Freud's atonement

The authors explore Freud's preoccupations with death and dying. In particular, they focus on the day of Freud's death, which was the Jewish Day of Atonement and the Jewish Sabbath. The significance of this event, which the authors think was “planned,” was not just in order to obliterate years of pain and suffering from cancer, but also to overcome a lifelong burden of conflict and guilt about his relations with his family and colleagues as well as his Jewish cultural/religious upbringing. The authors consider whether the timing of Freud's death represented a premeditated return to his cultural and religious roots.     

The Vanishing Mother: Reply to Commentaries

In this response to discussions by Aron and Boyarin I draw attention to the instability of the figure of the mother within Freud's presentation of his life, as well as within psychoanalysis. I link this instability to the figure of a “spectral” mother and perhaps subversive aspects of femininity. Whereas Aron links castration anxiety with prevailing anti-Semitic ideas, I look to the Jewish ritual of the Brit Milah and the laws of Niddah, which further reveal attempts to control and contain femininity. Boyarin raises a concern between historicizing and psychoanalyzing Freud that I consider a misreading. I believe my hybrid method of moving between historical, cultural, religious, and psychoanalytic planes, as lived by Freud within his family, is not so different from Boyarin's own approach.     

Freud's Jewish identity,circumcision, and the theory of castration anxiety: problem or pride?

In this work the author reflects on the Jewish identity of Sigmund Freud. It is acknowledged that Freud, even though he seemed ambivalent towards Jewishness and even though anti-Semitism was omnipresent, not necessarily perceived his Jewish identity as problematic. Rather, it seems as if Freud had a positive Jewish identity, which was connected to profound knowledge in Jewish religion and tradition, even though he declared himself as a Godless Jew. Both his Jewish identity and his knowledge in Judaism seemed to have contributed to some of his insights into the human psyche. The impact of the traditional Jewish circumcision and the insights connected to the theory of castration anxiety are specifically discussed. The author suggests that Freud's positive Jewish identity, and the significance of circumcision, contributed to his insights into the prerequisites of human development and how we as individuals are shaped both by our interpersonal relationships and by the cultural context.     

Women on the Couch: Genital Stimulation and the Birth of Psychoanalysis

Following Freud's emphasis on his rejection of hypnosis as leading up to the development of psychoanalysis, there has been little mention in the psychoanalytic literature of the larger context of the somatic medical treatment of hysteria within which Freud treated his hysterical patients, and which Freud himself practiced. We contend that Freud's emphasis obscured his association with massage, electrotherapy, and the procedure of genital stimulation practiced by his medical colleagues in the treatment of hysteria. We show that the history of genital stimulation—including its obfuscation, desexualization, medicalization, and co-option from traditional women healers by an exclusively male medical establishment—provides us with the background for a more sophisticated understanding of the context in which Freud developed his theories. Specifically, we examine the contribution of this understanding to Freud's theoretical emphases on autonomy and individuality, abstinence and the renunciation of gratification, penis envy, clitoral versus vaginal orgasm, mature genital sexuality, and the “repudiation of femininity” as the “bedrock” of psychoanalysis. We demonstrate that Freud's position as a Jew in an anti-Semitic milieu fueled his efforts to distance his psychoanalytic method from the more prurient practices of his day, including one his society associated with Jewish doctors and patients.     

THE TRAINING ANALYSIS AT A TIME WHEN THEORY IS IN SHORT SUPPLY1

The author discusses the risks confronting the training analysis when original theoretical production is lacking. In his view, little progress has been made since Freud's time in establishing a general science of the psyche based on Freud's interpretive method. What has been transmitted is stated to be not Freud's method of discovery but the knowledge thereby produced, which has been handed down in the form of doctrines, defined as theory presented as psychic fact. Hence analyses tend to apply theories rather than to discover unconsciouses. Some of today's most common interpretational aberrations are described, and the author shows the powerful suggestive effect on patients of using doctrines as metaphors of psychic life. Where such a training analysis is reinforced by a like form of theoretical teaching and supervision, candidates may uncritically assimilate the relevant theory. The author uses his concept of the reality‐providing circuit to show how belief in a doctrine imparted by the training analysis makes that doctrine appear as the ideological basis of psychoanalytic knowledge. He finally notes that, theories being essentially heuristic instruments and not bodies of acquired information, the consequence of the current dearth of theories, which have degenerated into doctrines, is that the training analysis itself has come to constitute the theory of training in many institutes.     

Freud's Ironically Jewish Science: Commentary on Paper by Jill Salberg

In his commentary on Jill Salberg's integrative and contextualizing article, “Hidden in Plain Sight: Freud's Jewish Identity Revisited,” Aron examines several ideas related to Freud's ironically “Jewish science.” First, this commentary takes up the question of what it has meant to speak of a “Jewish science” historically, and what it might mean today. Shockingly, Aron shows that the rise and fall of psychoanalysis has been traced to Jewish influence. He then expands on Salberg's article by reviewing the relationship between circumcision and castration and considers the impact of Freud's Jewish identity and his anxiety about anti-Semitism on the structure of the psychoanalytic method and specifically on Freud's discovery of the “royal road.”     

Gender and Transference

Despite an early interest, Freud explicitly rejected philosophy, because of its “speculative” character. He struggled with balancing the intellectual appeal of philosophy with the certainty he hoped to find in positivist science. Putting aside the scientific status of Freud's work, the author re-examines Freud's attitude towards philosophy. Failing to recognize the assumptions of his investigations, Freud segregated psychoanalysis from philosophy on the charge that philosophers equated mind with consciousness, putatively propounded unfounded speculations, and assumed false conclusions about comprehensiveness. However, Freud never completely abandoned his initial philosophical proclivities. His own contributions to cultural history, social philosophy, notions of personal identity, and the humanistic thrust of psychoanalysis, demonstrate that he continued to address his earliest interests in philosophical questions. The author elucidates the philosophical complexity of psychoanalysis and concludes that a reconsideration of Freud's self-appraisal of his intellectual commitments is warranted.     

WITHSTANDING TRAUMA: THE SIGNIFICANCE OF EMMA ECKSTEIN'S CIRCUMCISION TO FREUD'S IRMA DREAM

The author considers the medical rationale for Wilhelm Fliess's operation on Emma Eckstein's nose in February 1895 and interprets the possible role that this played in Freud's dream of Irma's injection five months later. The author's main argument is that Emma likely endured female castration as a child and that she therefore experienced the surgery to her nose in 1895 as a retraumatization of her childhood trauma. The author further argues that Freud's unconscious identification with Emma, which broke through in his dream of Irma's injection with resistances and apotropaic defenses, served to accentuate his own “masculine protest”. The understanding brought to light by the present interpretation of Freud's Irma dream, when coupled with our previous knowledge of Freud, allows us to better grasp the unconscious logic and origins of psychoanalysis itself. 1     

Engaging with the unknown: How Judaism enabled Freud's psychological discoveries

A large literature has formed around the question of how Freud's Jewishness and/or Judaism influenced his psychological discoveries and development of psychoanalytic theory and methods. The article organizes the literature into several core theses but brings new clarity and insight by applying two essential criteria to demonstrate an impact of Judaism on Freud's thinking: direct content and historical timing. First, there should be evidence that Freud incorporated actual content from Jewish sources, and second, this incorporation must have occurred during the most crucial period of Freud's early discovery, conceptualization, and development of psychoanalysis, roughly 1893–1910. Thus, for example, Bakan's well-known theory that Freud studied Kabbala is completely negated by the absence of any evidence in the required time period. Part I reviews the literature on the influence of Freud's ethnic/cultural Jewish identity. Part II introduces the Judaic sacred literature, explores Freud's education in Judaism and Hebrew, and presents evidence that Freud had the motive, means, and resources to discover and draw from the “Dream Segment” of the Talmud—along with the traditional Judaic methods and techniques of textual exegesis. Freud then applied these same Judaic word-centered interpretive methods—used for revealing an invisible God—to revealing an invisible Unconscious in four successive books in 1900, 1901, and 1905.     

Mysticism,Reality, Illusion,and the Freudian Critique of Religion

Freud's critique of religion cannot be fully understood if his ontogenetic perspective is explored outside of his phylogenetic perspective. The former allows for illusionistic thought processes that are orthogonal to reality claims. The latter requires consideration of empirical claims to truth within a social psychological perspective. It is only the phylogenetic perspective that allows Freud to maintain that religion is delusional, whether or not it is also illusional. Freud's rejection of "as if" philosophies as exemplified by Vaihinger is based upon his refusal to allow religious truth claims to escape their empirical, social foundations. Recent efforts to revive psychological theories of religion rooted only in illusionistic thought, as exemplified in the use of Winnicott's conceptualization, must confront social psychological issues similar to those articulated within Freud's phylogenetic view. A mystical reading of Freud is suggested in which claims to truth within psychoanalysis, science, and religion can be confronted in an empirical and inherently social manner.     

The patient's private construction of meaning and canons of science: Freud's case studies noch einmal1

Starting from Freud's classical case studies, the author highlights the tension between the psychoanalytical starting point in the subject's own meaning construction and the claims of the professional expert to objectivity, privileged knowledge and interpretative precedence. Psychoanalytic investigation of subjective phenomena came into existence parallel with Freud's magnifi cent project to furnish ‘a psychology that shall be a natural science’. The privileged knowledge of the specialist was substituted by the explicit intention to listen to the individual's own stories and private explanatory constructions. In order to investigate the territory of the unconscious, Freud had to develop various strategies for uncovering and correcting errors, and for testing clinically anchored hypotheses. However, Freud regularly failed to follow his own intentions. The thesis the author presents here is that departures from the explicit ambition to follow the subject's own meaning construction, and departures from the scientifi c attitude, easy to trace in Freud's case studies, accompany each other. These departures have had far‐reaching consequences for the present status of the psychoanalytic knowledge.     

Freud with Charcot: Freud's discovery and the question of diagnosis

Although Charcot's seminal role in influencing Freud is widely stated, although Freud's trip to Paris to study with Charcot is well recognized as pivotal in his shift from neurological to psychopathological work, a key fact of the Freudian heuristic remains largely underestimated: namely, that Freud's psychopathological breakthrough, which gave birth to psychoanalysis, cannot be separated from his ‘diagnostic preoccupation’, which is a crucial and at times the first organizing principle of his earliest writings. The purpose of this article is therefore to reopen the question of diagnosis by following its development along the path leading from Charcot to Freud. The authors demonstrate that Freud's careful attention to diagnostic distinctions follows strictly in the direction of Charcot's ‘nosological method’. More importantly, the article intends to identify the precise way in which his ideas operate in Freud's own work, in order to understand how Freud reinvests them to forge his own nosological system. If the authors trace the destiny of Charcot's lessons as they reach Freud's hands, it is the importance granted to mixed neuroses in Freud's psychopathology that allows them to pinpoint the role played by the diagnostic process in the rationality of psychoanalysis.     

APPRECIATING DIFFERENCE: ROY SCHAFER ON PSYCHOANALYSIS AND WOMEN

The author describes and appreciates Roy Schafer's critique of Freud's view of female psychology and his other contributions to the psychoanalytic literature on women, noting his then‐novel emphasis that took into account social and cultural factors in analytic treatment. She relates the influence on Schafer's work of his ambiance in that era: the Yale University Student Health Services during the social turmoil of the 1970s (where she was his supervisee), with the university becoming coed, as well as the theoretical plurality even in the early days of the Western New England Psychoanalytic Institute.     

The psychogenesis of the ego: notes on Freud's 'case of homosexuality in a woman'

This paper examines Freud's (1920) case study 'The psychogenesis of homosexuality in a woman' in the light of the second topography that was being elaborated in his theoretical writing at that time. The analysis of the ego and its defence mechanisms, which was to become such an important part of clinical technique in Anglo-American psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic psychotherapy and psychodynamic counselling, is not set out explicitly in any of Freud's case studies. However, in this last case study presented by Freud, it is possible to see how an attention to family dynamics, Oedipal structures and patterns of identification set the stage for the new notion of the ego to emerge. This 'turning point' in theory and clinical technique is also, in this case, intimately related to theories of sexuality, and Freud's own assumptions about homosexuality and heterosexuality are considered here in relation to his account of the ego.     

The countertransference dream1

Can the analyst's night‐dream about his patient be considered as a manifestation of countertransference‐and, if so, under what conditions? In what way can such a dream represent more than just the disguised fulfillment of a repressed wish of the analyst? Is there not a risk of the analyst unconsciously taking up and ‘using’ the content of a session or other elements coming from the analytic situation for his own psychic reasons? The author, closely following Freud's dream theory, shows the mechanisms which can allow us to use the dream content in the analytical situation: preserved from the secondary processes of conscious thinking, other fantasies and affects than in the waking state can emerge in dream thought, following an ‘unconscious perception’. After examining the countertransference elements of Freud's dream, ‘Irma's injection’, which leads off The interpretation of dreams, the author presents a dream of her own about a patient and its value for understanding affects and representations which had hitherto remained unrepresented.     

Inching towards wholeness: C.G. Jung and his relationship to Judaism

The evolution of Jung's relationship with Judaism is interpreted as reflecting aspects of the individuation journey over the course of a long life. The progress and limitations of his public positions and personal relationships are explored through his published work and correspondence. Perspectives from relational psychoanalysis and Jewish philosophy are used to amplify Jung's understanding of Jewish, and specifically Kabbalistic, text and image. Dimensions of the author's own journey toward greater acceptance of his own Jewish soul is also considered, along with the wider contemporary relevance of these themes.     

Rape and Communicative Agency: Reflections in the Lake at L–

Freud's case study of “Dora” ignores indications that her symptoms might have resulted from a fear of rape. Drawing on feminist adaptations of Lacan, this paper suggests that fear of rape may serve as a horizon for women's ability to perceive themselves as efficacious speakers. Freud's failure to recognize this fear may reflect men's unwillingness to acknowledge their own role in rape as well as anxiety over the possibility of losing his own credibility.     

The ego in Lucy R: notes on conflict in one of Freud's first cases

This paper focuses on Freud's discussion of the case of 'Lucy R' presented in Studies on Hysteria (Breuer and Freud, 1895). It is possible to see here a notion of the 'ego' being employed by Freud many years before the 1920 'turning point' in his work, and an account of the ego as a 'dominant mass of ideas' is used to explain how psychical conflicts for his patient are transformed into physical symptoms. The image of the ego defending itself against an 'incompatible' idea structures Freud's own account, and it also structures recent critical commentaries on Freud's work from within feminist writing and studies of rhetoric. Some consequences for present-day psychodynamic practice are reviewed in the course of the discussion.     

THE FATHER,THE FATHER FUNCTION,THE FATHER PRINCIPLE: SOME CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOANALYTIC DEVELOPMENTS

The author discusses Freud's thinking on the role of the father, as well as that of later French theoreticians. To illustrate his remarks, he draws on the poetry of Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1912–1987), a Brazilian poet whose work often dealt with themes of the father, the family, and his own paternal relationship. The author also discusses the psychic formation of the father principle and how this may be evident in the clinical analytic setting, even when the analyst's approach privileges field theory, intersubjectivity, or other concepts emphasizing the relationship between analyst and patient.     

Interpretations of Freud's Jewishness, 1924–1974

During the first fifty years of historical and biographical commentary on Freud and the origins of psychoanalysis there were there periods of interpretation of Freud's Jewishness. During the first period, extending from the mid-1920s until the 1950, it was widely assumed, following the works of Wittels, that Freud was essentially Viennese, that his Jewishness was at most incidental. During the second period, extending until the late 1960s, Freud was believed by some, following Bakan, to be essentially Jewish, and to have concealed that important aspect of his life intentionally. During the most recent period, and especially in the early 1970s, psychoanalysis was interpreted as a compromise wrought by Freud to meet the conflicting demands of secular German and scientific modernity and Jewish and othe traditions.