innocent person’, Freud wrote adoringly. Their own mothers, he observed, ‘only look after the physical needs of their sons’. Frau Flüss’s sphere includes the ‘spiritual’ too (Clark 1980:25–6). Calf-love in a 16-year-old is not necessarily significant but the absence of any later reference by Freud to Frau Flüss may well be so (26) and, in our context, these comparisons, involving the lady’s intellect and refinement, suggest an acute sensitivity to these qualities. The young Freud, with a whole new culture grafted on since childhood, has left the embarrassing and inappropriate manners of the shtetl behind, although not its utilitarian attitude to the body and its needs. Freudianism might have served as an effective ‘transformation formula’ for emancipating Jewry, as Cuddihy so persuasively argues, but no Christian romantic hocus-pocus was ever to be allowed to gloss over the rude facts of life. Freud was not persuaded by his Swiss followers to substitute polite euphemisms for his sexual references: ‘I had no use for such household remedies’, he wrote to Abraham after a visit from Bleuler and his wife (quoted in Cuddihy 1974:79). On the other hand, Freud had no wish to look or sound like his cultural stereotype; ‘it did not seem attractive to find oneself classed with the… Talmudists’, he wrote at the end of his life (Freud 1939, SE 23:17). As a very young man, he had been ‘petrified with horror and shame in the presence of the Christians’ when, at the funeral of a young Jewish suicide, the family friend—‘spoke with the powerful voice of the fanatic, with the ardor of the savage, merciless Jew’ (E.L.Freud 1975:65). Norman Podhoretz notes in his book Making It how widespread, even in 1953, ‘and not least among Jews, was the association of Jewishness with vulgarity and lack of cultivation (1968:161). Podhoretz writes that ‘Maurice Samuel once wrote a whole book, The Gentleman and the Jew, to show that the idea of the gentleman…at different times and…places,…always… stood in opposition to the idea of the Jew (1968:48). Freud was aware of this association. ‘Jews have bad manners’, Joseph Wortis complained when Freud told him that he thought the Jews of nowadays ‘a superior people’. ‘That is true’, replied Freud, ‘they are not always adapted to social life. Before they enjoyed emancipation in 1818 they were not a social problem, they kept to themselves—with a low standard of life, it is true—but they did not go out in mixed society. Since then they have had much to learn’ (Wortis 1954, cited by Cuddihy 1974:36). In fact Freud’s relationships with his women followers played a central part in his life and work and women were from the outset accepted as devoted members of his inner circle. Since Lou Andreas-Salomé, Helene Deutsch, and Marie Bonaparte were especially important to him in different ways I shall discuss his relationships to them and the contributions they made to the psychoanalytic movement in some detail. Of these, the personal history of Andreas-Salomé is of particular interest. She was probably closer to Freud for a longer period of time than any of the others and is usually singled out as a

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prime example of his egalitarian attitude to women. The lives led by the women disciples closest to Freud all seem to belie their own theoretical views on the nature of femininity and the role of women, but none more so than that of Lou Andreas-Salomé. Her friendships, one writer has noted, ‘approximate a Who was Who of Central European intellectual life’ of the time (Kaufman in Binion 1968). She has been described by Rudolph Binion (until recently her most comprehensive biographer) as a ‘near-mad near-genius of a woman’ (1968:ix). Friedrich Nietzsche, who loved and was rejected by her (Peters 1963:134), found her at the age of 22 to be the ‘most intelligent of all women’ (Binion 1968:81) and sought to make her his pupil, ‘someone to inherit and carry on my thinking’ (Binion 1968:54). Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra has been said to have grown out of his ‘illusion about Lou’ (Gast quoted in Peters 1963:142); the ‘misogynist twist’ in the first book to have been written ‘in her dishonour’ (Binion 1968:100), and Beyond Good and Evil, with its diatribe against emancipated women to have emerged from his bitterness and despair over her. Nietzsche writes of ‘the torture of loving Andreas-Salomé, calling her his ‘sirocco incarnate…an utter misfortune’ (Binion 1968:543). The poet Rilke, whose mistress she was for several years, dedicated a cycle of poems to her. He attributed his ‘most transforming experience’ to her encouragement and direction (Peters 1963:210). She had a most powerful attraction for unusual and creative men and her pre-analytic writings brough her considerable literary prominence. Her own marriage lasted for forty-three years but was never consummated (Peters 1963:174). At Andreas-Salomé’s behest her husband, Friedrich Carl Andreas, eventually took a ‘wife substitute’ which left Lou free to live her own life (176). In middle age Andreas was appointed to the chair of Oriental Languages at the University of Göttingen, where Lou spent the last twenty years of her life: her psychoanalytic period. She left Göttingen regularly, visiting or travelling with friends and lovers; once to Russia with both her husband and the poet Rilke. It was with another lover, Poul Bjerre, a Swedish psychotherapist, that she attended the Third Psychoanalytic Congress in Weimar in 1911, where she met Freud. She was then aged 50. Bjerre soon fell out with the Freudians but Andreas-Salomé was instantly converted. She records in her Journal how Freud jokingly accused her of regarding psychoanalysis as ‘a sort of Christmas present’ (Andreas-Salomé 1964:90), but he was very soon impressed by her grasp of psychoanalytic concepts. In 1912 she asked Freud if she could come to Vienna for six months to study. There she attended the ‘Wednesday Evening Discussions’ (and was allowed by Freud to attend Adler’s seminars too, a rare dispensation). Within weeks, Freud was complaining that her absence left him gazing ‘spellbound’ at her empty chair (Pfeiffer 1972:11). Andreas-Salomé disagreed with Freud on some important issues although this was always expressed in her extensive private correspondence with him or, as in the Victor Tausk affair, in her Journal. On the subject of femininity they were almost in total accord. On female intellectuality, this accord was complete. Andreas-Salomé’s writings on the topic in her pre-Freudian days were the most Freudian of her works. One of the bestknown examples of emancipated womanhood in Europe, she had already been attacked by feminists as a reactionary for her descriptions of the essential ‘nature’ of women. Nothing she wrote later deviated substantially from these pre-analytic views. She herself

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remarked that psychoanalysis had merely confirmed what she already knew and for this has been accused by Binion of treating Freud’s work narcissistically, ‘as a contribution to her existence rather than the reverse’ (Binion 1968:461). Andreas-Salomé’s relationship to Freud shows clear evidence of a powerful, unresolved transference neurosis. Her several ‘personal’ talks with him almost certainly constituted the ‘rudiments of an analysis’ (Eissler 1971:28), and seem to have established this bond which grew in intensity over the years. Among her last words to him were ‘If only… I might look into your face for but ten minutes—into the father-face over my life’ (quoted in Binion 1968:377). In 1925 she wrote, ‘I feel only too deeply how utterly, utterly I am beside you, and with you, as if I were a piece of age-old Anna somehow inseparably hanging on’ (quoted in Binion 1968:373). I have drawn heavily on Binion’s version of the letters between Freud and AndreasSalomé (as well as on his historical account), rather than on those used in the volume edited by Ernst Pfeiffer and approved by Anna and Ernst Freud. An examination of the two versions shows that certain passages have been omitted altogether in Pfeiffer’s book while others have been altered. This is particularly apparent in the letters concerning Anna Freud and in our context nothing could be more revealing of the closeness between Freud and Andreas-Salomé, as well as of the extraordinary nature of that bond, than these allusions. According to Binion, Freud confided to Andreas-Salomé on five separate occasions his anxiety about Anna’s ‘father fixation’ (Binion 1968:372). There are no references to this anxiety in four of the letters as published in Pfeiffer’s collection (dated 11 August, 1924; 10 May, 1925; 11 May, 1927; 11 December, 1927). In the letter of 6 January, 1935, Freud writes, ‘What will she do when she has lost me? Will she lead a life of ascetic austerity?’ (Pfeiffer 1972:204), and he compares his attachment to Anna to his addiction to cigars (Pfeiffer 1972:113). According to Binion, however, the original letters also show that Freud asked Andreas-Salomé to help wean Anna from an Oedipal fixation to him (10 May, 1925, Freud to Andreas-Salomé). In her reply Andreas-Salomé refuses, deeming ‘Anna’s incestuous set-up more blissful than any alternative “within normalcy”’ (Binion 1968:372–73). The last two excerpts do not appear in the Pfeiffer versions of these letters. The full implications of this situation will, it is hoped, be the subject of future studies. The fact that Anna Freud was analysed by her father (Eissler 1971:81) must reveal something quite fundamental about his attitudes to female personality and about his own emotional needs in relation to women. Eissler (1974:391–415) has denied the rumour (Kardiner 1977:77) that Anna was, for a time, in analysis with Andreas-Salomé and we must therefore conclude that Freud had placed the latter in some kind of surrogate wiferelation, at least in her role with Anna. For he also writes, ‘I know she will not be stranded as long as you are alive, but she is so much younger than the two of us’, thus virtually effacing his wife (13 May, 1924). Again, this passage is cited by Binion (1968:373) and is missing from the letter of that date published by Pfeiffer. It may be significant that when Andreas-Salomé died at 76, Freud commented to Arnold Zweig that she was the same age as his wife (cited by Schur 1972:489). Andreas-Salomé was capable of some picturesque displays of submissiveness. ‘Nothing pleases me more than to run in your leading-strings’, she told him, ‘only they must be good and long ones’ (quoted in Binion 1968:379). However, these displays had

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some possibly unconscious, sadistic counterparts for the relationship was by no means free of conflict. Both Binion (1968:27), who calls Andreas-Salomé’s own account of herself ‘fanciful…distortions’ (1968:x) and Stanley A.Leavy, who more courteously suggests that her Journal was written with publication in view (Leavy in Andreas-Salomé 1964:7), indicate that she polished and amended her entries with future readers in mind. Andreas-Salomé in a sense revenged herself on her ‘joy-bringer’ by leaving behind certain accounts of Freud that have proved quite disturbing. Thus his harsh comments about the suicide of his brilliant but troublesome pupil, Victor Tausk, caused something of a shock within the psychoanalytic movement when published. From Freud there came occasional sniping about the value of Andreas-Salomé’s oftenpraised talent for synthesis. ‘I so rarely feel the need for synthesis’, he wrote (Pfeiffer 1972:32), and Binion shows (1968:374) that he often evaded a major critique by paying her compliments or conceding totally. He countered her objections to his troubled theory of narcissism by taking a pot-shot at her affair with Tausk. ‘I know that your concern with Tausk’s work helped familiarize you with the subject of narcissism. But his constructions were totally unintelligible to me’ (358). Andreas-Salomé’s correspondence with Freud lasted from 1912 until her death in 1937. Gallantly, he walked her home in the small hours after their ‘personal exchange of ideas’ (Andreas-Salomé 1964:44), gave her roses (131), and sent her money regularly during the hard inflation years. He would have ‘dropped’ Tausk sooner, he told her, except that she had ‘raised him so’ in his estimation (Pfeiffer 1972:98). He believed that Andreas-Salomé had ‘an intrinsic superiority…an inborn nobility’ (Kardiner 1977:77). All the loyal female disciples shared with Andreas-Salomé a view of femininity that, to a greater or lesser degree, conformed with the Freudian model and they all seem to have identified with this position from their respective relations of transference to him. While some undoubtedly extended the Freudian perspective, particularly in respect of the importance of the mother and the pre-Oedipal stages, they did not deviate from Freud on the central issues of female sexual development. Indeed they often defined it and prescribed what it should be about with far less caution than Freud himself. However, Binion’s ironic observation that Andreas-Salomé saw Freud’s work as confirming her own ideas is an apt one. For she was the only one of this group of disciples who, long before she met Freud, was saying things about femininity which required only minor adjustments to fit into the Freudian framework. Andreas-Salomé’s theories were first propounded when she was 23 and working with Nietzsche on her first essay on women. Women, she wrote, ‘if left to themselves…would continually create out of their weakness not only “men”, but also “gods”’ (quoted in Binion 1968:71). Nietzsche suggested additional topics to be considered in this essay from which came the idea of pregnancy, as the ‘cardinal state which gradually over the centuries fixed the nature of woman’, a tenet that Andreas-Salomé was to retain all her life (Binion 1968:82). In an article published in 1899, ‘Heresies about the Modern Woman’, Andreas-Salomé took issue with her friend, the feminist explorer Frieda von Bülow, who had protested publicly about the disparagement of women’s writings. Women, wrote Andreas-Salomé, unlike the true artist whose personality and sex are simply vehicles for his art, have a ‘lesser capacity for differentiation’, and, remaining grounded eternally in their biological

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destiny, can never go beyond ‘self reduplication on paper’. Women may write, she said, but they should not take it so ‘frightfully seriously’ (Binion 1968:233). She elaborated further in ‘The Human as Woman’ (also published in 1899), opening with the conventional Victorian theory of the questing, active male cell that woos the female ‘egg cell’—a pattern that she held endures throughout life on both psychological and physiological levels. Lyricizing the less developed feminine element, she declared woman to be ‘more immediately in touch with the boundless plenitude around about her, hence more lazily attached to her native ground’. Woman’s ‘fond lolling within herself’ is contrasted to man’s ‘selfless devotion to a goal’. Woman is no mere appendage to man but closer to the organic source of things, is herself ‘a sufficiency’ and, so long as she refrains from the ‘pure devilry’ of intellectual endeavour succeeds to ‘her natural greatness…. The manly man shudders alike at the man-mad as at the emancipation-mad woman.’ Woman’s intellectual productions were ‘autumnal fruit’. ‘Which will prove stronger?’ asked Andreas-Salomé to rave reviews from Georg Simmel (who later developed doubts about her biologism), Martin Buber, and beleaguered antiemancipationists all over Europe, ‘woman or the unwomanly demands she is making on herself, time will have to tell’ (Binion 1968:233–37). This theme of woman’s lesser differentiation, so dear to Victorian scientists, runs throughout Andreas-Salomé’s work and is often glorified and lyricized in turgid Laurentian-style prose. In her Freudian period it is aligned with the formulations of masochism, passivity, and narcissism that, interestingly enough, tend to characterize the work of the women closest to Freud. In this model, the male, lacking the ‘harmony’ of the undifferentiated woman, is better able to focus and concentrate his attention and is thus capable of ambition and intellectuality. Freud reached a similar conclusion via a somewhat different route. Arguing from soma to psyche, Andreas-Salomé, Binion notes, constructs a Freudian model and although she later repudiated this essay, she retained its central ideas. ‘Thoughts on the Problem of Love’ (1900) presents Andreas-Salomé’s most idiosyncratic thesis. She herself lived by its principles all her life, although she does not appear to have pressed them with Freud. The power of love thrives on strangeness, she held: it waxes with the ‘alien possibilities’ of the object. Novelty generates passion. ‘Two are at one only when they remain two’; ‘unity must be momentary’ (quoted in Binion 1968:252–53). This programme, preceded as it is by some remarks on the universality of the incest taboo, might be seen as more indicative of a neurotic sexuality than of any principle of liberation, and as an attempt ‘to make a kind of ethical norm out of her own life of serial polyandry’ (Leavy in Andreas-Salomé 1964:8). She had expanded on this theme in 1909 with Eroticism—a book commissioned by Martin Buber—in which she presented sex as primarily a physical urge like hunger or thirst, easily appeased and soon satiated, so that there is a continuous need for new objects. Freud’s own belief that the value of the love object diminishes after sexual satisfaction is attained is very much in accord with this model although he was, of course, talking theoretically, and only about men. He must have been aware of Andreas-Salomé’s views, however, and there is evidence that he was flattered from the first by her devotion to him. Perhaps the aggressive sexuality of this blonde-haired Gentile femme fatale attracted the austere Jew who stood ‘for an infinitely freer sexual life’ but had himself ‘made very little use of such

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freedom’. Such a woman propounding at the same time such firm, theoretical views on the inadequacy of the female intellect and the primary nature of female masochism and passivity could well have proved irresistible. The idea that love thrives on strangeness surfaced only diffidently in AndreasSalomé’s psychoanalytical writings. ‘Toward Woman as a Type’, published in 1914, is basically a psychoanalytic revision of ‘The Human as Woman’. As she is described here woman finds her own activity and creative fulfilment in motherhood. The concept of femininity, once active in its all-pervasive ‘sufficiency’, now gives way to the confusing ‘passive but positive’ sexual signification. In Binion’s summary: ‘Man constrasts with woman as enterprising achiever with indolent receiver snug in her “joy-egoism”…. For woman whose lover is person and superperson at once, love’s bondage is no tragic fate but a grace of nature’, although easily depleted by virtue of its own unitary force. Here Andreas-Salomé’s ‘principle’ undergoes a sea-change for woman’s love wanes not with the ‘alien possibilities’ of the object, but because ‘the very lushness of the love feast may well overtax her means, leaving little “for a reasonable, durable agreement”’ (Binion 1968:555). Man, by contrast, forever seeks but never finally achieves ultimate unity except in ‘superpersonal values and images’ in the intellectual goal which is for him what woman finds in the sexual act. The author elaborates further in her Journal adding a characteristic twist. Fidelity, morality, and marriage, she thinks, may be evidence of neurotic conflict in that they serve to cover up and justify the repression of instinctual life. It is ‘really woman’s only cultural attainment that she isolates sexuality from her experience less than man’ and to the sexual act, she ‘devotes all the strength of her civilization (which man employs elsewhere)’ (Andreas-Salomé 1964:80–1). This last curiously resembles Freud’s important subsidiary theme of woman’s hostile opposition to the masculine drive for civilization. In common with her sister disciples and in marked contradiction of her own career, Andreas-Salomé was quite consistent on the matter of female intellectuality. This was a male prerogative. In ‘Woman as a Type’ the renunciation of clitoridal sexuality at puberty not only was seen as essential to the attainment of femininity, but also determined ‘the specifically feminine virtues one and all’, which ‘are those of abnegation: where women assert themselves in competition with men, those are the very virtues from which they would emancipate themselves’ (Binion 1968:555), she wrote, although the Journal reveals a curious variation on this theme: ‘Woman—the fortunate animal [is]…regressive without a neurosis…. Narcissistic and cultureless, woman…perhaps never attains the final insights of the mind but instead finds her being in the intuitive knowledge of life and mind…. For a neurotic, the wish to become a woman would really mean the wish to become healthy.’ (Binion 1968:118) Andreas-Salomé does not, on the whole, emerge as a significant contributor to psychoanalysis; her influence was mainly restricted to Freud himself. In his own rather ambiguous tribute to her talent for corroboration, Freud wrote: ‘I strike up a—mostly very simple—melody; you supply the higher octaves for

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it; I separate the one from the other, and you blend what has been separated into a higher unity; I silently accept the limits imposed by our subjectivity, whereas you draw express attention to them. Generally speaking, we have understood each other and are at one in our opinions.’ (Pfeiffer 1972:185) However, one paper by Andreas-Salomé has proved to be of lasting interest. Freud described ‘Anal and Sexual’ as the ‘best gift to me to date’. Andreas-Salomé’s proposition that the child’s first prohibition—that of anal erotism—‘becomes his first piece of repression’, was to make a lasting impact not least on the theories of femininity since it also provided a rationale for the troublesome feature of vaginal awareness in the young girl. Thus Freud writes in his ‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality’: ‘The genital apparatus remains the neighbour of the cloaca, and actually [to quote Lou Andreas-Salomé] “in the case of women is only taken from it on lease”’ (1905, SE 7:187n.). Vaginal sensitivity, according to this model, is of anal origin not only in its infantile manifestations, as many later psychoanalytic writers have understood, but also remaining permanently dependent on its source in the cloaca. The corresponding idea of the ‘equivalence of faeces and child, rectum and birth passage, is reinforced by the anatomical proximity’ (Jaffe in Blum 1977:367), and the symbolization is employed by both sexes, with the equation of faeces to gift, baby, and penis. I have said that Andreas-Salomé did disagree with Freud on some major issues. She predicted that the ‘unalterable contradiction in the application of a method derived from science—the logical analysis by which we gain control of the outer world—to the immediate data of our innermost experiences’ (quoted by Leavy in Andreas-Salomé 1964:18) would be problematic for the establishment of psychoanalysis as a ‘scientific’ enterprise. She thought that Freud was mistaken about the actual defect in religious belief in which she saw positive, creative possibilities. She believed that his warring polarities of nature and culture were not just linked forcibly by repression and sublimation but by a ‘natural’, creative tendency in man toward cultural achievement. Repression could thus, on occasion, be natural and life-enhancing. She charged Freud with confusing primary and secondary narcissism, correctly predicting that it would become a ‘burning issue’ (Andreas-Salomé 1964:110) for psychoanalysis in the future and she thought that he confused the two entities of the ego and the self—‘confounding the individual’s defensive system with his person as it is known to him’ (cited by Binion 1968:357). Some of Andreas-Salomé’s Journal entries show her to have been more frequently at odds with Freud than her letters to him revealed. About Victor Tausk, she wrote that ‘Freud acts with complete conviction when he proceeds so sharply against Tausk’ (Andreas-Salomé 1964:97). But just as she kept silent at Freud’s ‘Wednesday Discussions’, she kept most of her disagreements to her private correspondence with him or confided them to her Journal. She described the ‘tragedy’ of the relationship between him and Tausk: ‘it is…clear than any independence around Freud…worries him and wounds him quite automatically in his noble egoism as investigator, forcing him to premature discussion’ (Andreas-Salomé 1964:97). She noted an anxious denial of Otto Rank’s individuality and a fear of ‘regicide’ on the part of Freud when he complained that there were not ‘six such charming men’ like him in the group for Rank, she writes, was

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‘nothing but a son’ (Andreas-Salomé 1964:97). Notwithstanding their differences, Andreas-Salomé’s attachment to Freud was obviously an intense one. In 1922 she had written to him, ‘since my visit to the Berggasse in 1921 I cannot go long without either writing to you or hearing from you’ (Pfeiffer 1972:111). To the man she called the ‘father-face over my life’ (Binion 1968:377), she wrote before she died, ‘Dear, dear Professor Freud—I should soonest only repeat this, as if everything that fills me full were in it’ (376). In 1934 she had counted herself among ‘those beyond reckoning who love, love, love you!’ (376). As early as 1913, AndreasSalomé had owned, in conversation with her friend Ellen Delp, that ‘her father had stood behind her god, her lovers, and Freud’ (366n.). Freud probably came closer to admiration for Lou Andreas-Salomé than any other of his women disciples and he treated her with a characteristic mixture of real affection and condescension. In his obituary notice he wrote, ‘We all felt it as an honour when she joined the ranks’. However, as if in agreement with Andreas-Salomé’s own theoretical views of women’s intellectual achievements, views which she certainly did not invoke in relation to her own, the notice continues, ‘She never spoke of her own poetical and literary works. She clearly knew where the true values in life are to be looked for (Freud 1937, SE 23:297). This is a highly ambiguous tribute to make to the author of 17 books and 119 articles, described as ‘probably… the most distinguished woman in Central Europe’ (Eissler 1971:24). Freud’s most complimentary words here are also the most revealing: ‘Those who were closer to her had the strongest impression of the genuineness and harmony of her nature…all feminine frailties, and perhaps most human frailties, were foreign to her or had been conquered by her’ (1937, SE 23:297). Like Andreas-Salomé, the life and career of Helene Deutsch seems to contradict her own theoretical position on the psychology of women. Deutsch was born in 1882 to a Jewish family in Polish Galicia. She became a staunch advocate of the theory of female passivity, but from an early age was herself an active emancipationist and revolutionary. Since high-school education was closed to girls, she studied secretly, against her parents’ wishes, for the Abitur—passport to the European universities—running away from home to take the university examinations. She enrolled in the Medical School of Vienna University and was one of only three women to take the degree. By then she was already a seasoned political activist. She had helped found the first working women’s movement in her home town, organized its first strike, and with two other suffragettes had successfully pressured the University of Vienna Law School to open its doors to women. Deutsch did her psychiatric and neurological training at the famous Wagner-Jauregg Clinic where she first heard Freud lecture. During the First World War she served there as ‘clinical assistant’ (de facto since women were officially barred from the rank), working with war casualties and heading the women’s section. She studied with Kraepelin in Munich for one year (Briehl 1966:282–84). Thus Deutsch entered psychoanalysis from the world of psychiatry. She was admitted to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1918, and in 1925 she helped create the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute which she served as director for ten years. At the 10th International Psychoanalytic Congress, with S.Rado and H.Sachs, she formulated the programme which was to become the basis for all future psychoanalytic training (Briehl 1966:285–87). Briehl, who worked and studied with Deutsch in Vienna, speaks of ‘an

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exquisitely keen mind…piercing, intuitive and keenly critical’ (287–88). Paul Roazen reports from interviews with former colleagues and pupils that her seminars are still recalled as ‘remarkable experiences’ (Roazen 1979:454). Yet so intense was Deutsch’s reliance on Freud’s approval that, had she known that he was originally opposed to the founding of the Vienna Institute, a fact that came to light only in Ernest Jones’s biography, her ‘entire energy for the project would have disappeared’ (Deutsch 1973:160). She reports with chagrin that she once ‘immersed’ herself in a study of Don Quixote only to find that Freud’s personal sympathy was ‘always with the “Fool”’ (Deutsch 1973:149). She saw Melanie Klein’s divergent work in child analysis as evidence that her analysis (with Karl Abraham) had failed, thus unconsciously equating analysis with indoctrination (141). Yet like Andreas-Salomé, Deutsch was able to see, although not to say until long after his death, that Freud’s need was primarily for ‘followers and collaborators’. She talks of ‘Freud’s need for an assentient echo from the outer world’ which caused him to require that his pupils be ‘above all passive understanding listeners; no “yes men” but projection objects through whom he reviewed…his own ideas’ (in Ruitenbeek 1973:174). Freud was ‘an inspired pathfinder’, she wrote, who, ‘regarding his co-workers as a means towards his own impersonal objective accomplishment’, was made ‘annoyed’ and ‘impatient’ by ‘every impulse towards originality when it subserved other than objective purposes’. He ‘was too far ahead of his time to leave much room for anything really new in his own generation. It seems to be characteristic of every discoverer of genius that his influence on contemporary thought is not only fructifying but also inhibitory’ (Ruitenbeek 1973:176). Again, writing of the small, select monthly meetings that Freud held for the early group of analysts close to him, she notes, ‘He did not succeed in creating in us the illusion that it was we who gave and he who received, although he made the effort to do so’ (178). Jones has also described this feature of Freud’s personality: ‘Freud had…a plastic and mobile mind,…open to new and even highly improbable ideas. But it worked this way only on condition that the ideas came from himself; to those from outside he could be very resistant, and they had little power to change his mind.’ (quoted in Roazen 1973:88) Along with the deep sense of veneration that she felt for Freud and a passionate dedication to his cause, Deutsch’s account conveys a trace of resentment and more than a tinge of regret. A similar ambivalence is apparent in her discussion of Freud’s ‘human weaknesses’. She notes that Freud was ‘very happy’ at any recognition from officialdom or when a colleague of ‘acknowledged scientific rank’ joined the movement ‘despite his disdain for official position’. But she could well be speaking on a much more personal and subjective note when she adds that:

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‘his unwillingness to make concessions expressed itself—so strongly indeed, that in such cases he was tempted to make it a condition that the person in question should give up his official position…. One sometimes felt inclined to interpret this as an act of affective vengeance on the part of Freud against officialdom.’ (quoted in Ruitenbeek 1973:174) Deutsch herself gave up her ambitions in academic psychiatry at Freud’s behest. She reports him as telling her that it would not be possible to continue her work at the Wagner-Jauregg Clinic (Briehl 1966:284). According to Eissler, there were other reasons why Deutsch gave up her post (1971:191–92) but her phrase ‘he was tempted to make it a condition’ indicates a much more directive stance on the part of Freud. Briehl notes that in her later career in Boston, Deutsch was able to return to the hospital work she had loved but which had been impossible in Vienna (Briehl 1966:288). Deutsch published many influential works including some valuable clinical texts. Her writings as a whole comprise a ‘comprehensive psychology of the life cycle of women’ (Briehl 1966:282), but she is best known for her two-volume work The Psychology of Women. The nucleus of this work, published as an essay in 1925, has been described by Juliet Mitchell as ‘redolent with normative morality… distasteful psychologizing’ and ‘biologism’ (Mitchell 1975:127). However, it is sometimes considered to be the fullest and most detailed extrapolation of Freud’s views of women and, indeed, Robert Fliess, the editor of The Psycho-Analytic Reader, tells us that it was produced ‘in collaboration’ with Freud (Fliess 1973:165). One talent which Deutsch shared with her sister disciples was the ability to extend Freud’s concepts while retaining their focal points and central structure. Thus Deutsch, like Freud, saw the sexual development of the girl as essentially problematic. She must renounce her clitoral masculinity and proceed to discover a ‘new’ sexual organ before she can experience any sense of femininity. Deutsch thought that men must discover the vagina and possess it sadistically, in order to attain sexual maturity. The woman discovers her own vagina only through being ‘masochistically subjugated by the penis’ (quoted in Fliess 1973:166). Orality is the prototype of female sexuality, the mouth being the prototype of the vagina. The small girl makes an unconscious association between breast and penis and this equivalence gives rise first to oral fantasies of intercourse and pregnancy. Later this leads to anal-sadistic fantasies in which she identifies either with the active, sadistic father or with the passive, sadistic mother. The clitoris is an inadequate substitute for the penis and the small girl, unaware of her vagina, is inconsolable on discovering the penis. ‘Every attempt to pacify…[her] envy…is rightly doomed to complete failure’ (Fliess 1973:165–79). While the vagina is to become the ‘organ of pleasure’ in the mature female, it is her infantile, sado-masochistic conception of coitus, revived through identification with her mother and the equation of the latter’s breast with the Oedipal penis, which provides her with her model for femininity. The act of coitus has two stages and must be followed by parturition for its completion. Orgasm is terminated by labour which is ‘an orgy of masochistic pleasure’. For Deutsch the actual pains of labour are the aim as well as the means of motherhood. Masochism is a normal, necessary, and desirable part of the

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female’s adjustment and she carefully distinguishes it from its abnormal representation (Fliess 1973:165–79). In Volume 1 of The Psychology of Women Deutsch diverges from Freud and, more specifically, from Karl Abraham on the determinants of penis envy, but only to extend and, in the process, to buttress their hypotheses. Penis envy, although probably ubiquitous, is not the primary cause of ‘masculine wishes’ since no experience alone can explain the female ‘genital trauma’. This trauma is innate. ‘It is a biologically predetermined inhibition of development that paves the way to femininity and at the same time creates a traumatic disposition’ (Deutsch 1944:119). In Freud’s as in Deutsch’s early theories, passivity and its correlate masochism are consequences of the castration complex. In Deutsch’s 1945 conception of the genital trauma, however, there is a ‘dispositional-traumatic readiness for penis envy’ which external experience will precipitate and facilitate (319). Finding first that she lacks an active organ, the girl then discovers that she lacks a passive one too since she has no awareness of her ‘completely passive receptive’ vagina until she experiences coitus. She is, to all intents and purposes, organless. So the genital trauma results not only from penis envy but also from the fact that the girl, finding her active tendencies thwarted due to the ‘inadequacies’ of her ‘inferior’ organ, also finds that no ready organ exists for the transformation of those tendencies into passive ones (229–30). There is a second dimension to Deutsch’s concept of the genital trauma which, by this time, has replaced the term ‘female castration complex’ altogether (150 n.2). First outlined in 1930, Deutsch proposes a masochistic infantile identification with the mother based on birth fantasies of a bloody, painful character (in Fliess 1973:201). An obscure awareness of the mother’s menstruation manifests itself in the small girl’s early fantasy life, Deutsch finds, with an unconscious knowledge concerning her own organs and anxieties of their being ‘torn and dismembered internally’ (Deutsch 1944:150). She goes to a great deal of trouble, however, following Freud, to deny the possibility of any unconscious vaginal awareness in girls. Deutsch cites Melanie Klein’s findings here about cruel infantile fantasies of dismemberment and injuries to internal organs, so it is particularly puzzling to find that she specifically refers these fantasies to the ‘stomach and intestines’: the ‘paths of penetration and expulsion are represented by the mouth and anus’ (Deutsch 1944:231). Passivity is the major consequence for the woman of the total dependence of the vagina on the man’s activity for its awakening. Masochism is inevitable since the vagina must be ‘subjugated’ by the penis and indeed, is ready and waiting; its role has been predetermined by the early experience of the girl that followed on the renunciation of her active-sadistic phallic fantasies. The masculine-narcissistic protest—‘I won’t be castrated’—is converted at that time to ‘I want to be castrated by father’. The equation of the masochistic fantasies of rape with the wish for a child, together with the masochistic identification with the mother described above, determines the set towards femininity. Narcissism, which completes Deutsch’s triad of essential feminine attributes, follows from the repression of masochism when the latter tendency is intensified and the ego is threatened. In her view, it is an adaptive and positive defence. When not excessive, it lies at the core of the ‘feminine woman’ who is ‘naturally passive-narcissistic’ (Deutsch 1944:188–90).

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Deutsch’s 1930 paper, ‘The Significance of Masochism in the Mental Life of Women’, corrected what Freud saw as a defect in a preceding study by Lampl-de-Groot (1927), in which the hostility that marked the girl’s turning away from her mother was not indicated. Deutsch’s later work modified this position on the hostility of the motherdaughter relation and it is perhaps significant that this crucial shift—it is one for which she has been justly praised—was made only after Freud’s death. In 1944 the daughter’s predominantly ‘hate-filled attitude’ has come to be seen as a neurotic formation. In normal development the detachment process is gradual and is seen as a ‘conflict between attachment and detachment…in favourable cases the process ends with a positive, tender, and forgiving relation to the mother—and such a relation is one of the most important prerequisites for psychologic harmony in later femininity’ (Deutsch 1944:253). In a further shift away from the Freudian conception, Deutsch recognizes that the girl’s turning to the father is primarily active. The mother is perceived by the girl as the main agent of ‘the inhibiting influence’ imposed by the environment because of the girl’s greater biological weakness. The mother’s world loves, inhibits, and ultimately ‘condemns to passivity’ (246). The father’s is one that may allow ‘activity’ but never aggression. Ideally the girl will renounce her aggression in exchange for the ‘bribe’ of love. Thus once again feminine activity becomes passivity for the residual energy is invested in masochism. For Deutsch, as for Andreas-Salomé, the female’s destiny is always represented by the equation of love, passivity, and pain (Deutsch 1944:246–53). In Deutsch’s theories, as in those of her sister disciples, intellectuality in woman is an important issue. Deutsch is at her most prescriptive here; her theorizing lacks the cautionary or diffident note that often mitigates even Freud’s account and in fact reads like a formula for the development and encouragement of masochistic tendencies. Deutsch has been widely criticized on various grounds for this concept and I shall therefore quote from just two passages so as to render some of their flavour. However, in view of the unfavourable comparison here of Deutsch to Freud, it is worth recalling once again that the nucleus of the work in question, that is Deutsch’s 1925 paper, was written ‘in collaboration’ with Freud (Fliess 1973:165) and that her later 1930 paper on female masochism was approved by him (195). Although criticized so widely, Deutsch’s twovolume work on the psychology of women has been extremely influential. Volume 1, from which the following extract is taken, was reprinted eighteen times between 1944 and 1971. Deutsch’s ideal ‘feminine-erotic’ type ‘leaves the initiative to the man and out of her own need renounces originality, experiencing her own self through identification. Some…need to overestimate their objects,…[e.g.] “He is wonderful and I am part of him”. These women are…ideal life companions for men;…ideal collaborators… happiest in this role. They seem to be easily influenceable,… They are the loveliest and most unaggressive of helpmates…. They do not insist on their own rights—quite the contrary. They are easy to handle in every way—if one only loves them. If gifted in any direction, they preserve the capacity for being original and productive…. They are always willing to renounce their own achievements…

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and they rejoice in the achievements of their companions. They have an extraordinary need of support when engaged in any activity directed outward… [if] the danger[s] of masochistic subjection…are successfully avoided, we have here the most gratifying type of the “feminine woman”.’ (Deutsch 1944:191–92) ‘Woman’s intellectuality is to a large extent paid for by the loss of valuable feminine qualities: it feeds on the sap of the affective life and results in impoverishment of this life…everything relating to exploration and cognition, all the forms and kinds of human cultural aspiration that require a strictly objective approach, are with few exceptions the domain of the masculine intellect, of man’s spiritual power, against which women can rarely compete. All observations point to the fact that the intellectual woman is masculinized; in her, warm intuitive knowledge has yielded to cold unproductive thinking.’ (290–91) The contradiction between this depiction of femininity and Deutsch’s own contributions have been noted by several writers. It is one that, as we have seen, is also characteristic of Andreas-Salomé but an important difference between the two is that Deutsch’s ideal woman is also sexually handicapped. Freud thought that the female’s sexual drive was weaker than the male’s (1908, SE 9:192), but he also believed that the sexually unsatisfied married woman, restrained and inhibited by ‘civilized’ sexual morality, could become neurotic (195). Deutsch holds that the majority of women listed in statistics as frigid may be ‘psychically healthy’ and, so long as they remain sexually unenlightened, find satisfaction in a ‘happy and tender sense that they are giving keen pleasure’, convinced that coitus is sexually important only for man. The modern woman, she thinks, who is requiring more direct sexual gratification, is tending towards masculinity and neurosis. This tendency is aggravated by the fact that ‘masochism—the most elementary force in feminine mental life’ is now being subverted by the attempts of modern women to avoid pain in defloration and childbirth (Fliess 1973:206–7). The idea that sexual gratification is a gratuitous expectation on the part of the woman was taken further in Deutsch’s later work where she says that the ‘illusion of the equivalence of the sexual act for the two sexes’ should be renounced (Deutsch 1945:84). The sexual act can assume its full significance for the woman only if it is not ‘transformed into an act of erotic play or sexual equality’ (103). Gratification of her selflove should be achieved by way of her partner’s desire; passive-masochistic pleasure and the hope of a child are the woman’s appropriate rewards. Helene Deutsch was analysed by Freud himself for one year and according to Paul Roazen her ‘emotional transference to Freud was immense’. Like other patients she became temporarily convinced that her analyst was in love with her. ‘She remembers… musing: But what will poor Frau Professor do?’ (Roazen cited by Ruitenbeek 1973:170). Freud terminated the analysis abruptly because he wanted time to take the ‘Wolf Man’ back into analysis (Briehl 1966:285) and Deutsch admits to disappointment which she dealt with by attempting to put a brave face on things. ‘I considered myself mature enough then to react to the situation objectively, without bringing my transference

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problems to bear on it’, she relates in her autobiography (Deutsch 1973:133). The working through and dissolution of the transference is the central and most difficult task of psychoanalysis and the analyst usually remains an object of fantasy to some extent. Considering the unique way in which the psychoanalytic process itself mobilizes affects and anxieties, it is not surprising that problems of identification—both positive and negative—tend to beset the movement as a whole. Given that Deutsch had the live experience of Freud’s own highly charismatic presence from which to construct her transference neurosis, the problem of its resolution might well seem insurmountable, as of course it also proved to be for many male followers. If we add to these factors the abrupt termination of Deutsch’s analysis then the maturity which she lays claim to could well be disputed. She seems to have remained permanently bound to Freud by an unresolved transference relationship, and the fact that she was unable to develop any such relationship with Karl Abraham in Berlin, to whom she went for a second analysis, feeling that none was even possible, seems to confirm this (Roazen 1979:457). When Freud terminated Deutsch’s analysis, he told her that she did not need any more; she was not neurotic (Briehl 1966:285). She tells us that he advised her to continue ‘as before in the pursuits of professional and scientific goals, thus sustaining my old identification with my father’ (Deutsch 1973:133). Deutsch was to describe one of the many dangers to the woman’s personality development of this formation in her later work. ‘Another form of woman’s activity stems from her active identification with her father,…femininity …assumes an overpassive and overmasochistic character’ (Deutsch 1944:287). Thus the advice given to Deutsch by Freud, who by now represented a surrogate father, possibly in perpetuity, seems rather ambiguous if not mischievous and her theoretical constructions of female passivity, masochism, and narcissism should, perhaps, be seen partly as a personal response to this situation: a repetition of a much earlier pattern. Deutsch herself was clearly aware of some deep injury when her analysis was so suddenly terminated for she writes, ‘Nevertheless, perhaps from a feeling of rejection, I reacted by having the first depression of my life’ (Deutsch 1973:133). In later years Deutsch revised her position somewhat on female sexuality. In 1960, at a panel discussion on frigidity in women held by the American Psychoanalytic Association (Deutsch 1965), she spoke of being ‘bitterly disappointed’ in the results of the psychoanalytic treatment of frigidity. In marked contradiction to Freud’s views she described healthy women who had never experienced orgasm and psychotic women who were intensely orgasmic. She had also concluded that the clitoris is the sexual organ, the vagina the organ of reproduction. Deutsch still considered the function of the vagina to be unequivocably ‘passive-receptive’ and she regarded the typical orgasm in woman to be one that culminates in ‘a mild, slow relaxation with complete gratification’ (Deutsch 1965:358–61). According to Betty Friedan (1965:288), she threw the conference ‘into an uproar’ by suggesting that orgasm in women had been overemphasized and that she was not sure that women could or should experience a true orgasm at all. Deutsch’s work on the psychology of women greatly elaborated on yet conformed with Freud’s basic approach. As she herself has said, his ideas had for her the ‘character of a categorical imperative’ (Deutsch 1973:216) and her mission was to preserve the ‘original kernel’ of his teachings. That she achieved this only at some cost to herself she makes abundantly clear:

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‘Even if the more conservative and loyal followers seem at times to be out of touch with reality, they nevertheless discharged by their piety the debt we owe for our common spiritual existence…. In defense…it makes a great difference whether one has grown out of the intimacy with Freud into independence…, or whether one owes his independence to an emotional conflict.’ (Deutsch in Ruitenbeek 1973:179) The third woman disciple to be discussed here, although more briefly, is the Princess Marie Bonaparte, who was a great favourite of Freud and a member of his inner circle. She was also an intimate friend who was influential in helping the Freud family and others escape from Nazi Austria. It is significant that Bonaparte, like Deutsch and Andreas-Salomé (and of course many others of the early pioneers) was analysed by Freud himself. Bonaparte was encouraged by Freud to contribute to the early psychoanalytic theories of female sexual development and character. According to Stein-Monod, in 1935 he drew her attention to the tendency in much of the current psychoanalytic literature to deny the fundamental ‘phallicity’ of woman and, since she had come so ‘close to his own views on the subject he advised her to write something on it’ (Stein-Monod in Alexander, Eisenstein, and Grotjahn 1966:403). Bonaparte believed that masochism is ‘biologically intrinsic to the female, for the female germinal cell is essentially an object that is broken into’ (405). It manifests itself at the oral, anal, phallic, and adult stages in related forms. The little girl’s discovery of the anatomical distinction between the sexes is as crucial an event as in the classical Freudian formulation but the way she reacts is biologically determined by her constitutional bisexuality. This accounts for her powerful and primary ‘masculinity complex’ and her difficulties in renouncing the clitoris—an organ which the author variously describes in her book, Female Sexuality, as ‘useless’, ‘rudimentary’, and ‘truncated’ (Bonaparte 1973). Bonaparte takes issue with Melanie Klein and Karen Horney on the question of early vaginal awareness and the primary nature of femininity in exceptionally strong terms. They are described as ‘protagonists of the equal importance of the vagina and the penis, these feminine apologists of the vagina’ (Bonaparte 1973:33) and accused of penis envy. Bonaparte herself proposes a model of infantile eroticism in which the cloaca—the undifferentiated combined vaginal and anal openings—are sensitized. The clitoris is first passively then actively cathected as the little girl’s attachment to her mother becomes active, this stage giving way to the castration complex when the attachment to her father is initiated. A second passive cloacal phase then follows with the positive Oedipus complex when the clitoris is repressed and the child turns towards the father (Bonaparte 1973). Bonaparte stresses the biological features of female sexuality and holds particularly extreme views about the function of the clitoris. She is impressed with the idea that the practice of ritual mutilation of the ‘female phallus’ follows nature, ‘which created it in stunted form’ (Bonaparte 1973:159). Pursuing a reference by Freud, Bonaparte wonders if excision merely confirms the female’s ‘biological castration’ (158). She admired the theory of the Spanish biologist, Maronon, who held that woman must be considered to be an unfinished man whose development has ‘come to a stop’ considering him to be ‘in the right’. The woman’s reproductive organs take up ‘the energy which is used by the male in

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building-up his whole organism… femininity…would thus be a stage of evolution which has stopped midway between adolescence and the adult man’ (8). While women’s more complex psychosexual development requires more libidinal expenditure than men’s, this is easily impeded because of libidinal deficiency. Bonaparte follows Freud’s much more tentative finding in ascribing to women a ‘typically feminine condition of female frigidity’, which is a function of their strong bisexuality (quoted in Chasseguet-Smirgel 1976:29). Her theory of female masochism is well known, and I shall merely quote some representative remarks. Bonaparte believed that the women must accept passivity and masochism as imposed on her by her biological constitution and drawing on Freud’s essay ‘A Child is Being Beaten’, she interprets a fantasy which Freud found to be perverse and sadomasochistic in such a way that it becomes ‘a normal, indispensable factor’ of female sexuality (Bonaparte 1973:87). ‘Vaginal sensitivity in coitus…is…largely based on the existence…and acceptation, of…immense masochistic beating fantasies. In coitus, the woman, in effect, is subjected to a sort of beating’ (85); ‘the fecundation of the female cell is initiated by a kind of wound; in its way, the female cell is primordially “masochistic”’ (78). ‘Women who show too great an aversion to men’s brutal games’, Bonaparte finds, ‘may be suspected of masculine protest and excessive bisexuality. Such women may very well be clitoridal’ (86). Bonaparte herself played a leading part in establishing psychoanalysis in France. Like Deutsch and Andreas-Salomé, she was a creative and prolific writer; she was responsible for preserving Freud’s letters to Wilhelm Fliess in the face of strong opposition on his part (Freeman and Strean 1981:89–91). She had many political and social interests that extended well beyond psychoanalysis. Ethel Person has observed that ‘Bonaparte’s insights are clinically useful today’ but that her mistake was to confuse meaning with causality (in Strouse 1974:260). This may also be true of Deutsch and, to a certain extent, of Andreas-Salomé. These three disciples of Freud are all in theoretical agreement with Freud’s proposition that the ‘strivings’ and ‘literary productions’ of ‘emancipated’ women represent neurotic formations (Freud 1918, SE 11:205), yet all of them wrote more or less prodigiously themselves and led active, intellectual lives. On the whole then Eissler’s argument which invokes these friendships as evidence against Freud’s bias towards women is not a strong one. Women may well have found Freud to be gentle, protective, and understanding and there is no doubt that he valued many of their contributions. However, these things do not in themselves signify an attitude of equality towards women. Freud’s relationships with these disciples were clearly characterized by considerable condescension on his part and a great deal of conformity on theirs. But these followers probably fulfilled a valuable function in Freud’s life in that, as active, dominant women in their own right, they served as reassuring catalysts for the conflicts he experienced surrounding women and femininity in general. In addition, as the eldest son in a family of five sisters, Freud was accustomed to being surrounded by younger, respectful females and, in fact, was able to reconstruct a similar situation within his own immediate family with his three daughters, his wife, and her sister who made her home with them.

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If Freud’s theories about female psychology are seen as part of an elaborate defence against his anxieties about women and if the kind of theories propounded by these devoted followers as well as the quality of their ties to him are taken into account, then some light is shed on what seems to be a puzzling contradiction in Freud’s attitudes to women and to femininity.

4 Freud’s Vienna I have proposed that Freud failed to achieve a satisfactory model of feminine character and that this failure may be traced to a conception of women’s ‘nature’ that derives essentially from that of the traditional Jewish cultural ethic although this was filtered through the subjective experience of a somewhat assimilated, educated Jew. Since the internalization of that ethic was, by definition, unconscious, the resulting assumptions and biases were not identified by Freud and were, therefore, never subjected by him to analytic scrutiny. At this point then, what must be demonstrated is the quality and extent of Freud’s Jewishness and Judaism. The difficulties of defining these terms are well known to sociologists and other writers on Jewish affairs. We shall sidestep the debate by asserting first of all that the distinction is partly a false one. The two cannot be entirely separated, since what Maurice Freedman has called the ‘civilizational’ character of Jewry has always required that for their ritual and secular institutions Jews must draw on their community (Freedman 1955). Intense private theological preoccupations with sin and salvation are often seen as a ‘weakening of Jewish communal consciousness in favour of dangerously self-reliant personal encounters’ (Schulweis cited by L.A.Berman 1968:303). Secondly, we have available to us Freud’s very clear working definition of his Jewishness which he made in his address to the B’nai B’rith Society: ‘not the faith, not even the national pride,…but…many dark emotional powers all the stronger the less they could be expressed in words, as well as the clear consciousness of an inner identity, the familiarity of the same psychological structure’ (my emphasis) (E.L.Freud 1975:366–67). Two quite different areas of his personality are indicated here: one from which he drew a conscious sense of identity, acknowledged and affirmed on this and many other occasions throughout his life, and a second one, often denied, that formed the source of those ‘obscure emotional forces’ for which this most eloquent of men could find no words. These forces must be, in Freud’s own terms, of crucial interest to our understanding of the man. I have already suggested that there is some ambiguity in Freud’s account of his Jewish education and of the extent of his familiarity with Jewish matters. Ernest Jones tells us that ‘Freud himself was certainly conversant with all Jewish customs and festivals’ (1956, vol. 1:21). Freud’s children, however, have assured Jones that their grandfather, Jacob Freud, ‘had become a complete free-thinker’, although Jones does find some evidence to the contrary (21). Nevertheless Jones believed it unlikely that Jacob Freud kept up with Orthodox custom after reaching Vienna when his son was 4 years old (21). As if to confirm this, Freud, on occasion, not only denied ever having learned Hebrew, he also denied being able to identify with certainty the written script. In a letter to A.A.Roback (20 February, 1930) he writes, ‘My education was so un-Jewish that

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today I cannot even read your dedication, which is evidently written in Hebrew. In later life I have often regretted this lack in my education’ (my emphasis) (E.L.Freud 1975:395). In another letter, written in 1936, Freud denied ever having learned both Hebrew and Yiddish (Klingsberg 1973:vi). Freud’s choice of the phrase ‘which is evidently written in Hebrew’ in the first letter is a puzzling one, in the light of what we can piece together of his education. He is not claiming here to have forgotten Hebrew; he is disclaiming any previous acquaintance with it. This denial is the more extraordinary in view of the fact that Freud was taught ‘the Scriptures and Hebrew’ (E.Jones 1956, vol. 1:179) by Professor Samuel Hammerschlag at the Leopoldstädler Communal Gymnasium, which he attended for eight years from 1866 and where he had a brilliant career, passing out with distinction (22). Nor was his relationship with his Hebrew teacher a formal or a transient one. He remained on such intimate terms with him and his family that he was able to say, ‘He has been touchingly fond of me for years; there is such a secret sympathy between us that we can talk intimately together…he always regards me as his son’. Years later, Freud named his youngest daughter, Anna, after Hammerschlag’s daughter and his second daughter Sophie, after the old man’s niece, Sophie Schwab (179). The influence of the Hebrew teacher on his pupil is also confirmed by the obituary that Freud wrote for him in the Neue Freie Presse (11 November, 1904): ‘S.Hammerschlag…was one of those personalities who possess the gift of leaving ineradicable impressions on the development of their pupils. A spark from the same fire which animated the spirit of the great Jewish seers and prophets burned in him.’ (1904, SE 9:255) The mystery of Freud’s denial of any acquaintance with Hebrew is further compounded by the gift of the family Bible which his father presented to him on his thirty-fifth birthday. Jacob Freud wrote his dedication in Hebrew, a fact that would be incomprehensible had his son never learned it. Moreover, the dedication clearly expresses Jacob’s conviction that it was ‘in the Book of Books’ that the young Sigmund first encountered the ‘spirit of God’ that moved him to learning in his seventh year: ‘Thou hast seen in this Book the vision of the Almighty…thou hast done and hast tried to fly high upon the wings of the Holy Spirit…. Now… I send it to you as a token of love’ (quoted in E.Jones 1956, vol. 1:21–2). These words are not likely to have been written to a man whose education was as ‘unJewish’ as Freud has described. Moreover, the Bible itself was the Philippson Bible which deeply engrossed him as a young child. Freud’s copy was the second edition (1858) printed in German and Hebrew with commentaries and illustrations (Freud 1900, SE 5:583, n.2). The dedication itself is also unlikely to have been written by a ‘complete free-thinker’ although Jacob’s possession of the Philippson Bible, with its sacrilegious illustrations, shows him to have been an adherent of the Reform Movement. Jones is obviously not aware of the contradictions inherent in the two statements—‘Freud himself was certainly conversant with all the Jewish customs and festivals’, and, ‘His [Freud’s] children have

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assured me that their grandfather had become a complete free thinker’—although he does suggest that there is some evidence to the contrary (Jones 1956, vol. 1:21). However, there is more concrete evidence of Freud’s early involvement in a living, practical Judaism, which comes from a letter to his fiancée written (23 July, 1882) when he was twenty-six. This letter has often been examined by writers on Freud who have found in the last paragraph a strong affirmation of the ‘Jewish spirit’. It also contains evidence of a much closer and more intimate connection with a traditional everyday Judaism. In the course of a long conversation with a Jewish stationer in Hamburg who, it transpired, was a disciple of his fiancée’s grandfather, Rabbi Isaac Bernays, Freud writes: ‘The man from whom I ordered this despotic paper on Friday could supply it only on Sunday; “for on Saturday”, said he, “we are not here. It is one of our ancient customs.” (Oh, I know that ancient custom!)…. I had to take a chair beside him while he… recommended to me this and that excursion: “I’d like to come along with you myself, but I am an old Jew, and just look at me.” I looked. His beard was shaggy. Yesterday they were not allowed to be shaved. “You know, of course which Fast Day is upon us?” I knew all right. Just because years ago at this season (owing to a miscalculation) Jerusalem had been destroyed I was to be prevented from speaking to my girl on the last day of my stay…. So, said my old Jew, nine days before Tisha B’Av, we deny ourselves every pleasure…. My old Jew provided several more ingenious attempts of this kind to explain and support the Scriptures. I knew the method:…. And as for us, this is what I believe: even if the form wherein the old Jews were happy no longer offers us any shelter, something of the core, of the essence of this meaningful and life-affirming Judaism will not be absent from our home.’ (E.L.Freud 1975:18–22) A first reading of this letter does show a kind of statement of intent on the part of Freud to his fiancée who was brought up along strictly Orthodox lines. It is an affirmation of his Jewish identity albeit firm in the principles of intellectual emancipation. A more careful scrutiny, however, reveals another aspect. A sense of contradiction is evoked; certain doubts are raised in relation to his statements about the ‘un-Jewishness’ of his education. The falling away of his family from religious orthodoxy, at least in Freud’s early years, is cast into question by two remarks made in this letter, which, I would claim, are immediately recognizable to any Jew reared in an observant or even semi-observant household. The first is in his response to the printer’s: ‘“for on Saturday… we are not here. It is one of our ancient customs”.’ ‘Oh I know that ancient custom!’, Freud exclaims to Martha. To the second, ‘“You know, of course which Fast Day is upon us?”’, he responds, ‘I knew all right’. These claims by Freud to ‘know’ seem to come from personal experience of customs that, even to the children of the devout, are often wearisome and tedious. ‘Oh I know that ancient custom!’ The exclamation mark itself speaks volumes. It is inconceivable that he is voicing an attitude to a school topic: the subject matter of lessons given in religious instruction. He ‘knew all right’ which Fast

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Day was imminent and precisely why the old man was unshaven. He even gives the day its Hebrew name Tisha B’Av (the ninth day of the Jewish month of Av). For a Jew to know ‘so well’ those ancient customs requires that he grow up in a household that has made at least a certain minimal commitment to the customs and rituals of observed Judaism. The Jewish home is the focal point: the theatre of operations of Jewish ritual observance. That Jacob Freud later drifted away from his religious roots, as is claimed, is, of course, possible and indeed probable. The man who wrote the above letter to his fiancée, however, could not have spent his childhood years in the house of a complete free-thinker. Of some interest too is the account of Jacob Freud given by his granddaughter, Judith Bernays Heller, who stayed with her grandparents for a year and recalls that Jacob divided his time between reading the Talmud in Hebrew and other Hebrew and German books (Heller 1956:419). This granddaughter was also impressed with Jacob Freud’s recitation of the complete Passover Haggadah (the ritual narrative) in Hebrew, from memory, at the family service (419). Also, we know that Freud was no stranger to this service for Theodor Reik remembers him comparing the Maori taboos described in Frazer’s The Golden Bough to the Had Gadya, the Aramaic refrain recited at the family Passover service (Reik 1962:155). Marthe Robert writes that ‘Freud never attacked the Jews as such and was never… ashamed of them; he always felt a kind of attraction or sympathy for them’ (Robert 1977:35). Certainly Freud’s attraction and sympathy for Jews was an essential part of his being. More than this, he endowed the quality of Jewishness with something miraculous and indefinable. In a letter to the sister-in-law of David Eder, the English psychoanalyst, after his death, he writes, ‘we were both Jews and knew of each other that we carried this miraculous thing in common, which—inaccessible to any analysis so far—makes the Jew’ (Robert 1977:35). That Freud himself felt his Jewishness to be inaccessible to any analysis confirms the view that certain essential features of Freud’s personality remained unexplored. It is not true to say, however, that Freud was never irritated by or ashamed of the Jews as such. I believe that a sense of shame is involved in many of the contradictions that, it is claimed here, manifested themselves in his work and in his personality and we have already seen that as a young man Freud was ‘petrified with horror and shame in the presence of the Christians’ by a bitter Jewish oration at a friend’s funeral. Even more important was the shame felt by the young Freud for his father’s ‘un-heroic conduct’ in the famous ‘hat-in-the-gutter’ incident when he was humiliated by a Cossack soldier. We shall have more to say about this question in the following pages but for the moment, it is worth noting that this particular incident was so traumatic that, according to Jones, Jacob Freud never regained the place he had held in his son’s esteem (E. Jones 1956, vol. 1:25). In the last years of his life, explaining why he delayed publication of Moses and Monotheism, Freud speaks of his unwillingness to ‘argue publicly’ the implications that followed from his hypothesis that Moses was an Egyptian. He ends with the statement: ‘And lastly, it did not seem attractive to find oneself classed with the schoolmen and Talmudists who delight in exhibiting their ingenuity without regard to how remote from reality their thesis may be’ (1939, SE 23:17). Freud, above all, wanted to be seen as a scholar and scientist and the product of an enlightened humanistic education and culture, as indeed he was. It is contempt that he expresses here for the Talmudism of his ancestors

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and from which he tries so assiduously to dissociate himself. It was one shared by a great many Jews of that time and is still felt by some today. It partly devolves on a deep repugnance for the over-compulsive approach to the texts and rituals that dominated the everyday life of the vast majority of Jews in pre-emancipation Eastern Europe down to the smallest and most intimate details and which gave enormous power and authority to religious elders. The centuries-long confinement within the ‘four cubits of the Law’ resulted in an ever-growing number of forbidden thoughts and actions. The suffocating restrictions inspired many of the impassioned revolts on the part of the various reform movements of the Enlightenment. Thus the Jewish historian, Heinrich Graetz (1817–91), found the methods used by the Talmudists ‘distorted, hair-splitting and perverse’. It made the ‘crooked straight and the straight crooked’. A second historian, Israel Marcus Jost (1793–1860), accused the ‘Talmudists’ of having ‘stood outside the present time, living in an imaginary world’. For Lazarus Bendavid (1762–1832), a Berlin Jewish philosopher, the ‘mischief with the shameful, nonsensical’ ceremonial law had to be stopped before the ‘miserable’ Jewish condition could be remedied (Patai 1977:467–68). For hundreds of years, however, the Jews of the ghettos had clung to the Talmud as to a liferaft. Robinson writes in 1892: ‘Even the Bible itself did not come so close to the daily life of the Ghetto as the Talmud and the Mishna. The Bible was a thing eternal, apart, unchanging. The Talmud was a daily companion, living, breathing, contemporary. With a hundred remedies for a hundred needs. A nation persecuted, lives though its times of stress rather by its commentaries than by its Scriptures. In the Ghetto the Talmud was a door into the ideal always open.’ (Hertz 1938:157) We have seen that Jacob Freud was a Talmudic scholar who apparently returned to the rabbinic precept to study in his declining years. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud recounts an early memory of his father handing his children a book for them to destroy. Robert says of this incident, I think rightly, that there must be a ‘serious moral trauma’ involved, for at the age of 40, Freud still cannot bring himself to disclose the meaning of the dream which recalled this scene (Robert 1977:114). She suggests that the scene might indicate to Freud a pseudo-assimilated, still barbarous father, one who truly reveres only the Book of Books (113–14). In the event Freud may have come to honour his father’s and his own roots in the Talmudic tradition in a particularly lasting way. The resemblances between the Talmudic and the psychoanalytic dialectical traditions have often been noted. Indeed Theodor Reik specifically links the two modes: ‘The Talmudic texts treat punctuation and sentence structure very casually, so that a statement can be read in a positive or negative sense, can express an assertion as well as a doubt or a query’ (1962:204). Thus Talmudic dialogue is always ambiguous and thought is antithetical. ‘It was not accidental that Freud could prove in his psychoanalytic research that the things which we rate highest are subterraneously connected with those which we hold in abhorrence’, Reik writes (210). Freud himself was in no doubt of the debt he owed his origins. He believed, as we’ve already seen, that psychoanalysis could have been invented only by a Jew. ‘Why’, he

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asked Pastor Pfister, did it have to wait for ‘an absolutely irreligious Jew’ to invent it (Meng and E.L. Freud 1963:63). In his address to the B’nai B’rith in 1926 Freud said, ‘Because I was a Jew I found myself free of many prejudices which restrict others in the use of their intellect: as a Jew I was prepared to be in the opposition and to renounce agreement with the “compact majority”’ (E.L.Freud 1975:367). To say that Freud took an opposition role is, of course, a massive understatement but it is necessary and important to question whether the prejudices which restricted others, and from which he was so sure that he was free, were not replaced by several of his own. Henri F.Ellenberger is one of many scholars to complain that our data on Freud is insufficient and our knowledge of his childhood is ‘meagre. Further undetected sources of Freud are yet to be discovered’ (Ellenberger 1970:468). In his own account of the history of the development of psychoanalysis, Freud has indicated where we might look. In An Autobiographical Study, Freud wrote, ‘My deep engrossment in the Bible story (almost as soon as I had learned the art of reading) had, as I recognised much later, an enduring effect upon the direction of my interest’ (1925, SE 20:8). He is certainly referring to his later preoccupations with the origins and psychology of religion and culture. Later on in the same book he wrote: ‘I have never ceased my analytic work nor my writing…[but] interests which I had acquired in the later part of my life have receded, while the older and original ones become prominent once more…. My interest, after making a lifelong détour through the natural sciences, medicine and psychotherapy, returned to the cultural problems which had fascinated me long before, when I was a youth scarcely old enough for thinking.’ (71–2) There is no doubt that Freud rejected the few religious tenets and practices that his parents had retained. But repudiation of tenets and practices does not preclude the implicit acceptance of their inherent ideals as Landes and Zborowski have found in their study of Eastern European shtetl culture (in Kiell 1967:24). There is evidence of an intense conflict surrounding just this kind of issue in a dream that Freud reports at the time of his father’s death. He presents two significantly different versions: the first he described to Wilhelm Fliess (Bonaparte, A.Freud, and Kris 1977:170–71); the second is the version that is included in The Interpretation of Dreams some three years later (Freud 1900, SE 4:317–18). Freud wrote to Fliess that on the night after his father’s funeral he dreamt that he found himself in his barber’s shop. A notice said: ‘You are requested to close the eyes.’ On the day of the actual funeral, Freud tells Fliess, he had been delayed at this same barber shop and had arrived late at the house of mourning, annoying his family who were already ‘displeased’ with him for arranging a ‘quiet and simple’ funeral. Freud’s own interpretation is brief: the notice has a ‘double meaning’. ‘It means “one should do one’s duty towards the dead” in two senses—an apology, as though I had not done my duty and my conduct needed overlooking, and the actual duty itself. The dream was thus an outlet for the feeling of self-

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reproach which a death generally leaves among the survivors.’ (Bonaparte, A.Freud, and Kris 1977:171) In The Interpretation of Dreams some important changes have been made. The dream now takes place before the funeral, thereby eliminating the offence of unpunctuality, and the notice resembles a ‘No Smoking’ sign in a railway station. It reads ambiguously either as in the original, ‘You are requested to close the eyes’, or, ‘You are requested to close an eye’. The barber’s shop has disappeared. Only Freud’s family’s anger with him remains but he is exculpated by the fact that he ‘knew’ his father’s own views on the subject. The anger itself is also rendered less meaningful since it is now motivated merely by the fear of being ‘disgraced’ (1900, SE 4:317–18). The problem of personal guilt has been avoided from the beginning by the generalization (in the Fliess version) to universal guilt: ‘the feeling of self-reproach which a death generally leaves among the survivors’ (Bonaparte, A.Freud, and Kris 1977:171). Marthe Robert sees Freud’s main offence here as being late although she asks whether the family’s anger might really be due to shock because he wished to do away with or reduce the religious ritual to an unacceptable minimum. Only the later version shows Freud claiming to know best his father’s views (Robert 1977:90–1). However, I have selected this dream for further examination because I believe that certain material has been overlooked which throws a different light on the dreamer’s communication. When Freud rather confusingly speaks of the double meaning of the notice—it is ‘an apology as though I had not done my duty… and the actual duty itself’—he may well be referring to a Jewish custom whereby the eldest-born son present at the death of his father closes his father’s eyes (Ganzfried 1963, vol. 4:91). He had almost certainly encountered the source of this custom in Genesis where, most significantly, it is Joseph, the object of Freud’s youthful identification, who closes his father’s (Jacob’s) eyes (Genesis 46:4). In classical psychoanalytic terms this act would represent the son’s Oedipal triumph over the father but the dream also conveys a protest by the super-ego that is concerned with religious impiety and which Freud manages to evade by distorting the original version. The latter reveals that he did not observe a far more important religious obligation on mourners for, as he tells Fliess, he visited the barber on the day of his father’s funeral (Bonaparte, A.Freud, and Kris 1977:171). In Orthodox Judaism the cutting of hair is forbidden the mourner from the time of the death (Ganzfried 1963, vol. 4:95) until thirty days after the funeral as are many other activities (126). The disappearance of the barber’s shop in the second version of the dream is therefore of some significance for, as well as the unconscious self-reproach, members of the Freud family may also have been displeased with him for trimming his hair and beard on that day, as well as for arranging so ‘simple’ a ceremony. Although the family was clearly no longer religious, it is extremely unlikely that a Jewish family so recently transplanted from its traditional Orthodox roots would be willing to forgo such rites for the dead as these. It is even more unlikely in the case of a man who had spent the last years of his life studying Talmud. We have no way of knowing if the family observed the Shiva—the seven days of prayer and mourning—or if Freud and his brothers recited the Kaddish—the prayer for the dead. These questions are not unimportant in the context of Freud’s ideas about the force of the unconscious super-ego. The Kaddish, for example, is traditionally valued as the

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mourner’s intercession for the Almighty’s forgiveness and mercy for the dead person and also as the means by which the latter’s name is remembered and preserved. And while there seems to be no apparent reason why Freud, as an irreligious Jew, should be expected or expect himself to observe rituals that seemed archaic and irrelevant, his dream, with its message ‘You are requested to close the eyes’, seems to signify other things best left concealed. The later addition of ‘You are requested to close an eye’ suggests a recommendation that Freud himself turn a blind eye to them and this is exactly what he proceeds to do by means of his ‘forgetting’ and distortion of the first version of the dream. The ambiguity surrounding Freud’s attitudes to certain aspects of his Jewish identity is such that it is hardly surprising that different writers have gathered quite conflicting impressions. Another area where this has occurred concerns the question of his feelings towards Zionism. Freud’s denial of any feelings of ‘national pride’, his claim not to espouse Jewish nationalistic ideas, must be examined for three reasons. First, because it conflicts with other accounts including certain statements of his own and is also at odds with what appear to be some powerful unconscious suggestions in his dreams. Second, because Zionism was an important and emotive issue for Jews at that time and lastly, because the discussion demonstrates how Freud’s ambivalence on the matter has given rise to confusion and misunderstanding on the part of scholars. Thus Ellenberger writes, ‘Freud never showed any sympathy for the Zionist movement nor did he have any personal contact with Theodor Herzl’ (1970:558, n. 196). Freud himself states with some emphasis in the Preface to the Hebrew translation of Totem and Taboo (1930): ‘No reader of…this book will find it easy to put himself in the emotional position of an author…who cannot take a share in nationalistic ideals’ (1930, SE 13:xv). Yet, in a letter to Professor Friedrich Thierberger four years earlier, he had written, ‘Towards Zionism I have only sympathy’ (quoted in Simon 1957:275). In his birthday address to the Vienna B’nai B’rith Society cited above, Freud stated that he was moved by neither ‘faith nor national pride’. Yet he displayed both when he hailed the reconstruction going on in Palestine in another letter written to the Jewish organization Keren Hayessod on 20 June, 1935 (Klingsberg 1973: viii–ix). The text of this letter appeared in the Jerusalem Post: ‘I fully know how powerful and beneficial an instrument [Keren Hayessod] has become for our people in its efforts to establish a new home in the old land of our forefathers. [It is] a sign of our unconquerable will to live…. Our youth will pursue the battle.’ (Jerusalem Post, 23 July, 1970) Two of Freud’s sons were members of Zionist organizations. Ernst was a member of the Student’s Zionist Federation and Martin was a member of Kadimah. Martin writes that he felt some trepidation about telling his father that he had joined the organization. ‘Not that I was sure he would be pleased: Jewish citizens in distinguished positions had a strong prejudice against Zionism…. As it turned out, he was plainly delighted and said so;… many years later, he himself became an honorary member’ (M.Freud 1957:164–65). Ellenberger’s statement that Freud had no personal contact with Theodor Herzl is also

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not entirely accurate. It is true that they never actually met, but in 1902 Freud sent Herzl a copy of The Interpretation of Dreams with the hope that the latter would review it for the Neue Freie Presse, of which he was an editor. He wrote to him, ‘But at all events, may I ask you to keep the book as a token of the high esteem in which I—like so many others—have held since many years the poet and fighter for the human rights of our People’ (cited by Simon 1957:274). The above examples are relatively well known. Less well known are the contents of a letter published for the first time in Jerusalem in 1973. This letter was written in 1930 in response to an appeal by the Jewish Agency to prominent European Jews to voice publicly their views on British government policy on both the Jewish access to holy sites in Jerusalem and immigration to Palestine. In it Freud refuses his support, pointing out that he is opposed to the choice of Palestine for the Jewish homeland and that he doubts that it could be achieved. He deplores the ‘baseless fanaticism’ on the part of Jews which has aroused Arab hostility and notes that the much disputed Western Wall on Temple Mount—the Jewish access to which was the immediate cause of the crisis—was not, in fact, a part of the ancient Jewish Temple at all and that Jewish piety was therefore misdirected (Klingsberg 1973:viii). It is clear that Freud’s associations with the Zionist cause were kept private. They are expressed in letters and in other private communications; he made no public statements on the subject except those in which he denied his interest and involvement. But there is evidence of an unconscious preoccupation with the person and ideas of Herzl with whom Zionism came to be identified at that time. Willy Aron (1956–57) relates Dr Leo Goldhammer’s account of a dream of Freud’s which he recorded during a series of lectures delivered between 1905 and 1909. In this dream Herzl appeared to Freud and conveyed to him ‘the idea of immediate action regarding Palestine, if the Jewish people is to be saved’. Freud remarked in his lecture that never before had he been interested in Herzl’s ideas (cited by Aron 1956–57:294). While much of the material cited above dates from the late 1920s, by which time more German-speaking Jews were becoming receptive to Jewish concerns, the letter to Herzl was written in 1902 and the above-mentioned dream dates from the early 1900s. Moreover, another dream concerning Herzl, although containing no explicit mention of him, occurred even earlier. This is the ‘My son, the Myops’ dream in which Freud reports that he was sitting on the edge of a fountain, which he identifies as being in Siena, depressed almost to tears. Two boys, one of them his eldest son, are brought out by a female figure and handed over to their father (who is not Freud). The elder boy uses the words Auf Geseres and Auf Ungeseres in farewell. Geseres, Freud tells us after consulting a philologist, is a Hebrew word denoting ‘imposed sufferings’ or ‘doom’ (1900, SE 5:441–42). Martin S.Bergmann, however, informs us that the Hebrew word gezerot refers specifically to anti-Jewish laws. The fact that Freud was unconsciously aware of this is clear from the manifest content of the dream and from his further association of the words to gesäurt-ungesäurt, ‘leavened and unleavened’ bread which the children of Israel ate in their flight from Egypt (Bergmann 1976:13). Freud goes on to say that the dream was provoked by a play that he had recently seen, called Das Neue Ghetto, in which

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‘The Jewish problem, concern about the future of one’s children, to whom one cannot give a country of their own, concern about educating them in such a way that they can move freely across frontiers—all of this was easily recognizable among the relevant dream-thoughts’. (1900, SE 5:442) The lines that occur to Freud in relation to this are ‘By the waters of Babylon, we sat down and wept’ (442). Surprisingly his associations go from there to the fountains of Siena and Rome, and thence to England where his two elder brothers lived (444, n.1). But the most startling omission here is that of the name of Theodor Herzl who was the author of the play (Bergmann 1976; Simon 1957; Loewenberg 1971). Bergmann sees the intrusion of the Hebrew words as evidence of a displacement from ‘the original Promised Land (Israel) to the adopted Promised Land (Rome)’ and of an unconscious struggle with the wish to convert to Catholicism. He also points out that the line ‘By the waters of Babylon’ is taken from Psalm 137 and is, of course, the psalm of Jewish suffering in exile (Bergman 1976:12–13). However, the ambiguities and contradictions in Freud’s attitudes to these issues have to be seen within the context of the complex Jewish situation in the German-speaking world. For by the turn of the century, when The Interpretation of Dreams was written, European Jewry had been shaken for over a hundred years by the problems of assimilation, apostasy, pogroms, emigration, and most recently by the disturbing questions surrounding Zionism. Being Jewish in Vienna was a very complicated affair indeed and Freud’s position as a first-generation member of the Austrian-Jewish intelligentsia was particularly so. In their book, Wittgenstein’s Vienna, Janik and Toulmin write that ‘The problems of identity and communication plagued Viennese society at every level— political and social, individual and even international’ (Janik and Toulmin 1973:65). Franz Joseph ruled over an ‘ungovernable melange of Germans, Ruthenes, Italians, Slovaks, Rumanians, Czechs, Poles, Magyars, Slovenes, Croats, Translyvanian Saxons and Serbs’ (40). As the cleavages deepened with the progressive fragmentation of the Habsburg realm, nationalist ideologies of race and language swept through the Habsburg realm like a tidal wave. Some of these nationalist preoccupations rubbed off on to Jews who, moreover, had their own pressing reasons for holding some powerful prejudices. A striking example of these prejudices concerns the origins of Freud and his family. Thus Hanns Sachs writes: ‘His [Freud’s] and my parents or grandparents came from Bohemia and Moravia, an origin which at that time involved a strong contrast to the Jewish immigrants from the “East” who had lived a much more segregated life in the ghettos of Galicia and Poland. The “Westerners” among whom we both grew up were willing to surrender a good part of their religious traditions and orthodox beliefs in exchange for modern thoughts and the European way of life.’ (Sachs 1945:20) Stefan Zweig, using almost identical words, emphasizes his own Moravian origins and their superiority over those in Poland and Galicia (Zweig 1943:16).

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Sachs’ parents and grandparents may have been Bohemian but Freud’s were not. Freud was indeed born in Moravia but both his parents were immigrants from the ghettos of East Galicia. They were Ostjuden (Eastern Jews) who had spent some years in Moravia before moving to Vienna, probably surrendering much of their religious orthodoxy along the way. Jacob Freud was born in Tysmenica (Tysmenitz) in Eastern Galicia (Schur 1972:19) and Amalie in Brody in North-East Galicia (M. Freud in Fraenkel 1967:202). The famous ‘hat-in-the-gutter’ episode reveals that Jacob Freud probably dressed as an Orthodox Jew at least until early adulthood since it was at his ‘new fur cap’—the traditional headgear of the pious Jew—that the Christian anti-Semite aimed his blow (S.Freud 1900, SE 4:197). The fact that Freud’s parents were Ostjuden—already noted in the previous chapter—is emphasized here because of its significance to his sense of Jewish identity and because it is closely connected to the vexed question of his attitude to Zionism. Sachs’ comment shows clearly the sense of superiority and hostility felt by him towards the Ostjuden. When Martin Freud speaks of the ‘strong prejudice’ among ‘distinguished’ Jews against Zionism, he is touching on one aspect of an issue that was fundamental to the problem of the German-Jewish consciousness, just as Sachs and Zweig are reacting stereotypically to another. Some general measure of the level of feeling involved can be obtained from the fact that Maurice Benedikt, the Jewish editor of the influential Neue Freie Presse, actually forbade all mention of the word Zionism in his columns although Theodor Herzl was one of his editors (Clare 1981:90). George Clare points out that Benedikt, like many assimilated Jews, associated Zionism with the ‘despised’ Ostjuden. These were mainly Yiddish-speaking, Orthodox Jews from the eastern ghettos of Lithuania and Galicia whose proletarian existence in the Leopoldstadt ghetto district of Vienna in rapidly increasing numbers was seen as a threat to the hard-won status of the educated Jewish middle-classes (Heer 1972:4–6). Zionism was feared, Clare explains, as ‘a Jewish movement which proved the anti-Semites right: if the Jews saw themselves as a nation…different…from their host populations, were they not confirming the…view that Jews were alien usurp[ers]?’ (Heer 1972:91). Theodor Herzl had declared that ‘only the poorest Jews will go…[to Palestine] but desperadoes make good conquerors. The rich…will follow later’ (Herzl in Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz 1980:426). He knew that Eastern European Jewry, ‘forced to face the brutal nature of anti-Semitism in a much more violent fashion’ (419), would provide (as indeed it did until the rise of Hitler) the bulk of the earliest waves of immigration to Palestine. As Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz write, ‘Western Zionism until the rise of Nazism was largely a philanthropic movement devoted to the welfare of the persecuted Jews of Eastern Europe’ (1980).1 ‘Everything in our almost thousand-year-old Austrian monarchy seemed based on permanency’, Stefan Zweig wrote in his autobiography, yet each component part was in conflict with the rest (Zweig 1943:13). Some of this conflict is clearly represented in the play of opposing forces characterizing European Jewry. Clare speaks of his two grandmothers, both of whom were born in Galicia. As a young child he was aware of his preference for the one who had shed her eastern past and appeared ‘totally westernized’. The other grandmother, with her sing-song Yiddish intonation, the child resented. ‘We were, or rather thought we were, quite different from that bearded, caftaned lot’ (Clare

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1981:31). The extent to which this preference determined Clare’s attitude to Zionism is illuminating: on the first day of Anschluss he refused a friend’s invitation to join a militant Zionist organization because it would have meant acknowledging that he was ‘a Jew and not an Austrian’ (187). Educated German-speaking Jews often suffered a serious, indeed irreconcilable, conflict. They passionately hoped, even if they could not always succeed in believing, that they were themselves a new type of Jew; the kind who, in Zweig’s words, ‘lived apart from the commandments of their once holy books and…were done with the common language of old. To integrate themselves and become 1 It should

be noted, however, that a great deal of opposition to Zionism came from the Eastern European Hasidim who believed, as many of them still do today, that the coming of the Messiah alone could bring true redemption from suffering and exile.

articulated with the people with whom they lived, to dissolve themselves in the common life’, this was their purpose and hope. When the Nazi peril forced these Jews into a ‘community of interest’ many of them found, as did Zweig, that they had nothing in common with it at all (Zweig 1943:321–22). The German Jews were embarrassed by the offer of Zionism to rescue them. They were not the ones who required rescuing. Martin Freud’s ‘Jewish citizens in distinguished positions’ felt themselves to be a far cry indeed from the noisy, uncouth Yiddishspeaking immigrants; they knew, of course, on a deeper level that they were not nearly far enough. Peter Gay talks of ‘the almost compulsory disdain’ of the German-born and Germanspeaking Jews for the Ostjuden (Gay 1978:131), of how the latter were ‘set apart by their trades, their appearance, their speech’ (185). This was probably even more true of the Viennese than of the Berliners of whom Gay speaks, so that the gap between the Jewish classes was even greater in Vienna. There were other important differences, of course, in the Jewish experience of emancipation and assimilation throughout Europe, which I have had to generalize throughout this book. The features of Jewish transformation in different countries are related to the respective political and social conditions as well as to cultural movements and styles. As far as the Jewish experience in Austria-Hungary was concerned, there were three times as many Jews as in Germany. Yet according to the historian Simon Dubnov, the Jewish Reform Movement, which was always associated with the struggle for emancipation, was weaker in Austria due to the resistance of the Orthodox Jews of whom there was a far larger proportion (Dubnov 1973:129). Between 1860 and 1938, according to Heer, ‘an exclusive community of upper-middle class Jews lived…[in Vienna] its ranks closed to the influx of Eastern-European Jews and to its own lower-middle class’ (Heer 1972:4–5). Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz write that ‘Jewish modernization’ with all its contradictions occurred in the Germanic countries, not in Eastern Europe. The Jewry of the deutscher Kulturbereich which included Budapest, Prague, and Vienna ‘established many of the intellectual and institutional forms that were paradigmatic for Jewish modernity in general’ (1980:6). The divisions within European Jewry were both deep and complex and the essential

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distinction between the ‘native’ Jews and their uncouth and embarrassing brethren from the East was language. Competence in German became a ‘mark of status and a support for identity’, writes Gay; ‘not to speak Yiddish was one thing a German Jew, as a good German, did’ (Gay 1978:110). The young Freud’s pride at his teacher’s praise of his talents as a German stylist, therefore, has a special significance (E.Jones 1956, vol. 1:22– 3), for fin-de-siècle Vienna was a society virtually obsessed with questions about the purity and integrity of language. The preoccupation of writers and philosophers such as Wittgenstein and Karl Kraus with the connections between language, ethics, and aesthetics arose, as did ‘the talking cure’, within a mileu which was hypersensitive to the possibilities of language as a means of evasion and dissimulation, but also of cultural and social status. Thus many years later, when Freud tells Fliess of his collection of Jewish jokes (most of which must have been related in Yiddish), he feels obliged to ‘confess’ to having collected them (Bonaparte, A.Freud, and Kris 1977:211). At the same time, he carefully disassociates himself from the ‘jargon’ central to their effect by means of his highly scientific mode of discourse (Gilman 1984:607). There is no doubt that Franz Kafka touched on a sensitive nerve when he announced to the Jewish citizens of Prague before a performance by a Yiddish theatre troupe that they were mistaken if they believed themselves to be ignorant of Yiddish. They knew more than they thought, he said (quoted in Cuddihy 1974:40). Freud, as I have already noted, also denied knowing Yiddish although according to Theodor Reik, his mother retained the Yiddish dialect all her life (cited by Robert 1977:175). The point that I particularly wish to make here is that while Jews of Freud’s era often suffered all kinds of social and psychological conflicts in relation to the Gentile world, they were also deeply split within and between themselves, so that their sense of Jewish identity was often a matter of infinite and tortured complexity. For if lower-middle-class Jews were a source of embarrassment to their more assimilated counterparts, they were inevitably sometimes seen in this light by their own educated sons. The first generation of emancipated Jews often reflected in acute form the awkwardness and the negative self-image accompanying the transition from Eastern European ghetto life to western culture. Karl Emil Franzos for example, according to Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz, ‘did much to disseminate a negative image of the… Jews of Eastern Europe’ (1980:219). Even so beloved a figure as the Yiddish story-teller, Mendele Mocher Seforim, has been scathingly attacked for accepting the prevailing antiSemitic image (Aberbach 1985:16). Theodor Reik has called attention to Freud’s ‘meaningful remark’ in the essay, ‘Some Character-Types Met With in PsychoAnalytic Work’ (Freud 1916, SE 14). Here Freud chooses not to enter into a ‘discussion of the obvious analogy with character-deformation after longlasting sickliness and with the behaviour of a whole people with a past fraught with suffering’ but it is perfectly clear, Reik finds, that Freud is thinking of the Jewish people (Reik 1962:231). According to Hanna Arendt, the Judenfrage—the Jewish question-took on its own peculiar form in German-speaking Europe. This question, whose significance for issues of Jewish identity has been eclipsed by subsequent events, devolved not on anti-Semitism as such but on its denial by the Jewish bourgeoisie. The rejection of the immigrant Ostjuden, who were held to be responsible for provoking anti-Semitic feeling, involved a self-deception on the part of the Jewish bourgeoisie that was the despair of writers such

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as Franz Kafka and Walter Benjamin (Arendt, in Benjamin 1970:28–33). It has been vividly portrayed in a book by the Israeli writer Aaron Appelfeld, in which the Ostjuden are seen by the prosperous middleclass Viennese Jews as both the targets and culprits for Nazi persecutions (Appelfeld 1981). Kafka was thus addressing the Judenfrage with his ironic remark about Yiddish, and Freud clearly had his own share in this anxiety-ridden issue as his disingenuousness on these matters reveals. In a letter to Max Brod about German-Jewish writers and their passionate and tormented love affair with the German language, Kafka wrote that the Jewish question or ‘the despair over it was their inspiration’ (cited by Arendt, in Benjamin 1970:31). Arendt believes that the Jewish question was more significant for the intelligentsia than for the Central European majority for ‘their own Jewishness which played hardly any role in their spiritual household, determined their social life to an extraordinary degree and therefore presented itself to them as a moral question…in this moral form…[it] marked, in Kafka’s words, “the terrible inner condition of these generations”’ (30). I believe that this moral question is of as great importance to our understanding of Freud as is the more obvious one of the conflicts engendered by the situation of the Jew in the Gentile world of that day. Freud’s forgettings and dissemblings are most usefully seen not as evidence for an unconscious attraction to the idea of converting to Catholicism, as has been suggested by I.Velikovsky (1941:487–511) and other writers, or even as a consistent wish to deny essential elements of his Judaism. They should be seen rather as evidence of the ‘terrible inner condition’ of this generation resulting from the peculiar conflicts and stresses and the need to maintain the double standards of speech, thought, and behaviour that its members’ position on the borderlines of nations, societies, and epochs required. I have been concerned to show that if Freud was ambivalent about certain aspects of his Judaism, and if he was selective in expressing certain feelings, he was by no means unique. Writers who seek to place Freud into some neat category or other often overlook the enormous complexity of the tensions and conflicts to which he was subject. One example of this kind of simplified view is that of Peter Gay, who finds that Freud lived ‘far less in Austrian Vienna than in his own mind’ which Gay claims was occupied by the ideas of international positivism, classical archaeology, the models of Jean Martin Charcot, and odd, stray scraps of his Viennese experience. For Gay, however, Freud’s Vienna was primarily ‘medical Vienna’ (1978:33–4). This perception seems to be based on some kind of muddled idealization of Freud. A glance through The Interpretation of Dreams is sufficient to show that Freud lived on other, less exalted planes too. If we recall that the ‘hat-in-the-gutter’ episode was one ‘whose power was still being shown in…emotions and dreams’ in 1900 (The Interpretation of Dreams), and that it devolved on a social insult meted out to his ‘unheroic’ Jewish father by a member of the dominant race; if we bear in mind that Freud’s parents lived in the working-class ghetto district of Leopoldstadt where, according to Martin Freud, Jews lived who ‘were not of the best type’ (in Fraenkel 1967:19), it is clear that Freud spent a great deal of time in an atmosphere rather less rarified than Gay would prefer. I have emphasized Freud’s origins because I wish to put forward a hypothesis which

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seeks to explain not merely that Freud’s Jewish consciousness influenced his views on women, but also how and why it came to influence him in the particular way that it did. Percy S.Cohen has noted that in communities and populations that have become marginal, and in which, at the same time, males are made to feel powerless or deprived of certain essential features of the dominant group’s model of masculinity, one problem that is likely to arise or be aggravated is that of the male’s gender identity. He has suggested that the Jew emerging from the ghetto may have had a particular way of experiencing and coping with social and cultural marginality which posed specific problems for the Jewish male concerning his masculinity (1979, personal interview). The traditional Jewish emphasis on the ‘culture of learning’, Cohen has observed elsewhere, and the styles of learning themselves had, until the process of enlightenment, not only enabled Jews to maintain their sense of identity as a cohesive group but also permitted a sense of superiority and omnipotence which effectively complemented the sense of vulnerability experienced by them as an ethnic minority (P.S.Cohen 1980:211). In traditional Jewish society the mitzva or commandment of learning is enjoined on all males and it is learning that confers social status. In the ghettos of Eastern Europe it came to be regarded as the primary value. The most learned scholars, those who sit by the Eastern Wall of the synagogue, are the fayne yidn—the fine Jews; the sheyne—the beautiful; the pney or ‘faces’ of the community (Zborowski and Herzog 1962:73–4). Cohen indicates even more specifically the ‘central values inherent in Jewish social life’ when he notes the shtetl distinctions of Am Ha ’Sefer, ‘People of the Book’ for the learned man, and Am Ha ’Aaretz, ‘People of the Land’, for the common or prosteh Jew (1980:211). The emphasis is clearly diverted away not merely from the uncouth, ill-mannered, and unlearned, but also from any manifestation of physical power or strength, or from physical action. Zborowski and Herzog write that ‘they fight like prosteh’ is said contemptuously of quarrels lacking the scholars’ decorum. Verbal violence is equally despised and quarrelling is for women and the prosteh (Zborowski and Herzog 1962:148–49). Physical violence, although indulged in rarely by the latter, is ‘un-Jewish’ for prosteh and sheyne alike. It would be particularly shunned in relation to the Gentile. Thus Freud’s father’s behaviour in the ‘hat-in-the-gutter’ episode was by no means ‘unheroic’ by shtetl standards. On the contrary, it showed the restraint and dignity expected of the Jew in the face of Goyishe brutality. At the same time ghetto culture assigned a much more active role to women, including a heavy share of the responsibility for economic support. ‘If anyone is sheltered, it is the scholarly man’, Zborowski and Herzog write of the shtetl Jew (132). Since the woman was always secondary to the man in the spiritual or intellectual sphere she was often expected to be responsible in mundane affairs (Landes and Zborowski 1967:25–6). Whereas the scholar ideal was one distinguished by physical passivity, the woman controlled the crucial domestic ritual on which her husband’s piety depended. She may have managed the livelihood, as well as the home and the children, and thus have spoken the local language and moved about the countryside more than her husband. The shtetl Jew’s own sense of his masculinity; his gender identity, was meanwhile safeguarded by shtetl norms and values which sanctioned and justified the creation of ‘an inner world…in which the arbiter of conflict was not the substance of physical power and

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political status but, rather, the sophistry of interpreting the Divine Will’ (P.S.Cohen 1980:211). Thus male value and status was so bound up with ideals of scholarship that, as Zborowski and Herzog tell us, the dowry of a girl was often proportional to the bridegroom’s learning (1962:82) and the shtetl ideal of male beauty was one that emphasized his physically passive preoccupations: pale complexion, weary half-closed eyes, long beard, and pale delicate hands (81). The emancipating Jewish intellectual aiming for citizenship of the outside world found that he had no tradition or cultural stereotype for the model of masculinity employed by that world. Thus I am suggesting that, for the Jew emerging from the closed culture of the ghetto or shtetl, the question of his sexual identity and of his physical being in general may have become particularly problematic and that what Leslie Fiedler has called the ‘castrating force’ of ghetto Judaism (in a reference to Abraham Cahan’s novel The Rise of David Levinsky (Fiedler 1971:83), became a matter for shame and self-hatred. Inevitably the image of the unphysical man; the one who is unable or unwilling to fight, ride, drink, and, perhaps by unconscious extrapolation, to love, came to be seen as effeminate and without honour, and it is clear that this is how the 12-year-old Freud perceived his father. Thus, in his illuminating discussion on this conflict of interests in the Jews of this era, Milton Himmelfarb observes that both Freud and Isaac Babel were profoundly and permanently affected by seeing their fathers as ‘not standing up to Gentile ruffians’ (Himmelfarb 1973:10). The perception of passivity as a Jewish trait can be traced through a very wide range of sources, both Jewish and Gentile. In a discussion of how the recovery of Jewish honour and pride was the main concern of early political Zionism, Leo Strauss ponders on this obscure statement by Spinoza: ‘If the foundations of their religion did not effeminate the minds of the Jews, I would absolutely believe that they will at some time…establish their state again’ (quoted in Strauss 1965:5). Milton Himmelfarb, commenting on Spinoza’s charge of passivity, which is not ‘completely wrong’, accuses the rabbis of ‘rationalizing powerlessness’ and propagandizing against ‘manly might’ by, for example, ignoring Hasmonean victories (Himmelfarb 1973:12–13). Not surprisingly Jews have also had a curiously ambivalent preoccupation with manly honour. It was Herzl who wrote in 1895 in his diary, ‘If there is one thing I should like to be, it is a member of the Prussian nobility’ (quoted in Schorske 1981:150), and it was also Herzl who wanted to invoke the duel to restore the honour of Jews against their maligners (160). Freud’s contemporary, Otto Weininger, actually killed himself out of self-loathing for what he saw as the incurable, feminine qualities of Jews and in this connection Himmelfarb argues that ‘What all modern Jews in Eastern Europe had in common, transcending any difference of formal ideology, was that they valued action, forcefulness, masculinity, and saw the old Judaism as passive, weak, feminine. They liked Esau more than their parents did, and Jacob less.’ (Himmelfarb 1973:185) Zionism, in its early days, was associated with superstition, ignorance, and the physical appearance of the unathletic, sedentary, ‘semi-Asiatic Jew’ that offended the acculturated

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Jew and the non-Jew alike. If men like Walter Rathenau and Otto Weininger are rightly seen as ‘self-haters’ for despising the Jewish physical type, it is equally true that the early Zionist programmes were all concerned to improve what was seen as a degenerated stock. The names given to their athletics training clubs, those of Jewish military leaders such as Bar-kochba and Maccabi, demonstrate this preoccupation with Jewish honour, manliness, and physical strength (P.S.Cohen 1979, personal interview). Even more explicit was Zionist leader Max Nordau’s proposal to build the new Muskeljudentum or Jewry of Muscle (Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz 1980:434–35). Thus Clare points out that Zionism was not just a nationalist movement offering Jews the hope of a land of their own; it also promised a ‘new and different type of Jew, different from the insecure assimilants and different from the ghetto-created perversions of Jewry…. The return of a whole people to its true nature…was the ultimate aim and true greatness of Herzl’s…vision’ (1981:91). There are a number of isolated psychoanalytic observations that lend partial support to or echo this sensitive theme in relation to the contemporary Jew of the western Diaspora. Otto Fenichel notes, in an article written in 1946 for the magazine Commentary, that ‘a striking trait of the Jewish national character is that of indirect aggression’ of which ‘one form is the traditional belief in their superiority; that is, in being the chosen people’. Fenichel ascribes this directly to the fact that less ‘direct aggression’ is permissible to the Jew than to other nations’, thus lending support to Cohen’s observation (Fenichel 1946:42). Rudolf Loewenstein makes a similar interpretation. He finds that motor aggression being discouraged in the Jewish child, the ego must deal with the aggressive drives in a ‘special way’. Hence the Jew’s cerebral way of life with obsessive and compulsive traits (including moneymaking) serving as defence mechanisms against aggressive impulses (Loewenstein, cited by L.A.Berman 1968:471–72). Berman finds that it is this typically Jewish repression of aggressive impulses that gives rise to the characteristic joke in which ‘wit triumphs over brute force’ (475). David Singer makes a related point in the context of his studies of Jewish crime in the United States. He shows that the practice of ‘self-censorship’ on the part of the Jewish community consistently prevents any mention of Jewish crime, examples of which he lists at some length. Singer finds that ‘only one model of Jewishness, the “nice Jewish boy” has been available’ and that the American Jew therefore lacks the meaning of expressing a basic human drive in a Jewish context (D.Singer 1974:70–7). Singer, following Michael Selzer, also notes in this context that Zionism did not originally stem from Messianism but from the desire to ‘normalize’ the personality and situation of the Jewish people, and he quotes Chaim Nachman Bialik’s quip that a normal Jewish nation will have been achieved when the first Jewish horse thief is arrested in TelAviv (76). In Mary McCarthy’s The Genial Host the Jewish men are described as more feminine than Gentile men of similar social background. McCarthy ascribes this to the distinctive quality of the Jewish mother-son bond, a topic which we shall discuss in Chapter 6. ‘In most of the men, the masculine influence had, in the end, overridden or absorbed the feminine…. There might be a tendency to hypochondria, a

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readiness to take offense, personal vanity, love of comfort…on the other hand, there would be unusual intuitive powers, sympathy, loyalty, tenderness, domestic graces and kindnesses unknown to the Gentile.’ (quoted in Ellmann 1979:56–7) One is reminded of Freud’s words to Josef Wortis: ‘Ruthless egotism is much more common among Gentiles than among Jews, and Jewish family life and intellectual life are on a higher plane’ (quoted in L.A.Berman 1968:398). It is interesting to note that intellectuality is aligned here with the superior quality of family life which would devolve on McCarthy’s qualities of sympathy, tenderness, kindness, and intuitiveness: qualities that are culturally associated with women. Ernest Hemingway’s Robert Cohn represents a hostile Gentile caricature of Jewish ‘effeminacy’ drawn with great subtlety (P.S. Cohen 1982, personal interview). ‘I do not know how people could say such terrible things to Robert Cohn’, Hemingway’s Gentile protagonist writes of the Jewish middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. ‘There are people to whom you could not say insulting things…. But here was Cohn taking it all’ (Hemingway 1976:43). ‘Why don’t you ever get drunk, Robert?… Do you think you belong here among us? People who are out to have a good time?’ (147). Cohn turns green when the bull gores the horses, rarely gets drunk, and falls asleep when he does; he oppresses everyone with his air of funereal suffering. Cohn’s failure is so profound that his very victories become defeats; when he fights and knocks out the heroic bull-fighter, he is the one to break down and be disgraced. Hemingway has captured in Robert Cohn the pathos of this caricatured Jew who is the perennial outsider, who fails as he must in his efforts to break through his cultural stereotype and become the romantic, virile lover. Cohn is excluded from the world of the erotic, from the ‘man’s’ world, because he is temperamentally inept in some profound and instantly apparent way, even by contrast to the physically emasculated Gentile Jake. Some element of the stereotype is usually shared by all parties concerned: witness Mendele Mocher Seforim’s clichéd portraits of the dirty, devious hook-nosed Jew. For Philip Roth’s Portnoy, ‘America is a shikse nestling under your arm whispering love…; skating behind…the yellow ringlets of a strange shikse teaches me the word longing [author’s italics]. It is almost more than an angry thirteen-year-old little Jewish Momma’s boy can bear’, Roth has him protest (Roth 1971:165). ‘Please,’ Portnoy begs his analyst, ‘Please, who crippled us like this. Who made us so morbid and hysterical and weak? Why, why are they screaming still, “Watch out! Don’t do it! Alex—no!”… Doctor, I can’t stand any more being frightened like this over nothing! Bless me with manhood! Make me brave! Make me strong! Make me whole! Enough being a nice Jewish boy’ (40). Leslie Fiedler has remarked on the ‘pathos’ inherent in the fact that it is as a lover that the Jewish-American novelist sees himself at his moment of entry into American literature and that it was the new sexual freedom of the post-ghetto world that inspired a whole genre of pre-1930s erotic fiction (Fiedler 1971:76). There remains also, however, even in Robert Cohn’s humiliation, a tinge of the age-old Jewish contempt for the sensual body and its expressions with its fear of ‘instinctual anarchy’ (Himmelfarb 1973:185). The Gentile who rides horses, gets drunk, fights, and fornicates is also the goy who kills

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and rapes in the next pogrom. Shikur—the drunk—is always a goy. Even in his own community the unlearned Jew, the amoritz, lacks yikhus—status—for the highest esteem comes from generations of learned ancestors. In The Future of an Illusion Freud remarks, ‘Civilization has little to fear from educated people and brainworkers…; such people are… vehicles of civilization. But it is another matter with the great mass of the uneducated and oppressed, who have every reason for being enemies of civilization’ (1927, SE 21:39). He is voicing here the shtetl Jew’s contempt as well as his fear of the unlettered peasant, and the ‘mob [which] gives vent to its appetites’. He, the Jew, on the other hand, deprives himself in order to maintain his ‘integrity’ (E.L. Freud 1975:50). Zborowski and Herzog observe that the shtetl boy is told that fighting in prohibited because it is ‘un-Jewish’. ‘A “real” Jew does not fight…will not hurt man or beast…is moderate, restrained and intellectual’ (1962:341). ‘With you it’s always blood’, the young Jew says in I.J.Singer’s The Brothers Ashkenazi, ‘carnage and murder. That’s not the way. You must appeal to man’s reason, not to his instinct’ (I.J.Singer 1983:212). To Ernest Jones, Freud outlined his own very Jewish preference for brains above brawn: ‘For various reasons the Jews have undergone a one-sided development and admire brains more than bodies’, he said. ‘The Greek balance is certainly preferable…but if I had to choose between the two I should also put the intellect first’ (E. Jones quoted in Rieff 1979:262). Similarly, in Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, Alex Portnoy’s athletic cousin is told by his mother, ‘Heshie! Please! I do not need goyische naches!’ (a Gentile’s joy or reward) (Roth 1971:61). My argument so far holds that there has been considerable conflict between the Jew’s conscious belief in his intellectual, moral, and cultural superiority to the Gentile and his unconscious feelings of shame and loathing for those traits in himself which both the Gentile and, to a certain crucial extent, the Jew himself have believed at times to exist. This implies an envious attraction to those qualities in the Gentile which he has, historically, regarded with fear and contempt and which would stand in sharp contradiction to his conscious ethos. Hostility and contempt for the female might, I believe, follow closely on a rejection of the feminine and the ‘effeminate’ in the self. I am, therefore, not merely suggesting that Freud internalized an important Jewish traditional attitude towards women. Freud was radical enough and his genius was profound enough for him to have rebelled against this stereotype as he rebelled against many others. One reason for his failure to do so relates to the factors discussed in this chapter. Thus I propose that Freud’s model of women is essentially a caricature of a castrated man and, as such, closely resembles one of the caricatures of the exilic Jew which both the Gentile and, to a certain crucial extent, the enlightened Jew himself internalized. It is a parody of a man who is castrated, politically, socially, and sexually. It involves at once a denial and a projection of the unacceptable feelings of envy for the phallic qualities of the Gentile; a deep feeling of shame for their lack and, as an important adjunct, the opportunity of channelling a certain amount of anti-Semitic aggression towards a weaker target. Ernest van den Haag (1977:201) has noted that the Germans often despised the ‘German’ Jews, who themselves despised the Ostjuden, who reminded them of the Jewishness that they despised in themselves, and that westernized Israeli Jews have employed this same defence in regard to ‘Oriental’ Jews. In a similar way

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Freud seems to have directed his own unacceptable feelings against women. When reduced to the castrated ‘other’ in this way, woman becomes an insurance against man’s castration anxiety. She serves as an object on to which his fears as to his own ‘otherness’ can be projected, neutralizing, at the same time, the anxieties felt towards her. The mechanism also involves an identification with the aggressor of the kind described by van den Haag for, after all, it was extremely likely that most authorities would agree with him on the subject of women and many of them did. It also accorded well with the enormously influential evolutionary theories of the Victorian era (which I have been obliged to neglect in this study) by which for example skull capacity and dimension as well as height and weight were used to prove an innate male (as well as Caucasian) superiority. In these theories, women were considered more susceptible by their sexual constitution to intellectual and emotional lability and weakness as well as to all kinds of psychopathological states. Freud was closely concerned with the debate on this topic that raged throughout academic psychology and biology at this time and on which the ‘science’ of sexual pathology was largely founded. His model of femininity was thus both ethno- and ego-syntonic. It fitted in with the prevailing wisdom and with his own needs. His characterization of feminine sexuality approximates to the cruel caricature of the anti-Semite in more than one way. The opposing stereotype is always required to complete the fantasy. Ellman, citing the novelist Paula Marshall, observes that in the United States black women have been classified as ‘nymphomaniacs or mammies’ depending on age and figure (Ellmann 1979:90). In a similar way Jews have also been seen as dangerously if obscurely hypersexual; witness Hitler’s association of them in Mein Kampf with the city of Vienna’s vice traffic (quoted in Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz 1980:486). Freud’s model of women seems to have some important features in common with these opposing stereotypes so that dangerous, anarchic sexuality is attributed to women at the same time as an inherent frigidity. In Civilization and Its Discontents he writes: ‘women soon come into opposition to civilization and display their retarding and restraining influence…. Women represent the interests of the family and of sexual life. The work of civilization …compels [men] to carry out instinctual sublimations of which women are little capable.’ (1930, SE 21:103) Yet women also have a ‘weaker sexual instinct’ (S.Freud 1908, SE 9:192) and his findings suggest to him the ‘hypothesis of its being constitutionally determined and even of there being a contributory anatomical factor’ (1933, SE 22, 132). Thus in the essay ‘Femininity’ he writes, ‘it is our impression that more constraint has been applied to the libido when it is pressed into the service of the feminine function’ (1933, SE 22:131). On another related level there is no doubt that Freud saw the attack made by psychoanalysis itself on conventional and scientific Gentile wisdom in phallic-aggressive terms. He thought that the ‘blow’ struck to man’s narcissism by psychoanalysis was even more ‘wounding’ than those of Copernicus and Darwin (1917, SE 17:140–41). A repudiation of femininity might also have been seen as essential by a Jew who wished to assault Gentile strongholds in the scientific world. For the historical associations of the

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Jewish male with political and physical passivity, as well as the distinctive quality of his maternal and other family ties, might well have rendered it especially risky to approach too closely to any respect or admiration for women (P.S.Cohen 1984, personal interview). This factor would have constituted a constant environmental incentive to retain a dogmatic, derogatory view of women for fear of being compromised by the pernicious stereotypes of Jewish character.2 And Freud’s response to his father’s account of the ‘hatin-the-gutter’ incident leaves no doubt that Jewish political and social powerlessness proved intensely traumatic. Of Isaac Babel whose father was like Jacob Freud, humiliated by a Cossack soldier, Lionel Trilling writes, ‘The sons of such men have much to prove, much to test themselves for’ (Babel 1974:21). My argument in this chapter represents an explanation grounded in sociological features for what, if I am right, constitutes a deeply 2 It may

be objected that the military prowess of the State of Israel belies or has reversed what I have claimed are anxious associations on the part of the Jewish male to issues of sex and gender identity and to women. This represents a different historical development and must be the subject of other studies. However, it is interesting to note that Israel is certainly not noted for the degree to which its male population supports feminist aims.

embedded psychological formation. Erik Erikson has said, in one of his brilliant discussions about cultural conditioning, that ‘a human being at all times…is organised into groupings of…family, class, community, nation…[is thus]…an organism, an ego, and a member of a society and is involved in all three processes of organisation’ (Erikson 1965:31). If it is true that the exilic Jew, because he lacked political autonomy and national rights to self-defence, felt himself to be seen as—and at some profound level to be—castrated; and if he experienced feelings of shame and envy for the non-Jew’s phallic qualities which he then projected on to women, this is still an insufficient explanation for the emotional and psychological formation suggested. For while different cultures might selectively mobilize and facilitate certain fantasies and motives through patterns of child-rearing, these would have to be grounded in and reinforced by experiences occurring early in life. Thus not all Jewish analysts subscribed to Freud’s theories about women. Indeed, as Maria Torok has pointed out, members of the early Hungarian group of analysts, who were for the most part Jewish, were later to call some of these very theories into question (Torok 1985, personal communication). It is therefore within Erikson’s first category—the family—that we must look for Freud’s need to accept and utilize what I have described as the hostile and fearful projections with which he has invested femininity. In the next chapter I shall examine this need and its origins within the context of the Jewish perception of femininity, look at certain psychodynamic features of the Eastern European Jewish family and, in particular, at some aspects of the relationships within Freud’s own family.

5 Jewish family psychodynamics Virginia Clower, in an otherwise excellent discussion on the psychology of women and its history, observes that ‘The traditions of society, heavily reinforced by the patriarchal attitudes of both the Christian church and Orthodox Judaism, offered “Kinder, Kirche, Kuche” as the only areas for female activity’ (1979:284). This statement reveals a common and deeply rooted misunderstanding of the essential differences between Jewish and Christian attitudes to women. Christianity did indeed offer women these three areas of activity, although attitudes to marriage and to women’s active participation in church rituals have been frequently, and in the case of the latter remain, problematic. (See Ruether 1974, especially essays by Ruether, 150–83, and by Parvey, 117–49.) Orthodox Judaism, however, has traditionally denied women any significant role within the synagogue community. Kinder and Kuche only have been the Jewish woman’s portion (P.S.Cohen 1983, personal interview). She has been excluded from the ‘heart’ of traditional Orthodox Judaism, from the mandatory communal prayer and study which is the Jew’s primary mode of expression and commitment, and therefore from an active religious role. On the other hand, it is commonly believed that the Jewish attitude to sex and to women is a particularly positive one, that both men and women enjoy a tradition in which sex is not only deemed necessary but also, unlike that of Christianity, desirable. In this chapter I intend to explore the contradictory attitudes within Judaism to women. I shall try to show how Freud’s immediate experience as a Jew enabled him to radicalize our views of sexuality but how that same experience led him to construe femininity in a particular way. Before going any further, it is important to note that the observations made here about characteristic tendencies within the Jewish family refer, for the most part, to those Jews of Central and Eastern Europe whose forebears had been settled there in ghettos and hamlets for several centuries, not to those deriving from Islamic countries or the lands around the Mediterranean basin. While the Torah was binding on all Jews there was, as in all complex belief systems, a significant amount of selection from essential sources, as well as a certain degree of behavioural nuance. Styles and preoccupations have been a matter of both individual and group emphasis, interpretation and reinterpretation of texts rather than a reflection of them. However, contrary to some feminist opinion, assumptions that women’s status has been generally lower in Judaism than in other religious and social systems, is without much foundation. It has, on the whole, been neither lower nor higher. As Sherry B.Ortner argues, women are considered and treated as inferior to some degree in every known society: ‘each culture’, Ortner writes, ‘in its own way and on its own terms makes this evaluation’ (1974:69–70). Woman is invariably seen as occupying a position between

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culture and nature, while serving as an agency for the conversion of nature into culture, through the socialization of children. Each culture, of course, copes with the problems of separation and differentiation, of child from mother, and of male from female, in its own way. My concern here is to show how and on what terms Judaism has done so. It has, in common with all primitive societies, shared a fear and an envy of the female’s creative functions. The waxing and waning of these feelings also abound within rabbinic culture (Cooper 1986, personal interview). The images of women depicted in the Bible, itself spanning a period of some 2,000 years, naturally incorporate a variety of views. There is, likewise, a certain variety to be found in rabbinic literature. Roslyn Lacks (1980) describes in an illuminating discussion, how women’s place in Judaism after the destruction of the second Temple underwent certain radical changes, for rabbinical opinion made its own interpretations, explications, and codifications of the existing patriarchal ethos of the Old Testament. The rabbinic era of course saw a radical transformation of Jewish society as a whole but Lacks emphasizes the emergence of clearer division and polarization of the sexual characters and roles. Thus, while dissenting opinion often occurred, the majority view retained and consolidated separate orders of existence for male and female. Two features can be clearly distinguished as they emerge and are developed over the millennia. Both have their roots in biblical law and custom but seem to have crystallized through the centuries in the hands of the rabbis. The first is women’s exclusion from scholarship and obligatory prayer. The two ritual requirements are closely related and this separation of women has done more than anything else to ensure and preserve their lower spiritual and intellectual status. The second, citing Lacks once again, is the greater protections afforded in the rabbinic era to women in the sphere of marriage, home, and family. The latter gain, however, served to consolidate further the earlier loss and their confinement to the home was thereby stricter. Such protections, which assumed a patriarchal setting, reinforced the resulting sense of women as ‘others’, as a separate human category; a sense that was buttressed by the stringent and, in effect, punitive laws of ritual purity (Lacks 1980:120– 22). The Jewish attitudes to sex are often seen as wholly positive by contrast to those of Christianity. For example, the Anglican theologian D.S.Bailey writes that in early Christianity, ‘the decisive test, the critical discipline was that of sexual continence’. The ‘cult of virginity’ followed inevitably upon St Paul’s teachings and the Christian view, in contrast to the Jewish, came ‘to look upon sexuality as something not only emotionally disturbing, but also, in some sense defiling and tainted with evil’ (cited by D.M.Feldman 1974:82–5). David M.Feldman, citing Bailey’s view, adds that the Hebraic roots from which the early church departed, ‘teach no antipathy to sex, and the sin of Adam and Eve has no special connection with sexual activity’ (85). These accounts represent a considerable oversimplification of Jewish attitudes to sex as well as to the creation myth. The story of Eve’s birth clearly reflects what seems to be a primordial need on the part of the male to reverse the natural order of the life-bearing process and show the birth of the child from the male. Theodor Reik sees in this reversal of roles the culminating stage of an extended rite de passage by means of which our civilization has repressed the archaic maternal power and moved on to appropriate and control it (cited by Ruether 1975:146–47). However the punitive element attached to

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female sexuality, which involves the serpent/seducer’s intrusion into the paradisial state, suggests, using psychoanalytic terms, the child’s need to punish and restrain the mother who betrays him with the sexually powerful father. The ambivalence felt for the ‘treacherous’, feared but also loved maternal object is dealt with in different ways by various social systems but the majority have emphasized the need to control the power and sexual appetites of females. Lacks correctly emphasizes, contrary to the theologians’ view, that the early events of Genesis have, since the Christian era and its view of woman as temptress, also been associated by Jews at times with the Fall of Man (Lacks 1980:93–7). We can see this in Isaac Bashevis Singer’s The Family Moskat, for example, where the attending doctor announces to the expectant mother, ‘The curse of Eve is upon you’ (I.B.Singer 1980:360). Nevertheless the theologians’ findings of important differences between Jewish and Christian views of sex are undoubtedly valid and, as we shall see in the chapter to follow, overt attitudes to both sex and to women have indeed differed markedly. It is quite true that within Judaism there has been a celebration of procreation and fecundity, as it is also true of most religions of antiquity. However, a great deal of ambivalence to sexuality, that frequently amounts to an aversion, also informs some rabbinic thought and writings. The associations between women, sex, and sin can be clearly discerned in the powerful Talmudic edict kol be-ishah ervah—woman’s voice is an abomination—as well as in countless other warnings on the corrupting effect of the female and the dangers to male purity and piety of her presence. Chastity and abstinence are indeed proscribed; Judaism took a different path from that of Christianity. However, the conscious assumption that marriage and sex are necessary and even ‘good’ does not necessarily indicate a positive or conflict-free view of women or of sex. To marry and beget children are religious injunctions in Judaism. The primary statement of the value of marriage is found in Genesis 2:18: ‘It is not good that the man should be alone: I will make him an help meet for him’. That of procreation (which Dr Feldman, like many other modern rabbis, is at pains to point out is pronounced in a separate context), is based on the charges to the sons of Noah after the Flood (Genesis 9:1 and 9:7) to ‘Be fruitful and multiply’ and repeated to Jacob (Genesis 35:11). Marriage is regarded as the only proper environment for the fulfilment of this injunction but the rabbis added a third value to marriage; it minimized the possibilities and the need for illicit sexual activities: ‘He who reaches the age of 20 and has not married spends all his days in sin…[or] all his days in thoughts of sin’ (Tb. Kiddushin 296, quoted in Feldman 1974:30). Celibacy is actually proscribed for the observant Jew and on this issue there is no rabbinical dissent (although there is one rabbinical drop-out, Ben Azzai, who claimed exemption on the grounds that he loved only Torah). So important is the early fulfilment of the commandment of marriage that it is one of only two reasons allowed for the sale of a Torah scroll (cited by A. Cohen 1975:162). Thus the early Hebrews were intensely concerned with procreation. Judaism, after all, is based on kinship, unlike Christianity which is based on fellowship or brotherhood in Christ. But Judaism is also distinguished by the importance placed on the rights of the woman to sexual satisfaction within marriage. The commandment of Onah (conjugal duties) found in Exodus 21:10 is accepted as specifying the husband’s ‘conjugal debt’;

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that sexual intercourse is his obligation and his wife’s right is made clear by the fact that he is forbidden by Talmudic law to repudiate it. Should he vow to do so, the vow is automatically rendered null and void (Feldman 1974:61–3). Nor is the wife permitted to forgo her claim to it as she may to material rights. Even a man’s vow to deny himself sex carries a time limit of one to two weeks since his wife will suffer by it (63). In his discussion of women’s rights in Judaism, Raphael Loewe has pointed out that while the wife may not refuse her husband’s approaches without valid reason, there is no emphasis on the propriety of sexual enjoyment for the man. The sexual requirements for the male all devolve on the duties of propagation and the avoidance of sin. It is his duty, however, to provide his wife with gratification. It does seem then as though Judaism articulates an unusual concern for the sexual rights and well-being of women (Loewe 1966:40–1). However, it is important to note that the commandment to be fruitful is given to the man, not to his wife. The onus is on him to ‘seduce’ her into helping him to fulfil his religious obligations. But since the duty of Onah applies even where infertility or an existing pregnancy is the case, it is clear that the ritual need for propagation cannot be the only reason. A more persuasive one is suggested by the stringent laws of sexual morality. Just as early marriage is the primary instrument for the regulation of the sexual passions, so their continued mastery requires a sanctioned means of expression. In Judaism the erotic impulse is partly channelled and directed by the elaborate system of avoidance laws. The laws of ritual purity and the restrictions on illicit sex serve as a reminder of the dangers inherent in sex, as well as delineating woman’s ‘otherness’. The fact that sex is actually compulsory, however, is proof of the awareness—central in Judaism—of the danger to the social structure of repressed sexuality. Thus the city of Jerusalem went so far as to issue an ordinance in 1749 barring all unmarried men aged from 20 to 60 from the precincts of the city (Feldman 1974:31). A third and related point is that the need to control women is clearly a pressing one in any patriarchal society. Woman, it is strongly and repeatedly suggested throughout the centuries of teachings, never really succeeds in spiritually transcending the baser levels of sensuality: ‘women are overcome by the spirit of fornication more than men, and in their heart they plot against men; and by means of their adornment they deceive first their minds, and… through the accomplished acts they take them captive’ (quoted in Lacks 1980:96). The Testament of Reuben thus explains man’s fall from grace and while this particular model for the origins of evil is often said to have fallen into disfavour, the rabbinic preoccupation with female tzniut—modesty or privacy—is a constant theme in the treatment of women. Moshe Meiselman writes, ‘Implicit in woman’s creation, was a command that she develop a specific trait of the human personality to its maximum—the capacity for tzniut’ (Mieselman 1978:11). The Jewish woman is usually characterized as mother, daughter, or wife. She bears males, is married off by and to them and she links the generations between them (Bird in Ruether 1974:60–1). As a good wife ‘her price is far above rubies’ (the King James Version of the Bible, Proverbs 31:10) and this verse is often cited by Jewish apologists. However, she is also, apparently, just as rare, for the verse starts ‘who can find her’. She acquires merit—the route to heaven—only by sending her sons to study Torah and by facilitating her husband in doing so. Her legal standing is the cause of considerable embarrassment to many enlightened

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authorities today. (These include two eminent Orthodox Rabbis who freely acknowledged ‘embarrassment’ to this writer but asked to remain anonymous.) Some of the apologetics on the subject seem to reflect this sense of unease. Raphael Loewe speaks of the ‘seeming disabilities of women’ within Jewish law only being applicable in the light of the fact that Jewish girls were traditionally married at the age of 12. Women’s rights, obligations, and restrictions in ceremonial and civil law proceed from this fact, Loewe explains, indicating that the law, as it applies to women, is geared to 12-year-old children. This explains the recurring legal classification of ‘women, children, and slaves’ and the strong resemblance between the ‘informalities’ of the legal procedures as they apply to women and as they are applied in the juvenile courts today out of consideration for child psychology (Loewe 1966:24). In another part of his article Professor Loewe pragmatically observes that the woman’s position follows inevitably from the essential role of the family and that indeed, ‘if the future of Judaism/Jewry is to prove an organic unity with its past, the maintenance of the pattern is indispensable’ (50–1). Roslyn Lacks summarizes some of the legal and moral ‘disabilities’ of women in Orthodox Judaism: ‘They are excluded from the Minyan (the quorum of 10 males required for worship). They are excluded from testifying as witnesses in Jewish courts of law. They may not be called to read the Torah in the Synagogue. They cannot become Rabbis. They are obliged to maintain significant distances from men during menstruation and for the following seven days. In the marriage ritual it is the groom who repeats the vows that consecrate the woman to him. She remains silent. The husband can initiate divorce proceedings. The wife cannot do so. The birth and rights of passage of a boy are celebrated with elaborate ritual. Those of a girl receive a minimal response. Men must recite a daily prayer thanking God for not having been made a woman. (Abstract from Lacks 1980:xx) In addition, woman are not granted the legal status of heirs; they are owed their share of any estate in the capacity of creditors. The laws that are most often implicated in cases of hardship among Orthodox Jews today are those concerned with marriage and divorce. For example the childless woman must be divorced by her husband after ten years regardless of which party is infertile. Another law states that a childless widow must obtain her brother-in-law’s release from her obligation to marry him before she may marry again. Thus an English correspondent writing in the Jewish Chronicle (10 December, 1982) expresses her gratitude to the Reform Synagogue for enabling her, without obtaining the release of chalitzah, to marry again and remain within the Jewish community.1 She had been unable to obtain the cooperation of her brother-in-law and could not remarry due to the ‘strictures of orthodoxy’.

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1

The law prescribes that the widow of a childless marriage must take part in a Levirate marriage, namely she must marry her husband’s brother. Release from this obligation can only be obtained with the permission of her brother-in-law and by carrying out the rite of chalitzah (Deuteronomy 25:9).

Having fulfilled his procreative duties, which also serve to protect the future of the Jewish people, the Orthodox Jewish male has traditionally turned to his central mission in life: the work of self-sanctification. The heart of traditional Judaism is communal prayer and study and this devolves on the verse: ‘Therefore shall ye lay up these my words in my heart…. And ye shall teach them to your children’ (Deuteronomy 11:18–19). This has always been taken to mean that sons must become learned in the Torah, writes Dr J.H. Hertz (1936, vol. 5:151). Rabbi Hertz’s discussion on Jewish education (151–54) makes the secondary role of women very clear: ‘Though it was never intended that women become learned in the Torah, a clear understanding of the fundamentals of Jewish faith and duty was required.’ He quotes Judah the Pious, writing in the Middle Ages: ‘Girls too should receive instruction in the Holy Law…. Everyone should know the Divine laws and commandments; youths …in the Hebrew language,…women and girls…in their mother tongue’ (152). Hertz goes on to say that the lower standard of education for girls in past centuries ‘did not then much matter as in the sheltered life of the olden ghetto’, their morale remained unharmed. He quotes M. Joseph’s Judaism as Life and Creed approvingly: ‘“The Jewish woman vied with her husband in an admiration for a religious culture which she was not permitted to share [my emphasis]; her greatest pride was to have sons learned in the Torah…and she could immolate herself as a martyr when the need arose”’ (Joseph quoted in Hertz 1936, vol. 5:152). A devotional literature in Yiddish exclusively intended for females was current at the time of Joseph’s writing, Hertz points out, which incidentally was also Freud’s time. This sanguine attitude to the historical effacement of the Jewish female’s rights to and means of spiritual expression is, surprisingly, shared by a more contemporary source than Rabbi Hertz (who was Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom, and wrote this account as late as 1929). Raphael Patai writes in his book The Jewish Mind: ‘What was psychologically more important than her own educational attainment was the immense pride the Jewish woman took in the scholarliness of her menfolk. It was through them that she fully participated in the study-centred religious life of the Jewish community, and that she identified with the world and values of learning. The women basked in the reflective glory of whatever scholarly eminence their fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons attained.’ (Patai 1977:520) As these writers indicate, ‘The Hebrew Language…is…key to all Israel’s treasures…the most important of all human tongues… the Sacred Tongue…which shall give that child a lot and portion in the synagogue, the heart of Jewish communal life’ (Hertz 1936:153). However, ‘teaching a daughter Torah’, one Rabbi suggested in the first century, was like ‘teaching her obscenity’ (quoted in Lacks 1980:9). While this last extreme position is frequently represented today as a minority view, it must have obtained for many centuries

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since it was commonly implemented in Eastern European Jewish culture. Indeed, with the exclusion of women from any function or role in communal prayer and study, their exclusion from the Sacred Tongue and their confinement to Mame Loshn, the ‘mother tongue’, namely Yiddish, was inevitable. Freud’s mother, who spoke ‘broken German’ all her life, was thus speaking Mauscheln—(German spiced with Yiddish)—or Yiddish proper. The men, inevitably, spoke Yiddish too but they traditionally learned Hebrew, as did Freud’s father. Hence Freud’s claim not to understand Yiddish seems rather disingenuous for, according to John Geipel, it was spoken in the nineteenth century with varying pronunciations and local idiosyncrasies ‘from Amsterdam in the West, to Moscow in the East, from Copenhagen in the North, to Milan in the South’ (Geipel 1982:15), and Moravia and Vienna were certainly no exceptions to this rule. Moreover, as Theodor Reik has told us in his book Jewish Wit (1962:31), most Jewish jokes, of which Freud was very fond, continued to be expressed in ‘jargon’, that is in Yiddish. Yiddish was sometimes the only language that the woman of the Eastern European ghetto or shtetl (and the unlearned or prosteh Jewish man) could read and write, although Polish or Russian would be acquired by Jews who had dealings with the world outside. Zborowski and Herzog tell us that ‘two parallel literatures’ existed in the shtetl (1962:125) and that this was reflected in the cry of the travelling book-seller: ‘books for women and sacred books for men’. The ‘books’ were in Yiddish and the ‘sacred books’ in Hebrew (126). Except for certain blessings on the Sabbath and festivals, which in the past were often learned by rote, women have no obligation to teach themselves or others, or to be taught at all. They have consequently often been described by the rabbis as frivolous and ignorant. ‘The juxtaposition in Maimonides’ works of “women and the ignorant” is frequent’ (Encyclopaedia Judaica 1971, vol. 16:627). As Judith Hauptman describes it, the Talmud makes the following distinctions in setting some general rules relating to women and the commandments: first it divides the commandments into two categories, the active and passive, the positive and negative. Each of these categories is subdivided into time-bound and non-time-bound commandments. Women are obligated, as are men, to abide by all the negative commandments (for example no one may kill, steal, break the law of Sabbath, and so on) but of the positive commandments only those that are not time-bound need be observed. (There are some exceptions: for example the woman must attend the Passover seder, light the Sabbath candles) (Hauptman in Ruether 1974:190– 91). While men are commanded to holy study and prayer, the reason usually given for women’s exemption is that their domestic obligations are primary. A.Cohen states that women are exempt from commands of ‘Thou shalt’ (1975:159) but not from those that have the form ‘Thou shalt not’ (159:2n.). The impression given here of adults dealing with young children is particularly marked; even more so when seen in the context of a culture that has, for millennia, held that sanctification is attained through the study of the sacred writings thereby retaining literacy for its male members throughout the Dark Ages. We should note here that in discouraging literacy in its female members Judaism is not exceptional in comparison with other social systems. It is difficult to make accurate comparisons but Catholicism, for example, did little or nothing for long periods to encourage its followers of either sex in literacy while Protestantism seems to have done

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so for both sexes. On the other hand, while there is no ritual separation of the sexes in the Christian church service itself as there is in the synagogue, pastors and most other Protestant church officials have traditionally been male. Indeed, two reports—one by the Laity commission of the Roman Catholic Church of England, the other a collection of essays by Anglican vicars’ wives—unite in the view that ‘there appear to be not two classes in the church, clergy and the laity, but three, the clergy, the laity and the female laity in that order of precedence’ (The Times, 3 October, 1983). One could justifiably argue, however, that in separating men and women in the synagogue and restricting the latter’s participation to the role of onlookers, Judaism takes the discriminating tendencies towards women much further than organized Christianity. (The Encyclopaedia Judaica observes on this topic that woman’s role in organized worship in ancient Israel was also ‘limited to secondary functions. There was no order of priestesses’, 1971, vol. 16:625.) It has been suggested that Jewish women were exempted from those duties that would ‘either mandate or make preferable a communal appearance on their part’. They were duties that would have taken a woman out of the house and away from her husband’s surveillance. Saul Berman finds that ‘exemption would be a tool used by the Torah to achieve a particular social goal’, one that devolves on the role of the Jewish woman being centred almost exclusively in the home (S.Berman 1976:121–22). Another aspect of the exclusion of the woman from active, religious participation concerns the laws of ritual purity. Before the final destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem, thus were various classes of persons listed as ritually impure: lepers, those coming into contact with corpses, and menstruating women. There were rules of purification for all of these as well as exclusion laws above and beyond that forbidding them access to the Temple. After the destruction of the Temple, not only were the restrictions placed upon menstruating women retained by the rabbis but extra days of impurity were also added. Thus the Orthodox Jewish woman today is considered defiled and defiling for seven days after the end of her menstruation and must perform an elaborate complex of avoidance behaviours. It is difficult not to find in these laws evidence of rabbinic hostility towards the female function. Elizabeth Koltun cites as evidence of this hostility Tractate Niddah (57b) which designates the uterus as beth hatorfa, or place of rot (editorial notes in Koltun 1976:70). It is even more difficult to believe the apologist’s argument that the Jewish male (and female) will be unaffected by the conflicting feelings towards women that these taboos so strongly suggest. The exclusion of Jewish women from the crucial communal ritual gave them, on one important level, a passive, dependent role within Judaism. Obviously the biological factor of childbearing would have served to keep them in a domestic relation but this is heavily reinforced by verses such as: ‘All glorious is the King’s daughter within the palace’ (Psalms 45:14; quoted in Koltun 1976:116), which underlines the powerful rabbinic delineation of the female role as one of privacy or modesty. It is plain that as far as her formal position is concerned the Jewish woman occupies a significantly inferior place to the man. Yet, at the same time, Judaism appears to be distinguished by what Loewe describes as a ‘marked ethical concern for domestic life and a clear appreciation of the realities of the power which womanhood can exert’ (R.Loewe 1966:11–12). Indeed the Jewish ‘matriarch’ has long been a by-word in both biblical and contemporary terms. So how is the image of woman depicted above to be reconciled with

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the portrait of the Jewish mother so well known to contemporary novelists and comedians? How is the discrepancy between the subordinated Jewish woman and the proverbial matriarch of the jokes and legends to be explained? ‘The wife is the actual head of the household’, Landes and Zborowski write (1967:30); ‘There is room for matriarchs as well as patriarchs [in the shtetl]’ (Zborowski and Herzog 1962:141). Yet these writers also say, ‘In a sense the culture ignores its females although they are present, active and often forceful…. “The baby” of the shtetl is a male’ (1962:317). These apparently conflicting statements encapsulate the contradictory role of the Jewish woman. I shall trace just a few strands in the development of this curiously invisible but ‘forceful’ Jewish mother and look at some of the implications for her and for her family of the differential treatment of the sexes. Freud himself appears to have been the son of just such a woman and considering what he has to say about the development of human personality, this must be of some significance for the way that we view his work. There is no question about the fact that higher value and status was traditionally attached by both parents to sons. ‘Children are wanted’, Zborowski and Herzog write, ‘but boys are wanted more than girls’ (1962:309). The son is seen by the rabbis as the ‘hope of Israel’s future’; ‘Jerusalem was destroyed only because the children [boys] did not attend school’ (Montefiore and H.Loewe 1974:517); salvation is possible only if they pray for it (518). Moreover, only the son is able to recite the Kaddish, the important ritual prayer for the dead. Thus a newborn son is even today sometimes called the ‘Kaddishl’ by his proud parents, and Zborowski and Herzog record a small boy’s taunt to his sister, ‘We are the ones who will say kaddish, but what will you do?’ (1962:348). Even in the role of daughter, the female is theoretically dispensable as is clear from a little-known rabbinic dispensation that is available to release here from the commandment of honouring her parents should her husband wish it (Chill 1974:43). Landes and Zborowski (1967:27) report that the birth ‘of a son is announced joyously in the Synagogue, in contrast with the flat announcement of a daughter’s birth’. Rabbi C.G.Montefiore observes that modern apologists for the rabbis tend to ignore or evade these differences. It is quite true, he notes, that the rabbis were all monogamists, that they: ‘honoured their mothers profoundly, and usually honoured and cared for their wives…but… Women were, on the whole, regarded as inferior to men in mind, in function and in status…. It was not for nothing that the daily blessing was said…: “Blessed are thou, O Lord our God, who has not made me a woman”.’ (Montefiore and H.Loewe 1974: xviii) In an attempt to refute the charge of masculine bias, Raphael Loewe argues that the Jewish appreciation of women is such that the Shekhina itself—the female aspect of the Godhead—is ‘both grammatically and metaphorically’ conceived of as feminine (R.Loewe 1966:27). However, while the use of feminine imagery might activate certain unconscious responses, as in the case of the Shekhina, these might bear only an indirect relationship to the conscious perception of the actual female. Thus the appearance of a female child has often been less welcome. Patai tells the story of one Hasid who came to prayers late, saying that his wife had given birth to a daughter in the night. The resulting

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clamorous congratulations distracted the Maggid—sage or preacher—who, on hearing the reason for the disturbance, said with great annoyance, ‘A daughter! He should be flogged!’ (Patai 1977:198). The difference in value and status is often cited by Jewish women as a source of some resentment. One celebrated party to this resentment was Bertha Pappenheim, whom Ernest Jones revealed to be Josef Breuer’s patient Anna O. The Studies on Hysteria written jointly by Freud and Breuer was based to a large extent on Pappenheim’s casehistory. Pappenheim describes the secondary importance accorded by Orthodox Jews to girls: ‘This can already be seen in the different reception given a new citizen of the world. If the father, or someone else, asked what “it” was after a successful birth, the answer might be either the satisfied report of a boy, or—with pronounced sympathy for the disappointment—“Nothing, a girl” or, “only a girl”.’ (quoted in Koltun 1976:149) It is interesting to speculate on the feelings of mortification expressed here by Anna O and the part these might have played in her illness. Indeed Gilman has shown that the hysterical description of Anna O’s language involved also the disruption of her Jewish identity. The prayer she found herself unable to remember would have been a Hebrew one; the religious language of her father. Breuer, unlike Freud, was able to grasp the significance of this relationship although he was unable to confront the sexual aetiology of Anna O’s neurosis. Thus he noted the deterioration of her German into Yiddish. Freud, on the other hand, grasped the significance of the sexual dimension but managed to repress its relationship with her Jewish identity (Gilman 1984:601–03). Significantly, Pappenheim went on to become a well-known feminist and social worker and campaigned against the heads of the Jewish community for social and educational equality for Jewish women, complaining that they lacked the rights of 13year-old boys. Classical interpretations to the effect that Anna O was defending against Oedipal conflicts (Jensen 1970:xxxix) may have taken insufficient account of these factors. There are more recent accounts testifying to the complex emotions sometimes experienced by Jewish girls that result from the differential treatment of the sexes. In an unusual study of first-generation American-Jewish women, Alexander Grinstein indicates that special problems of identity may arise: ‘These girls have to contend with special difficulties which highly colour their reactions of penis envy as well as sibling rivalry. They come from homes which culturally place a high value upon the male members of the family, especially the sons. The European and Jewish tradition of the importance of the male, perpetuated in the daily prayers of the Orthodox Jew, dominate the attitude in the household. Boys are to be educated, and the goal of “my son, the doctor” is no myth in its importance to the self-esteem of the hard-working and selfsacrificing mother.’ (Grinstein 1967:87–8)

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The special problems of identity affecting these women, Grinstein suggests, devolve on the ‘philosophy of the home’ which dictates the differential treatment of males and females. Considerable affection and care in the early years, while of value, resulted in subsequent, additional conflict and difficulties in separation from the mother. ‘The consequence of the mother’s ambition for her sons and preferential treatment of them often results in a bitter sacrifice of the daughter’s personality’, Grinstein notes. ‘The obseisance demanded of the daughters to their brothers’ expected accomplishments serves to perpetuate a feeling of repressed aggression and secret contempt within these girls’, as well as resentment towards both mother and husband (88). Grinstein adds that the unconscious identifications made with their old-world mothers involves them in behaviour characterised by ‘crudeness and inappropriateness in their dress,… harshness in their behaviour towards their children,…loudness in their manner’, the most striking of their mothers’ ‘primitive characteristics’ (85). Grinstein also found that ‘In their mothers’ unconscious the son was frequently equated with the mothers’ phallus’. In the daughters, an intensification of narcissism is associated with viewing their own bodies as a prized object to the impairment of healthy object relations (88–9). Similar patterns to those examined in Grinstein’s study are described by Maria H.Levinson and Daniel J.Levinson as being ‘not uncommon in the Jewish community’ (although they note that it is not known if they are more frequent among intermarrying Jews who were the subjects of their study). The mothers’ greater interest and appreciation of sons tended to increase the girls’ hostility towards males and cause complications in their heterosexual adjustments. (This was associated with feelings of disappointment in their fathers which followed on affectionate relations with them in early childhood (Levinson and Levinson 1958–59:114). ‘In a sense, the culture ignores its females,… “The baby” of the shtetl is a male’ (Zborowski and Herzog 1962:317). Yet the Eastern European woman, in particular, was noted for her strength and dominance. Her social and economic role often encompassed the earning of the family’s livelihood as well as the running of the household, for the place of the sheyne or learned Jew was in the study house. These writers stress that there is room for matriarchs as well as for patriarchs’ in the shtetl (1962:141). Indeed, in a rather less idealized and nostalgic study of the shtetl family by Landes and Zborowski, the authors observe that the wife is the actual head of the household ‘expected to be fully responsible in mundane affairs,… the father…becomes like a child to her in the home, except when he is studying or performing ritual acts’ and mother is frequently described as a ‘loving despot’ (Landes and Zborowski 1967:26–30). Margaret Mead has pointed out that the fashionable use of the term ‘matriarchy’ (as applied to American society) does violence to a useful concept (Mead 1962:275). I suggest that its use in the case of Jewish women is equally misplaced. ‘A matriarchal society’, writes Mead, ‘is one in which some if not all of the legal powers relating to the ordering and governing of the family…are lodged in women rather than in men’ (275). As we have seen, these are precisely the powers that the Jewish woman lacks, along with the status and esteem that accompany them. Thus a contemporary Orthodox scholar jibes, ‘In Judaism, woman is queen of the coop’. But Lacks who cites this observes, ‘It is not the coop, however, but the academy that was historically accorded highest status’ (Lacks

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1980:124). The fact that legal, political, and religious authority resides in the men, together with the concomitant assumptions about women, ensures that the power of the woman is often a more subtle affair which, under certain unfavourable circumstances, may be comprised of emotional and psychological pressures: that is manipulative stratagems, such as emotional blackmail and masochistic threats mobilizing guilt, anxiety, and other pathological defences. We must be cautious in drawing general conclusions both as to the predictability of psychological types and the inevitability of and nature of defences. Of course, not all Jewish girls are relegated by their families to a position subordinate to males while many who are so treated remain psychologically healthy, finding efficient modes of mature adjustment. Moreover, as I have been at pains to point out, many of the conditions and attitudes described are, to some extent, characteristic of those applied to women in general and not just to Jews. The devaluation of women occurs in most societies in varying degrees and it is clear, as we have seen, that in the ghettos of Eastern Europe, women probably enjoyed a greater amount of influence than is often the case. However, it was the sphere of male activity which was morally the important one. The essential distinction, aptly defined by Rosaldo, is between ‘the ability to gain compliance and the recognition that it is right’ (Rosaldo and Lamphere 1974:21). For male authority has usually been mitigated by women’s informal influence and power. Women have always exerted important pressures on the social life of the group. Nevertheless it is extremely interesting to note Philip E.Slater’s finding that personal identification by a daughter with her mother does not correlate with ‘psychological adjustment’ in the population as a whole (cited by Chodorow 1974:59). Chodorow ascribes Slater’s findings to the lack of adequate ego boundaries or a firm sense of self on the part of the mother who is unable to provide experiences of differentiating ego-development for her daughter leaving her dependent and confused as to her own boundaries (Chodorow 1974:59). A similar point is made by Judith Weinstein Klein in her study of third-generation American-Jewish women. She finds that the effects of the ‘women-denigrating messages inherent in Jewish culture’ can be seen in the ‘correlations for women of cultural, religious and racial identification with self-denigration and alienation’ (J.W.Klein 1980:34).2 These contemporary Jewish women, like those in Grinstein’s study, seem to be expressing a sense of mutilation in identifying too closely with their mother’s roles; the models of female strength frequently offered them are marked by compromise and selfsacrifice and evoke guilt and helpless rage. It must be of some significance that an essential distinguishing feature of early Kibbutz ideology was the attempt on the part of both sexes to reject traditional Jewish 2 It may

be objected here that in Golda Meir Israel is one of the few states to have elected a woman prime minister. As I’ve already observed, contemporary Israeli events represent a different historical development but we should note that the religious party’s daily newspaper, Hatzofe, had objected to Mrs Meir’s appointment as director of a Jewish Agency department in 1946 on the grounds that it was a breach of ‘Nature’s own laws’. When Mrs Meir became prime minister, Rena Kronenthal writes, ‘Talmudic logic found a way out of the flagrant violation of Nature’s order’ by declaring that the presidency was the supreme position and that ‘Golda would only be in second place’ (Jerusalem Post, 1 June, 1983).

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family behaviour patterns. Bruno Bettelheim writes of the founding woman that ‘her mother’s life seemed so overwhelming an example of giving to children, so much all of one piece, that she could not imagine herself identifying with parts of it and not others…. To be free of such an image, one had to be free of it in toto’ (quoted in Rein 1980:37). Several writers have examined the origins of the Oedipus concept in Freud’s thought in relation to the patriarchal structure of the German family (for example Fromm 1941; Riesman 1950). Arnold Meadow and Harold J.Vetter suggest, however, that the Jewish family structure plays a more decisive role and cite Freud’s statements on the mother-son and husband-wife relationships as evidence for this. They refer to Freud’s contention regarding the intensity and ‘completeness’ of the mother-son relationship in comparison with that between husband and wife (Meadow and Vetter 1967:164). The possibility that the theory of the Oedipus complex—articulating the child’s conflict with the paternal power—might be a reaction-formation on Freud’s part to an opposite constellation, one in which the informal and customary role prescribed that his mother was the dominant and most powerful influence and his father the weaker one, is not usually considered. Freud’s own ‘family romance’ has usually been seen in conventional patriarchal Jewish or Victorian terms. However, formal status, as we have seen, is by no means a sufficient or accurate indicator of actual roles and may even result in an opposite and contradictory situation. The implications here would be that Freud employed a considerable amount of denial and repression about the details of his own life. Meadow and Vetter also indicate an important feature characteristic of Jewish family patterns in which cross-sex ties are highly emphasized, often at the price of husband-wife relationships. Landes and Zborowski, in their discussion of the Eastern European Jewish family, speak of the ‘inclusive libidinal character’ of the mother-son relationship, of which the sisters ‘partake to a lesser extent’ contrasting it with the spiritualized and remote character of the father. ‘In so far as is possible to a living creature, a father’s personality is de-libidinised’, these writers emphasize and these features were listed among those that were marked and consistent enough ‘to make this family distinct among the others in the European tradition’ (1967:24). In a footnote to this observation, the authors remark: ‘Within…[this family] we find reminders of Freud’s familial formulations, but embedded among relationships and values that were unrealised by him’ (50). Thus Freud’s curious belief that a woman’s relationship with her son is the only one to bring her ‘unlimited satisfaction’ since it is entirely ‘free from ambivalence’ (S.Freud 1933, SE 22:133) seems understandable in the light of the psychodynamics of the traditional Jewish family and his own experience must have influenced this highly idealized view. His father, who was married to his first wife at the age of 17 in his native shtetl and who spent the years of his old age studying Talmud, certainly followed the ancient patterns of his people in important essentials however much he deviated from the written codes. Those ‘ideals held for all though they were often ignored in practice’ (Landes and Zborowski 1967:24). Indeed Freud himself suggests some such acceptance as this on more than one occasion when he refers to his ‘Jewishness’ and even more specifically, in his comment to Joseph Wortis, ‘Ruthless egotism is much more common among Gentiles than among Jews, and Jewish family life and intellectual life are on a higher plane’ (cited by Cuddihy 1974:36). Subsequent psychoanalytic findings have long since superseded Freud’s simplistic formulation of the mother-son relationship. The

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fact that he adhered to it, it is suggested, can be understood only in terms of his own ‘family romance’, the need to defend against related anxieties, and the larger subcultural system in which that ‘romance’ occurred. Freud said that ‘A mother can transfer to her son the ambition which she has been obliged to suppress in herself’ (1933, SE 22:133) and this idea, in the form of the suppression and sublimation of penis envy, is the cornerstone of his psychology of women. In the classical formulation, the ‘authentic’ woman (Nunberg and Federn 1975, vol. 4:53) wants sex and children as compensation for the narcissistic wound of castration. Thus the issues of her deficiency and humiliation became, from the beginning, the central ones in the psychoanalytical debates about femininity, and the major determinants of self-esteem are, for Freud, gender-linked. However, narcissistic pathology almost certainly starts much earlier than the phallic stage, as Peter Barglow and Margaret Schaefer have pointed out in the context of their discussion of Freud’s theory of women, and would result from an unsatisfying primitive parent-child state and separation-individuation process (cited by Blum 1977:427–28). Parental mirroring responses and cues to ‘feminine’ qualities, leading on to parental identifications, are probably the most significant factors in the girl’s gender self-image, they state (432). Freud could never ‘conceive of the active, nurturant mother who had her own sources of pride and consolation’ (Schafer 1974:464), but at the same time, he could not see that his concept of the disgruntled and deeply envious woman precluded, in psychoanalytic terms, the possibility of a perfect and unambivalent mother-son relationship. For the suppression and frustration of all aspirations and ambitions, as well as an unconscious libidinal attachment to the bearer of the envied penis, would almost certainly involve the woman in a great number of conflicting feelings towards him. However, it is clear that in a very important sense, the Jewish mother has historically been obliged to express many of her emotional needs in the relationship with her son. Thus Rachel’s plea to Jacob (Genesis 30:1), ‘Give me children, or else I die’, as we have seen earlier in this chapter, remains highly relevant both legally and socially to Orthodox Jews even today. Whereas Zborowski and Herzog found barrenness to be a source of ‘guilt and bitter shame’ for the shtetl woman (1962:310), Jeanette Kupfermann’s recent study in North London revealed that among contemporary Hasidic Jews too, ‘a woman has virtually no status until she is a mother’ (1981:57). And while this is doubtless true of many traditional societies, Judaism, through its exclusion of the woman from any ritual communal role, thereby ensures that her investment in her ‘symbol-saturated’ males (Diamond 1957, quoted in Rein 1980:22) is of a particularly intense and anxious nature. If virtue and spirituality—directly available through prayer and scholarship—are the main routes to salvation, then the woman’s stake in her male child is a more critical one even than her husband’s who can, after all, earn his own heavenly reward. It was, we recall, the biblical Rebecca, who preferred her pious, intellectual son Jacob; Isaac favoured Esau, whose main interests were with the physical appetites. In his essay on Leonardo da Vinci, which is generally thought to represent autobiographical concerns, Freud wrote, ‘So, like all unsatisfied mothers, she took her little son in place of her husband, and by the too early maturing of his erotism robbed him of a part of his masculinity’ (1910 SE 11:117). Writing about the shtetl origins of the early Zionist settlers in Palestine, Natalie Rein describes a widespread pattern in which

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there are significant similarities. She finds that the woman lived ‘in the deep shadows’ of her menfolk, having ‘no identity if she was not a wife or a prospective bride’ (Rein 1980:20), yet finding no hope for growth or even love in marriage. Rein quotes S.Diamond (1957): ‘Love, as such, and certainly romantic love, was not considered of primary importance in initiating or even maintaining the union…. The mother’s task was to protect and nurture the children’ (Rein 1980:21). Elaborating on this study, Rein continues: ‘Since their marriages were based on the need to maintain family life and not on any inter-personal relationship,… They became wholly dependent emotionally on their children, relating especially to their sons who, by comparison, rated so much higher, that their need to drain love from them became an obsession.’ (22) Rein then quotes again from a passage by S.Diamond (1957), that echoes and expands on this description: ‘the mother’s relationship with her son, most strikingly in his early years, was direct and overprotective,… Undoubtedly, the mother’s response to the son served as an outlet also for emotionally inhibited relationships with the symbolsaturated father…. We can…view this relationship of the Jewish mother to her son as a species of romance, cultivated, cherished and idealised by the mother.’ (Rein 1980:22) This finding is strikingly similar to the one already quoted by Landes and Zborowski and which was found still to obtain in the second-and third-generation American descendants of Eastern European immigrants: ‘we have found the involvements between mother and son to be so far reaching and intense as to approximate a kind of adoration’ (Landes and Zborowski 1967:33); ‘It seems to us that though the marital obligations are fulfilled with the husband, the romance exists with the son’ (31). It seems clear that the Jewish girl’s path to motherhood, when it has taken place along customary traditional lines, is likely to have been a troubled one for she has had to negotiate and survive some important renunciations. Of course this is true for all humans but the Jewish girl has, historically, been less likely to achieve a self-fulfilling mode. Her rewards are primarily compensatory ones. In both Jewish and Freudian terms, she lives not for the gratifications eventually achieved by the boy who successfully resolves his developmental dilemmas but for those she may attain only through another person: for those mediated for her by males. Thus her need for self-esteem and for opportunities of self-assertion are likely to be urgent ones and the prescribed ritual requirements would intensify her desire for and preference for sons. She might seek to overcome her frustrating position, to change it strategically by becoming the mother of a boy thereby finding both a form of reparation and a narcissistic tool. But contrary to Freud’s postulate, her ambivalence towards the male could be a powerful factor in such a relationship. Feelings of envy and rivalry and the wish to retaliate might well coexist with maternal love that is based on these factors and perhaps this explains why the sense of the dominating Jewish mother is never far from the popular fantasy of the enveloping,

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castrating one. Both conventional wisdom and rabbinic teachings repeatedly bear witness to these fantasies of the overpowering, controlling mother. According to Reik, making mothers the butt of jokes and mockery is a characteristic Jewish trait that is rare among other peoples. These mothers’ preoccupation with food he writes, seems to be about making the ‘nutritional symbiosis of babyhood and with it the dependence of the children on them permanent’ (1962:83). The use of food by Jewish mothers as a means of domination and control is well known and has been cited in several studies (for example Bart in Koltun 1976:79; Hall 1938, cited in Patai 1977:450–51; Bales 1944, cited in Patai 1977:450–51). The Jewish woman of Amalie Freud’s class and generation, in particular, was denied a social and cultural role that had been enjoyed by her maternal ancestors for generations. In shtetl culture the latter had been able to find in their autonomy over the material world significant consolation for their exclusion from the male sphere of sacred ritual. With the ‘embourgeoisement’ of Jewish society in Vienna, which devolved entirely on the successful achievement of the upwardly aspiring males of her family, and her own confinement by the norms and values of nineteenth-century secular society, the ambitious Jewish woman found herself with a truly enormous investment in her sons’ achievements. Her traditional ‘dominant’ role in the household, lacking a more meaningful and fulfilling social function, exposed her family to her ambitions, frustrations, and disappointments in a particularly intense way. Freud’s mother was no exception: ‘the hero’s garb was in the weaving at the cradle itself’, writes Jones of Amalie’s hopes and aspirations for him (E.Jones 1956, vol. 1:5). Freud’s sister recalls two heroic prophecies made by fortune-tellers about him in his early years and says that their mother’s trust in his future destiny may have played ‘a definite part in the trend given his whole life’ (Bernays 1940:335). Jones also speaks of Amalie Freud’s ‘pride and love’ in this respect (E.Jones 1956, vol. 1:6). John E.Gedo has suggested that Freud had an ‘unusually close relationship to his doting mother’ and that Amalie might have had reason to turn from her husband to her son with particular intensity (Gedo 1976:287). Clearly his mother’s ambition for him was a major factor in Freud’s life, although we hear very little about it directly. Ernest Jones tells us that Freud’s attitude to certain matters of his personal life was one of quite inexplicable ‘secrecy’. He never discussed his childhood and early years, even with his children. Indeed, what they knew of the early period of their father’s life they learnt from Jones’s own account. ‘The topic…seemed to be taboo’; Jones conjectures that ‘in Freud’s earliest years there had been extremely strong motives for concealing some important phase of his development—perhaps even from himself. I would venture to surmise’, Jones adds, ‘it was his deep love for his mother’ (1958, vol. 2:455–56). Marjorie Brierley suggests, however, that the discovery of the Oedipus complex may have been facilitated by Freud’s need to bury much earlier and intolerable conflicts relating to his mother. It is unlikely, as Brierley observes, that he had no ambivalent feelings towards her. A solution of the kind chosen by Freud, emphasizing the role of the father in early childhood, could well indicate the strength of those feelings and might also be reflected in his work by his difficulties in relation to early infantile life and by the inadequacy of his views on femininity (Brierley 1956:480). The reserve shown by Freud regarding his mother is so marked, particularly in relation

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to his remarkable and courageous candour about his father, that we cannot help but suspect defensive motives. We shall look more closely at Freud’s relationship with his father a little later. Meanwhile, we note Jacob Freud’s granddaughter’s description of how the old man ‘lived somewhat aloof from the others in the family, reading a great deal—German and Hebrew (not Yiddish)…in the midst of this rather emotional household…he remained quiet and imperturbable…never raising his voice’ (Heller 1956:419). The description closely resembles the one drawn by Zborowski and Herzog of the typical configuration of the family of the sheyne or learned Jew described in Chapter 4. We also saw in previous chapters that Amalie Freud was, by her grandson’s account, a typically Galician Jewish woman. Martin Freud wrote that these Galicians had ‘little grace and no manners; and their women were certainly not what we should call “ladies”’ (M. Freud 1957:11). Theodor Reik remembers Amalie as having retained the ‘language, the manners, and probably the beliefs of her native environment. She spoke broken German, well seasoned with Yiddish’ (cited by Robert 1977:175). Ernest Jones tells us that, ‘curiously enough’, Freud spoke very little of his mother. She was ‘very given to complaining, and…she suffered from…tuberculosis’ (1956, vol. 1:173). From the two grandchildren already cited, we learn far more. Judith Bernays Heller writes of an ‘emotional household with its three young women [two of Freud’s sisters had left home by then] who sometimes did not get on well with one another, and their mother who was usually troubled and anxious—probably with financial worries—…a volatile temperament, [who] would scold the maid as well as her daughters and rush about the house…shrill and domineering. (1956:419) This granddaughter talks of a ‘prejudice’ she had against her grandmother who was ‘fine looking…efficient…capable…lively and sociable…loved and honoured by her children…was it because I …felt…she preferred the male members of her brood…?’ Years later a second visit confirmed her grandmother’s ‘lack of interest’ in her. With familiars, she seemed to this granddaughter to be a ‘tyrant’, and a ‘selfish’ one. Quite definitely, she had a strong personality and knew what she wanted’. She ‘continued to make her will felt’ until the last (Heller 1956:419–21). Martin Freud’s memories are just as vivid although somewhat less disappointed. Significantly, he writes of the ‘belligerence’ of the Galician Jews in relation to his grandmother, not his grandfather. Amalie’s people might seem ‘untamed barbarians to more civilized people, they alone of all minorities, stood up against the Nazis. It was men of Amalia’s race who fought the German army on the ruins of Warsaw; and it might, indeed, be true to say that whenever you hear of Jews showing violence or belligerence, instead of that meekness and what seems poor-spirited acceptance of a hard fate sometimes associated with Jewish peoples, you may safely suspect the presence of men and women of Amalia’s race.’ (M.Freud 1957:11)

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Amalie was difficult to live with, Martin testifies; no one envied Aunt Dolfie, who devoted her life to taking care of her mother. ‘There are people who, when they are… disturbed will hide these feelings because they do not want to affect the peace of those around them; but Amalia was not one of these.’ Any attempt to stop her impatient agitation while waiting for her beloved Sigmund to arrive at the family gathering would ‘produce an outburst of anger which it was better to avoid’ (11–12). Paul Roazen writes of Amalie Freud: ‘other grandchildren agree that she was a disciplinarian, at least to close relatives; many in the family suffered from her authoritarian character’ (1979:68–9). We know virtually nothing about Amalie Freud’s childhood world or of her relations with her parents and family members but we may observe something of her inner world from the sketches drawn by these grandchildren. Amalie was born in the Galician town of Brody (E.Jones 1956, vol. 1:3). She spent part of her childhood in Odessa and would, almost certainly, have lived in the Jewish ghettos of both cities. She moved to Vienna as a young girl. As with the whole Freud family, there is some doubt as to the quality and extent of her ties with formal Judaism, although they were almost certainly closer in sympathy to the Reform movement than to Orthodox Judaism. Martin Freud writes that Amalie never celebrated Jewish festivals, while his cousin Judith Bernays Heller describes a Passover Seder celebrated by her grandparents in which the complete service was recited in the original Hebrew and which her grandfather knew by heart. Clearly this granddaughter was witness to a side of the elder Freuds’ lives which Sigmund’s children were either not able or willing to recollect. We are not able to do more than point to these questions. The answers must await further studies, perhaps when the unaccountably rigid restrictions on access to the manuscript letters of Freud in the Library of Congress are finally lifted. It is extremely unlikely, however, that Amalie and Jacob Freud were as remote from their religious roots within Judaism as has been suggested. While the period of Amalie’s youth coincided with the cultural crisis of the emancipation with its attendant conflicts between Jewish Orthodox and Reformist factions, Amalie could not have belonged to that privileged class of wealthy, liberated Jews who, from the 1780s, had educated their women to be at home in German culture for, as we have seen, she spoke ‘broken German’ all her life (Patai 1977:267). It is probable, therefore, that Amalie Freud was raised according to the customs and rules of traditional Judaism. It would have been difficult for the ordinary Jew to have raised his daughter in any other manner in the ghettos of Brody and Odessa, although both were actually centres of Jewish Enlightenment. So while it is likely that she shared the care and affection enjoyed by other family members, it is also likely that value and status and their concomitant rewards would have been greater for the males of Amalie’s family. It is clear that she raised her own sons and daughters along traditional although not Orthodox lines. Stephen Bank and Michael D.Kahn remark that Freud became a ‘parental and a paternal child’ to his own siblings and was treated with a respect that ‘verged on deference’ by his mother. The family piano, on which she wished her musical daughter to have lessons, was removed when the young Sigmund objected to the noise; a considerable sacrifice for a young girl of that class of upward-aspiring Jews (Bank and Kahn 1980:499–500). These writers see him as a ‘classic first born’, but Amalie would also have been following a strong cultural pattern with her son. Her behaviour conforms

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to one of those enduring modes described by Landes and Zborowski (1967). Paul Roazen describes a dream that Amalie had of her son’s death in which she was attending his funeral while around the coffin stood the heads of state of the major European nations. Roazen writes, ‘For an old mother, even a Jewish one, to experience such a dream is not implausible, but to permit an account of having dreamed of such a catastrophe to cross her lips…does reveal something about the nature of her own yearnings’ (1979:66–7). Roazen is right in saying that this is exceptional behaviour. The various taboos surrounding the topic of death, particularly that of a child, would ordinarily prevent such a disclosure and are by no means extinct among ‘traditional’ Jews today. Amalie Freud’s dream clearly reflects the extent of her pride and ambition for her beloved son, but it may also reflect on another, important level, feelings of envy and resentment associated with her own, early deprivations. Maternal hostility towards sons has received less attention in the literature than that involved in other family conjunctions but the desire to control, dominate, and, indeed, retaliate, might well coexist with a maternal love that is founded on narcissistic disappointments. One of Freud’s rare references to his mother is in the context of his chagrin at disappointing her aspirations for him and is significant in this context since it concerned her ‘surprise that her younger son was to become a professor before her elder’ (quoted in Kanzer and Glenn 1979, vol. 1:275). The dream in which this piece of information surfaces is well known and has been variously interpreted in terms of Freud’s own ambitions, sibling rivalry, and so on. Its relationship to ambitious strivings on the part of a frustrated and narcissistic mother adds an extra dimension. While Freud acknowledged his mother’s faith and pride in him as the source of his self-confidence, he assiduously avoided any conscious hint of hostile feelings towards her and never wrote about matricidal fantasies on the part of males, conspicuously ignoring Jocasta’s fate and her motives in favour of those of Oedipus. Indeed the word ‘matricide’ does not occur in the index to the Standard Edition of Freud’s works. However, Roazen points to the correspondence between an anxiety-ridden dream of his mother’s death—the dream of the bird-beaked figures—that Freud reported having had as a 7-year-old (Roazen 1979:66–7), and the dream of his mother reported above. Freud himself traces the anxiety in this first recorded dream of childhood back to an ‘obscure and evidently sexual craving’ (1900, SE 5:584). However, it seems pertinent here, in the context of what we have been saying about the possibility of conflicting feelings between mother and son, to point to a feature that has been overlooked by writers who have discussed Freud’s powerful youthful identification with the biblical Joseph (for example Eissler 1971:253–54). This is the fact that Joseph’s mother, Rachel, died while giving birth to Joseph’s only full sibling, Benjamin, so that both sons were subsequently raised and nurtured by their father. Freud’s identification with Joseph, therefore, involves among other important features the fantasy of being the loved and favoured child of a nurturing father (named Jacob) and of a mother who dies sometime in his early childhood. In his analysis of Freud’s dreams, Alexander Grinstein finds several examples of unconscious aggression towards both his mother and his wife, particularly in relation to the bearing of children (Grinstein 1980:373). He notes the fact that Freud was uncharacteristically absorbed by Rider Haggard’s novel She in which aggression against mothers, as well as incestuous wishes, are marked (418).

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On the other hand, Freud’s theoretical idealization of the maternal role must be juxtaposed against his peculiar hostility towards old women, if we are to obtain an accurate measure of his attitude towards women: ‘Women are especially awful in old age, but men are not much better’, he said to Joseph Wortis. ‘It is said that women are the best examples of love and human kindness, but that applies at best to young women. When a woman begins to age, she becomes an awful example of malevolence and intolerance, petty, ill-tempered and so on’ (Wortis 1940, quoted in Puner 1949:211). An important instance of Freud’s feelings towards ‘old’ women occurs in his recollections of his Czech nursemaid, a figure I have not emphasized in this study. Freud’s relationship with this ‘ugly, elderly but clever woman’ (Bonaparte, A.Freud, and Kris 1977:219), whom he described as the ‘primary originator’ of his troubles, has been studied by many writers and is referred to briefly by me in Chapter 7. On the whole, I see Freud’s own emphasis on this undoubtedly important figure as an example of how he resorts to a defensive splitting of the mothering figure in order to deal with a hostile, threatening fantasy. Philip Rieff, in a footnote to his discussion on Freud’s catalogue of feminine deficiencies, writes, ‘Although a Jew, and therefore one for whom, as son, the relation to the mother must have been specially fraught with meaning, Freud achieved a notable repression of it in his own self-analysis—a repression which Ernest Jones accepts without question in his life of Freud’ (Rieff 1979:185n.). I believe Freud’s relationship to his mother was fraught in specific ways, that some of these were the consequences of the cultural nuances I have described, and that the whole question is extremely important to our study of Freud’s theory of women. If, as seems relatively non-controversial today, we see the boy’s central developmental task in terms of his separation and differentiation from his mother and identification with his father, then a culture or family in which these tasks are made more difficult, for whatever reason, would be likely to render the male’s achievement of masculinity conflict-laden and ambiguous. It is likely that even when all goes well in the male child’s progress towards differentiation, he will encounter the need at crucial stages for a certain ‘repudiation’ of the mothering female (P.S.Cohen 1981:428). Contrary to Freud’s assumption, however, this repudiation is probably not rooted in biology. It is much more likely to represent a ‘defensive manouver against an earlier stage: closeness and primitive identification with mother’ (Stoller 1973, cited by P.S.Cohen 1981:430). If things do not go well, however, there might be a much more powerful tendency for the male (as’ indeed there might be for the female too) to deny and resist maternal ties and to devalue women in general. Relations with women would be fraught with dangerous, regressive fantasies of dependence, submission, and engulfment which would have to be defended against for the preservation of gender identity and psychic equilibrium. The task is common to all humans everywhere; the general devaluation of women certainly suggests that it is universally problematic. In this context we should note Freud’s insistence that identification, ‘the earliest expression of an emotional tie with another person’ (1921, SE 18:105), is made with the father. Identification, he said, involves admiration and the wish to emulate the admired object and in the essay cited here, in which he is discussing the male child, Freud makes a rather anxious qualification insisting that there is nothing passive or feminine about these wishes. On the other hand, the tie with the mother is a ‘straightforward sexual objectcathexis’ which, a few years later, he was to insist was based on the economic need for

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food. Most surprisingly, it occurs at ‘the same time…or a little later’ (105) than the tie with the father, and Freud goes to great pains to insist that the two ties are ‘psychologically distinct’. If my argument is right and Freud was obliged to defend against earlier traumatic anxieties relating to his mother it is not surprising that his essays on femininity came to be written only after her death. Indeed, it is a testament of his genius that he could write them at all. However, his surprised realization in 1931 of infantile attachment to the mother extends only as far as the girl (1931, SE 21:226) and this manoeuvre represents, I believe, Freud’s continued denial of his own maternal ties. His insistence that the infant’s attachment to the mother is based on ‘economic’ factors (1926, SE 20:136–38), and on an objectless and autoerotic mode, is a necessary part of his formulation since if the tiny infant has the capacity and need for object relationships and if the ‘fundamental’ anxieties originate in early infancy then, clearly, the mother’s functions and role are more complex, subtle, and powerful than Freud wished to perceive. Freud’s theoretical neglect of the importance of the mother in the infantile life and development of the male child, in particular, seems, as Swan suggests, to be an essential part of a very powerful resistance to the idea of identification with the mother. Could this resistance be one of the reasons for Freud’s ‘forgetting’ of Yiddish: his mother’s tongue and his first language? The mother’s voice envelops the baby in a ‘blanket of sound’ from the beginning of life (Anzieu 1976, quoted in Grinberg and Grinberg 1984:30) and his relation to the mother’s breast will influence his later relation with the mother tongue. Thus Freud’s striking facility for other languages might well have served defensive purposes. The development of Freud’s theories, Swan writes, can be seen as a record of his struggle with the contradictions in the concept of identification and with the idea and feelings of dependence. Freud’s picture of masculine maturity is ‘of a man driven to outrun his own personal history; driven, that is, to outrun identification with his own body which, historically, originates in the identification with the body of his mother, the original unity of mother and infant’ (Swan 1974:1–10). I am contending that there is a marked tendency to render the Jewish male’s task of separation from his mother and identification with his father especially problematic and that Freud himself was no exception to this pattern. In fact, in more ways than one, he may have been subject to an inordinate amount of conflict surrounding the whole issue. At this point then, having examined the admittedly scanty material available on Amalie Freud against the backcloth of the Jewish cultural tradition in which she was born and raised, we will take a closer look at Freud’s father from a viewpoint unusual to Freudian scholarship. We will examine Jacob Freud as the husband and father of a household in which Amalie was mother and wife. While Amalie Freud seems to have been a domineering as well as a doting mother, Jacob Freud was, by all accounts, ‘gentle to the point of blandness’ (Ross 1979:317), ‘permissive’ (Grinstein 1980:66), and in his later years, at least, ‘helpless and ineffective’ (M.Freud 1957:20). John Munder Ross has suggested that it may well have been the ‘discrepancy between the Oedipal father and his own that moved Freud to search for the “primal father” in prehistory’, and that the ‘awesomeness’ attributed to the latter by Freud was a projection and, therefore, a function of his own need (Ross 1979:318). Jones tells us that Freud described his father ‘in rather Micawber-like terms as being

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“always hopefully expecting something to turn up”’ (E.Jones 1956, vol. 1:3). Jacob was ‘never a very enterprising or successful man’ (172) and apparently did not succeed in earning a living from the time he left Freiberg. Jones adduces, from an incident that occurred when Freud was aged 2, that it was on his personal experience of a stern paternal authority that he later drew for the formulation of the reality principle. The small Sigismund, having wet his bed, had attempted to mollify his father by promising to buy him a ‘new red bed’ (E.Jones 1956, vol. 1:7). However, the child seems here to be responding to an awareness of paternal weakness and deficiency rather than authority for it is he who is assuming the role of the patriarch here (Choisy 1963:113) and this is also the case when, as an adolescent, he reprimands his sisters so forcefully that they still recalled the incident as old ladies (M.Freud 1957:20). ‘My father played no active role’, Freud wrote to Fliess (Bonaparte, A. Freud, and Kris 1977:219), and, as I noted previously, it is significant that in Martin Freud’s autobiographical work, the aggressiveness and bravery of the Galician Jews are personified by Amalie rather than by Jacob Freud (M.Freud 1957:11). Freud has made it clear that the famous ‘hat-in-the-gutter’ incident left him with a lasting sense of disappointment in his father (1900, SE 4:197). However, it is likely that the incident screens a much earlier, more profound disappointment (Gedo 1976:190). The gentle, ‘rather aloof’ Jacob seems to have failed to provide the kind of emotional support needed by the sensitive, gifted child. We should note that in addition to neglecting the importance of the mother’s role in infantile life, Freud, on the whole, neglected the positive aspects of the father in favour of his inhibiting, punitive Oedipal representations. Ross, who notes this omission, observes that recent psychoanalytic research is redressing the balance by focusing attention upon the importance of the father in helping to ‘extricate a child from the maternal orbit’ (Ross 1979:325). It was his revered professor of physiology, Ernst Brücke, Freud tells us, who corrected his father’s ‘generous improvidence’ and advised him to give up research (1925, SE 20:10). Most observers have focused on the reference to Jacob’s generosity. Freud’s own unconscious emphasis, however, might have been on the second word since, according to Jones, Jacob’s lack of business enterprise was such that the family was often obliged to accept financial help from Amalie’s relatives (E.Jones 1956, vol. 1:19). Later, Sigmund and his brothers supported their parents financially so that the ‘new red bed’ was, figuratively speaking, provided by Sigmund in reality. Recent research on the effects of more subtle forms of paternal deprivation sheds significant light on the problems which I suggest obtained in Freud’s family. For example R.R.N.Carvalho observes in an illuminating discussion that the absence of an effective father figure exposes the child to the ‘all-too-present mother’. Carvalho writes, quoting E.Seligman, that these mothers are ‘ego-damaging be they withdrawn…or oversolicitous…seductive [or] puritanical…’ (Seligman quoted by Carvalho 1982:343). They may be unable to release the child, being perceived by him as stronger and more determined in contrast to the weaker father, who is unable to protect him against the powerful mother and her fantasied revenge. This failure distorts the mother as an object for external representation and renders differentiation of self and object problematic, since the failure of triangulation prevents the parents being seen in relation to each other and, therefore, as separate objects. The consequences may also involve problems in

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‘sexual’ identification and a tendency to confuse and distort objects and part-objects. The father may be experienced as unavailable either because he allows himself to be effaced and excluded, or because factors within the mother militate against his inclusion, a situation with which the infant may collude (343). A vivid example of this situation and of the disturbing effects on the child is portrayed by our archetypal Jewish son, Alexander Portnoy, whose mother greets him within earshot of his permissive, unprotesting father with: ‘“Well, how’s my lover?”…if I’m her lover’, protests Portnoy to his long-suffering analyst, ‘who is he, the schmegeggy she lives with?’ (Roth 1971:108). Portnoy’s father seems to have stepped aside here in favour of his son, thus colluding in a mother-son ‘romance’ that resembles in important respects the pattern found by Landes and Zborowski in their study of shtetl culture (1967). Similarly Jacob Freud, as Ross observes, ‘seems in many ways to have stepped aside in favour of a son…born with a caul foretelling great deeds’ (1979:317). As an exceptionally gifted child, Freud may have also experienced filial conflicts on other grounds. Erik H.Erikson believes that men of outstanding gifts may sense in themselves in early childhood ‘some kind of originality that seems to point beyond a mere competition with the personal father’s accomplishments’ (1975:164). These exceptionally gifted people experience, while young, an ‘early conscience development’ which leads to their being treated by their parents as ‘potential redeemers’. A pattern of this kind is certainly implicit in Freud’s Joseph identification and, it is generally acknow-ledged, in other features of his youthful personality (Erikson 1975:164). As we saw in Chapters 3 and 4, the young Sigmund was Jacob’s first westernized son: an educated Jew in a society in which education was thought to be the sole route to emancipation (Arendt 1951:58). (It is true that Jacob’s eldest sons Emmanuel and Philip were settled in England but they were born and raised in Eastern Europe.) We have seen in the discussion of some of the social and psychological issues surrounding the entry of the Eastern European Jew into western bourgeois society that Jacob and Sigmund Freud would have been divided by more than the usual generational differences. In their brilliant discussion on the dwindling of effective, paternal authority in contemporary society, Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich stress that ‘An upbringing that hopes to be adequate to the confusing contradictions of our society must offer help in adapting to existing conditions as well as help in becoming independent of the claims of such adaptation when they involve the risk of loss of identity’ (Mitscherlich and Mitscherlich 1975:192). They observe that in a time of ‘intensified identification difficulty, the father himself is in need of support’. He may then, in a regression of his own, turn to his son for support in ‘situations where he feels “out of his depth”…. Fathers and sons alike seem to be searching for a “father”—a super-father’ (194). The admiration and respect that Jacob expressed for his son’s intellectual prowess might have served only to exacerbate the boy’s filial conflicts, fostering a sense of guilt only made greater by the gentle, non-authoritarian figure. Over-idealization of a child will cause normal infantile feelings of omnipotence to be exaggerated. There was no doubt in Jacob’s mind as to his son’s superiority even though filial proprieties were always observed. ‘My Sigmund’s little toe is cleverer than my head, but he would never dare to contradict me!’, Jones reports him boasting to a friend (E.Jones 1956, vol. 1:21).

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Once again, it is to Philip Roth that we turn for a vivid description of the feelings of rage and guilt experienced by a high-achieving Jewish son towards just such a loving, gentle, and too-admiring father: ‘Others are crushed by paternal criticism—I find myself oppressed by his high opinion of me! Can it possibly be true (and can I possibly admit) that I am coming to hate him for loving me so? Praising me so?’ (Roth 1977:243). H.Loewald (1951) speaks of the father’s task of mediating concrete reality to the child. It is this that averts the danger of maternal engulfment and the subsequent loss of identity for the child. The father’s prohibitive aspects emerge only later, Loewald finds, after this facilitating role is developed. In the ‘absence’ of such a father the child fantasizes that he has destroyed him, and he is afflicted by guilt as well as by a feeling of being unsupported. The ‘absent’ father engenders a situation in which the mother—also felt both by herself and the child to be unsupported—becomes the responsibility and burden of the child who feels called upon to mediate her practical problems (Loewald, cited by Carvalho 1982:349–53). The Freud family conjunction, in which Freud became a ‘parental and paternal’ child vis-à-vis his sisters (Bank and Kahn 1980:499), seems to represent one variant of the kind of ‘absent’ father situation described above. My point here is that Jacob Freud must have been experienced by his son as seriously inadequate long before the incident of the ‘hat-in-the-gutter’. For Jacob, having lost his own cultural anchors, seems to have turned to this much admired son, who was clearly going to ‘make it’ in the Gentile world, with even more than the usual, loving intensity. Unequipped to cope with either the outside world or his turbulent young wife and household, and having lost a social and economic world in which his passive, scholarly role was facilitated and valued, Jacob stood aside for the brilliant youth whom he himself had taught so well. A transitional man himself, suspended between cultures, Jacob’s sense of failure must have been a potent, if implicit, force in his son’s life. Freud’s theoretical failure to regard sufficiently the effect of the mother on the child and his overemphasis on the influence of the father on the child’s development can now be seen to have some very specific causes. The powerful mother of infancy, Roy Schafer writes, must be rejected, denied, and ignored. For the same reason she must be protected or repaired, often by idealization. The burden on women to be pleasing represents an attempt on the part of men to control this archaic mother-figure who lies concealed ‘behind a ready smile and yielding empathy’ (Schafer 1978:157–64). We can observe in certain events of Freud’s life attempts of just this kind at control and idealization. Writing to his fiancée, about the ‘absurd’ notions of J.S.Mill on the question of women, he exhorts her: ‘Am I to think of my delicate, sweet girl as a competitor?… I will make every effort to get her out of the competitive role into the quiet, undisturbed activity of my home. It is possible that a different education could suppress all women’s delicate qualities—which are so much in need of protection and yet so powerful—… It is also possible that in this case it would not be justifiable to deplore the disappearance of the most lovely thing the world has to offer us: our ideal of womanhood.’ (E.L.Freud 1975:76)

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This passage should not be seen as representing a typically Victorian mixture of chivalry and condescension but rather as a demonstration of apprehension and anxiety. Love was never blind for Freud and romance, as a careful examination of his love-letters reveals, was not a part of his personal or cultural ethos, a topic I shall return to in Chapter 6. Indeed a few months earlier, in a discussion about his fiancée’s appearance, he wrote to her that although some people thought her beautiful, ‘I have no opinion on the matter’ (cited by E. Jones 1956, vol. 1:113). By the next letter, he had decided that it was not beauty that she excelled in but ‘goodness and understanding’ which, with age, are what ‘transfigure the features’ (113). Some two years later, during which time, according to Jones, Martha had failed to evince the ‘yielding docility’ that he required of her (121– 22), Freud finds that the ‘pure noble beauty’ of her brow and eyes is mitigated by ‘an almost masculine expression, [to her nose and mouth] so unmaidenly in its decisiveness’ (113). The same sense of anxious apprehension is apparent in another letter written after a period of ‘despondency’ and ‘bad thoughts’: ‘I know after all how sweet you are,…how you will share in my interests,… I will let you rule the house as much as you wish, and you will reward me with your sweet love and by rising above all those weaknesses for which women are so often despised’ (E.L. Freud 1975:70–1). The weaknesses were later to be systematized and incorporated into the Freudian characterization of women: ‘for women the level of what is ethically normal is different from what it is in men. Their super-ego is never so inexorable, so impersonal, so independent of its emotional origins…they show less sense of justice…they are less ready to submit to the great exigencies of life,…are more often influenced in their judgements by feelings of affection or hostility.’ (Freud 1925, SE 19:257–58) In the context of this study, it is extremely interesting to note the similarities between this characterization of femininity and the account given by Zborowski and Herzog of the shtetl view of women (as well as that in the Testament of Reuben quoted earlier in this chapter). Women of any class, these writers say, have much in common with the unlearned man. Both are noted for their ‘lack of restraint, for volubility and excitability. They share…an orientation more characteristic of the week than of Sabbath. In all these qualities they are, according to shtetl standards, less “Jewish” than the learned Jew, and thus, closer to the Gentile’ (Zborowski and Herzog 1962:151). ‘Woman is dangerous, not only because she herself lacks virtue but still more because she rouses in man a desire stronger than his will and his judgement…. The danger is rather that a creature so undisciplined and given to excess will… incite him to break the rules…to eat of the forbidden fruit.’ (Zborowski and Herzog 1962:134) Woman is by nature sinful (133), vain, and—always a physical being—should be supplied with ornaments to enhance her beauty (138). Some of Freud’s theories of culture seem to echo this ‘worldview’ even more closely than the better-known remarks quoted above:

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‘women soon come into opposition to civilization and display their retarding and restraining influence…. The work of civilization has become increasingly the business of men, it confronts them with ever more difficult tasks and compels them to carry out instinctual sublimations of which women are little capable…. Thus the woman finds herself forced into the background by the claims of civilization and she adopts a hostile attitude towards it.’ (Freud 1930, SE 21:103–04) Freud invoked the Lamarkian theory of phylogenesis (to which he was extremely attached, to the lasting embarrassment of the psychoanalytic movement) in a particularly idiosyncratic manner, to provide a rationale for this view: ‘Religion, morality, and a social sense—the chief elements in the higher side of man—…were acquired phylogenetically out of the father-complex:… The male sex seems to have taken the lead in all these moral acquisitions; and they seem to have then been transmitted to women by cross-inheritance.’ (Freud 1923, SE 19:37) I have indicated that some of these views were presented independently of clinical evidence, or to buttress it. They are ‘Character-traits which critics of every epoch have brought up against women’ (1925, SE 19:257). One wonders if the theory of phylogenesis itself is being used by Freud to displace anxieties originating in his own prehistoric, infantile life on to the prehistoric life of the race. The Jewish woman never achieves an autonomous adult state, so that she must defer to a man on any question of religious observance (such as the ritual purity of food and utensils) even if she knows the answer from long experience (Zborowski and Herzog 1962:130). For Freud too the female never attains psychological and emotional maturity. The irresolution of the Oedipus complex, however, serves only to make her more amenable to control. ‘It does little harm to a woman if she remains in her feminine Oedipus attitude…. She will in that case choose her husband for his paternal characteristics and be ready to recognise his authority’ (Freud 1940, SE 23:194). Writers such as Juliet Mitchell who insist that Freud was descriptive rather than prescriptive in his comments about women surely overlook this statement. The adoption of masculine standards as the absolute norm is, of course, not restricted either to Freud or to Judaism. However, the linking of masculinity with the renunciation of wishes and obedience to the reality principle and their location at the root of all cultural endeavour, has a characteristically Mosaic ring to it. This is also observed by Judith van Herik, who discerns the vital link between Freud’s theories of culture, religion, and gender. She notes in her brilliant discussion that femininity is always associated by him with gratification, fulfilment, and the persistence of archaic or primal forms, that is to say with the pleasure principle. ‘The mother is the image of fulfillment’, she writes (van Herik 1982:21) and in this construction we can point to a close correspondence between the Freudian and the traditional Eastern European Jewish views of women. In both these doctrines the mother through her continued wish for libidinal gratification remains permanently bound to and dependent on the father-figure. For Freud, her

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Oedipus complex is therefore not dissolved. On the other hand, ideal masculinity (although rarely achieved), is always associated with renunciation of submission to gods and to fathers as well as to the archaic libidinal strivings towards mothers. All intellectual, ethical, and spiritual achievements are associated with renunciation; it is renunciation that women, neurotics, and the religious are least capable of. Thus maleness, paternity, and patriarchy are superior to femaleness, maternity, and matriarchy, for the outcome of the normal feminine development is a continuation of the disgruntled infantile position of attachment and wish-fulfilment. In both doctrines femininity is less valuable than masculinity for the woman can, at best, facilitate masculine effort and achievement. More commonly, her efforts towards the subversion of cultural aims must be guarded against by males. Thus, even in Freud’s myth of primal origins, the matriarchal phase that comes after the son’s rebellion is merely a provisional one lasting until the patriarchal order is restored (Freud 1939, SE 23:83). There were strong political reasons for the early analysts to emphasize the universality of their findings and, therefore, the psychological unity of mankind. They were, after all, with only the odd exception, members of a generation of Jews in the process of ‘emancipation’ into middle-class European, Gentile society which defined them chiefly in negative terms. Many came from observant families and observed Orthodox rituals during their formative years (Gorer 1966:40–1). Had these pioneers been less dedicated to the establishment of psychoanalysis as a ‘science’, and more able to confront their own conflicts regarding their Jewish identities, it might have proved possible to detect the cultural nuances in their emphases on certain aspects of the Oedipus complex and its vicissitudes. While the classical Freudian formulations, as is generally the case with ideas of great stature, pointed the way forward for both dissidents and exponents, they were extreme enough to render alternative responses inevitable. Freud’s theoretical neglect of the mother in the early life of the child and his insistence on the centrality of the phallic, paternal power represents, apart from anything else, a denial of the profound importance of the two-person phase in infantile life; the phase ‘before’ father when the infant is ‘alone’ with his mother. I believe that Freud’s disturbed relationship to his own mother and thence to women in general was responsible, to a large extent, for this neglect. The resulting theoretical confusion that has surrounded the issues of femininity and of maternal function and priority has divided the psychoanalytic movement from its earliest days. In the light of our findings about some of the ways that Eastern European Jewish society structured family patterns, it may seem no accident that the most powerful and organized movement to correct this balance came from an analyst who was also a Jewish woman. Nor can it be entirely coincidental that Melanie Klein’s work was facilitated by Ernest Jones who was one of the very few Gentiles among Freud’s early disciples.

6 Freudian and rabbinic sexual doctrines Donald Meltzer is one of several writers to have observed of Freud’s conception of love that, bound as it is to his theory of the distribution of energy or libido, it never goes much beyond ‘enlightened self-interest’ and ‘nowhere in his conceptions of it does loving develop beyond this seeking for gratification’ (Meltzer 1978:84–5). The libido theory indeed suggests that being in love depletes the ego of its narcissistic investment in favour of the object which is treated as its ‘own ego’ (Freud 1921, SE 18:112). For Freud the ego is impoverished by love; it is ‘only a short step’ from being in love to being in a state of hypnosis. ‘There is the same humble subjection, the same compliance, the same absence of criticism,…the same sapping of …initiative’ (114). Also, ‘Traits of…selfinjury occur in every case of being in love’ (113). However, unlike hypnosis, which is aim-inhibited, love is transformed and remedied by sexual satisfaction. The normal ‘overvaluing’ (Freud 1910, SE 11:169) of the sexual object (which is characteristic of men) diminishes and ego-libido is restored on the attainment of satisfaction so that for Freud sexual gratification, as Meltzer aptly observes, loosens object relationships and diminishes the need for and value of the love-object (Meltzer 1978:122). On the whole, Freud saw the essential function of sexuality as being the relief of sexual tension upon which meaningful object relations might be superimposed (Meltzer 1978:44), although his distinction between the concepts of love and sexuality was by no means a consistent one. Philip Rieff stresses that pleasure in the sexual relation is defined by Freud in the manner of Schopenhauer, as a negative phenomenon, ‘the struggle to release oneself from unpleasure or tension’ and he finds this approach ‘renders ironical the idea of pleasure in union, for the erotic longing is abolished at the moment of fulfilment’ (Rieff 1979:155). This suggestion of the problematic nature of pleasure for Freud is of great importance to this study. David Riesman believes that Freud experienced an ‘ascetic, rationalistic dichotomy between work and play’ (Riesman 1950:15). He finds in Freud’s work a ‘utilitarian’ attitude towards sex—particularly towards foreplay—an understanding of ‘man’s physical and psychic behaviour in the light of the physics of entropy and the economics of scarcity…the process of life as drawing on the given natal store, as on a bank account. Hence, for him, effort, expenditure, was problematical: it needed to be explained.’ (Riesman 1950:11) For Riesman this attitude is characteristic of the Puritan work ethic of nineteenth-century Europe. In locating Freud so firmly within a nineteenth-century Christian ethic, Riesman and, as I’ve shown on other occasions, Rieff neglect the references suggested by Freud

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himself who, on many occasions, pondered on the fact that it was not ‘entirely a matter of chance that the first advocate of psycho-analysis was a Jew’ (1925, SE 19:222). The Freudian doctrine of sexuality can be seen to be of a more ancient lineage, since, to reiterate the central theme of this book, Freud’s first and lasting culture was Jewish. As he himself put it: ‘we carried that miraculous thing in common, which…makes the Jew’; a quality he thought not accessible to ‘any analysis’ and which must have formed the basis of his psychic structure (E.L.Freud 1975:428). The culture of nineteenth-century Europe, like that of classical antiquity, was a learned culture acquired through discipline and scholarship. ‘To Sigmund Freud’, Martha Robert argues, ‘the primordial murdered father was Jacob Freud the Galician Jew, and not a legendary Greek king’; Psychoanalysis was born out of the drama of Jacob Freud’s death, she writes, and although it described an ‘enormous circle’, it closed in Moses and Monotheism ‘with a grandiose vision of the Jewish parricide,…the very act…that initiated an entire civilization’ (Robert 1977:12). It can therefore be no coincidence that Freud came from a long tradition that viewed as bizarre, hypocritical, and ultimately unhealthy, the aesthetic exhilaration and ritualized longing that characterized the spirit of Christian bourgeois romantic love. John Murray Cuddihy in his book The Ordeal of Civility (1974) is one of very few writers not merely to observe but also to consider the implications of the crucial fact that the Freudian sexual doctrine had its origins in the enounter between two cultures that differed radically in their sexual ideologies. Freud wrote that ‘the ascetic current in Christianity created psychical values for love which pagan antiquity was never able to confer on it’ (1912, SE 11:188), and while this statement might seem to us to strike a faint personal note of envy, the phenomena of romance, courtship, and, indeed, forepleasure depend, as Cuddihy persuasively argues, on the principle of delayed consummation which, in both the Freudian and the Jewish doctrines, is consistently deplored. ‘A certain amount of direct sexual satisfaction seems to be indispensable for most [psychic] organizations’, Freud wrote (1908, SE 9:188). ‘All who wish to be more noble-minded than their constitution allows fall victim to neurosis’ (191). Summing up the central problem of modern-day ‘nervousness’ he wrote, ‘the injurious influence of civilization reduces itself in the main to the harmful suppression of the sexual life of civilized peoples’ (185). Cuddihy quite rightly notes that courtship, like love, was seen from a traditional Jewish viewpoint as a Gentile refinement. He quotes Ernest van den Haag: ‘Love as “an esthetic exhilaration and as a romantic feeling”… never made much of a dent on Jewish attitudes towards the body or towards the opposite sex. Love as “sweet suffering” was too irrational. If you want her, get her.’ Cuddihy goes on to observe: ‘To play with sexual stimulation, to postpone the intense endpleasure of orgasm, was a form of goyim naches, of games goyim play…“love [was regarded] as a goyish invention,” and so, in fact, did Freud—and so, in fact,…it was.’ (Cuddihy 1974:70–3) This is entirely consistent with the account of shtetl values given us by Zborowski and

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Herzog. They tell us that the greater incidence of divorce among prosteh families in the shtetl was believed by sheyneh Jews to be due to the fact that they more often marry ‘for love’. ‘People who “play at love” are unstable…they say’ (1962:289). Theodor Reik confirms this observation, ‘No, love or romance had no place in the Judengasse’ (1962:97), and we find this view depicted by many Jewish writers. In Isaac Bashevis Singer’s autobiographical stories, his mother, descended from generations of rabbis, finds married love ‘a sign of commonness’ (I.B.Singer 1979:13). In Israel Joseph Singer’s story The Brothers Ashkenazi, love is seen as vulgar, indulged in by a spoiled female (I.J.Singer 1983:108–10). In this book the orthodox millionaire patriarch Kalman cries, ‘What’s this—love in my house? Like with musicians! I won’t hear of it!’ (110). Theodor Reik writes that the matchmaker’s view that love and beauty are not the main things in marriage was the ‘realistic one…. Love makes time pass, time makes love pass’ (1962:97–8). Romance was traditionally regarded with the utmost suspicion and cynicism. At best, it was a bonus: ‘love is sweet—but better with bread’ (Rosten 1977:303). At worst, it was symptomatic of the dangerous erosions of traditional Judaism: ‘Maybe she’s fallen in love—God forbid’, remarks the rabbi in Isaac Bashevis Singer’s The Family Moskat, of the errant ‘modern’ daughter of a Chassidic family (I.B.Singer 1980:97). Rieff finds that Freud’s ‘admonition to his fiancée that marriage survives on respect, not love,… anticipates his great critique of the romantic ideal of love’ (1979:167n.). Freud himself wrote to his eldest daughter ‘that finding a respected name and a warm atmosphere in her home was decisive in my choice of a wife’ (E.L.Freud 1975:272). Yet, if Ernest Jones’s version is accurate, Freud did not have a friendly relationship with Martha’s mother. As his letters testify, the period of courtship was fraught with hostility between Frau Bernays and Freud with Martha often torn between her allegiance to both. However, Freud was adhering closely to the Jewish Talmudic tradition of marrying the daughter of a scholar with a respected name, since Martha Bernay’s grandfather was Chief Rabbi of Hamburg and her uncles were scholars of note. Romantic love may be problematic in Judaism for reasons other than its reputed instability. Idealization of the loved one and the illusion that she’s beyond reproach are hardly likely in a culture in which women are considered so spiritually inferior that their prayers ‘didn’t count because God didn’t listen to women’ (Yezierska 1975:9). Women were ‘immersed in the material world and were blind to the Truth’ (I.J.Singer 1983:63). In a discussion of the unconscious fantasy underlying courtly love, Richard A.Koenigsberg observes that: ‘the basic idea…is that the lady is to be worshipped…not only because of her intrinsic beauty and nobility, but because of her capacity to endow the man with virtue through her acceptance of him.’ (1967:38) The idealization involved in this attitude of humility is clearly rooted in a reaction towards women of great ambivalence. Within the Jewish ethic, however, the shadchan jokes testify to the fact that, as Reik indicates, reality will always ‘out’ in the end. Distortions and concealments, nearly always about the girl, are hardly meant to succeed

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for the shadchan invariably gives the game away himself. No man marries an angel except in sentimental songs, says Reik. ‘You and I married a woman, which means a human being with failings and foibles, with faults and frailties’ (Reik 1962:97). Beauty was thus often viewed cynically as illusory or temporary or simply impractical. ‘All girls are beautiful, all the dead are holy’, runs the cynical old proverb. Again, ‘A pretty face costs money’. A beautiful girl was described as yomtovdik—for festivals—as opposed to suitable for everyday use (Shear 1983, personal interview). We have seen in Chapter 6 how obligatory early marriage, based on the Talmudic injunction, was designed to channel and contain the male’s erotic impulses so as to leave his reason and spirituality untrammelled. If the romantic illusion is based on the sexual unavailability of the loved one, early marriage was designed to preempt or puncture this very illusion. Freud observes drily in one of his discussions about the ‘phenomenon of sexual overvaluation’, his favourite term for love: ‘If the sensual impulsions are more or less effectively repressed or set aside, the illusion is produced that the object has come to be sensually loved on account of its spiritual merits, whereas on the contrary these merits may really only have been lent to it by its sensual charm.’ (1921, SE 18:112) For Freud the ‘credulity of love becomes an important…source of authority’ (author’s emphasis, 1905, SE 7:150) and this, we shall see a little later, is a source of concern both in traditional Judaism and for Freud. Judaism has historically directed both male and female towards marriage almost from the moment of birth. Indeed, marriages not only are said to be made in heaven, but also are arranged by God forty days before birth (cited by A.Cohen 1975:163). The prayer read at the infant boy’s circumcision ceremony ranks the nuptial canopy with his entry into the Law and good deeds. The verse ‘Profane not thy daughter, to make her a harlot’ (Leviticus 19:29) was levelled at the man ‘who delays in arranging a marriage for his daughter while she is of a suitable age’ (cited by A.Cohen 1975:162). Marriage ‘keeps us from sin’, the rabbis said (Epstein 1967:15), an attitude that was roundly condemned in Anglicism by the poet John Donne who spoke of men using their wives ‘in medicinam’ (my emphasis, Szasz 1981:108). The destructive potential of physical passion was thus always at the forefront of the Jewish mind and a preoccupation with sexuality has characterized the Jewish teachings from their beginnings; ‘Passion is a master’ runs the Yiddish proverb (Shear 1983, personal interview) and both in Freud’s individual and group psychologies, the image of love as only a ‘short step’ from hypnosis in its depletion of the healthy ego is not very distant from this view. The comparison of the Jewish rejection of sexual asceticism with the Christian ethic of chastity has, as I have noted elsewhere, often persuaded both Christians and Jewish scholars of the wholly positive and affirmative conception of Jewish coitus and marriage (Bailey 1959:100–01, cited by Feldman 1974:85). However, what Max Weber has with great subtlety described as the ‘marked diminution of secular lyricism and especially of the erotic sublimation of sexuality’ (my emphasis) is an important factor here. Weber finds a ‘naturalism’ in the ‘Jewish ethical treatment of sexuality’ which he sees as being

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rooted in the historical aversion of the Jew to the aesthetic. He sees the origins of this aversion in the second commandment proscribing graven images and in the later ‘pedagogic and jussive character of the divine service in the synagogue’ (Weber 1964:256–57). Other writers have examined this interesting feature of the traditional Jewish attitude to sex and marriage and found, like Weber, that the denial and suppression of the erotic as opposed to the sexual has indeed contrasted markedly with the ‘naturalism’ of the sexual ethic. ‘The body’, writes van den Haag, ‘is not, as it is with Christians, in conflict with the spirit. But it is not in harmony with the intellect either.’ While the cultural emphasis within Eastern European Judaism was, for centuries, diverted away from physical action, the body has been treated as a kind of vehicle serving the mind; to be given its due, with needs that must be gratified, ‘to get rid of the nuisance, as it were…, but never as something romantically longed for and fulfilling’ (van den Haag 1977:148). Zborowski and Herzog explain the rationale for this deeply rooted perception: The body is respected primarily as the container and squire of the mind and spirit’ they observe (1962:357). Thus sex was ritualized so that the urgent sexual needs were placated but this ‘pragmatic and manipulative attitude towards the body’, writes van den Haag, ‘has led to a certain joylessness’. Physical pleasure for its own sake was of little theoretical importance in Eastern European Jewish life and was always subordinate to that derived from study, argument, and obedience to the law (van den Haag 1977:148–49). Jean-Paul Sartre also noted an effort on the part of Jews ‘to treat the body rationally …[it is to] be cared for, cleaned, maintained, without joy, without love, and without shame—like a machine’, he writes, seeing in this tendency a ‘bodily uneasiness’ and a desire to transcend the physical in favour of ‘objects or truths susceptible to reason’ (Sartre 1965:121–23). Thomas Szasz and Roslyn Lacks, from quite different viewpoints, both find that this quality of joylessnes has had important implications for sex in Judaism. Szasz argues that by making marriage and procreation compulsory, the ‘Jews thus spoiled eroticism’ (Szasz 1981:110). Lacks, after summarizing Maimonides’ rigorously prohibitive codification of sexual behaviour in his Guide to the Perplexed, writes, ‘All joy is, somehow, drained’ (1980:4). Moving on to the sexual regulations in the Code of Jewish Law—the handbook of rules and interpretations that Lacks, like Zborowski and Herzog in shtetl culture found was still most likely to be available in observant Jewish homes—she notes more than a hundred sexual proscriptions reflecting what she describes as a ‘pageant of avoidance’. Lacks goes on to conclude that these have a profound impact even today reflecting ancient taboos and ambivalences in a modern setting (5–6). Cassie Cooper goes even further. In a discussion based on her clinical work she says, ‘there is an inhibitor in sex as it is practised in orthodox Judaism’. Cooper attributes this to the messages implicit in the rituals of purification and required celibacy and in the prayers and precautions surrounding sex (Cooper 1986, personal interview). The biblical prototype of the ‘physical’ man is Esau, contemptuously described in one Midrash—the rabbinic anecdotes on biblical passages—as having chosen the world of fleshly pleasures, that is eating, drinking, marriage, and procreation, while still in the womb. His brother Jacob’s spiritual sphere had none of these things (Graves and Patai 1966:189). It is interesting to note that the Jewish paradise is to be an ‘exquisite banquet’ but unlike that of Islam, where the faithful are promised ‘bashful virgins’, it resembles

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the Christian heaven in that it is sexless. ‘Physical desires will no longer obtrude, and the sway of the spiritual nature of man will be dominant’, A.Cohen observes (1975:366). The problematic nature of physicality in traditional Judaism has been noted by writers and workers from the most diverse fields. Shalom Aleichem, in his story Passover in the Village, describes Nachman Veribivker as a ‘tall Jew, broad shouldered, a giant… [who] bends his shoulders so as to look more Jewish. But it is useless. He is too big’ (Aleichem 1981:455). Isaac Babel has his Jewish child in ‘The Story of My Dovecot’ declare: ‘Like all Jews I was short, weakly, and had headaches from studying’ (Babel 1979:94). The Eastern European shtetl ideal of masculine beauty is ‘a silken young man…a delicate, anaemic willowy youth…all brains and no brawn’ (Koestler 1977:175) although as Hyam Maccoby emphasizes, this represents a mediaeval European rather than an ancient Jewish ideal (Maccoby 1978:91). I have suggested in previous chapters that this physically passive ideal was extremely problematic for the emancipating Jew in terms of his gender identity and physical being in general. Philip Rieff believes that this Jewish aspiration of intellectual superiority over physical prowess, cultivated by an insecure Jewish intelligentsia attached to its sacred history, ‘has shifted from the learned Germany of Freud’s era to athletic and nervous America’, so that the inherited emphasis has now altered (Rieff 1979:262). Himmelfarb too found that the modern Jew is distinguished by his preference for Esau over Jacob. However, this issue is probably more complex than these observations suggest. Among other factors, it may involve the differential attitudes of mothers and fathers, as in the biblical account in which Rachel preferred the wily, intellectual Jacob while Isaac favoured the hunter, Esau. In Philip Roth’s stereotypical American-Jewish family it is Alexander Portnoy’s aunt who begs her athletic son not to bring her ‘goyishe naches’ (Roth 1971:61). For Freud, at least, the ancient Jewish ideal of scholarship was not discarded for it informs an attitude of superiority and contempt for the physical, the concrete, and the mundane that occasionally surfaces quite clearly in both his personal and theoretical writings. Thus we find him saying to Ernest Jones that the Greek balance of physical and intellectual achievements was certainly preferable. For various reasons ‘the Jews had undergone a one-sided development and admire brains more than bodies,…but if I had to choose between the two I should also put the intellect first’ (cited by Rieff 1979:262). Again in Moses and Monotheism: ‘The pre-eminence given to intellectual labours throughout some two thousand years…has helped to check the brutality and the tendency to violence which are apt to appear where the development of muscular strength is the popular ideal. Harmony in the cultivation of intellectual and physical activity, such as was achieved by the Greek people, was denied to the Jews. In this dichotomy, their decision was at least in favour of the worthier alternative.’ (Freud 1939, SE 23:115) Shtetl values held that physical superiority was appropriate only for goyim but even the far more sophisticated Berlin Jews, according to Reik, regarded military honours cynically as ‘Goyim Naches’ (Reik 1962:61). Saul Bellow also describes ‘How those old-

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time Jews despised the goy wars, this vainglory and obstinate Dummheit’ (foolishness) (Bellow 1979:212). So we can see that Freud’s view of military heroism as representing a form of madness shows, in fact, a very proper Jewish attitude (Freud 1915, SE 14:296– 97). Freud was fond of comparing his concept of Eros to that of Plato: ‘The enlarged sexuality of psychoanalysis coincides with the Eros of the divine Plato’ (quoted by Murdoch 1978:37). Freud’s Eros (which from 1920 he believed to be biologically opposed not to the instincts for self-preservation, but to the aggressive death instinct) does resemble that of Plato’s in some ways, as a kind of life-force or universal energy, but it diverges radically in others: notably in its perception of the physical body. Plato, whose dialogues often took place in or before leaving for the gymnasium, and whose appreciation of sensual masculine beauty of the sort exemplified by Greek sculpture was inherited by western Christian culture would, notwithstanding the transcendental nature of his Eros, not have endorsed Freud’s complacency about the Jewish choice of intellectuality. Indeed, Socrates was a constant source of amazement to the Platonic Greeks in that someone so ugly could also be wise and appealing. However Socrates, it was important for them to say, was strong and hardy. Plato would certainly have deplored the ‘silken young man’ who carried the Jewish torch of culture through the centuries (Heaton 1983, personal interview). The Jewish ideal of the body as a serviceable vehicle for the intellect does seem to have been shared by Freud in important ways and van den Haag rightly observes the contempt that this attitude implies (1977:148). Indeed it may not be too far-fetched to suggest a certain degree of alienation in Eastern European Jewish culture which is evident in the sharp division of body from mind. The quality of joylessness referred to by the above writers and the diminution of ‘sexual lyricism’ noted by Weber (1964), may represent an effective devitalization or ‘flatness’ associated with the withdrawal of an essential part of the personality, a feature that I believe is apparent in the writings of Freud. A split of just this kind is deliberately symbolized in a curious way in the custom of the girdle worn by the male during study and prayer, and worn all the time by the very pious. The girdle designates the separation of the spiritual and intellectual centres from those of the physical. Zborowski and Herzog, in noting this custom, remark that shtetl portraits often depict only the head in lifelike fashion, bodies often looking like dummies (1962:358). Interestingly enough, a rare portrait of the Freud family when Sigmund and his five sisters were very young, is painted in precisely this fashion. Freud’s eldest son Martin describes ‘the comic lack of proportion which shows the children with big heads and stiff little bodies like dolls’, but where the painter has managed to catch a remarkable likeness (M.Freud 1957:14–15). While Freud preferred to align himself with the classical writers of antiquity his concept of Eros actually resembles Spinoza’s more closely than it does that of Plato. Lou Andreas-Salomé, we may recall, discovered in Spinoza the true ‘philosopher of psychoanalysis’ (Andreas-Salomé 1964:75). Emotional passions, van den Haag observes, in a discussion of the Jewish quality of Spinoza’s ideas of love, came under the heading of De Humana Servitute—of human bondage. But Spinoza’s view that love is ‘one’s relationship to any external cause of whatever brings pleasure’ misses the point, van den

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Haag finds. The girl pleases because one loves her, one doesn’t love her because she pleases (van den Haag 1977:151). Van den Haag’s objection here seems to be that Spinoza has reduced the idea of love to that of ‘cupboard love’, echoing Meltzer’s criticism of Freud’s concept of enlightened self-interest. (I am aware of, but will not pursue here, the fact that the above argument oversimplifies the fundamental and subtle psychoanalytic concept of the transferential element in love.) For Spinoza, ‘Spiritual unhealthiness and misfortunes can generally be traced to excessive love of something which is subject to many variations’, Bertrand Russell writes in his summary of Spinoza’s philosophy of love (Russell 1961:559). The resemblance here to Freud’s anxious concern that ‘the credulity of love’ usurps more legitimate forms of authority is striking. In the previous chapter I described the theologians’ view of the ‘positive and affirmative’ nature of the Jewish attitude to coitus as being a representative one and suggested that this was an oversimplification, albeit an understandable one, in the light of comparisons with the Christian ethic of chastity. I have also claimed that, alongside the respect traditionally shown within Judaism for the sexual impulse and its expression, a certain quality of contempt and an aversion for the body and its pleasures are to be found in the Jewish sexual doctrines. These qualities are also present and apparent in the writings of Freud. ‘Muffled by the impersonal, scientific tone’, writes Rieff, ‘Freud communicates to us a mixed aversion and respect no less ambivalent than that of other observers of the sexual fact as it appeared in the nineteenth century…. While urging…that we dispense with such childish fantasies of purity…, Freud at the same time comes to the tacit understanding that sex really is nasty, an ignoble slavery to nature.’ (Rieff 1979:154) Rieff is referring to a curious strain in Freud’s writings that is usually either ignored or else seen in terms of his sexual realism: as an important element in his call for the ‘rehabilitation of the flesh’ which, indeed, it partly is. In indicating the essential animality of sex, Freud repeatedly stressed the ugliness of the sexual organs, ‘the position of the genitals—inter urinas et faeces—remains the decisive and unchangeable factor…. The genitals themselves have not taken part in the development of the human body in the direction of beauty: they have remained animal, and thus love, too, has remained in essence just as animal as it ever was.’ (1912, SE 11:189) Disgust for the genitalia, following the upright position assumed by man and the consequent depreciation of smell in favour of sight, is first proposed by Freud in his correspondence with Fliess: ‘Libido and disgust…seem to be associatively linked’, he wrote (Bonaparte, A.Freud, and Kris 1977:233). Early memories of experiences involving the anal and oral zones will be repressed causing the ‘sensation of disgust to develop from the sensation of internal craving’ (234). This receives its fullest exposition, oddly enough, in two very long footnotes in Civilization and its Discontents where it is

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linked with an essential and intrinsic disturbance of human sexuality (Freud 1930, SE 21:99–100, n.1; 105–07n.). The editors of the Standard Edition of Freud’s works note that, whereas in his essay on ‘civilized’ morality and in the Three Essays as well as in other works, he attributes sexual repression to the constraints of civilization, in this book he proposes an additional ‘organic repression’ of sexuality that precedes the origins of civilization (although as they indicate, no clear evaluation of the part played by internal and external forces was possible until later when his investigations of ego psychology were made) (60–1). Freud tells us that the assumption of an upright posture had important consequences for human sexuality: ‘it was not only his anal erotism which threatened to fall a victim to organic repression, but the whole of his sexuality; so that since this, the sexual function has been accompanied by a repugnance which cannot further be accounted for, and which prevents its complete satisfaction and forces it away from the sexual aim into sublimations and libidinal displacements…. All neurotics, and many others besides, take exception to the fact that “inter urinas et faeces nascimur [we are born between urine and faeces]”. The genitals, too, give rise to strong sensations of smell which many people cannot tolerate and which spoil sexual intercourse for them.’ (1930, SE 21:106n.) Hence there is a ‘primary repelling attitude’ (106n.) which is linked, in these weighty footnotes, to the sexual difference: not just to the discontent which is the theme of the book or to the disgust which is associated with the proximity of the excretory organs. The taboo on menstruation, Freud believes, derives from an ‘“organic repression” as a defence against a phase of development that has been surmounted’, a phase in which the male psyche was stimulated by menstrual olfactory stimuli (99n.). Jane Gallop, citing this view, argues that for Freud human sexuality seems to be essentially disturbed. The ‘odor di femina’, she writes, ‘becomes odious, nauseous, because it threatens to undo the achievements of repression and sublimation, threatens to return the subject to the powerlessness, intensity and anxiety of an immediate, unmediated connection with the body of the mother.’ (Gallop 1982:26) Earlier, Freud had found the cultural demand for the renunciation of incestuous urges for mother and sister to be the factor that rendered civilized sexual satisfaction problematic (1912, SE 11:186). In this essay, ‘On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love’, he writes that the sexual act must be seen ‘basically as something degrading, which defiles and pollutes not only the body’ by ‘Anyone who subjects himself to a serious self-examination on the subject’ (186). At this point I would like to examine more closely that curious mixture of hostility, aversion, and respect that surfaces at times in the rabbinic teachings on sex and on women and which closely resembles these views. In his article on castration anxiety, ‘The Meaning of Anxiety in Rabbinic Judaism’, Richard L.Rubinstein finds that in the

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Aggadah—the corpus of rabbinic folklore and myth embellishing the biblical narrative— the female genital organs are often seen as the objects of punitive violence and mutilation which indicate to him an unconscious identification of women with castrates. Rubinstein suggests that this view has much in common with the psychoanalytic theory of the origins of castration anxiety in which the male child is stricken with terror at the sight of the female genitalia. He notes that in these tales, which were constantly being retold at all levels of community life, the rabbis have sharpened the punitive character of women’s existence and, without scriptural sanction, have undertaken to regard her biological and social characteristics as the result of divine punishment. Thus all rabbinic references to the origins of menstruation, in contrast to biblical ones, ‘regard it as punishment’ (Rubinstein 1963:139). Rubinstein believes that a society that emphasizes the Father-God religion and the masculine prerogative might also intensify castration anxieties and that this could result in a complex, psychological system of defensive structures, including the projection of those fears on to females. His view is that the phallic and patriarchal elements both in psychoanalysis and in Judaism have been overstressed, an emphasis which he finds probably indicates anxiety concerning the mother dating from a much earlier and more primitive stage. Whatever the reason Rubinstein believes that a fear of the Mother ‘never disappeared in Rabbinic Judaism’ (149–50). This theory is of some significance to this study of Freud’s theories about women; I believe it also sheds considerable light on the ancient and highly complex system of avoidance laws and sexual taboos. The feeling of repugnance to sex and to women which lurk beneath the surface of rabbinic thought are occasionally made more explicit. The influential Rabbi Abraham Ibn Ezra found ‘the sex act as being basically offensive in the eyes of God’ (quoted in Chill 1974:209). A namesake of this rabbi said, ‘Lust should be stifled, for it cannot lead to truth’ (Moses Ibn Ezra, quoted in Rosten 1977:307). Maimonides thought that the ‘object of the perfect Law [is] to make man reject, despise, and reduce his desires as much as is in his power. He should only give way to them when absolutely necessary’ (Maimonides 1956:327). Rabbi Acha said ‘that in sexual intercourse even the saint of saints cannot well escape a certain taint of sin’ (quoted in Schechter 1961:253), because the appetites to be satisfied are the animal ones. Freud reminded us so frequently of the proximity of the sexual to the excretory organs, Rieff believes, in order ‘to deflate the pride of civilized man’. Thus he emphasized those qualities in the sexual instinct which make it ‘intractable to a civilized sensibility’. To discount tendencies towards ‘a new doctrine of sweetness and light, he stressed, instead, the enduring models of affection and related bodily aptitudes which sexuality cannot transcend’ (Rieff 1979:153). Cuddihy, from a different standpoint, argues a similar case in relation to the Freudian doctrine as a whole. Freud, whose life-work was to make sense of the Jewish Emancipation experience, was concerned to unmask Gentile refinement; ‘linking the coarse to the refined’, he intended to show the high-minded Goyim that all men, like the vulgar, upstart Jew, had raw and unsocialized ids (Cuddihy 1974:29–30). Both views have much to commend them. Freud himself remarked that man had always known that he had a spirit: ‘I had to show that there are also instincts’ (quoted in Rieff 1979:146). Freud is always concerned to remind us, as Norman O.Brown also emphasizes in his discussion of Freud and the poet Jonathan Swift that Celia does indeed

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shit (Brown 1959:187–89) and he came from a cultural milieu that considered even bodily excretion worthy of its own specific prayer of thanksgiving (Zborowski and Herzog 1962:328). However, taken within the wider context of Freud’s writings, with their repeated references to an intrinsic and essential lack of satisfaction located within the sexual instinct itself, these explanations are insufficient in themselves. While a ‘repugnance’ toward sex, a ‘primary repelling attitude’ is, in Civilization and its Discontents, implicated for ‘All neurotics, and many others besides’ (Freud 1930, SE 21:106) (a highly questionable statement in itself), frustration and disappointment is always the principal side of sexuality as it is presented to us (Rieff 1979:165). For Freud, a ‘mental absence of satisfaction’ may be intrinsic to sexual life itself (1910, SE 11:223). This devolves, in most of his work, on the power of the original tie to the parent. Love is between imagos—the prototypes of the original authority relations—and the delusion that the loved one is unique; the compulsive character of falling in love is based on the child’s experience with the mother figures in his past (Freud 1905, SE 7:229, n.1). Yet, beyond his brilliant insights into Oedipal vicissitudes and the ‘civilized’ aversions to the bodily processes, there is a bleak and bitter quality that is striking not least because the pleasures of successful adult sexuality—the need to give pleasure to the loved one and indeed the whole notion of tenderness—are virtually absent from Freud’s accounts. Interestingly enough, in the light of our findings about the Jewish mother-son bond, this is very far from being the case with his descriptions of infantile and childhood sexuality. ‘How often it happens, however that it is only his son who obtains what he himself aspired to!’, Freud wrote, ‘a man’s love and a woman’s are a phase apart psychologically’ (1933, SE 22:134). Jacques Lacan has taken Freud’s insistence on this intrinsic asymmetry or imbalance between the sexes to be a profound statement about the nature of desire which is ‘something other’ than the supply of (the child’s) needs. Desire is the ‘“remainder” of the subject, something which is always left over…. Desire functions much as the zero unit in the numerical chain’ (cited by Rose in Mitchell and Rose 1982:32). Against this concept of desire, Lacan quotes Freud’s statement that ‘we must reckon with the possibility that something in the nature of the sexual instinct itself is unfavourable to the realisation of complete satisfaction’ (1912, SE 11:188–89, cited by Rose in Mitchell and Rose 1982:32). Accordingly, it is this persistence of desire as a ‘primordial absence’ that constitutes the Lacanian idea of castration (Mitchell in Mitchell and Rose 1982:6). For Freud, the object is always ultimately disappointing for its value soon goes down, unlike that of alcohol where the same brand retains its appeal indefinitely (1912, SE 11:188) and he sees only the act of discharge as genuinely pleasurable (1905, SE 7:210). Thus sexual tension is counted by Freud as an ‘unpleasurable feeling…[although] it is also undoubtedly felt as pleasurable’ (209). Forepleasure—an ‘incentive bonus’ (211)—is perverse if it ‘linger[s] over the intermediate relations to the sexual object which should normally be traversed rapidly on the path towards the final sexual aim’ (150). I believe that while Lacan’s interpretation of this central idea of an intrinsic human dissatisfaction is a subtle and elegant one, it represents only a partial reading of Freud’s perception of sexuality. The view that sexual tension is essentially an unpleasurable feeling somehow (mistakenly?) felt as pleasurable is a deeply anti-erotic one which can be seen to be rooted in his own disturbing family experiences and, related to these, in the

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traditional sexual utilitarianism of Judaism with its deep suspicions of the western European Romantic ethic. ‘They are in love, he with himself, she with herself, runs the old Yiddish proverb (Shear 1983, personal interview), thus putting the whole idea of romance firmly in its proper, narcissistic place. I agree with Rieff where he finds that the fact that love is self-serving is Freud’s ‘brilliant and true insight’ (Rieff 1979:158). However, I think that Freud was, unconsciously perhaps, drawing on an ancient Jewish fund of folk wisdom when he perceived it. The awareness of the centrality of the sexual impulse is encapsulated in the Jewish teachings by the concept of the Yezer Ha’ra, the evil impulse. Contemporary writers often equate Freud’s concept of libido directly with the evil impulse (Patai 1977:500). The rabbinic concept has evolved over the course of the centuries, as well as being variously interpreted but the ‘common opinion’, according to Cohen’s Everyman’s Talmud, is that the yezer is the ‘disposition of the human being which results from natural instincts, especially sexual desire’ (A.Cohen 1975:90). The impulse is an obstacle to righteous life and a force for wickedness and it is clear that the concept represents an attempt on the part of the rabbis to explain the presence of evil in a world created by a just and omnipotent God. Whether the yezer is innate or not remains controversial. Some rabbis saw it as an internal force present from the time of cohabitation or from the moment of birth (Schechter 1961:253). ‘Sin croucheth at the door, i.e. the opening of the mother’s body’ (Sanhedrin, 91B, quoted in A. Cohen 1975:90). The general view, however, according to Schechter, is that the impulse accompanies man ‘from his earliest childhood to his old age’ (1961:254). The yezer is, strictly speaking, the capacity for evil rather than evil itself. Man’s moral worth is judged by his ability to overcome his impulse, not by its strength or weakness. Greater men are reputed to have greater impulses, hence the more significant their struggle (Lacks 1980:144). A man’s yezer, like Freud’s libido, is also the source of his creative energy, ‘it may well be that nothing of considerable importance can occur in the organism without contributing some component to the excitation of the sexual instinct’, Freud wrote in ‘The Economic Problem of Masochism’ (1924, SE 19:163). Rieff observes that ‘Freud expanded the idea of sexuality to fill the category of the natural impulse (1979:147). The concept of the yezer fulfils a similar function. While it was said to have been created to preserve the human race (Schechter 1961:267), the rabbis, like Freud, saw that it was responsible for what Benjamin Nelson describes as the ‘permanent susceptibility of the [human] organism to retrogression’ (1975:165). Like Freud, who wrote in ‘The Resistances to Psychoanalysis’ (1925) that ‘art, religion and the social order originated in part in a contribution from the sexual instincts’ (quoted in Rieff 1979:339), the rabbis saw that without the yezer, ‘no man would build a house or get married or beget children’ (R.Samuel b.Nahman, quoted in Epstein 1967:14). The yezer must, therefore, be mastered; never denied. For Freud, while sexuality ‘remains the weak spot’ in human cultural development (1905, SE 7:149), and the renunciation and sublimation of an essential portion of the sexual impulse was a necessary element of civilization, its repression was, at the same time, not merely futile but dangerous. The rabbi’s yezer receives a very similar consideration; it is to be ‘held off with the left hand and drawn closer with the right’, as Rabbi Simeon b.Elazar declared in a much-quoted teaching (quoted in Epstein 1967:14).

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Libido for Freud, as well as for the rabbis, therefore, must be made accessible to consciousness. The object was always to put it in its proper place so that its resources might become ‘serviceable to reality’ (Rieff 1979:172). It is repressed—not suppressed and sublimated—sexuality that subverts human culture; just as for the rabbis, it is the ‘improper’ use of the passions that renders the yezer dangerous to civilization (Schechter 1961:267). ‘Woe, if the sexual instincts should be set loose!’, Freud declaims in true Old Testament style. ‘The throne [of civilization] would be overturned and the [ultimate] ruler trampled under foot’ (Freud quoted in Rieff 1979:340). While the yezer is usually portrayed in the terms of sexual enticement, it is also equated with Satan and the angels of destruction, three of whose names, writes A.Cohen, mean ‘anger’ (1975:54). Thus in his essay on Michelangelo’s Moses, it is the prophet’s yezer that Freud has him overcome when the impulse to destroy the tablets in the face of the errant Israelites is renounced. Moses reaches ‘the highest mental achievement that is possible in a man, that of struggling successfully against an inward passion for the sake of a cause to which he has devoted himself.’ (Freud 1914, SE 13:233) Moses is known for his hasty temper, as Freud notes, and he thought that Michelangelo added ‘something new and superhuman’ to the figure. However it is Freud himself who has done this, rather than the sculptor, and his need to do so was so ambivalent as to make him conceal his authorship of this essay for some ten years (E.Jones 1958, vol. 2:410). In this essay Freud’s fantasied Moses figure emulates his own father’s behaviour in the ‘hat-in-the-gutter’ incident which caused the young Sigmund such humiliation and distress. This Moses conquered his ‘inward passion’ of rage: to range himself ‘on the side of mildness and forgiveness’ (1914, SE 13:232–33). In this reinterpretation of the myth of the man who, twenty-four years later he was to describe as ‘a father substitute,… allotted the role of super-ego in mass-psychology’ (Freud 1939, quoted in Rosenfeld 1951:84), Freud can also be seen to atone for his condemnation of his father’s ‘unheroic’ conduct, making Moses master his yezer and showing himself to be more Jewish than the Scriptures. On this topic, Eva Rosenfeld has made the interesting observation that the Moses essay was written in the same year as his paper on ‘Narcissism’ in which the first full exposition of the super-ego was propounded (1951:83). There is no evidence of course that Freud was conversant with the rabbinic view of the evil impulse, but his preoccupations with the renunciations called for by human culture were present from an early date. In Freud’s idea of primal history, human society begins with a crime and a remorseful killer (Rieff 1979:198). It devolves on the manner in which man deals with his good and bad impulses and his discovery of the absolute need to rule and renounce his passions: ‘ethics is a limitation of instinct’, Freud wrote in Moses and Monotheism (1939, SE 23:118), a statement that can be seen to be in close accord with the absolute rabbinic belief that the Jew’s life problem and his task was his struggle with his yezer. Thus Louis A. Berman has observed that ‘When he talks about sex, the Jew is carrying on a dialogue on man’s mystery of his passions, over which rabbis and scholars have openly pondered for many hundreds of years’ (L.A.Berman 1968:375).

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Warner Muensterberger notes that the first mention of the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction in Freud’s writings occurs in a letter to Fliess in 1897 (Freud 1897, SE 1:257) and that this was a very unusual observation for those days (Muensterberger 1969:378). There is evidence of an earlier and intense concern that Freud had with the matter, however, in a letter to Martha Bernays written in 1883 which I have mentioned briefly in Chapter 4. Ernest Jones has noted that this letter is ‘pregnant with ideas that came to fruition half a century later, particularly in Civilization and its Discontents’ (1956, vol. 1:209). Freud was then aged 27 and a full reading of this letter does indeed suggest that the germ of his later insights into civilization’s discontents and of his social and individual psychologies was present long before the discoveries of psychoanalysis. He himself—in a tribute to Josef Popper-Lynkeus—was to ascribe these insights to the ‘bitterness of the life of a Jew and of the hollowness of the ideals of present-day civilization’ (1932, SE 22:224). In his letter to Martha, he writes that while watching a performance of Carmen it occurred to him that: ‘The mob gives vent to its appetities, and we deprive ourselves. We deprive ourselves in order to maintain our integrity, we economize in our health, our capacity for enjoyment, our emotions; we save ourselves for something, not knowing for what. And this habit of constant suppression of natural instincts gives us the quality of refinement. We also feel more deeply and so dare not demand much of ourselves. Why don’t we get drunk? Because the discomfort and disgrace of the after-effects give us more “unpleasure” than the pleasure we derived from getting drunk. Why don’t we fall in love with a different person every month? Because at each separation a part of our heart would be torn away…. Thus we strive more toward avoiding pain than seeking pleasure…. The poor people, the masses, could not survive without their thick skins and their easygoing ways…. The poor are too helpless, too exposed to behave like us. When I see the people indulging themselves, disregarding all sense of moderation, I invariably think that this is their compensation for being a helpless target…it would be easy to demonstrate how “the people” judge, think, hope, and work in a manner utterly different from ourselves. There is a psychology of the common man which differs considerably from ours.’ (E.L.Freud 1975:50–1) These observations do seem to constitute a kind of blueprint of Freud’s future philosophy. They can be seen also to represent the centuries-old Jewish ethical code of restraint and moderation and its central ideal of the sheyne, refined and spiritually elevated Jew. The letter reveals a remarkable awareness, for so young a man, of the ethical and psychological strictures on the whole idea of pleasure which have involved such peculiar and specific problems within Judaism. The therapeutic aim in classical Freudian psychoanalysis is the transformation of the neurotic patient’s ‘compulsion to repeat’ into the ability to make conscious, objective, sexual decisions; so that the dialectic is always between ‘understanding and seeking to act’. We must love ‘in order not to fall ill’, Freud wrote (1914, SE 14:85). The sick man is unable to love but he is also unable to think clearly. Neurosis, like religion, weakens

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the intellect and makes people stupid (1927, SE 21:43–4). But so does falling in love since, for Freud, as I have shown, love always coexists uneasily with individual and collective autonomy. The ‘psychical valuation that is set on the sexual object’ rarely ‘stops short at its genitals’ (1905, SE 7:150), and this overvaluation leads to intellectual infatuation. The lover’s ‘powers of judgement are weakened…he submits to… judgements with credulity’ (150). Freud is always intensely concerned to maintain the autonomy of reason over the passions and the resolution for him seems to be, to cite Meltzer once again, to retrieve the investment of libido from the object: to get it back again, thus restoring the integrity of the ego. So from Freud’s point of view, it is both fortunate and necessary that ‘the value of the love object goes down’ upon its attainment and unfortunate and dangerous if this does not occur, for love is blind. I believe that for Eastern European Judaism too much love, like too little, resulted in that dulling of the mind and confusion of thought which tradition had long associated with the incomprehensible and dangerous passions of the Gentile. Echoes of this are strongly implied, I maintain, in Freud’s doctrine of sexuality and love. I have said that Judaism, with its injunction to early marriage, has always recognized that the most urgent, instinctual demands must be appeased before any meaningful attempt at solving the central reality tasks—study and prayer—can be achieved. Love, after that, is an impediment to those tasks and, most importantly, a danger to communal survival. Too much love, in that it excludes the rest of society and uses up precious libidinal energy, is inherently subversive: ‘love comes into opposition to the interests of civilization’ (Freud 1930, SE 21:103). Max Weber speaks of the pious Jew’s ‘self-control’ and its necessity in relation to his fulfilment of the law but also of his need ‘to stay on guard, never permitting himself the free expression of his passions against powerful and merciless enemies’ (Weber 1964:256). Sartre adds the Jew’s passion for rationalism and his deep distrust of intuition: ‘to base his conduct on tact would be to recognise that reason is not a sufficient guide in human relations and that traditional and obscure powers of intuition may be superior to it.’ (Sartre 1965:124) A sublime faith in the intellect was as characteristic of Freud as it was of his ancestors. No doubt, it also reflects that longstanding cultural mistrust of superstition and mysticism which goes back to the ancient struggles against idolatry. Hence, Freud’s advice to Karl Abraham who distrusted Jung’s theoretical deviations: ‘On the whole it is easier for us Jews, as we lack the mystical element’ (H.C. Abraham and E.L.Freud 1965:46). Of course, this statement is not necessarily true. We know that Freud was strongly drawn to superstitious beliefs in the mystical powers of dates and numbers and some of his most important ideas have been seen as having mystical implications (Ostow 1982:6). The mysticism of his father’s Hasidic ancestors might well have played a part in this. However, in The Future of an Illusion he writes:

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‘It is once again merely an illusion to expect anything from intuition and introspection; they can give us nothing but particulars about our own mental life, which are hard to interpret.’ (Freud 1927, SE 21:31–2) It is ironic that this master of intuitive insight, whose introspective genius gave us The Interpretation of Dreams, could not permit himself to recognize one crucial source of his inspiration. The Jewish people preserved its ‘unity through ideas’, Freud wrote to a member of the Yiddish Scientific Institute in 1938, and because ‘of them we have survived to this day’ (quoted in Bakan 1975:48). It is precisely this Jewish mystique of intellectuality with its emphasis on the ‘culture of learning’ which, as I have emphasized in previous chapters, enabled Jews not only to maintain their sense of identity as a cohesive group but even permitted a sense of superiority and omnipotence which effectively complemented their sense of vulnerability (P.S.Cohen 1980:210–13). It is effectively portrayed by I.J.Singer in The Brothers Ashkenazi where the failed millionaire businessman Jew ponders on his revenge: ‘Not with the sword, not with the gun, but with reason would the Jew overcome…. The Jew lived by his reason; the Gentile, by his fists’ (1983:407). Freud’s conviction that psychoanalysis could have been invented only by a Jew was based on a belief that Christian cultural attitudes to sex differed from those of Jews. ‘Because I was a Jew’, he said to his B’nai B’rith lodge, ‘I found myself free from many prejudices which restricted others in the use of their intellect.’ Why, he asked in the now familiar letters to Pastor Oskar Pfister, did it have to wait for ‘a completely godless Jew’ to discover psychoanalysis (cited by Cuddihy 1974:96). Freud answered his own question, as Cuddihy notes, in another letter to Pfister during a pessimistic discussion of his theory of the death instinct which outraged contemporary moral sensibilities almost as much as his theories of sex. ‘In my experience most of them [human beings] are trash…. That is something that you cannot say aloud, or perhaps even think, though your experiences of life can hardly have been different from mine.’ (cited by Cuddihy 1974:93) Eight years earlier, Cuddihy remarks, Freud had written to Pfister on the publication of the latter’s book, Hate and Reconciliation, saying that it ‘suffers from the hereditary vice of…virtue; it is the work of too decent a man, who feels himself bound to discretion’ (93). A ‘completely godless’ Jew meant one of the kind described by Hannah Arendt: a Jew accustomed to a degree of separation from the Jewish as well as from the Gentile majority, one of those who ‘started an emancipation of their own, of their own hearts and brains’ (Arendt 1978:68). It meant also one who was not bound by the Gentile rules of discretion and decency; one who could say aloud what was forbidden by the ‘vice of virtue’. For the ‘emancipating’ Jewish intellectual aiming at citizenship in the outside world, later marriage and individual object choice ensured that the sexual anxieties and

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frustrations of that world now fell to his lot but without the Gentile’s predilections for and tradition of idealization and illusion. ‘The price to be paid for being cultured is, after all, a doctrinal point of major consequence to Freud’, writes Philip Rieff (quoted in Cuddihy 1974:38), although, as Cuddihy rightly observes, Rieff does not make the crucial link here with the continuing Jewish Emancipation experience of which Freud himself was so important a part. In Chapter 2 of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Freud describes a conversation with a young Jew on ‘the social position of the race to which we both belonged’. He ‘bemoaned the fact that his generation,…was destined to grow crippled, that it was prevented from developing its talents and from gratifying its desires’ (Freud 1901, quoted in Cuddihy 1974:39). In this same book Freud cites a patient’s remark: ‘We in our family have all become nervous because we wanted to be something better than what with our origin we were capable of being’ (quoted in Cuddihy 1974:40). Freud’s awareness of the causes of modern-day ‘nervousness’ was facilitated and sharpened, I contend, by the Jewish experience of modernization and we should note Ludwig Lewisohn’s comment that Freudianism was ‘first of all an effort on the part of the Jewish people to heal itself of the maladies of the soul contracted in the assimilatory process’ (Lewisohn 1929, cited by Cuddihy 1974:13n.). Jacob Freud was first married at the age of 17 in his native shtetl (E. Jones 1956, vol. 1:2). His son was married at the age of 30 after more than four and a quarter years of tortured and frustrated passion, three years of separation from his fiancée, and more than nine hundred letters. Ernst Simon has observed that Freud’s attitudes towards sex questions closely resemble that of the Talmud in that both are characterized by an uninhibited ‘freedom of expression and a strictly anti-libertine attitude…both in theory and in practice’ (Simon 1957:292). Generations later, Alfred C.Kinsey came to some remarkably similar conclusions about American Jews: they ‘discuss sexual matters publicly with less restraint than most other groups’ but ‘the freedom with which [Jews] record the details of their own sexual activities and the freedom with which they discuss those details, not only with us but with many of their fellows and with utter strangers, has…little relation to the extent of the overt activity in their individual sexual histories.’ (Kinsey 1948, quoted in L.A.Berman 1968:375) In spite of their long engagement, Simon notes, neither Freud nor his fiancée ever ‘entertained the possibility of any extra-marital tie, even though prohibited religious factors were no longer present’ (Simon 1957:293). Freud’s great essay on the ‘civilized’ sexual morality that enforced abstinence of this kind is usually taken to be a general statement on middle-class bourgeois morality and its consequences. Simon finds Freud’s bleak dicta on married sex in this essay, as well as his refusal to use contraception in his own married life, to be more to do with an ‘ethical heritage’ of Orthodox Judaism than with any other influence around at that time. He notes that Freud chose the solution of an Orthodox Jew to the problem of restricting the size of his family and refrained from further intercourse. His rejection of contraceptive devices on the grounds of hygiene was, in Simon’s view, ‘at that time already outdated…[and] can only be explained as a potent legacy from the Orthodox Judaism of his forefathers’ (1957:293).

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While this is probably something of an oversimplification and Freud’s withdrawal from sexual activity surely had other, more complex personal reasons (Choisy 1963:48), his account of married sex in this essay is a particularly pessimistic one. It seems to have a great deal to do with what has been suggested here is a more subjective subcultural problem with the whole idea of pleasure and his belief that civilization is antithetical to it. This problem, it is suggested, was relevant in an especially powerful and specific way to the first generation of ‘emancipating’ Jewry moving out of ghetto and shtetl and into middle-class Gentile society. In the above-mentioned essay, Freud wrote: ‘satisfying sexual intercourse in marriage takes place only for a few years…. After these three, four or five years, the marriage becomes a failure… For all the devices hitherto invented for preventing conception impair sexual enjoyment, hurt the fine susceptibilities of both partners… Fear of the consequences… first brings the married couple’s physical affection to an end; and then…puts a stop…to…mental sympathy.’ (1908, SE 9:194) We have seen, however, that Freud was intensely concerned with the issue of the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction as a very young man and even then, spoke of ‘avoiding pain’ rather than ‘seeking pleasure’ (E.L.Freud 1975:50). Ernest Jones has described Freud as displaying ‘less than the average personal interest’ in sex. ‘He would have been out of place in the usual club-room…. He always gave the impression of being an unusually chaste person—the word “puritanical” would not be out of place—and all we know of his early development confirms this conception.’ (vol. 1, 1956:298) I have not made any systematic examination of Freud’s own married relationship in this study although I have referred to it at times. It seems clear that his personal life was disappointing. However, I believe that Freud’s consistent emphasis on the mechanical ‘detensioning’ aspects of sexuality, his lack of understanding and mistrust of the essential nature and values of adult love, and his view of love as constituting a physical need to be satisfied in order to maintain health—as a prophylactic measure—are first, a function of the disturbances in his emotional and social life described in Chapters 4 and 5. Second and closely related to this, they are to a significant extent a function of the traditional Jewish sexual ethic with its distinctive attitudes to the physical body, to women, and to the ideas of pleasure and love (Zborowski and Herzog 1962:357). These attitudes were rendered especially problematic by the plight of the first-generation, assimilating Jew who, remaining strongly bound to a private, secular, but enduring culture, viewed askance the ‘sweet suffering’ of the Gentile world of love and romance, yet felt himself excluded from a whole sphere of activity that was somehow mysterious, rich, and enviable. ‘Apart from a few queer fanatics, all the world knows’ that ‘Sexual love is undoubtedly one of the chief things in life’, Freud wrote in an essay on ‘transferencelove’ (1915, SE 12:169), but this clinical phenomenon only proves to him how blind,

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how unreal, and how essentially lacking in sense ‘normal’ love really is. I have said that this quality of Jewish sexual ‘moralism’ has not been entirely restricted to Eastern European culture or even to the early generations of assimilating Jews. Rabbi Samuel Glasner observes in an American study: ‘It is difficult to generalize about Jewish sex attitudes and sex practices. The picture that emerges, however, seems to lean in the direction of a frank, nonpuritanical attitude of acceptance of sex, accompanied by a rather rigid, selfimposed discipline of sexual restraint.’ (Glasner, quoted in L.A.Berman 1968:375) Kinsey, whom I have already quoted, discussing his finding that Orthodox Jews have a lower frequency of sexual activity, finds this curious quality of Jewish moralism to be prevalent in the wider Jewish population: ‘Non-devout Jewish groups, even including those who observe none of the Orthodox customs and who may be removed by several generations from ancestors who even attended the synagogue, may still be controlled to a considerable degree by the Talmudic interpretations of sexual morality.’ (Kinsey, quoted in L.A.Berman 1968:385) These data, Berman observes of Kinsey’s findings, ‘may contain all sorts of sampling errors and yet be useful as a rough estimate of the phenomenon surveyed’ (1968:386–87). Philip Roth draws attention to the problem that Jews have had in confronting sexuality and, relatedly, violence or aggression in themselves and each other. In an examination of American fiction in the post-Holocaust decades, Roth finds that the Jew is associated with ‘righteousness and restraint, with the just and measured response rather than with those libidinous and aggressive activities’ (1977:201). ‘Only a goy’ can say ‘“I want!”’ in the way that the ‘hoggish and greedy hero’ of Henderson the Rain King does in Saul Bellow’s novel, Roth observes. ‘“I want”…is the voice of the id—raw, untrammelled, uncompromising, insatiable, and unsocialised desire’ (204). Roth notes the equation in Bellow’s work and also in that of Bernard Malamud ‘between the Jew and the conscience, and the Gentile and appetite’ (205–06). Freud, I have shown, had a similar problem when it came to saying ‘I want!’. ‘We restrain ourselves’, we saw him writing to his fiancée in the letter cited above. Many years later, with noble candour and also with the personal pessimism and disappointment that characterizes his view of sex. he wrote: ‘I stand for an infinitely freer sexual life, although I myself have made very little use of such freedom.’ Rather ambiguously, he added, ‘only so far as I considered myself entitled to‘(E.L.Freud 1975:308) which comment has contributed to some rather dubious speculation about adultery on his part with his wife’s sister Minna Bernays. I have shown that the basic sexual needs were traditionally regarded as too dangerous to deny and were treated with great caution and respect within traditional Judaism. Thus if it was no coincidence, as Freud thought, that psychoanalysis was invented by a Jew, it could also be no chance that its first audience was a Jewish one. Max Schur has described how the members of the B’nai B’rith society listened without shock to Freud’s theories of the sexual aetiology of neurosis at a time when ‘no one in Europe would listen’ (Schur

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1972:393). The distinctive restrained character of sex in Judaism, in the midst of the Jews’ explicit and theoretical plenty, as it were, is just the quality experienced in the form of a ‘diminishing and unmanning’ taboo, against which Philip Roth’s Alexander Portnoy rebels so unsuccessfully (Roth 1977:16–17). Why Portnoy must use ‘that word’ all the time is what his book is all about, Roth has said (17). Portnoy’s spectacular and obsessive search for the heart of the sensual and erotic mystery that invariably ends in the stale obscenity of forbidden acts and offences is the last thing the Jew is expected to engage in. For the ‘nice Jewish boy’ has no culturally sanctioned vehicle for ‘going wild in public’ (200) (or in private either for that matter). Susan Weidman Schneider, writing in the American Jewish women’s magazine Lilith, talks of the Jewish preoccupation with survival and says, ‘we’ve gotten the message that our bodies aren’t for fun…there is a strong sense in Jewish writings of the necessity for restraint regarding sex’ (Schneider 1977:7). A sense of fun is notably absent from both the Jewish and the Freudian views of sex. The inhibitions involved seem to be more apparent to the popular literary imagination than they have been to scientific workers and scholars. In his fictionalized account of Freud and his early circle, Anthony Burgess has Lou Andreas-Salomé say to him, ‘Oh, you bourgeois Jews. You speak freely of sex on the lecture platform—all theory, little practice’ (Burgess 1982:341). For good measure Burgess has Freud’s mother add that Freud knows nothing about women either (343). Burgess’s shrewd and amusing caricature, which links the Freudian with the Jewish sexual doctrines of sex and of women, lends popular support to my argument of the close relationship between the two.

7 If Oedipus was an Egyptian In 1935, in a postscript added to An Autobiographical Study, Freud acknowledged the closeness of the link between the development of psychoanalysis and his own history and personality: ‘Two themes run through these pages: the story of my life and the history of psycho-analysis. They are intimately interwoven’ (SE 20:71). I have already devoted considerable attention to various aspects of Freud’s Jewish consciousness and we have seen that his theories about women are linked to it in important ways. But in the light of his insistence on the role and function of the Oedipus complex in the formation of individual and cultural identity, we need to explore this question a little further; specifically in its relation to Freud’s central preoccupation with the idea of incest. At the same time, it must be acknowledged that my focus on the Jewish elements in Freud’s personality and history has been at the expense of many others. Of course the Jewish cultural and scientific giants of fin-de-siècle Europe were not just Jews but, as Erikson points out, ‘Jews and Germans and Europeans’ (1965:347). Among the important influences on Freud were his faith in classical antiquity and the philosophies of the German Romantic movement as sources of wisdom and truth, his love of European literature which he read in several languages and, perhaps above all these, his devotion to the ideals of science. I have not intended to reduce Freud’s personality or the source of his creativity to a single element, but to emphasize the quality and scale of some of the unresolved tensions and conflicts that were an integral part of Freud’s life and work and a vital source of his creativity. Our understanding of Freud is diminished if we oversimplify or play down these issues or if we, as Freud himself and many of his followers did at times, seek to reduce them to secondary factors. It may therefore be misleading at one important level to take Erikson’s description too literally. For while the members of Freud’s generation were indeed Jews, Germans, and Europeans, their identities as members of the last two groups were anything but as clear as this remark suggests. This was especially the case at the time when Freud was completing his education. The situation of the Jews in Austria, always a fluctuating affair, became acutely painful towards the end of the 1870s. The preceding era of political liberalism, heralded by the constitutional reforms of 1868 which granted Jews civic equality, had seemed to hold out the hope of full emancipation. The fragmentation of the Habsburg realm saw a growing reaction in a powerful pan-German Christian-nationalist movement. According to Dennis Klein, with the huge influx of impoverished Jews from the eastern provinces, a new and virulent form of anti-Jewish feeling emerged which seriously disrupted existing relations between German Jews and non-Jews. Freud’s awareness of belonging to a race considered alien developed during his time in the higher classes of the Sperl Gymnasium. The influx of provincial Jews into Vienna at this time was such that the percentage of

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Jews in the school as a whole rose from 44 per cent in 1865 to 73 per cent in 1873 (D.B.Klein 1985:48). In 1873, when Freud enrolled at the medical school of the University of Vienna, he found that tolerance of German Jews was seriously eroded by association with the Eastern European immigrants whose demand for education was putting considerable pressure on the available resources. ‘Above all, I found that I was expected to feel myself inferior and an alien because I was a Jew’, Freud wrote of this time and while he refused ‘absolutely to do the first’, he did not deny the second (1925, SE 20:9). The situation worsened during the next decades. In 1878 the German student fraternities began expelling Jewish members and this was followed in 1882 by the infamous Waidenhofen Manifesto issued by the German-Austrian student body which declared Jews to be ‘ethically subhuman’ and therefore without honour (Oring 1984:106). During Freud’s tenure at the medical school a violent clash erupted between Jewish students and German-Nationalist demonstrators. The eminent surgeon Theodor Billroth—a member of the teaching faculty much admired by Freud (E.Jones 1956, vol. 1:62)—published an argument for the restriction of places for Eastern Jews in the University Medical School on the grounds of their educational backwardness. A footnote elaborated his more general views of the place of the Jew in German society setting the stage for a more ominous anti-Semitic response, a response that emphasized inherent distinctions of Jews as a people as opposed to the cultural differences of the Jewish immigrants (D.B.Klein 1985:50–2). Billroth’s statement highlights the agonizing dilemma of the educated, German Jew who, with his passionate love of a language and culture that he considered to be his own, now found himself aligned as an alien with the backward and ‘ignorant’ Ostjude: ‘It is often forgotten that the Jews are a well defined nation and that a Jew—just as little as Persian, Frenchman, New Zealander or African—can never become a German. Whatever is meant by Jewish German, it is only coincidental that they are speaking German, only coincidental that they are educated in Germany…. They lose their [Jewish] national tradition just as little as the Germans lose their German manner no matter where they live…. It is thus neither expected nor desirable that the Jews ever become German-nationalists or participate in the national struggles like the Germans themselves. Above all, they cannot possibly be sensitive to the accumulated influence of medieval romanticism, upon which our German sensibilities—more than we want to admit—are based; for, the Jews, have no occasion to ponder with special delight the German middle ages…. It is certainly clear to me that, in spite of all reflection and individual sympathy, I deeply feel the cleavage between pure German and pure Jewish blood.’ (quoted in D.B.Klein 1985:51) Freud’s reaction to the anti-Semitic movement was to renounce his German identification as, in high school, he had abandoned his ambitions to study law—the traditional road to a political career. He later recalled his bitter disappointment: ‘I considered myself German intellectually until I noticed the growth of anti-Semitic prejudice in Germany and German

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Austria. Since that time, I considered myself no longer a German’ (quoted in D.B.Klein 1985:54–5). Some writers (for example Ellenberger 1970) have claimed that the intensity of antiSemitism in Vienna during Freud’s lifetime has been exaggerated. The testimony from some of Freud’s contemporaries, however, indicates that, if anything, it has been underestimated. It is evident in Einstein’s caustic remark that ‘If my theory is proven correct, Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare that I am a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove untrue, France will say that I am a German and Germany will declare that I am a Jew’ (quoted in Reik 1962:51). Hannah Arendt also attests to this situation when she observes that it was only as members of an international society of the renowned that Jewish ‘nationalization and assimilation’ were recognized and in which national prejudices seemed no longer valid. It was actually easier for ‘an Austrian Jew to be accepted as an Austrian in France than in Austria’ (Arendt 1951:53). Nothwithstanding their monumental achievements, Jewish membership of the European scientific and cultural community of that time was essentially both marginal and provisional while the social lives of these central European intelligentsia were entirely determined by their Jewishness. ‘I can hardly remember a non-Jewish person among the many guests at our home’, Martin Freud wrote, referring to the early 1900s (quoted in D.B.Klein 1985:72). The prevailing sense of alienation is summarized in Moritz Goldstein’s bitter comment: ‘We Jews administer the intellectual property of a people which denies us the right and ability to do so’ (quoted in Arendt in Benjamin 1970:30). Freud’s conviction, that psychoanalysis must be camouflaged in order to ‘pass’ in the Gentile world and his attempt to persuade Jung to lead it into the ‘promised land’ of psychiatry, is the strongest possible evidence of this awareness. Yet he realized that there was a price to be paid. To Karl Abraham’s protests he replied: ‘But my opinion is that we Jews, if we want to co-operate with other people, have to develop a little masochism and be prepared to endure a certain amount of injustice. There is no other way of working together.’ (quoted in Simon 1957:296) It was of course in Freud’s conflicts with his Jewish parents and the urgent necessity to explain them that psychoanalysis was born, not in events taking place in the outside world. However, I have suggested that Jacob Freud was a confused and irresolute if loving parent, plagued by a vague self-image in regard to his place and the place of the Jew in the outside world. Franz Kafka, himself preoccupied with the problem of a Jewish father, linked this issue with that of the crisis of Jewish emancipation and assimilation in a way that Freud was never able or willing to do. In a letter to Max Brod, about GermanJewish writers and their passionate love affair with the German language, Kafka wrote: ‘What appeals to me more than psychoanalysis [in this book] is the observation that the father complex from which more than one Jew draws his spiritual nourishment relates not to the innocent father but to the father’s Judaism. What most of those who began to write in German wanted was to break with Judaism, generally with the vague approval of their fathers (this vagueness is the

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revolting part of it). That is what they wanted, but their hind legs were bogged down in their father’s Judaism, and their front legs could find no new ground.’ (quoted in Robert 1977:9) Jacob Freud was less ‘revoltingly vague’ than Hermann Kafka and he appears to have retained somewhat more of an attachment to his experience of Judaism. Nevertheless I believe that Freud’s preoccupations with the problems of cultural and sexual identity became so central for him because of the particular quality of his childhood experience and the deep and related conflicts associated with issues of his Jewishness. Contrary to what he himself claimed, it was precisely a clear sense of ‘inner identity’ that he lacked. But, just as I do not wish to suggest that Freud’s personality can be reduced to sociocultural or psychological factors alone, neither am I claiming that his ideas and discoveries be taken to represent or reflect something to be seen as the ‘Jewish personality’. I have tried to show the subjective and sectarian elements which were catalytic in the discoveries of psychoanalysis, not to suggest that these were universally valid for Jews of all times and places. Thus the traits and characteristics described in this book do not necessarily represent qualities that are exclusively Jewish. Cultural traits are created through patterns of child-rearing and perpetuated through the reward and inhibition of different behaviours. Indeed, recent studies reveal important differences in attitudes, personality traits, and patterns of behaviour found in Jewish communities at different times. In Raphael Patai’s book The Jewish Mind, the comparisons between Sephardi, Oriental, and Ashkenazi Jews in Israel are particularly significant. Patai shows clearly how the traits and characteristics of host populations play a decisive role in cultural styles (1977:372–407). The differences in psychiatric symptomatology between these groups are an especially clear illustration of this fact. Although Jews themselves, Freud included, have often insisted on certain attitudes peculiar to themselves (recall, for example, his remarks to Joseph Wortis about Jewish family life), there is in all complex belief systems a significant amount of selection from essential sources as well as a certain degree of behavioural nuance. Thus styles and preoccupations are matters of both individual and group emphases—interpretations and reinterpretations of the texts rather than reflections of them. In his illuminating discussion of the relationship of Judaism to psychoanalysis, Mortimer Ostow points out that it was always necessary to infer much of the day-to-day law of ritual observance from the spare verses of the Pentateuch. The Written Law had to be complemented by the Oral Law so that biblical exegesis always occupied Jewish thinkers. Changes occasioned by the different cultural characteristics and standards of host populations were periodically required so that the art of interpretation and reinterpretation—so highly developed in Judaism—is probably the result of the need to deal with and facilitate these changes (Ostow 1982:8–9). In pre-Enlightenment Eastern and Central Europe Jewish communities tended to be much more isolated from Gentile society than, for example, in Arab or Christian Spain or Italy where there was often Jewish participation in social and cultural life. The differences between European Jews were thus more likely to be the outcomes of inner development yet, as Patai shows, there were broad but distinctive regional differences in outlook. Thus Lithuanian Jews were considered to be rational, logical, cool, and scrupulous in their observation and interpretation of the law and Hasidism made little

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headway against them. By contrast, Jews from the Polish-Galician-Ukrainian regions were said to be more pliable, warmer hearted, compassionate, and inclined to mysticism. Hasidism found a wide and enthusiastic reception in these regions (Patai 1977:384). However, there is one feature that clearly distinguished the European Jew from the Oriental and which undoubtedly proved of profound importance psychologically, culturally, and historically. While all Jews everywhere were subject people living at the pleasure and mercy of the Gentile majority, European Jews, by virtue of their designation as unrepentant deicides and universal malefactors, acted as targets for Christian sacred hatred in a way that differed markedly from the experience of Oriental communities; even those situated among the most hostile and contemptuous Islamic populations. In this crucial sense, the European experience was quite distinctive, for the Jews of Christian Europe came to fulfil a specific projective psycho-social function within their milieu, one which assigned them an archetypal role as innately evil. The continuing impact of this factor on the lives of Jews in Freud’s day should not be underestimated. If it seems remote from the world inhabited by Freud, the world of science, literature, and classical antiquity, we have only to recall that the gruesome and hideously degrading spectacle of the ‘blood libel’, in which Jews were tried for the ritual murder of Christian children, was staged on at least seven occasions between 1882 and 1911 in different parts of Europe including Germany and Hungary. The subsequent reverberations in the form of pogroms, riots, and emigrations were agonizingly real to Jewish communities throughout Europe although subsequent events have tended to obscure their impact (Grollmann 1965:72–3). Eastern European Jewish culture had, as we have seen, come to emphasize a fiercely active inner world in which faith, prayer, and study coexisted with and compensated for an external one in which the Jew’s only chance of survival lay in his capacity to endure. Thus it is more than likely that the traits of compulsiveness so often visible in the religiosity of Eastern European Jews; the compulsive treatment of ritual and law, which does not seem to be so strong a feature among Oriental Jews, was a function of the kind of emotional assault to which they were subjected by the nature of the anti-Semitic environment. The phenomenon known as ‘East European Talmudism’—the preoccupation with the minutiae of living within the ‘fence’ of the law and the overriding concentration on Talmudic study—should be seen in the context of the centuries of Christian persecutions, expulsions, crusades, and pogroms, events which were virtually unparalleled in the Islamic world even after Arab attitudes hardened in the late Middle Ages. Some early psychoanalysts, themselves of Eastern European origin, have observed ‘resemblances…between certain types of obsessive neurotics and devout Orthodox Jews, punctilious in the observance of the rites and ceremonies of their religion…obsessed with what is pure and impure, just and unjust’ (Loewenstein, cited by L.A.Berman 1968:476). Freud, of course, saw Judaism itself as a compulsive neurosis. Max Eitingon recalls him saying that this ‘type of neurosis appears today, in secular forms, very frequently among individual Jews’ and hinted more than once that he might himself be an obsessional type (cited by Simon 1957:294–95). In the dangerously unstable environment of Eastern and Central Europe, fear of the outside world placed enormous strain on the often-isolated Jewish communities, whose small size was maintained by the strict Jewish laws of endogamy. The weight put on

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marriage and the crucial categories of kinship meant that the family unit carried a large part of this weight. The young, assimilating Jew involved in the difficult process of disconnection, and wishing to disengage himself from parental pieties, was at the same time drawn into deep identifications with them: identifications rendered even more conflictual than is usually the case with upwardly mobile generations. Issues of personal and cultural identity merged and diverged continually and often painfully under the pressures exerted by the outside world. The quality of the emotional investments made in these young Jews by their parents, themselves in positions of uncertainty and transition, and the symbolic values still vested in them by the albeit more diffused Jewish community, added to the intensity of the struggle for personal identity. When Freud at the end of his life linked his nuclear principle of the Oedipus complex with the source of Jewish identity and the Mosaic mission, defining and distinguishing them—and the generation of culture itself—in terms of the renunciation of incestuous wishes, he was at the same time reasserting the link between his own various and confused identities in that extraordinarily creative way that was the hallmark of his genius. The exceptionally disorganized and disjointed form of Moses and Monotheism testifies to the struggle involved. I suggest that the topic of this strange book is even more specific and subjective than is generally recognized. For there was a longstanding preoccupation among Eastern European Jews with the prohibitions against incest which has been strongly linked to the conditions of endogamy and social isolation discussed above (and which also helps explain the continued rabbinic emphasis on early marriage). Once again, we don’t know enough about Jews from other cultural backgrounds to generalize. There is certainly an intense biblical and Talmudic concern with the topic which suggests an even longerstanding cultural awareness. However several writers have noted the unusual emphasis given to incest-avoidance procedures in the Eastern European family. David Bakan, for example, concludes that ‘incestual temptations seem to have been particularly exaggerated among the Jews, causing the development of intense counter-forces and consequently an exaggerated sense of guilt’. Bakan cites Landes and Zborowski’s study (1967) which shows the powerful emphasis on the taboos between young siblings (Bakan 1975:292–95). Louis Berman observes that while the incest theme is relatively rare in Western literature, it is surprisingly common in Jewish sources. The topic ‘is more often treated with awe and fascination than with loathing’, he finds, and notes that Orthodox tradition requires the reading of Leviticus 18, ‘the incest chapter’, on the Day of Atonement so that the Jew is warned each year against incestuous acts (1968:499). The theme of the Day of Atonement ceremonial itself has been specifically analysed in terms of the symbolic re-enactment of Oedipal conflicts and prohibitions (Feldman in Kiell 1967:403–30; K.Abraham 1979:137–47; Reik 1976:167–219). Other writers have noted the surprising fact that the Zohar—the foremost book of the Kabbala—speaks openly and approvingly of incest between mother and son and sister and brother, although this is of course meant to be seen in symbolic terms. The strong rabbinic interest in incest is evident in the Talmud, Landes and Zborowski tell us, in the dreams of incest with mother and sister which are ‘cooly described as opening the way to wisdom’. But the continuing Eastern European Jewish preoccupation is apparent in the many early Yiddish films which depicted inadvertent sibling

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involvement. In this context it is worth recalling here the striking conclusion of Landes and Zborowski on the Eastern European mother-son relationship which we saw described in Chapter 5: ‘It seems to us that though the marital obligations are fulfilled with the husband, the romance exists with the son’. These authors emphasized that the attachments between mother and son frequently ‘causes all other relationships to pale’ (Landes and Zborowski 1967:31–2). The incest prohibition is of course the basis of all human society. In Lévi-Strauss’s words, ‘in a sense it is the society’ (Lévi-Strauss 1978, vol. 2:19) and, as the source and basis for all moral law, it is with certain cultural variations universal. In the Jewish tradition this is reflected in the rabbinic legend that incest, along with its attendant evils of adultery, idolatry, and murder, was responsible for the destruction of the Temple. However, Judaism’s continued emphasis on the prohibitions and consequences of incest suggest that the idea might be less deeply repressed and less strongly internalized than in most societies (Bakan 1975:292–95). Freud himself believed that ancient Judaism was closer to primal events and to the original traumatic ‘deed’. He was also at pains to show how legal prohibitions merely testify to the power of hidden desires. Following J.G.Frazer he wrote: ‘The law only forbids men to do what their instincts incline them to do; what nature itself prohibits and punishes, it would be superfluous for the law to prohibit and punish. Accordingly we may always safely assume that crimes forbidden by law are crimes which many men have a natural propensity to commit.’ (1913, SE 13:123) In Judaism all forms of incest including and perhaps especially the homosexual kind, as hinted at in the biblical stories of Noah and Lot, are formally and explicitly forbidden. Louis M.Epstein notes in his impressive study Sex Laws and Customs in Judaism that the many biblical injunctions against ‘uncovering the nakedness’ between the same as well as the opposite sex all appear to refer to incestuous relations (Epstein 1967:32–3). Indeed the longstanding rabbinic disapproval of drunkenness is based on the biblical references to the attendant dangers of incest as in the fates of Noah and Lot. Sandor Feldman has interpreted the rite of the Blessing of the Priest performed on the Day of Atonement as a ritualized form of the paternal injunction to the child to renounce his Oedipal desires (Feldman in Kiell 1967:403–30). Sandor Ferenczi thought that the commandment to honour rather than love parents represented implicitly the prohibition of incest (Ferenczi, cited by Woolf in Kiell 1967:288). It is clear then that the Jewish preoccupation with the question of incest has not been confined to ancient times, nor even to the distant Eastern European past. The rules against ‘uncovering’ are still rigorously observed among Orthodox Jews today (as is evident from the voluminous dress of even the youngest children in their communities around the world) and were certainly maintained in the village community in which Jacob Freud was born and raised. Zborowski and Herzog write of shtetl culture: ‘the container, the body, must be concealed. Nakedness is shameful, even between man and wife. Even to members of the same sex, the body is exposed

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only in the bath house or when men and boys swim in the river. A son, however, must never see his father’s nakedness. As soon as children can dress themselves they are taught to be “modest” and “decent”. The body itself is not in the least disgusting, but to expose it would be so.’ (Zborowski and Herzog 1962:359) I believe that this emphasis goes some way towards explaining the lasting impact made on Freud of two incidents well known to students of psychoanalysis. The first appears in The Interpretation of Dreams and has been analysed by Freud himself and others in terms of urethral eroticism and its links with Oedipal ambition. He tells us that: ‘When I was seven or eight years old… I disregarded the rules which modesty lays down and obeyed the calls of nature in my parents’ bedroom while they were present. In the course of his reprimand, my father let fall the words: “The boy will come to nothing”. This must have been a frightful blow to my ambition, for references to this scene are still constantly recurring in my dreams.’ (1900, SE 4:216) The gentle Jacob is aroused here to a display of anger unequalled anywhere else in Freud’s account yet clearly the boy had merely used his parents’ chamber-pot. But at 7 and 8 years of age, even the adored Sigismund is expected to observe these prohibitions. (The reconstruction of these associations may also extend our understanding of the special significance to Freud of the final episode of this dream, in which he hands an old, partially blind man—his father—a urinal so that he was ‘now micturating in front of me’, 216.) The second incident is even better known for it heralded the discovery of the Oedipus complex itself. It is reported by Freud to his friend Fliess in the famous 1897 letter when he describes his sexual arousal as a small child towards his mother. This takes place on the train from Liepzig to Vienna: ‘[my] libido towards matrem was aroused;… I must have had the opportunity of seeing her nudam’ (Bonaparte, A.Freud, and Kris, 1977:218– 19). Freud’s use of the Latin matrem and nudam in this letter has often been found puzzling. Indeed the impact made by the train incident itself is something of a mystery since, as Max Schur points out, the Freud family had lived in much closer quarters in Freiberg than Freud has suggested and he was almost certainly subjected as an infant to sexual sights and sounds (Schur 1972:118–19). Freud’s use of a foreign language here is clearly an indication of the intensity of the feelings involved. The Latin words must act as a buffer or distancer that he still needs to place between himself and the prohibited sights. However, the prohibitions themselves may have been unconsciously conceived of in terms of yet another foreign language, one less acceptable to the assimilated Freud since he had certainly encountered them in the chapter of Leviticus in his Hebrew-German Philippson Bible along with the penalties exacted for these crimes. Jones tells us that Freud mistook his age at the time of this incident. He is 4 years old, not 2 to 2½ as he tells us (E.Jones 1956, vol. 1:14), but perhaps less guilt seemed to him to be attached to the younger age. The special ambivalence surrounding incestuous wishes in Freud’s subcultural milieux

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and in his own childhood reading of the Bible, combined with the distinctive psychodynamic features within his own family, may have made an impression on him that was more profound than is usually recognized. It is with this idea in mind that I am proposing that the extraordinarily fruitful phase of Freud’s thought, which led directly to the discoveries and inception of psychoanalysis, was actually initiated not by the death of Jacob Freud in 1896, although this was to add significant momentum to the process, but by the latter’s gift to him of the Philippson Bible on his thirty-fifth birthday in 1891. Let us trace the sequence of events leading up to this phase. Jones says that Freud must have had some appreciation of sexual factors in the neuroses sometime before 1895. However in 1886, when Chrobak—the third physician to do so—suggests the sexual aetiology in neurotic illness to him, he is still ‘somewhat shocked’ by the apparent cynicism of the remark. In 1889, discussing the Frau Emmy case, he is sure that there is no hysteria without a hereditary predisposition. In 1892, just three years later, he finds an acquired hysteria without any predisposition. Jones writes that Freud had ‘wavered a good deal’ on the issue but that now he was ‘realising that early experiences…constitute the predisposition’. Thus the trauma theory was born between the years 1889 and 1892 and during this period Freud also ‘gradually noticed that a remarkable number of… [his patients’] significant memories concerned sexual experiences’. He was ‘not prepared’ for this fact and it ‘astonished him’. He assumed later that he had been guided towards it by the physicians’ remarks. In 1892 he dispensed with hypnotism in the treatment of Frl. Elizabeth and, using his new technique of free association, achieved his first case in which he felt ‘satisfied’ with the completeness of what he termed the ‘psychical analysis’ (E.Jones 1956, vol. 1:267–74). In 1892 and the early part of 1893, Freud separated and defined neurasthenia and anxiety neurosis and their sexual aetiology. In the various papers written between 1894 and 1897 the method of free association leads with increasing frequency to the discovery of traumatic sexual experience in childhood until the collapse of the seduction theory with the discovery of infantile sexuality and the Oedipus complex in 1897. As I’ve observed, Freud’s self-analysis and the start of psychoanalytic insight are generally seen as being a reaction to Jacob Freud’s death in 1896. The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud said, was a piece of his own self-analysis and ‘my reaction to my father’s death’ (1900, SE 4:xxvi). But the first systematic analysis of a dream and what is therefore the inception of his self-analysis was undertaken by Freud in 1895 with his interpretation of the dream of ‘Irma’s Injection’. Max Schur thinks that the interpretation of this dream was in fact a ‘systematic procedure’ which must have been preceded by a long series of analyses of Freud’s own dreams and those of his patients’; Schur writes that a longer introductory phase of ‘systematic self-analysis’ probably started as early as 1893 (1972:73–4). It is clear that some mysterious and highly creative process was initiated in Freud in the early 1890s. Indeed in the years between 1875 and 1892 his ‘development was slow and laborious…. A change in his personality…seems to have come over him in the early nineties’ (E.Jones 1956, vol. 1:265–66). Elsewhere in his account, however, Jones is more specific as to dates. It was in 1891 with the work Aphasia, he writes, that we get our ‘first authentic glimpse…of the Freud of later years’ (234). By the summer of 1895 Breuer was writing to Fliess, ‘Freud’s intellect is soaring at its highest. I gaze after him as

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a hen at a hawk’ (266). It is significant that Jacob Freud had employed a similar image in his Hebrew inscription of the birthday volume: ‘Thou has seen the vision of the Almighty. Thou has listened and ventured and achieved soaring on the wings of the wind’ (Roback 1957:92). Following this sentence, Jacob Freud went on to evoke another image in a passage that is omitted by most scholars, including Ernest Jones. In Roback’s translation it renders as follows: ‘For long the book has been lying about like broken tablets in a closet of mine. And as you were completing your thirty-fifth year, I put on it a new leather cover and I called out: “Spring up, O well; sing ye unto it”. And I am presenting it to you as a keepsake and a token of love.’ (1957:92) I believe that this beautiful and compelling message acted as a powerful emotional charge to the young Freud. He would not have missed the symbolic meaning in his father’s actual equation of his gifts with a life-saving force. The inscription, in fact, constitutes an injunction to him to draw on ‘the Book’ for inspiration as he had done as a young child. Indeed the obscure text chosen by Jacob is curiously specific. The verse ‘Spring up, O well; sing ye unto it’ is taken from Numbers 21:17. It is the hymn sung by the wandering Israelites in celebration of the desert well to which they have been led by Moses under the guidance of a beneficient Jehovah. Freud’s continuous childhood memories start with the dream mentioned in Chapter 5— the dream of the bird-beaked figures—in which he sees his mother lying dead amid the regalia of an ancient Egyptian funerary relief. He identified the figures as those in the illustrations in the Philippson’s Bible. In this dream Freud appears to have condensed several different pictures from the pages of his Bible but the one that most closely resembles his description is the one in Volume 2 on page 394. It is the woodcut with the caption under it, ‘Hearse. From a bas-relief at Thebes’ (Rosenfeld 1956:101). It accompanies part of the text of Samuel 3:33–5, which describes the war between Saul and David in which the main elements are betrayal, death by castration, murder, and the possession of forbidden women, one of whom is the king’s daughter, another is the king’s concubine (Grinstein 1980:450–52). These themes must have had great suggestive power to this favourite son of a beautiful young mother whose husband was twenty years her senior and whose sons by his first marriage were her contemporaries. As a young child, Freud was deeply confused by the family constellation in which his father was grandfather to the two small playmates who were at the same time his own nephew and niece. One of his earliest fantasies was that his grown-up half-brother Philipp was the father of his new baby sister Anna (Jones 1956:10–11). The Philippson Bible (the similarity of the names might be highly significant) is rich in Egyptian illustrations but another one which features bird-beaked figures and a funerary relief occurs in Volume 1 of which the volume in his possession may have reminded Freud. This accompanies the text of Deuteronomy 4 in which Moses speaks to the Israelites reminding them of the exodus from Egypt and of the injunctions to keep the law with its rewards and punishments. It is followed by references to the Ten Commandments (449).

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We know that Freud’s deep engrossment in this Bible had a lasting effect on him and that many of his complexes were played out in biblical and Egyptian metaphors (Shengold 1972:157). Indeed for Freud, Egypt was the real focus of the Jewish drama. Palestine gets a small press by comparison. Thus he virtually ignores the three patriarchs and the biblical emphasis on their priority in Judaism (although he does make reference to the patriarch Jacob at several important points). His account of the origins of religious and ethnic identity, however, recognizes only Egyptian sources. With this in mind and given Freud’s childhood absorption in his Bible with its wealth of Egyptian imagery, it seems reasonable to propose that Jacob’s birthday gift recalled to him conflicts and anxieties long repressed associated with his overpowering and seductive mother—whose fearsome qualities he had projected on to his gentle father—and that these conflicts were subsequently made all the more vivid by Jacob’s death. Further, and here I am following an idea put forward in an early paper by Eva Rosenfeld, the fact that the illustration most closely associated by him with Oedipal anxieties is captioned ‘Thebes’ suggests that the Greek Thebes of Oedipus—Freud’s intellectual home—represents a later, unconscious displacement from the original Egyptian city (Rosenfeld 1956:103). He was to return to the Egyptian Thebes at the end of his life in the context of another mother-son ruling couple. Meanwhile Egypt as the original focus and vehicle of Freud’s childhood fantasy life—his emotional home—was probably far too close for comfort. (Although he might have had some intimation of these unconscious connections when he described The Interpretation of Dreams to Fliess as his ‘Egyptian dream book’, Bonaparte, A.Freud, and Kris 1977:294). The Greek Oedipus metaphor would certainly have proved more acceptable to an enlightened, classically educated European intelligentsia, Freud included, but would also serve to obscure the original source of the inspiration. Freud has on more than one occasion, we have seen, managed to repress his Jewish sources including the one from which he drew the technique of free association. This was the book by the Jewish convert, Ludwig Börne, which had been in his collection since childhood. On the other hand the displacement of the family drama to the Greek tragedy might have been even more apt than Freud consciously intended. For the unconscious motives of Jocasta are worth a more detailed examination than is usually given them and we appear to have been beguiled by Freud’s own emphasis to omit this. I would like to approach this question by examining a clinical paper by John Steiner. Steiner cites this remark by the theatre director H.I.Pilikian following his production of Oedipus Rex: ‘Everybody knows who Oedipus is from the start and everybody is covering up’. Steiner proposes that Sophocles means us to know at some important level that all the characters involved, including Jocasta, suspected or knew Oedipus’s true identity and that it is this fact which accounts for the tragic quality of the play and its lasting power over us. What all the characters do, for their own different reasons, is to turn a blind eye to that knowledge; a denial that leads inevitably to the ‘misrepresentation and distortion of reality’. Thus it is that a plague afflicts the city (Steiner 1985:161–72). Curiously enough Steiner himself turns an almost blind eye to the full implications of his own thesis. He interprets Jocasta’s motives in terms of the wish to remain Queen of Thebes and to bear children. What he omits is the possibility of an additional and more aggressive sexual motive—the complementary one to that of Oedipus—the need on the

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part of a mother, whose relationship to her son is founded on narcissistic disappointments, to control and dominate him and her seduction of him. However, Sophocles clearly wishes to portray in Jocasta a woman who is cruelly deprived of children; of status and also of any sexual life. Her emotional hunger and self-deception are evident when she takes without demur a young husband whose feet are scarred where his parents pierced them and who is the exact age of her son, had he lived. The question of Jocasta’s motives is not dealt with by Freud and has been left obscure by Sophocles. In both the omission could, arguably, be the given starting-point for any psychoanalytic enquiry. (A strong argument could also be made for Laius’s murderous jealousy of the mother-infant couple but this aspect will not concern us here.) The unconscious infantile fantasy of a devouring, rapacious, and omnipotent mother— familiar to contemporary psychoanalysis through the work of Melanie Klein—is a function of the infant’s helpless hostility and fear. By means of the mechanisms of introjection and projection, the infant experiences trust, confidence, and security when he feels that he contains ‘good’ objects such as the ideally gratifying breast. When he feels that he contains ‘bad’ objects such as the empty or absent breast, he experiences persecution and fear. In the early stages of the Oedipal situation which, according to the Kleinian way of thinking, occurs in the first months of life, the child fears that an omnipotent, phallic mother will engulf and castrate him in punishment for his hatred and envy of the fantasied parental couple. If the ‘good’ mother is, for constitutional or environmental reasons, insecurely established as an internal object, then Oedipal difficulties are increased and the internal object becomes terrifyingly aggressive and/or seductive. Marie Balmary has examined Freud’s treatment of Oedipus Rex and she rightly observes that with his emphasis on the desire and the guilt of the son, he has constructed psychoanalysis on a partial reading of the drama. In her study, which focuses on the guilt of Laius and suggests Freud’s appropriation of his father’s guilt in the matter of the latter’s undisclosed second wife, Balmary observes that Freud sees only ‘the guilt of the dominated, not that of the dominating’, whose murderous impulses are responsible for the disasters (Balmary 1982:74). However, Sophocles indicts a second person along with Oedipus in the actual crime of incest and the question of her motivation and awareness seems to have been overlooked. For it is the guilt and collusion of both mother and son which are responsible for the city’s pollution. Thus two have sinned; and on two heads, not one—on man and wife—falls mingled punishment’, Sophocles asserts (1947:61), and Jocasta’s refusal to pursue the truth, her hatred of oracles and prophecy, and her insistence that life is to be guided by the laws of passion and of chance, show her to be guilty in her own right. In Freud’s terms, she is entirely dominated by the archaic laws of the pleasure principle. Indeed, Jocasta is the prototypical woman of Freud’s theory—the woman so strangely split off from that idealized one of his mother-son duo—unable to renounce and sublimate her instinctual desires, morally deficient, her judgement ruled by her emotions, and a subversive force in the attempts to restore the civilized order. She seeks that narcissistic gratification and confirmation, earlier denied her, through identification with her son’s penis. But, at another most important level, Jocasta is also one version of that earlier, omnipotent pre-Oedipal mother, the one that Freud glimpsed only late in his life and which caused him so much surprise. The murderous, castrating,

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and seducing aspect of this mother is primary in the Oedipus story: she is the mother whose caretaking function is missing or broken down so that the infant is exposed— literally in this case—to the persecuting elements of the outside world and of her own unconscious hatred. (The ‘good’ mother represented here is Oedipus’s adoptive mother Queen Mesope, the wife of Polybus, who cared for the wounded infant Oedipus so tenderly. Oedipus’s efforts to keep this mother at a distance to protect her from his destructive impulses display strongly the infantile splitting mechanisms.) Freud was clearly unable to examine Oedipus and Jocasta in these terms and so he ignores the latter’s motives altogether. Thus, when he describes Jocasta’s attempt to console Oedipus by assuring him that men’s dreams of lying with their mothers have no meaning (1900 SE 4:264), or explains that the ‘deluded’ Jocasta despises dreams (1917, SE 16:330–31), it does not occur to him that an even more sinister piece of repression might be at work here than in the case of Oedipus who at least struggles to resist fulfilling the prophecy: struggles to achieve the reality principle. The above reading of Oedipus Rex is only one of many possible readings. In the primal, archetypal myths, levels of truth will correspond with endlessly varied levels of reality and interpretation. What is important to this study is the dimension that Freud has needed to overlook and the force with which he has surrounded the omission. He struggled heroically to gives us the means of understanding this myth and it is only by virtue of his discoveries that we are able to locate the elements that he needed not to see. In this keystone myth of psychoanalysis, Freud needs to believe not only that the ruthless, murderous, and perverted parents of Oedipus are none the less without any hostile fantasies towards their child but that there is no collusive sexual fantasy on the part of the mother for her son at all. Thus I agree that psychoanalysis is as closely constructed on the repression in Freud and on its unanalysed elements as on the manifest, analysed ones (Derrida cited by Balmary 1982:xix). But where Balmary finds that the impossibility of speaking of the father’s ‘fault’ is ‘at the heart of the Freudian enterprise’ (Balmary 1982:170), I would propose that his silence about the mother’s ‘fault’ is even more central. Having said that, it is always dangerous in the case of Freud, who led even where he himself could not follow, to generalize. He does describe a mother’s seduction of her son in great detail in his essay on Leonardo da Vinci. Freud proposes here that Leonardo’s mother, ‘like all unsatisfied mothers…took her little son in place of her husband, and by the too early maturing of his erotism robbed him of a part of his masculinity’. (1910, SE 11:117) So far, Freud seems to acknowledge fully the incestuous situation. Its consequence is Leonardo’s unhappy erotic life as a homosexual over which he triumphs by virtue of his art. Yet this is a ‘tender’ seduction (1910, SE 11:131) and at the same time Freud seems to lean heavily towards the normality of this maternal impulse. For he goes on: ‘A mother’s love for the infant she suckles…is in the nature of a completely satisfying love-relation, which not only fulfils every mental wish but also every physical need; and if it represents one of the forms of attainable human

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happiness, that is in no little measure due to the possibility it offers of satisfying, without reproach, wishful impulses which have long been repressed and which must be called perverse.’ (1910, SE 11:17) The idea that the woman’s mental and physical needs might, or ought to be, completely satisfied by her infant (he has specified elsewhere that he means the male infant) is a curious one, as I’ve already observed in previous chapters. Yet Freud is undoubtedly referring to what he perceives as the normal mother when he speaks of ‘a mother’s love’, in this way. Balmary notes that Freud renounced his seduction theory only in the case of living beings but that his writings about imaginary characters ‘are engulfed’ in it (Balmary 1982:72). In the Leonardo essay too, Freud recognizes the seduction but it is by a loving, benign, and victimized mother-seducer who is innocent of any aggressive motive. Indeed a few years earlier, in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, where he describes the development of infantile sexuality in response to maternal affection and care, he specifically exempts mothers from any motive or responsibility. He does go on to warn against excessive displays of ‘parental’ affection but manages in this way merely to blur the focus (1905, SE 7:223). When Freud abandoned the parental seduction theory in September 1897, he committed himself to the idea of infantile sexual motivation. His retraction exonerated fathers who had been, for him, the main guilty parties. (Although they were not exonerated to the extent that J.M.Masson, 1984, has recently claimed for Freud continued to warn that parental abuse was not that rare (1917, SE 16:370). He seems to have remained blind throughout his clinical work to the possibilities or implications of any real seductiveness on the part of mothers as, for example, in the case-history of Little Hans where he appears to regard the mother’s sexual behaviour as quite normal (Silverman in Kanzer and Glenn 1980:130). In 1933 in a discussion about infant girls, he does say that mothers are the original seducers, by means of their feeding and bathing activities (which perhaps implies the later Kleinian formulation of the infantile fantasy) but no sexual motive is attributed to them and any stimulation is inadvertent (1933, SE 22:120). Yet in 1896, in one of the last works published before the parental seduction theory was abandoned, Freud does see women as deliberately seductive. He indicts ‘nursemaids, governesses and domestic servants, to whose care children are only too thoughtlessly entrusted’, as well as teachers and older siblings (1896, SE 3:164). We should note here that Freud accused his own nursemaid of being the ‘primary originator’ (Bonaparte, A.Freud, and Kris 1977:219) of his neurosis but also that, as Swan has shown, this accusation occurs in the letter describing his sexual arousal for his mother (Swan 1974:16–17). In the 1896 work Freud’s emphasis is unusual enough to cause Strachey to add an editorial note remarking on the uncharacteristic omission of fathers (SE 3:164n.). Mothers are not mentioned either but Freud seems to come closer to them with his ‘nursemaids, governesses and domestic servants’ than ever before. Just over a year later, he retracted the theory itself altogether. Is it possible that he was motivated to do this by the need to flee from an idea that was personally intolerable? Ruth Abraham has suggested precisely this motive from Freud’s abandonment of the seduction

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theory and I think she is right (R.Abraham 1982:451). His ‘wish to pin down a father as the originator of neurosis and put an end to my persistent doubts’ (Bonaparte, A.Freud, and Kris 1977:206) could lend itself to a reading quite different to the customary one. For if Freud had pursued his theory of parental seduction, the crucial factor of childhood sexual fantasy might not have been discovered and pyschoanalysis as we know it would not have been born. However, if Freud had not abandoned it, it would have inevitably led him by a logical extension of thought and discovery to the concept, developed later by the ‘schismatic’ Melanie Klein and her followers, of the primitive fantasy of the ideal, allpowerful, primal mother and its decisive influence on the development of children of both sexes. But it would have led him also to its counterpart: the terrifying, seductive, and controlling fantasy which is a projection of the child’s own hostility but which might also be rooted in an external reality. Because his feelings towards his real mother were fraught with conflict and fear, he was quite unable to confront this concept and turned away, repressing his enquiry. Fortunately for us the different path he took gave others the means to explore this undiscovered country. Although this idea of the mother-son bond certainly implies the mother’s fantasy of being totally possessed of her male child, Freud could go on only to glorify a maternal love and devotion that was ‘entirely free from ambivalence’ while, in a more general way, devaluing women and femininity itself. This is a far more likely explanation for his actions at this time than J.M.Masson’s claim that Freud deliberately suppressed his evidence of real parental seductions for reasons of personal advancement (Masson 1984). It is repression that is involved here rather than any kind of deliberate suppression and it is evident in many different areas of Freud’s thought, as I hope to have shown. There is another instance of repression by Freud which I should like to discuss, for it draws together some of the diverse themes of his life and also of this book. We have seen that the myths and legends of Moses and of Egypt were for him the focus of a curious circular preoccupation. Indeed his last great work gave tortured expression to what was undoubtedly a grand passion. Moses and Monotheism is a compulsive and disjointed book which is often taken to reflect the aged Freud’s attempts to reconcile conflicts of personal and cultural identity. One of its many oddities is an omission on his part—a most unusual one for Freud—of the name of Karl Abraham from his list of references and sources. Freud’s proposition in this book, following one by Ernst Sellin, is that it was the Egyptian King Akhenaten (alias Amenhotep) who, ‘perhaps…following hints which had reached him—from near or distant parts of Asia—through the medium of his mother’ (1939, SE 23:110), erased his polytheistic father’s name and memory and introduced monotheism to Egypt. With this momentous step Akhenaten propelled human beings into that ‘triumph of intellectuality over sensuality’, of abstraction over senseperception by which Freud defined both individual and collective culture (113–14). Akhenaten’s vision inspired Moses who, Freud adduces from the evidence of his name, was an Egyptian. After the Pharoh’s death and Egypt’s reversion to its polytheistic ways, Moses adopted and converted the Hebrew bondsmen and led their exodus out of Egypt. The reluctant converts eventually murdered this Moses whose invisible God exacted such a thankless and arduous obedience. However, after great convulsions of guilt, a later generation of Israelites produced a new personification of him in a Midianite Moses so

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that, forced into the service of a strict monotheism on a grand scale, the Jewish religion took hold rising to the heights of a ‘sublime abstraction’ (1939, SE 23:19). Freud goes on to say in this strange and complex book that the murder of Moses was a re-enactment of the primal crime of the human race which he had described a quarter of a century before in Totem and Taboo and in which the conflicting feelings of love and hate, which must dominate the son’s relation to the father, are reflected. Christianity, he said, was an advance over the Jewish religion since Christians were able to acknowledge their guilt and remorse for their murdered redeemer whereas the ‘poor Jewish people…with their habitual stubbornness continued to disavow the father’s murder’ (1939, SE 23:90). This thesis, published in 1939, was bound to infuriate many Jews particularly at a time when European Jewry was threatened with systematic annihilation but this is beside the point I wish to focus on here. Freud drew on a wide range of sources for his study of Akhenaten. He used many of his own psychoanalytic writings and he also drew on his disciple Otto Rank’s The Myth of the Birth of the Hero. But, in omitting Abraham’s essay, he omitted the most detailed psychoanalytic study of this topic: it was a celebrated one that he was intimately acquainted with entitled, ‘Amenhotep IV: A Psycho-Analytical Contribution Towards the Understanding of his Personality and of the Monotheistic Cult of Aton’, which was published in 1912 preceding his own study by twenty-seven years. Abraham’s Amenhotep is a different personality from Freud’s. Abraham credits the king’s mother, Queen Tiy, with being not merely her son’s guiding influence but the actual instigator of the Egyptian reform. At the outset of this gigantic project which she embarked on immediately upon the death of her husband Amenhotep III, Tiy’s young son, according to Abraham’s version, was merely the instrument of her plans. For Abraham, as for Freud, this king is the precursor to Moses but he grew up to devote his own considerable talents and energies to continuing his mother’s work erasing his father’s gods and with them, his name, from the length and breadth of Egypt. Abraham explains Queen Tiy’s decisive influence over her son as stemming from an unusually powerful Oedipus complex. He invokes in support of this the fact that the king never took to himself a second consort even though the Asian princess chosen for him in his childhood by his mother failed to produce the necessary male heir. Thus he never made his own object choice remaining closely attached to both women. But Abraham also attributes Queen Tiy’s influence over her son to her ‘intellectual superiority’, ‘great intelligence…mental agility’, and ‘practical wisdom’ as well as her beauty (K.Abraham 1979:267). Freud’s slip or parapraxis in omitting Abraham’s study has been well documented, notably in a scholarly study by Leonard Shengold, who analyses this ‘surprising and totally uncharacteristic omission’ in terms of the different aspects of Freud’s own Oedipus complex. This, he thought, was displaced on to Abraham, first by virtue of the latter’s friendly association with that old friend and enemy, Wilhelm Fliess, and second, through Freud’s identification of his colleague with the biblical Abraham (Shengold 1972:135–36; 144–46). I am not entirely convinced by Shengold’s elegant interpretation for Freud did not forget Abraham in other contexts. On the contrary he had paid this esteemed disciple the ultimate compliment only a few years earlier, describing his essay on the female castration complex as ‘unsurpassed’. Nor was there any amnesia regarding

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Abraham’s Egyptian essay as late as 1923, as Shengold points out, for it is mentioned by Freud in a correspondence between the two men concerning the new discoveries of the Tutankhamen tomb (145). Abraham was originally introduced to Egyptology by Freud himself in Vienna and had been inspired by the latter’s fascination. The letters between the two show Freud’s excitement about Abraham’s study: ‘Just think of it, Amenhotep IV in the light of psychoanalysis’, he wrote, and its progress was eagerly discussed (127). However Freud’s later parapraxis might be explicable in the context of the arguments that I have put forward in this book. We should note that Abraham’s emphasis aroused some opposition even before it was published. When he came to read the manuscript, Freud had objected to Abraham’s generalization: ‘When the mother is particularly important the conflict with the father takes milder form’. Freud had replied’ I have no evidence of this’ (128). This brief exchange is quite central to my argument. For it can be seen that all Freud’s identifications with heroic figures enabled him to identify with fathers who were dominant and powerful unlike his own, while removing these traits from the maternal sphere. In Abraham’s Queen Tiy, however, Freud encountered the quintessential antithesis to his model of femininity. I suggest that Freud’s need to believe that monotheism was inspired by a masculine hero was so great that he attempted to erase Abraham’s thesis altogether at the same time finding himself unable to do so entirely. For he too, by means of his glancing reference to monotheism’s possible origins in ‘hints reached [the king]…through the medium of his mother’, proposed Queen Tiy as the probable source of Egypt’s—and therefore Judaism’s—monotheism. (His subsequent note to the effect that recent discoveries had revealed that she was Egyptian-born after all does not detract from this argument.) Yet this must be a point of enormous significance not merely for everything he means to say about the origins of this momentous development in human affairs, as well as for the character and motivation of the Egyptian king, but also for his own theories of femininity and masculinity in general. For in this reference, Freud attributes to a woman a moral, spiritual, and intellectual capacity of a kind that his own model of femininity renders highly improbable. Yet nowhere does he say that this mother is in any way exceptional. She is mentioned in passing and forgotten. Nevertheless I believe that Freud does manage in this book to ‘notice’ Abraham’s essay and that he does so by means of his parapraxis. The overlooking and mislaying of names and objects is of course discussed extensively by Freud himself, notably in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Analysing his own forgetting of proper names, he found that this was almost always associated with topics of ‘personal importance’ and those producing ‘strong and often distressing affects’ (1901, SE 6:22). Freud believed that nothing is ever forgotten that does not touch on a ‘personal complex’. Abraham’s essay touched on what was probably Freud’s most intense personal complex in more ways than one and it can surely be no coincidence that one of his wellknown, sudden fainting attacks took place during a discussion of this essay (Shengold 1972:138–40). However, as well as being the author of a most disturbing version of the origins of monotheism, Karl Abraham was also the second analyst of the enormously influential Melanie Klein. Abraham had recognized Klein’s talent during her analysis with him in 1924 and he both inspired and encouraged her in her work. Indeed it has been claimed

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that without this encouragement she would not have had the confidence to proceed (Grosskurth 1986:116–17) (although the importance of Klein’s analytical origins with Sandor Ferenczi in Hungary have probably been underestimated). By the late 1930s when the final section of Moses and Monotheism was being written, Klein (who insisted throughout her life that she was dedicated to extending and developing Freud’s work) was successfully established in England as the leader of what the aged and suffering Freud and his daughter, Anna, on whom he was now quite dependent, considered to be a dissenting school of psychoanalysis. Klein not only had challenged many of Freud’s basic tenets including his theory of female sexual development but also had carried with her many of his most devoted supporters including Ernest Jones, his analysand and translator Joan Riviere, and many others. The resulting controversy with Anna Freud, whose legacy has shaped the course of the development of psychoanalysis, is a part of psychoanalytic history. It culminated in 1945 with the division of the British PsychoAnalytical Society into three groups: the ‘A’ Group which supported Klein, the ‘B’ Group which adhered to Anna Freud, and the non-aligned Middle Group. Thus, in not noticing Abraham’s essay on Akhenaten, Freud could continue to avoid the intolerable fact of a woman’s initiative in what he considered to be civilization’s most important advance as well as the fact that this woman’s influence over her son was rooted not merely in her physical or sexual image but in an intellectual and spiritual capacity of exceptional nobility. He was also able to omit all memory of Abraham’s troublesome analysand and successor whose work had by that time succeeded in emphasizing the general power and influence of the mothering figure and whose theories about female sexual development seemed to be an elaborate extension of Abraham’s own thesis and of his last findings. I conclude this study of Freud and the origins of his attitudes to women with the observation of a small but telling detail. The poet HD, who was in analysis with Freud, tells us that his favourite out of his large collection of antiquities was his statuette of Pallas Athené (HD 1971:74–5). This statuette was his talisman. In 1938 Freud sent it on ahead with Marie Bonaparte for safe-keeping in his final exile. Athené, of course, is born not of a woman but out of her father Zeus’s forehead. Zeus has thus appropriated motherhood displacing both the baby with the mother and vice versa. But he has also produced a child who is free of the need—and indeed the means—to succumb to archaic maternal identifications. Like Macduff, who was also not ‘born’ of woman, she is invincible. In Aeschylus’s Oresteia, it is the chaste Athené, her father’s favourite child, who is chosen by Apollo to ‘oversee’ justice when Orestes is tried for the murder of his mother. ‘She is one of us’, Aeschylus has Apollo say (Aeschylus 1977:240), and there is a curious analogy here with Freud and his own illustrious daughter Anna: his ‘AnnaAntigone’, another protectress and guardian of aged heroes. Freud’s analysis of his daughter can surely be said to have made her ‘one of us’—to have bound her to him—in the most profound and lasting sense. Freud himself saw in Orestes’ acquittal in this drama ‘echoes’ of the revolution by means of which civilization succeeded from the matriarchal to the patriarchal order (1939, SE 23:114). With this daughter, who was the one finally elected to carry his mission for him into the Promised Land, Freud was able to assure himself of the success of his own lifelong revolution.

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Name Index Note: The abbreviation ‘F.’ is used for Sigmund Freud.

Aberbach, D. 58 Abraham, H.C. 22, 28, 108 Abraham, Karl: on Amenhotep 128–31; and Deutsch 39, 42; F.’s letters to 6, 30, 109, 116; on incest 119; and Klein 38, 130; on penis envy 18–20,39; on vagina, awareness of 11, 22 Abraham, R. 128 Abraham ibn Ezra 103 Acha, Rabbi 103 Aeschylus 131 Akhenaten, King of Egypt 128–31 Aleichem, S. 99 Alexander, F. 44 Amenhotep IV, King of Egypt 128–31 Andreas, Friedrich Carl 31 Andreas-Salomé, Lou 30–7,44, 100, 113 Anzieu, D. 87 Appelfeld, A. 59 Arendt, H. 7, 28, 58, 89, 109, 116 Aron, W. 54 Athene 131 Babel, Isaac 61, 66, 99 Bailey, D.S. 68, 97 Bakan, D. 109, 119 Bales, R.F. 82 Balmary, M. 125–6 Bank, S. 84, 90 Barglow, P. 80 Bart, P. 82 Bellow, Saul 100,112 Ben Azzai 69 Bendavid, Lazarus 50 Benedikt, Maurice 56

Name index

145

Benjamin, W. 7, 59, 116 Berger, P.L. 29 Bergmann, M.S. 54–5 Berman, L.A. 46, 62,106, 110–2,118–9 Berman, S. 74 Bernays, Isaac 48, 96 Bernays, Martha 27, 48, 90–1,96, 107 Bernays, Minna 112 Bernfeld, S. 22, 25 Bettelheim, B. 79 Bialik, Chaim Nachman 8, 62 Billroth, Theodor 115 Binion, R. 31–6 Bird, P. 70 Bjerre, Poul 31 Blum, H.P. 15, 36, 80 Bonaparte, Princess Marie 30, 44,131; and F.’s letters to Fliess (with A.Freud and E.Kris) 18, 44, 51,58, 85, 87, 101, 121, 124, 127 Börne, Ludwig 124 Breuer, Josef 76, 122 Briehl, M.H. 37, 38, 42 Brierley, M. 12, 82 Brod, Max 59, 116 Brown, N.O. 103 Brücke, Ernst 1, 87 Brunswick, Ruth Mack 25 Buber, Martin 34 Burgess, Anthony 113 Cahan, Abraham 61 Carvalho, R.R.N. 88, 90 Charcot, Jean Martin 2, 59 Chasseguet-Smirgel, J. 11–2, 14, 45 Chill, A. 75, 103 Chodorow, N. 78 Choisy, M. 88, 110 Cioffi, F. 12 Clare, G. 56 Clark, R.W. 30 Clower, V.L. 67 Cohen, A. 69, 73, 97–9,105–6 Cohen, P.S. 7, 60–2, 66, 67, 86, 109 Cooper, C. 68, 98 Cuddihy, J.M. 3, 7, 28–30, 58, 79, 95,103–,109– Delp, Ellen 37 Derrida, J. 126 Deutsch, Helene 25, 30, 37–43

Name index

146

Diamond, S. 80–1 Donne, John 97 Dubnov, S. 57 Eder, David 49 Einstein, A. 116 Eisenstein, S. 44 Eissler, K.R. 27, 32, 37, 39, 45, 85 Eitington, M.A. 118 Ellenberger, H.F. 51,53–,116 Ellman, M. 8, 63, 65 Epstein, L.M. 97, 105, 120 Erikson, E. 66, 89,114– Esau 80, 98 Fast, I. 14, 22 Federn, E. 80 Feldman, D.M. 68–9,97, 119, 120 Fenichel, O. 62 Ferenczi, S. 120, 131 Fiedler, L.A. 61, 63 Fliegel, Z.O. 8, 14–5, 19,21, 22–4,26 Fliess, R. 39–41 Fliess, Wilhelm 9, 45, 122, 129; F.’s letters to 18, 51,58, 87, 101, 106, 121, 124 Flüss, Frau 29 Fraenkel, J. 7, 56, 59 Franzos, Karl Emil 58 Frazer, J.G. 2, 49, 120 Freedman, M. 46 Freeman, L. 45 Freud, Amalie (F.’s mother): her background 55, 58, 82, 84; her character 29, 82–4,87; F.’s relationship with 3, 6, 12, 81–2,85–7,121 Freud, Anna (F.’s daughter) 25, 32, 46, 130–1; see also under Bonaparte Freud, Ernst (F.’s son) 32, 53; on F. and Abraham 22, 28, 33; on F. and Andreas-Salomé 32; on F. and Pfister 51; and F.’s letters 27, 30, 46–8,64, 90–1,94–6,106–7,110, 112 Freud, Jacob (F.’s father): his death 51–2, 122–3; as a father 87–90,114–41, 123; his gift of a Bible to F. 47,121, 122; his Judaism 6, 46, 48–50,55, 84; his marriage 109;

Name index his passivity 49, 60, 66, 87, 106 Freud, Martin (F.’s son): on Freud family portrait 100; on F.’s father 87; on F.’s mother 6, 29, 56, 82- 9; on ghetto life 59; on Jewish intellectualism 116; and Zionism 53 Freud, Sigmund: debate with Jones 19–6, 24–5; disciples 31–45; education 29, 46–7; family 1–2, 55 (see also Freud, Amalie; Freud, Jacob); ‘ignorance’ of Judaism 6–7, 46–8; illness 14–5, 22, 24; on intellectual vs. physical values 3, 64, 99; and Jewish family psychodynamics 69–93; his Jewishness (q.v.) 5, 46–8,94; on love and sex 30, 94–5,100–4,107–11; his marriage 27,32, 90- 16, 96, 109–11; his misogyny 1, 5, 27, 64–5,85, 90–2,129–30; his nurse 86, 127; Oedipus complex 114–32; politeness and civility 28–30; and psychoanalysis 2, 6–8, 50, 109; self-analysis 6, 12, 85; on sexuality 10, 94–112; his theories, development of 122; his theory of female sexuality 14–25; Vienna in his time 46–66 Friedan, B. 43 Fromm, E. 79 Gallop, J. 102 Ganzfried, S. 52 Gast, P. 31 Gay, P. 57–8,59 Gedo, J.E. 82, 88 Geipel, J. 73 Gilman, S.L. 58, 76 Glasner, S. 112 Glenn, J. 85, 127 Goethe, J.W. von 2, 28 Goldhammer, Leo 54 Gorer, G. 93 Graetz, H. 50

147

Name index Graves, R. 98 Grinberg, L. and R. 87 Grinstein, A. 76, 85, 87, 123 Grollmann, E.A. 118 Grosskurth, P. 131 Grotjohn, M. 44 Haggard, Rider 85 Hall, O. 82 Hammerschlag, Samuel 47 ‘Hans, Little’ 11–2, 18, 127 Hauptman, J. 73 HD 131 Heaton, J. 100 Heer, F. 56–7 Heller, J.B. 29, 49, 83–4 Helmholtz, H. von 1 Hemingway, Ernest 7, 63 Herder, J.G. von 28 Hertz, J.H. 50, 72 Herzl, Theodor 53–6,61 Herzog, E. see Zborowski, M. Himmelfarb, M. 8, 61,63 Horney, Karen: on F. 1; on F.’s theory 18–9,22; on infantile sexuality 25; and Jones 21,24–5; on penis envy 20–1,22; on vagina, awareness of 11, 12, 25, 44 Jaffe, D.S. 36 Jahoda, M. 1 Janeway, E. 20 Janik, A. 55 Jensen, E. 76 Jocasta 29, 124–5 Jones, Ernest: debate with F. 19–21,22–3; on development of F.’s theories 38, 99, 122–3; as disciple 93; on F. and anti-Semitism 114–5; on F.’s education 2, 29,58; on F.’s father 49, 87, 89; on F.’s fiancée 27, 90, 110; on F.’s intellectualism 64, 99, 122; on F.’s Jewishness 6, 46–8; on F.’s Moses 106;

148

Name index on F.’s mother 12, 81–2,85, 121; on F.’s sexuality 111; on F. and women 27; and Horney 20–1,25; and Klein 25, 93, 131; on vagina, awareness of 11, 25 Joseph 52, 85 Joseph, M. 72 Jost, I.M. 50 Jung, C.G. 6, 108, 116 Kafka, Franz 58,116– Kahn, M.D. 84, 90 Kanzer, M. 85, 127 Kardiner, A. 32 Kaufman, W. 31 Kiell, N. 51, 119, 120 Kinsey, A.C. 110, 112 Klein, D.B. 114–6 Klein, J.W. 78 Klein, Melanie: and Abraham 130; her analysis 38, 130; controversy with F. and Anna 131; on infantile fantasies 40, 125, 127; and Jones 25, 93, 131; on vagina, awareness of 11, 25, 44 Klingsberg, R. 47, 53–4 Koenigsberg, R.A. 96 Koestler, A. 99 Kohut, H. 15 Koltun, E. 74, 76, 82 Kris, E. see Bonaparte Kronenthal, R. 78n Kupfermann, J. 80 Lacan, Jacques 9, 104 Lacks, R. 4, 68–71,72, 77, 98, 105 Lamphere, L. 78 Lampl-de-Groot, J. 25, 40 Landes, R. see Zborowski, M. Leavy, S.A. 33, 34, 36 Leonardo da Vinci 23, 80, 126 Lévi-Strauss, C. 119 Levinson, M.H. and D.J. 77 Lewisohn, L. 110 Loewald, H. 90 Loewe, R. 70,74–5

149

Name index Loewenberg, P. 55 Loewenstein, R. 62, 118 McCarthy, Mary 8, 62 Maccoby, H. 99 Maimonides, Moses 73, 98, 103 Malamud, Bernard 112 Maronon, G. 44 Marshall, P. 65 Masson, J.M. 127–8 Mead, Margaret 77 Meadow, A. 6, 79 Meir, Golda 78n Meiselman, M. 70 Meltzer, D. 10, 94, 101, 108 Mendes-Flohr, P.R. 8, 56–8,62, 65 Meng, H. 51 Michelangelo 106 Mill, J.S. 90 Mitchell, J. 8–9, 15, 19–20,24, 28, 39, 92, 104 Mitscherlich, A. and M. 89 Montefiore, C.G. 75 Moses 49, 106, 119, 123, 128 Moses ibn Ezra 103 Moulton, R. 1 Muensterberger, W. 107 Munro, H. 24 Murdoch, I. 100 Nelson, B. 105 Nietzsche, F.W. 31, 33 Nordau, Max 62 Nunberg, H. 80 ‘O., Anna’ 76 Oedipus 124–5; see also subject index Oring, E. 115 Ortner, S.B. 67 Ostow, M. 6, 85, 117 Papenheim, Bertha (‘Anna O.’) 76 Parvey, C.F. 67 Patai, R. 50, 72, 75, 82, 84, 98, 105, 117 Person, E. 45 Peters, H.F. 31 Pfeiffer, Ernst 31–2,36 Pfister, Pastor Oskar 7, 51, 109

150

Name index Pilikian, H.I. 124 Plato 100 Podhoretz, N. 30 Popper-Lynkeus, Josef 107 Puner, H.W. 86 Rado, S. 37 Rank, Otto 18, 36, 129 Rathenau, Walter 62 Reik, Theodor: on anti-Semitism 115; on F.’s Jewishness 48–50,58–9,82; on incest 119; on Jewish humour 3, 58, 72, 81; on Jewish sexuality and love 68, 95–7; on military honours 99 Rein, N. 79, 80–1 Reinharz, J. 8, 56–8,62, 65 Rieff, Philip: on F.’s misogyny 27; on F.’s mother 6, 85; on F.’s sexuality 100–2,103,105–6; on intellectualism 64, 99; on Jewish emancipation 109; on love 96; on pleasure 4–5, 94 Riesman, D. 79, 94 Rilke, Rainer Maria 31 Riviere, Joan 131 Roazen, Paul 38, 42, 84, 85 Roback, A.A. 46, 123 Robert, M. 2–3, 6, 49–52,58, 83, 95, 117 Robinson, A.M.F. 50 Rosaldo, M.Z. 78 Rose, J. 8, 104 Rosenfeld, E.M. 106, 123 Ross, J.M. 87–8 Rossdale, J.M. 9 Rosten, Leo 96, 103 Roth, Philip 8, 29, 63–4,88–9,99, 112 Rubinstein, R.L. 103 Ruether, R.R. 67, 68, 70, 73 Ruitenbeek, H.M. 38,42 Russell, Bertrand 101 Sachs, Hans 37, 55 Samuel ben Nahman 105 Sartre, Jean-Paul 4, 98,108

151

Name index Schaefer, M. 80 Schafer, R. 10, 13, 15, 80, 90 Schechter, S. 103, 105–6 Schneider, S.W. 113 Schorske, C.E. 61 Schulweis, H.M. 46 Schur, M. 56, 112,121–2 Schwab, Sophie 47 Seforim, Mendele Mocher 58, 63 Seligman, E. 88 Sellin, E. 128 Selzer, M. 62 Shakespeare, W. 16 Shear, P. 97,105 Shengold, L. 124, 129–30 Silberstein, E. 30 Silverman, M.A. 127 Simeon ben Elazar 105 Simmel, Georg 34 Simon, E. 53, 55, 110,116, 118 Singer, D. 62 Singer, Isaac Bashevis 69, 96 Singer, Israel Joseph 64, 96,109 Slater, P.E. 78 Socrates 100 Sophocles 124–5 Spinoza, Baruch 8, 61, 100 Stein-Monod, C. 44 Steiner, J. 124 Stoller, R.J. 86 Strachey, J. 127 Strauss, L. 8, 61 Strean, H.S. 45 Strouse, J. 45 Sulloway, F.J. 7 Swan, J. 87, 127 Szasz, T.S. 4, 97, 98 Tausk, Victor 33, 36 Thierberger, Friedrich 53 Thompson, C. 1 Tiy, Queen of Egypt 128–31 Torok, M. 66 Toulmin, S. 55 Trilling, L. 66 van den Haag, E. 4, 64, 95, 98, 93–25 van Herik, J. 4, 92

152

Name index

153

Velikovsky, I. 59 Veszy-Wagner, V. 7 Vetter, H.J. 6, 79 von Bülow, Frieda 33 Weber, Max 3, 97, 100, 108 Weininger, Otto 8, 61 Wittels, Fritz 27 Woolf, M. 120 Wortis, Joseph 30, 63, 79, 85, 117 Yezierska, A. 96 Zborowski, M.: studies of shtetl culture: with Herzog, E. 6, 60–1,64, 73, 75, 77, 80, 83, 91–2,96, 98–100,104, 111, 120; with Landes, R. 6, 51, 60, 75, 77–81,85, 89, 119 Zweig, Stefan 55–7

Subject Index Note: The abbreviation ‘F.’ is used for Sigmund Freud.

aggressiveness 60–3,88, 112 anti-Semitism 54, 58, 114–6,118 anus 14, 35 Autobiographical Study, An (F.) 51, 114 babies, origin of 16–7,22, 36 Bible: Deuteronomy 72, 123; Esau 80, 98; Exodus 69; Genesis 27, 69,80; Joseph 52, 85; Leviticus 97, 119; Numbers 123; Philippson Bible 47, 121, 122–3; Proverbs 70; Psalms 55; Samuel 123 biologism 1, 9 birth 17, 36, 40, 68 bisexuality 18, 28 body 120; vs. intellect and spirit 3–4, 59–64, 80, 97–100,107–9 breast 23, 39 cancer 15, 22, 23 castration complex: in boys 17, 102–3; in girls 14, 17, 19–21,22, 40, 44; and penis envy 16–7,20, 39; and vagina 11, 16 ‘Child is Being Beaten, A’ (F.) 17 Christianity 109, 124, 129; and love 3–4, 95; and sexuality 68, 97; women’s role 67, 73 civilization 3, 7, 28–9,51, 64–5,102, 106–7 Civilization and its Discontents (F.) 3, 24, 65, 102, 104, 106

Subject index

155

clitoris 14, 16, 26, 39, 43–4 cloaca 22, 36, 44 contraception 110 desire 103–4 disciples, female 27–45: Andreas-Salomé 30–7; Bonaparte 44; Deutsch 37–43 dreams 50–2, 54, 85, 122 drive, sexual 104–6; of women 5, 41, 65 ‘Economic Problem of Masochism, The’ (F.) 105 eduication 72,89; of F. 29, 46–7 ‘Ego and the Id, The’ (F.) 17 Egypt 49, 123–4,128–31 ‘Electra complex’ 22 emancipation, Jewish 3, 6–7, 28–9,50, 55–8,89, 93, 103,109–,114–41 faeces 17, 20, 36, 103 family, F.’s 1–2, 55; see also Freud, Amalie; Freud, Jacob family psychodynamics, Jewish 67–93; different treatment of sexes 75–8; fathers and sons 89–90; F.’s father 87–90; F.’s mother 81–7; mothers and sons 79–81,86–7,88; procreation 69; sexuality 68–9; women’s role 67–8, 70–4 father: God as 103; —son relationship 2–3, 29, 88–90,116; see also Freud, Jacob ‘Female Sexuality’ (F.) 19 femininity 14, 22, 92; as deficient masculinity 1, 9, 16, 22, 25, 44,64, 80; motivation 10; see also sexuality, female feminism 8–9, 20, 31, 33, 37 Future of an Illusion, The (F.) 23, 63–4 genitals 101–2; trauma 40

Subject index

156

girls: castration complex 11, 14, 17, 19–6, 22, 44; Oedipus complex 17–8,21–2; penis envy 16–7,20–1,23–5,39; pre-Oedipal phase 22; transfer of erotogenic focus 14, 16, 17; vagina, awareness of 11–2, 16, 22, 25,44 humour, Jewish 3, 58, 72, 81 identification 86, 89 identity, Jewish 55–9,66, 81, 116,119; and F. 5, 46–8,94 incest 8, 119–20 infantile sexuality 25, 40, 125–7; see also girls instinct 3–5, 9–10 intellectualism: female 20,35–,41–4, 44; Jewish 6–7, 28, 57–61, 99–25, 109,115–6 Interpretation of Dreams, The (F.) 29, 50–6, 53, 59, 122, 124 Jewishness, F.: and anti-Semitism 114–41; identity 5, 46,48–50,55–,58–7, 94; his ‘ignorance’ of Judaism 9–7, 46–8; his shame 29–30, 49; Talmudism 29, 49–50; and Zionism 53–7 Jews 115, 116–8; anti-Semitism 54, 58, 114–6,118; Eastern vs. Western 5–6, 7, 29, 55–8,64, 117–8; emancipation of 3, 7, 28–30,50, 55–8,89, 93, 103–,109–,116–; intellectualism 6–7, 28, 58–61, 99–25, 108–9,115–07; masculinity 8, 60–4; and western culture 2–3, 28– 30, 51, 55–8,109; see also shtetl Judaism: communalism 46; and F. 6–7, 46–8; and F.’s theories 1–7, 128; incest 119–20; love 3, 94–5,107–8; marriage 4, 69–71,97; masculinity 8, 60–4; mourning 49–52, 75; neurosis 6, 108, 118; paradise 98; procreation 4, 69,98;

Subject index

157

and psychoanalysis 2, 6, 50, 109, 117; sexuality 3–5, 63, 67–9, 94–112; spiritual and intellectual values 3, 7, 60, 64, 99; women’s role 5, 60, 67–8, 90–1,103 libido 105–6 love: F. on 94, 100, 103, 107–8,111; Jewish attitude toward 3–5, 94–5,107–9 marriage 4, 69–71,97; F.’s 27,32, 90–,96, 109–11 masculinity 8, 60–4, 92; femininity as deficient 1, 9, 16, 22, 25, 44,64, 80 masochism 14, 39–41,44,105 matriarchy 74–5, 77 menstruation 40, 71, 74, 102–3 monotheism 128–30 Moses and Monotheism (F.) 24, 49, 95, 99, 106, 119, 128–30 mother: breast 23, 39; and daughter 13–10, 41,77–8; fear and envy of 12–4, 24, 68–9,85–6,90–1,103; idealization of 90, 92, 128; Jewish 74–5, 80, 89; role in child’s development 1, 3, 10, 79, 90; seductive 125–8; and son 10, 17, 24, 79–81,86–8,119, 126, 128; see also Freud, Amalie mourning 51–2, 75 narcissism 36, 40 Nazism 57, 58 neurosis 108; and castration complex 20; and Oedipus complex 8, 16; religion as 6, 118; and repression 16, 95; social origins of 25 nursemaid, F.’s 86, 127 Oedipus complex 8, 114–32; Amenhotep 128–31; and castration complex Oedipus complex (cont.) 17; Egypt 123–4; and F.’s childhood 2–3, 12, 87, 120–2; in girls 17–8,21–2;

Subject index

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infantile sexuality 126–7; and Jewish family (q.v.) 6, 79; and Jewish identity 116,119; Jocasta 124–5; Judaism and incest 119–20; the Philippson Bible 122–3; seduction theory 125–8; theory development 122 Oedipus Rex 124–5 Onah 69 orality 25, 39 orgasm 39, 43 Ostjuden 29, 56–8,64, 72, 119; see also shtetl passivity: of Jewish men 49, 61–2,91–24; of women 20,33, 39–41,45 penis envy 11, 16–7,20–1,23–5,39 phallic sexual monism 11–2, 16 phallocentrism 1, 8–9, 10, 25 Philippson Bible 47, 121, 122–3 pleasure, sexual: delayed 3, 95; F. on 4–5, 94,103–4; and Judaism 3–4, 97–8,112 politeness 28–30 portrait, Freud family 100 pre-Oedipal phase 22 procreation 4, 69,98 psychoanalysis: and feminism 8–9; and F. 2, 6–7, 50, 109; F.–s self-analysis 6, 12, 85; and F.’s theory of female sexuality 8–12, 14–5, 21; Gentiles and 6, 28, 93, 116; and Judaism 3, 6, 50, 109, 117; as product of encounter between two cultures 3, 28–30, 95; as ‘science’ 1, 9, 36, 93 Psychopathology of Everyday Life, The (F.) 109, 130 rabbinic doctrine 94–106 ‘Resistances to Psychoanalysis, The’ (F.) 105 restraint, sexual 4, 68, 106–7,110–2 role of women: Christianity 67, 74; Judaism 3–5, 61, 67–8, 70–5, 77, 80, 90–2

Subject index

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scholarship 61, 82, 99 seduction theory 125–8 sexual doctrines 3–5, 63, 94–112; desire 103–4; libido 105–6; love 94–7,100, 104, 107–8,111; physicality 99–100; pleasure 94,98–,104, 111, 112–; repugnance 102–3; restraint 106–7,110–2; spirit and intellect 99–100,108–9 sexuality, female: Andreas-Salomé on 33–5; Bonaparte on 44; castration 14, 17, 19–21,23; as deficiency 1, 9, 16, 22, 25, 64,80; Deutsch on 31–2; femininity 14, 22; and feminism 8–9; F.’s theory 1, 5, 14–26, 64; F. criticised 1, 9–12; F.-Jones debate 24–5; Horney on 19, 20–1,25; and Judaism 1–7; passivity 20,34, 32–3, 45; penis envy 16–7,20–1,22, 22–2; and psychoanalysis 8–12, 15; puberty 14, 16,. 17; vagina, awareness of 11–2, 14, 15–7,22, 25 shtetl culture 6, 51; body 30, 98–100,103, 120; incest 119–20; love 95, 111; manners 29; masculinity 60–1; mothers 79–81,85, 88; scholarship 61, 82, 99; sex 30, 97–8,111; violence 60, 64; women’s role 60, 72, 75, 77, 80, 90–2 ‘Some Character-types Met With in Psycho-Analytic Work’ (F.) 58 ‘Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes’ (F.) 21, 22 spiritual vs. physical values 3–4, 59–64, 80, 97–100,107–9 super-ego 17, 91, 106 ‘Taboo of Virginity, The’ (F.) 17 Talmudism 29, 49–50 Thebes 123

Subject index

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Torah 6, 69–72 Totem and Taboo (F.) 53, 129 transference 32, 42 ‘Transformation of Instinct, The’ (F.) 17 trauma 18, 40 unconscious, denial of 9 vagina 1, 39–40,43, 44; child’s awareness of 10–2, 16, 22, 25,44; transfer of erotogenic focus to 14, 15, 17 values, spiritual and intellectual vs. physical 3–4, 59–64, 80, 97–100,107–9 Vienna 1, 46–66, 114; Brucke Institute 1; and F.’s Jewishness (q.v.) 46–50; identity of Jews in 55–9,66, 81; Psychoanalytic Society 27–8,37; University 37, 115 violence 60, 64; see also aggressiveness women: analysts 27; F.’s attitudes toward 1, 5, 27,64–5,85, 90–2,122–55; F.’s disciples 31–45; F.’s marriage 27,32, 90–,96, 109–11; F.’s mother see Freud, Amalie; F.’s theory of female sexuality see sexuality; intellectuals 20,35–,41–,44; role of see role yezer ha’ra 104–6 Yiddish 7, 29, 47, 57–8,72 Zionism 53–7,61–2