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

Publisher: Wiley Country of Publication: United States NLM ID: 18020010R Publication Model: Print-Electronic Cited Medium: Internet ISSN: 1520-6696 (Electronic) Linking ISSN: 00225061 NLM ISO Abbreviation: J Hist Behav Sci Subsets: MEDLINE

Publication: New York : Wiley
Original Publication: [Brandon, Vt.]

Judaism* ; Psychoanalysis*/history; Humans ; Freudian Theory/history ; Jews ; Psychoanalytic Theory

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.
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Keywords: Sigmund Freud; history of ideas; history of psychoanalysis; history of psychotherapy; psychology and Judaism; psychology and religion

Date Created: 20231210 Date Completed: 20240124 Latest Revision: 20240124

20240124

10.1002/jhbs.22293

38071451