Hate and the ‘Jewish Science’ Anti-Semitism, Nazism and Psychoanalysis Stephen Frosh Hate and the ‘Jewish Science’ Also by Stephen Frosh AFTER WORDS: The Personal in Gender, Culture and Psychotherapy CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE (Second Edition) (with Danya Glaser) CRITICAL NARRATIVE ANALYSIS IN PSYCHOLOGY: A Guide to Practice (with Peter Emerson) FOR AND AGAINST PSYCHOANALYSIS KEY CONCEPTS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS IDENTITY CRISIS: Modernity, Psychoanalysis and the Self PSYCHOANALYSIS AND PSYCHOLOGY: Minding the Gap THE POLITICS OF MENTAL HEALTH (with Ragnhild Banton and others) THE POLITICS OF PSYCHOANALYSIS: An Introduction to Freudian and Post-Freudian Theory (Second Edition) PSYCHOANALYSIS IN CONTEXTS (with Anthony Elliot) SEXUAL DIFFERENCE: Masculinity and Psychoanalysis YOUNG MASCULINITIES: Understanding Boys in Contemporary Society (with Ann Phoenix and Rob Pattman) Hate and the ‘Jewish Science’ Anti-Semitism, Nazism and Psychoanalysis Stephen Frosh © Stephen Frosh 2005 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2005 978-1-4039-2170-3 All rights reserved. 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A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 Contents Acknowledgements vi Introduction 1 Part I: Freud, Jews and Anti-Semitism Chapter 1 Freud’s Jewish Identity 9 Chapter 2 A Hostile World: Facing Anti-Semitism 33 Part II: Nazism and the ‘Jewish Science’ Chapter 3 Psychoanalysis, Nazism and ‘Jewish Science’ 63 Chapter 4 A Non-Jewish Psychoanalysis 91 Chapter 5 The Repressed Returns 122 Part III: Anti-Semitism and the Other Chapter 6 Psychoanalysis of Anti-Semitism I: A Christian Disease? 151 Chapter 7 Psychoanalysis of Anti-Semitism II: Splitting and Narcissism 169 Chapter 8 The Other 198 References 217 Index 222 v Acknowledgements I would like to thank the Limmud organisation for stimulating my thoughts on Freud and Jewish identity, with which the project that turned into this book began. I am grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for providing me with a Research Fellowship in 2003–4 to support the writing of the book. Some parts of this book have appeared in earlier and shorter versions in the following journal articles. Freud, Psychoanalysis and Anti-Semitism. The Psychoanalytic Review, 91 (2004), 309–330 (Permission for reprinting granted by The Psychoanalytic Reviewand the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis.) Psychoanalysis, Nazism and ‘Jewish Science’. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 84 (2003), 1315–1332. The Other American Imago, 59 (2002), 389–407. vi Introduction It has sometimes been suggested that books on psychoanalysis, rather than being shelved in psychology sections in bookshops and libraries, should instead be listed under ‘Jewish Studies’. This is not quite as whimsical as it might seem: not only have psychoanalysts often been Jewish, but those who are not Jewish are frequently thought of as if they were. In addition, it can be argued that psychoanalysis is heavily indebted to, and informed by, ‘Jewish’ perspectives, attitudes, ethics and methodological approaches. Starting as it did with Freud, its origins were deeply embedded in the secular Jewish culture of the late nineteenth century, at a time in Europe when Jewish and other iden- tities were being debated and were undergoing radical change. Anti- Semitism was a powerful political and cultural force, science was struggling with religion, romanticism was having its nostalgic last gasp, and the revolutionary movements of the twentieth century – in pol- itics, science and the arts – were being born. The Jews were both inside and outside Western society: newly ‘emancipated’ and able to claim influential positions, yet still victims of social exclusion, anti-Semitic populism and new forms of ‘racial’ anti-Semitism that were gradually replacing the old Christian anti-Judaism. Psychoanalysis emerged from this background as one significant expression of the ‘Jewish mind’, reflecting and analysing Western civil- isation, revealing its irrational and intense underside. Subsequently, psychoanalysis has become broader in its appeal and its personnel, yet there is still an irresistible pull towards associating it with Jews and Jewish culture, due partly to an inward-lookingness and fascination with psychological ‘depths’ that is often thought of as character- istically Jewish. In some ways this has been to psychoanalysis’ advan- tage, giving it energy and a ready-made sense of collective and cultural 1 2 Hate and the ‘Jewish Science’ identity; in other ways, the association between psychoanalysis and Jewishness has been costly. In particular, anti-Semitism has infiltrated attitudes towards psychoanalysis, and there have been times when the denigration of psychoanalysis as ‘Jewish science’ has been murderously dangerous. This book explores the intimate relationship between Jewish iden- tity, psychoanalysis and anti-Semitism through what might be thought of as three ‘case studies’. The first of these, as is common in books on psychoanalysis, is concerned with Freud himself. Freud was absolutely antagonistic to religion, including Judaism, and at times ambivalent towards Jews. However, he not only acknowledged the influence of his Jewish background on his work, but he also asserted or even celebrated the significance of his Jewish identity and his continuing links with the Jewish people – arguably, increasingly so as he got older. Much of psychoanalysis was first outlined to Jewish audiences; the brilliant examples of dreams and jokes peppering Freud’s early psychoanalytic writings were largely Jewish in content and context; and in old age he wrote a major study on the theme of the origins of Judaism. His friends and colleagues were Jews; his way of thinking was Jewish, albeit heavily inflected with European cultural values; and in the end his fate – to be exiled from his homeland as a refugee from Nazism – was Jewish. As many historians of culture have shown, Freud’s Jewish connec- tions were neither artificial nor trivial. Freud’s own account of the meaning of his Jewish identity centred on three things: an emotional but somewhat inexplicable attachment to, and identification with, Jews and (to a lesser extent) Judaism; a sense of the value of being sufficiently ‘outside’ Western culture to gain analytic distance from it; and an appreciation of the extensive nature and effects of anti- Semitism. These three aspects of Jewish identity are discussed in Part I of this book, with the first chapter focusing on establishing the significance to Freud of his Jewishness and on his understanding of its emotional hold, whilst the second looks at his ideas on anti-Semitism, particularly as formulated in the book Moses and Monotheism. What emerges from this material is a view of psychoanalysis as founded on both a positive valuation of the critical vision that comes from being slightly outside the host culture, and as a response to – yet also a ‘carrier’ of – the hostility of that culture towards its outsiders, notably embodied in the figure of the Jew. If the Jewish heritage of psychoanalysis was something towards which Freud himself felt ambivalence, it is not surprising that this Introduction 3 feeling was shared by other early psychoanalysts, Jewish and non- Jewish alike. Psychoanalysis strove to be a neutral science yet patently demonstrated that its origins lay in a very specific set of historical and social circumstances, and that these had a continuing impact on its theories and practices. For Jewish analysts, living in a context in which anti-Semitism was one of the most powerful political ideologies, and in which assimilation to the surrounding culture was a tempting aspira- tion for Jews as a way to escape it, this meant having to deal with pro- fessional investments in something they might have been trying to leave behind. For non-Jewish analysts, the situation was even more stark: in a society in which to be a Jew was to be heavily derogated, they chose to identify themselves with a discipline invented by a Jew and dominated by Jews; they found themselves being analysed and trained by Jews; and they discovered that they were seen more-or-less as Jews by much of the surrounding culture. For them, being adherents of ‘Jewish science’ would always have some uncomfortable aspects; but once the external situation became one in which it could endanger their careers and possibly their lives, they were faced with a set of very difficult moral and practical choices. The second ‘case study’, in Part II of this book, explores what hap- pened when the psychoanalytic movement was brutally faced with the requirement to defend or repudiate its Jewish identity. Psychoanalysis grew up in German-speaking Europe and it was there that it met its great political adversary, Nazism. After the Second World War, the story of what happened was largely buried for about forty years, until a succession of historical ‘recoveries’ and a new generation of German analysts re-examined it. Historical work on the fate of psychoanalysis in the Third Reich has continued to reveal important information, without resolving all the controversies about the significance of the events in question for psychoanalysis itself and for a broader under- standing of what can happen when organisations are faced with the demand to collaborate or die – a demand that, of course, is all-too- often made of individuals in such circumstances as well. In Germany, it is now clear, the decision was made to collaborate, but how and why this happened and the impact of this decision after the war is a compli- cated tale. Chapters 3, 4 and 5 draw on this historical work to offer a psychosocial account of the collaborationist tendency in psychoana- lysis at that time, in particular how it expressed not only personal fears and ambitions and misguided strategies, but also something about anti-Semitism on a psychological and political level. What becomes apparent from this material is that the way German psychoanalysis