Hidden in Plain Sight: Freud's Jewish Identity Revisited

Abstract

Using a contextualizing, integrative approach, the author looks at aspects of Freud's life and the multiple levels of influence in terms of his theories. While keeping a broad overview of the historical and cultural life for Jews in 19th-century Europe, including the effects of anti-Semitism, emancipation, and the enlightenment movement, the author intertwines Freud's parents' lives and personalities as they played out in Freud's own development and in his theories. The author believes that Freud formed a particular repression linking Jewishness, passivity, femininity, and religion while elevating in his theories masculinity, activity, science, and atheism. The author specifically focuses on Freud's theories of the Unconscious and the oedipal complex as particularly representative of a split between his own Jewish home and the German high culture he was educated within. Drawing on literature within psychoanalysis and the disciplines of Jewish studies and broad cultural history, the author concludes that Freud's rejection of certain parts of his own life are embedded within his theory when considered from a multiply-layered point of view.