Vocation of Exile: Psychoanalysis and Judaism

Abstract

This paper aims to consider the signs of Judaism in Psychoanalysis, grounded in the way Freud practiced and demonstrated his Jewishness, in the context of the Viennese Diaspora, from his exile in London until the end of his life and conclusion of his work. Considering what the founder of psychoanalysis has recognized in Judaism as important to his affective and intellectual education, according to his own statements, it tries to demonstrate that the “roots” of errantry, nomadism and exile which single out the history of Jewish people, resound as an echo in the Freudian discovery. Our hypothesis is that what makes up the Jewishness of Freud himself, causing him to exile himself from the Jewish religious majority, as well as the identifications given by other people about his Jewish circumstance, was manifested together with the invention of Psychoanalysis, the major expression of his making up a Jewish devenir.