The Jewish and German Roots of Psychoanalysis and the Impact of the Holocaust
Introductory Remarks
The Holocaust is an event in world history, an important event in the twentieth century, a terrible century that is just coming to a close. But it is also an event in German history that has to be faced and an event in Jewish history that has to be mastered. I and a group of colleagues spent ten years studying the effect of the Holocaust on its victims and their children. One of the painful events we had to face was that the Holocaust is transmitted by the survivors to their children and even to the third generation. In that book we also included a chapter on the children of Nazis and we made the discovery that came as a surprise to all of us, that children of Nazis who knew about the participation of their parents in the Holocaust often identified themselves with the Jews and feared that they would be annihilated by their parents should they show signs of any weakness.
Beyond the Jewish tragedy we all were forced to recognize that given certain social circumstances such as a national humiliation, unemployment, and loss of religious and humanistic scruples, a democratic society did the equivalent of suicide by allowing an evil genius embodying the frustrations of many socially powerless people to gain power. Once in absolute control, he and his associates plunged the world into a devastating war. Were it not for the grace of God and the fact that so many European atomic scientists found refuge on these shores, the atomic bomb could have been discovered in Germany with results none of us dare imagine.
We psychoanalysts have learned to differentiate between at least three attitudes toward trauma: (1) The trauma has never been mastered, the Holocaust remains for its victim the only psychologically real event. One remains Hitler’s victim for [End Page 243] the rest of one’s life. For such people, the Holocaust is forever in danger of returning. They think of a refuge somewhere in middle America and keep flight tickets ready just in case. These are admittedly extreme examples, but we have encountered them. (2) Under ordinary circumstances, the Holocaust has been successfully relegated to the past, but the past has not been mastered. It threatens to return. An example would be as follows: A refugee woman driving beyond the speed limit is followed by an officer. Without awareness, the officer becomes a Nazi. She steps on the gas to escape for her life and thus transforms a simple punishment into a much more severe one. (3) The Holocaust is denied. It never happened. We hear continuously of books appearing and denying the unbearable historical events. Denial, however, as the psychoanalyst Robert Walder (1951) has found, is a weak defense and it has to be buttressed by a stable but dangerous paranoid defense. If the Holocaust cannot be denied it is because Jews and communists are perpetrating the lie that it did take place.
By comparison with these major issues, our symposium and exhibit is only a small event, but it reminds us that the Holocaust is also a part of psychoanalytic history. And we psychoanalysts must make sure that we have recorded it correctly without distortions or false idealizations, for any distortion of the past is conducive to recreation of the myth and is dangerous to our reality testing.
The Jewish Roots of Psychoanalysis
It is an historical fact that the creator of psychoanalysis was an Austrian Jew and the first circle of Freud’s disciples were Jews. The first gentile “converts” to psychoanalysis were psychiatrists in Bergholzi, a mental hospital in Zurich under the leadership of Bleuler and Jung. Freud was elated about this conquest of psychoanalysis. In his correspondence with Karl Abraham in 1908 we read:
Please be tolerant and do not forget that it is easier for you than it is for Jung to follow my ideas, for in the first [End Page 244] place you are completely independent, and then you are closer to my intellectual constitution because of racial kinship, while he, as a Christian and a pastor’s son, finds his way to me only against great inner resistances. His associations with us is the more valuable for that . . . It was only by his appearance on the scene that psychoanalysis escaped the danger of becoming a Jewish national affair.
(34)
In his letter to Abraham Freud assumes a great deal—namely that Jews inherently have less resistance to psychoanalysis than sons of pastors. That Judaism is a more rational religion was a theme made popular by Moses Mendelson. It was that version of Judaism that Freud’s teachers transmitted to him. It ignored the mythological and mystical irrational parts also found in the Jewish relation. It was useful in comforting Abraham but I believe we will make a mistake in considering it a mature opinion of Freud’s. The phrase “you are closer to my intellectual constitution because of racial kinship” shows that Freud thought that Jews show less resistance to psychoanalysis than others. In another letter, “our Aryan comrades are really indispensable to us, otherwise psychoanalysis would succumb to anti-Semitism.” The differences between Freud and Jung went deeper than the differences between gentile and Jew. Two months later he writes:
I nurse a suspicion that the suppressed anti-Semitism of the Swiss that spares me is deflected in reinforced form upon you. But I think that we as Jews, if we wish to join in, must develop a bit of masochism, be ready to suffer. Otherwise there is no hitting it off. Rest assured that if my name were Oberhuber in spite of everything my innovations would have met with far less resistance.
On 11 February 1910, Jung wrote to Freud imploring him:
To revive among the intellectuals the feeling for symbol and of myth and ever so gently to transform Christ back into the soothsaying God of the wine. . . . What infinite [End Page 245] rapture and wantonness lie dormant in our religion, waiting to be led back to their true destination.
It is not difficult to see that Jung is under the spell of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music. Two days later, Freud replied, “You must not regard me as the founder of a religion. My intentions are not so far reaching . . . I’m not thinking of a substitute for religion. This need must be sublimated (McGuire 1974, 294–95). It is evident from this exchange of letters that under Jung’s influence, psychoanalysis was in danger of severing its relationship to rational enlightenment and becoming a new religious movement. The period of friendship with Jung lasted between 1906–1913, which was also Freud’s most optimistic period. After the break with Jung, Freud became more self consciously a Jew. However, when World War I broke out, to our astonishment, for a time being at least, both he and Abraham were German nationalists, hoping for the victory of Germany in World War I.
If as an historian I look back at this early stage of psychoanalysis, I come to the conclusion that the defection of the Zurich group had a salutary effect. The attempt to make popular a tragic Weltanschaung created by a Jew behind a gentile fig leaf was bound to fail and did not do credit to psychoanalysis. I am using the word Weltanschaung advisedly because in 1927 Freud rejected the idea that psychoanalysis is a Weltanschaung or even a philosophy. He felt that in its philosophical aspects it represents science only. But psychoanalysis is more than a therapy. It does lay claim to a philosophy of its own. After Jung’s departure there were many creative analysts who were not Jews, but psychoanalysis did not attempt to deny its Jewish origins.
Who were those early disciples that gathered around Freud for the Wednesday night meetings? Fortunately the record of these meetings were preserved since 1906 (Nunberg and Federn, 4 vols., 1962–1975). Many of these early adherents were physicians, but they included also a musicologist and a music critic, a philosopher and authors of popular books. To my knowledge, they were all marginal Jews lacking in any Jewish cultural roots. On 6 March 1907, Alfred Adler, the future founder of individual psychology, but at the time still a [End Page 246] member of Freud’s inner circle, presented the case of a Russian Jewish student who had studied in an anti-Semitic gymnasium and where in Adler’s words the Jewish complex was very much in the foreground. This anti-Semitism was taking place in czarist Russia, far away culturally speaking, from Austria. One cannot read this discussion today without being struck by the fact that the discussants carefully avoided any discussion of Jewish issues. (Freud’s first biographer Willels (1931) does not discuss Freud’s Jewish origins.)
What about Freud’s own sense of Jewish identity? In 1976, I wrote what I believed to be the first paper on this topic. Since then a large literature has grown around the subject (Gay 1978; Rice 1990; Yerushalmi 1992). Almost all writers on the subject have cited a memory by Freud published in his Interpretations of Dreams:
I may have been ten or twelve years old, when my father began to take me with him on his walks and reveal to me in his talk his views about things in the world we live in. Thus it was, on one such occasion, that he told me a story to show me how much better things were now than they had been in his days. ‘When I was a young man,’ he said, ‘I went for a walk one Saturday in the streets of your birthplace; I was well dressed, and had a new fur cap on my head. A Christian came up to me and with a single blow knocked off my cap into the mud and shouted: ‘Jew! Get off the pavement!’ ‘And what did you do?’ I asked. ‘I went into the roadway and picked up my cap,’ was his quiet reply. This struck me as unheroic conduct on the part of the big, strong man who was holding the little boy by the hand. I had contrasted this situation with another which befitted my feelings better: the scene in which Hannibal’s father, Hamilcar Barca, made his boy swear before the household altar to take vengeance on the Romans. Ever since that time Hannibal had had a place in my fantasies.
(1900, 197)
This was obviously a decisive childhood memory that emerged in Freud’s self-analysis. It contains the moment in which he lost his idealization for his own father and substituted a new ego [End Page 247] ideal. Hannibal, although not a Jew, was a Semite and an enemy of Rome, which symbolized the Catholic church.
Jacob Freud’s story to his son should be understood in its historical context. Before the emancipation of the Jews in Germany, which occurred in 1809, they were prohibited from using public sidewalks and if a gentile called out to a Jew “Mach mores jud!,” the Jew had to take off his hat (Ewen 1948, 4). Full civil equality was granted to the German Jews in 1868 and Austria followed in 1869, when Freud was thirteen years old, some time after the incident reported.
In 1914, when Freud was visiting Rome, he stood before the Moses of Michelangelo in the church of San Pietro in Vincoli. There a new interpretation of that famous statue occurred to him. He saw Moses as “controlling his wrath and not about to break the tablets. He identified himself with Moses and attempted to sublimate his pain and anger about Jung’s renegacy. This insight, we may assume, evoked in him a greater sympathy toward his father who also controlled his anger in the encounter with an anti-Semite.”
In the preface to the Hebrew translation of Totem and Taboo, written in 1930, Freud said:
No reader of (the Hebrew version of) this book will find it easy to put himself in the emotional position of an author who is ignorant of the language of the holy writ—as well as from every other religion—and who cannot take a share in nationalist ideals, but who has yet never repudiated his people, who feels that he is in his essential nature a Jew and who has no desire to alter that nature. If the question were put to him: ‘Since you have abandoned all these common characteristics of your countrymen, what is left to you that is Jewish?’ he would reply: ‘A great deal, and probably its very essence.’ He could not now express that essence clearly in words; but some day, no doubt, it will become accessible to the scientific mind.
(1912/1913, XV)
For Freud’s thirty-fifth birthday his father, Jacob Freud, returned to him in a new binding the Philippson bible, the [End Page 248] Bible that Freud read as a child, with a Hebrew dedication to his son. Rice and Yerushalmi take this as evidence that Freud could read Hebrew. I, on the other hand, believe that it shows that Freud’s father was literate only in Hebrew.
Until recently the idea that psychoanalysis was a specific Jewish way of looking at the world would have been regarded as a sign of anti-Semitism. However, today many American Jewish analysts believe that there is at least a close affinity between psychoanalysis and Judaism. Ostow (1982) states:
Both Judaism and psychoanalysis teach that salvation, though conceptualized differently, can be obtained by virtue of special knowledge. Judaism and psychoanalysis share marginality: Jews are considered socially marginal and psychoanalysis is considered academically marginal.
Ostow also believes that Freud’s technique of free association has an affinity with the way the Jewish Rabbis interpreted Biblical text. The Rabbis believe in four ways of interpreting the Bible: Pshat, the plain meaning of the text; Remez, hints of alternative implied meanings; Drash, a homiletic meaning; and finally Sod, the esoteric meaning. If I am not as persuaded by this argument it is because the fathers of the church, St. Augustine for example, interpreted the Bible very differently, but in essence used this same technique of interpretation. Furthermore to me the analogy between these techniques of interpretation and the technique of free association is not convincing. One can add that Freud, like the Jewish Rabbis, put heavy emphasis on the role of memory, as already indicated earlier. What matters in this discussion is that Freud and his circle of assimilated Jews felt strongly about being Jews but this feeling was not buttressed by any specific Jewish knowledge.
A most interesting connection between psychoanalysis and the Bible has been formulated by the French psychoanalyst Chasseguet-Smirgel (1985). She contrasts the Biblical creator of the world with the world that the Marquis de Sade had described. The famous Marquis advocated the abolishing of all differences. Thus in his One Hundred and Twenty Days, he [End Page 249] advocated marriage among children, costuming little boys as girls, and girls as boys. Similarly, a bishop in the guise of a woman marries a woman who plays the role of husband. In Chasseguet-Smirgel’s interpretation, perversions are attempts to break down the barriers that separate men from women, child from adult, brother from sister, and the erogenic zones in one’s body. All things revert to chaos, differences are abolished, murder is nothing more than transformation of matter, and everything is reduced to excrement.
By contrast, the God of the Bible separates light from darkness, and the earth from the ocean. In a beautiful passage, Jeremiah, chapter V, verse 22, states:
Fear ye not me? Sayeth the Lord: Will ye not tremble at my presence, which have placed the sand for the bound of the sea by a perpetual decree, that it cannot pass it: and though the waves thereof toss themselves, yet can they not prevail; though they roar, yet can they not pass over it?
In keeping with this notion of separation Leviticus 18, verses 6–18, gives a long list of incestuous relationships that are forbidden, beginning with, “None of you shall approach anyone that is near of kin to him to uncover their nakedness: I am the Lord.” The list ends with, “Neither shalt thou take a woman as a rival wife to her sister to vex her, to uncover her nakedness, besides the other in her lifetime.” The last prohibition is of particular interest since it is the very act that the patriarch Jacob committed when he married the two sisters Lea and Rachel.
To me it seems essential to differentiate between two aspects of the problems which are all too often confused. The first is the question of whether psychoanalysis as a discipline is derived from Jewish sources. Does it owe a cultural debt to Judaism? I believe that the answer is no. But this no must be qualified. True, there is no hard evidence as we have when we discuss the German influence of any direct Jewish influence on Freud. Nevertheless, Freud did say that even after religious and national aspirations have been given up, the very essence of [End Page 250] Judaism remains. Here rational argument cannot play a decisive role. Chasseguet-Smirgel emphasized that the God of the Bible abhors incest as well as merger, thus making Judaism a non-symbiotic and non-incestuous religion. But there is also a Jewish religious term called “Dvekut,” which means cleaving unto God, a term very close to merger. A very different problem, sociological in nature, is whether psychoanalysis offered a way for assimilated Jews to find their way into the cultural mainstream and here the answer must be yes. As Ostow put it, “Psychoanalysis offers an activity in which Jews struggling at the interface between the Jewish community and the non-Jewish world can express their conflicting needs.” In this connection we might recall the ideas of a notable refugee from Germany, the psychoanalyst Kurt Lewin. He concluded that it is not the belonging to many groups that is the source of the difficulty, for we all belong to different groups, but the uncertainty of belonging. It is this uncertainty that has been referred to as Jewish marginality. A group according to Lewin is defined by interdependence rather than by similarity (Lewin 1948, 179 and 184). The Jews of Freud’s circle were a community of fate rather than a community of faith.
If Freud was right, that the world had to wait for a Godless Jew to discover psychoanalysis, and that it is easier for Jews to find their way to psychoanalysis, it is the marginality that makes this possible. It is interesting that during an analysis the analyst becomes for the analysand a very important and sometimes even the most important object, but the analyst never shows up within the family circle. He remains at the margins of the analysand’s life. If Jews are, as some people believe, particularly suitable for such occupation as psychology, psychiatry and anthropology, it is probably due to this marginality.
The German Roots of Psychoanalysis
Although Freud was born in Pribor, Czechoslovakia and died in London, he spent all but his first years of life and his last year in Vienna, within the German cultural orbit. Freud was the product of the German Gymnasium. Quotations from [End Page 251] Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Schelling, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer abounded. Goethe appears in Freud’s dreams and quotations from Goethe and Schiller occur spontaneously when Freud is free associating. When Freud analyzes slips of tongue, he gives instances taken from Schiller’s Wallenstein, Don Carlos, and Die Raüber.
In 1907, Freud was asked to comment on his ten favorite books (S.E. 9, 245). There he mentioned what he considers the most magnificent ones: Homer, Sophocles, Goethe’s Faust, Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Macbeth; then he included the most significant books: Yohan Weier, Belief in Witches, and Darwin’s Descent of Man; favorite books, among which he included Milton’s Paradise Lost and Heine’s Lazarus; and finally, settling to ten good books, he included Mutatuly, Letters and Works; Kipling, The Book; Anatole France, Sur la Pierre Blanche; Zola, Fecundite; Merezhkovsky, Leonardo da Vinci; C. F. Meyer, Huttens Letzte Tage; Macauley, Essay; Gomperz, Greek Thinkers, and Mark Twain, Sketches. The list is a homage to Freud’s universalism without language or national boundaries. The classical European past is alive to him. The authors are Dutch, English, French, American, Russian, and Swiss. The only book that touches on Jewish issues is Heine’s Lazarus.
Freud retained from the German classics many quotations that adorn his writings. For example, in Studies in Hysteria he quotes Schillers’ The Bride of Messina: “One countenance indeed shows before it happened and a different one shows the accomplished deed.” In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud said “I took as my starting point a saying of the poet philosopher, Schiller, that ‘hunger and love are what moves the world.’”
The influence of Goethe on Freud was, if anything, even greater. He decided to become a physician after hearing the poem on Nature, which at that time was attributed to Goethe. Wittels (1931), Freud’s early biographer, reprinted this poem. It is far below the standards of Goethe, but Freud’s contemporaries did not notice it. Freud was also the recipient of the Goethe prize, given by the city of Frankfurt, and on that occasion, Anna Freud, in the name of her father, delivered a short paper entitled “The Goethe Prize” (1930, 208). [End Page 252]
In that address Freud drew many parallels between Goethe’s insights and psychoanalysis. Of these the most striking is Goethe’s line in the posthumously published poem to Charlotte von Stein.
Ach du warst in Abgelbetten Zeiten meine Schwester oder meine frau.
Ahh! You were in times lived out long ago my sister or my wife.
In an erudite study, the psychoanalyst and refugee Kurt Eissler (1963) showed that Goethe’s relationship to his sister was unusually close and incestuous. What Goethe labeled times “lived out long ago” psychoanalysis recognizes as referring to the early years of infancy.
A quote appears from Goethe on the very last page of the posthumously published Outline of Psychoanalysis. Freud was discussing there the formation of the superego as representing the world we inherit from our forebears. He quotes Goethe:
Was du ererbet von deinen Vatern hast, Erwirb es, um es zu besitzen
What thou hast inherited from thy fathers, acquire it to make it thine.
(Goethe’s Faust, Part I, scene 1)
These are almost the last lines we have from Freud’s pen. It is indeed a most interesting statement for it contains a contradiction. We generally assume that what we inherit we need not acquire. However, Goethe believed, and Freud admired this belief, that the two are not opposed to each other, but what we inherit we must also acquire to make it our own.
As to Nietzsche’s influence: in the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement (1914, S.E. 14, 1516) Freud said,
I have denied myself the very great pleasure of reading the works of Nietzsche with the deliberate object of not being hampered in working out the impressions [End Page 253] received in psychoanalysis by any sort of anticipatory ideas. I had therefore to be prepared—and I am so, gladly—to forego all claims to priority in the many instances in which laborious psychoanalytic investigation can merely confirm the truth which the philosopher recognized by intuition.
This passage has been criticized, and in my opinion rightly so, by Helmut Junker (1991). He was surprised to discover that Freud showed so little interest in his place in western thought. One may also add that he did not do full justice to psychoanalysis because in the great discoveries that Freud made intuition played no smaller a role than it did in Nietzsche’s work. Nietzsche anticipated Freud when in his Zarathustra he recognized that many criminals feel guilty before they committed the crime, that is, they committed the crime out of a preexisting sense of guilt. Freud devoted a section of an essay to criminals out of a sense of guilt, in 1916 (S.E. 14, 333). Nietzsche’s superman in Freud’s own transvaluation of values turned out to be the supreme narcissist who loves no one and treats everyone on a need gratification basis. Freud compared Nietzsche’s superman with the father of the primal hoard (1921, 123).
By contrast to Nietzsche, Freud referred to Wagner only once (apart from associations of Freud’s patients to Wagner’s operas) in the Schreber case (1911, 68) where Freud made the significant observation that ideas of the end of the world occur in psychotics when there is a total withdrawal of attachment to people in the world. However, similar ideas can also take place in an overwhelming state of falling in love, when all what Freud called cathexes pass over to the love object. He gave Tristan and Isolde as an example of such an overwhelming love.
It was Wagner who in his The Ring put a brother and sister incest on stage as an example of blissful love. To my knowledge, a glorification of incest was never before attempted in Western literature. I would now like to present an example of a Freudian insight before Freud.
Let me bring you to the second act of Tristan and Isolde by [End Page 254] Wagner. The couple has just been caught in flagrante by King Mark. The King is not angry at Tristan but bewildered: “Where do loyalty and virtue flee when Tristan betrays?” Tristan replies, “What I did I cannot tell, what you are asking you will never find out.” But after this disclaimer, Tristan provides the answer. When his mother died in childbirth, she exiled him to the current world where the sun shines. Now with Isolde, he will return to his mother’s domain—the night devoid of sunlight. The explanation that he is ready to die because he wants to join his dead mother constitutes one of the great examples of a Freudian interpretation before Freud.
Had Freud listened carefully to Tristan and Isolde he would have discovered that when the lovers philosophized about overthrowing the tyranny of “the day” in favor of the kingdom of the night, they are in revolt against what Freud (1923) described as being dominated by the Superego.
It is of course well-known that Wagner was “The court musician” of Adolf Hitler, but so complex is this history that some of the great Freudian insights before Freud occur in the work of an anti-Semitic composer.
Freud particularly admired Heine’s sarcasm. He often quoted Heine’s remarks about philosophers: “With his nightcaps and the tatters of his dressing gown, he patches up the gaps in the structure of the universe.” I will also remind you of the magnificent quote in Freud’s paper on narcissism as to why God created the world, where Heine makes God say, “Illness was no doubt the final cause of the whole urge to create. By creating, I could recover; by creating, I became healthy” (Freud 1914, 85). This citation comes from the last stanza of Heine’s Seven Songs of Creation. They are humorous in nature and contain little that is profound. One wonders, therefore, how Freud kept these lines in memory and used them to such a telling effect for the paper on narcissism is unquestionably one of Freud’s most creative ones. It is a magnificent example of Goethe’s statement that what we inherit we must acquire anew.
In Civilizations and Its Discontents (1930, 110), Freud quoted Heine’s remarks. “Mine is a most peaceable disposition. My wishes are: a humble cottage with a thatched roof, but a good [End Page 255] bed, good food, the freshest milk and butter, flowers before my window, and a few fine trees before my door; and if god wants to make my happiness complete, he will grant me the joy of seeing some six or seven of my enemies hanging from those trees.” What Freud admired here was the ease with which Heine could permit his hostile impulses to reach consciousness.
Freud also quoted Heine’s complaint that “his religion was the plague dragged along from the Nile valley, the unhealthy beliefs of ancient Egypt.” We can only speculate whether this remark quoted in Moses and Monotheism had given Freud the idea that Moses was an Egyptian. Freud not only took ideas from Heine but in my view Heine had a profound influence on Freud’s style. This is not easy to prove, however, some examples taken from Heine’s writings may be used as illustration. I have given up the God of Hegel, or rather, the Godlessness of Hegel” (1948, 213). We remember that Freud called himself a Godless Jew. “The poet, that overgrown child” (1948, 221) recalls Freud’s essay of 1908, “The Poet and Daydreaming.” Anyone familiar with the way Freud spoke about his impending death will note the similarity to the way Heine described his death to Alexander Dumas:
“You may no longer find me in my present apartment, 50 rue d’Amersterdam, and that I may have moved to another lodging, quite unknown to me—and I will not even be able to leave my new address with the porter in case tardy friends like you may ask for me. I have no illusion of my future residence. All I know is that you enter it through a drab and fetid passage, and this entrance displeases me in advance. In addition, my wife weeps whenever I talk of moving.
(226) [all quotes are from Ewen 1948]
Heine died in 1857, the year Freud was born. He underwent baptism while Freud only considered it and was dissuaded by Breuer (Bergmann 1976). Anyone who reads Heine’s Hebrew melodies will know that baptism notwithstanding, he retained a deep attachment to Jewish lore and Jewish life [End Page 256] which he expressed in such poems as Princess Sabbath and Jehuda Ben Halevi. There is no similar description in any of Freud’s writings. Freud absorbed ideas from many writers but in my view he learned the most from Nietzsche. Nevertheless, Heine had the greatest influence on the formation of his personality. Style is an expression of the personality. In Heine the German and Jewish roots intermingled.
Psychoanalysis, in my opinion, emerged on the crossroad between the period of the Enlightenment and German Romanticism. As Fenichel (1941), one of the leading refugee psychoanalysts, said, “The subject matter of the psychoanalysis is the irrational. Its methodology, however, is rational.” I believe that this synthesis between the Enlightenment and Romanticism constituted one of the important appeals of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis was created by a Godless Jew and originated in a circle of Jews, the first generation of emancipation, who sought new ways of citizenship in a Europe that knows no national boundaries.
Epilogue: The Encounter With National Socialism
In 1933 Freud’s books were publicly burned in a bonfire. Jews were barred from participating in professional associations. On April 17, 1933, Boehm, a gentile psychoanalyst, came to Vienna to ask Freud’s blessing to replace Eitingon as president of the German Psychoanalytic Society. Kretschner resigned as the president of the International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy and was replaced by Jung, who was now an enthusiastic follower of Hitler. Jones reports that on 1 December 1933, he himself presided over a meeting of the Berlin Analytic Society “where the few remaining Jews volunteered to resign so as to save the society from being dissolved” (186). Jones further reports that in January 1937, Boehm went once more to Vienna where he talked for three hours until Freud’s patience gave out. Freud finally said, “Quite enough! The Jews have suffered for their conviction for centuries. Now the time has come for our Christian colleagues to suffer in their turn for theirs. I attach no importance to my name being [End Page 257] mentioned in Germany so long as my work is represented correctly there.” So saying, he left the room. Jones has done his upmost to exonerate himself and Freud from any complicity with National Socialism. Yet, one cannot deny that Freud and Jones tried to accommodate psychoanalysis to National Socialism. The accommodation failed, however; the fact that the International was willing to allow the German Psychoanalytic Society to remain within the International only if its Jewish members were not expelled but voluntarily resigned shows that psychoanalysis too shared in the spirit then current of accommodation to Hitler.
Anti-Semitism was endemic in western culture. Restricted and expelled from some countries, the Jews found shelters in others, and thus survived. With the emergence of the Enlightenment, represented in Germany by writers like Lessing, and as the ideas of the French revolution took hold, the Jews in the nineteenth century were emancipated and received equal rights. The euphoria of the French Revolution soon evaporated. The Congress of Vienna and the holy Alliance restored the old legitimacy. Secular anti-Semitism became strong throughout the nineteenth century. On the other side of the ledger was the fact that Jews gained equal rights. Until the rise of Hitler, it was hoped that eventually anti-Semitism would be overcome.
Psychoanalysis was one of the universalistic movements that emerged during this period of hope. Discovered by a Jew, supported by Jews, the language of psychoanalysis was a universal language. It emerged, as I already said, on the crossroads between the rational beliefs of the Enlightenment and the interests of Romanticism in the morbid. The process of emancipation and the growth of a world based on order was reversed by a new and particularly violent form of anti-Semitism, culminating in Hitler’s final solution. Fortunately for western civilization, Hitler’s Third Reich, proclaimed as intended to last one thousand years, lasted only a little over one decade. But we are still laboring over the impact of this catastrophe and the reversal of human values that took place. Hence this symposium.
