In any list of the most influential Jews of not only recent history but of all time, Sigmund Freud must rank near the top. Freud was (in Paul Johnson’s words in A History of the Jews) “the greatest of all Jewish innovators.” There is much truth to Johnson’s characterization. Freud’s colleague and personal propagandist Ernest Jones (in his three-volume biography of the Viennese psychoanalyst) also noted the huge influence the founder of psychoanalysis had on many fields. To name but a few, Jones identified Freud’s impact on clinical psychiatry, biology, anthropology, sociology, religion, the occult, art, literature, psychology, education, and criminology.
There are few figures in history that have had so wide (and controversial) an effect.Freud is commonly known as the father of psychoanalytic theory and practice. He was not the first psychologist, yet he is the first person people discuss when they think about the diseases of the mind. Many of his theories were attacked when first introduced, and many are still disputed, others derided as imaginative but useless. Freud’s importance rests securely, however, in the quality of his thought, not just for the provocative nature of many of his theories. His ideas changed the way people think about the unconscious. Before him, most people thought hysteria was caused by demons.Because of Freud, people are now more understanding about mental illness.
Prior to his discoveries, the mentally ill were thrown into insane asylums without hope of recovery. Despite lingering prejudice (and fear), many recognize psychological disorders today as simply another sickness, curable through therapy. Selecting the correct method of therapy has stirred the greatest controversy. Many scientists have questioned the medical basis of Freud’s theories. They are uncomfortable both with his psychoanalytic methods (which often take a long time to work) and with Freud’s basic assumptions. Still, his ideas continue to work their influence.Freud was born in the town of Freiberg, Moravia, then a district of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
His earliest memories were of a prosperous home. When Sigmund was four years old, however, his father lost his wool merchant business and the family moved to Vienna and into a period of great poverty. Freud would never forget the feelings of privation he suffered in his youth.His family members were not practicing Jews. Despite a fascination and respect for Jewish history and the character of his people, Freud was never observant. Yet he refused to convert, finding in his Jewish roots a strength to be different.
When he entered the University of Vienna, Freud was shocked to encounter the anti-Semitism of both students and faculty. Their racial hatred, sometimes muted, sometimes overt, both sensitized and energized him. He recalled later with some bitterness a story his father told him when he was ten. The young Jakob Freud was once walking well-dressed through the streets of Vienna, and suddenly his new fur cap was knocked off his head by a Christian thug shouting, “Jew! Get off the pavement.” Jakob walked quietly into the street, picked up his hat, and went away without protest. Sigmund was outraged by his father’s humiliation, referring to the story in traumatic terms.
Freud’s rage over the incident fueled his desire to fight for his beliefs.A top student, Freud studied medicine with a particular fascination for the physical sciences. Not sure what he wanted to do, other than somehow study the human condition, he worked first as a researcher at a physiological institute, then, desperate to earn a better living, joined the staff of Vienna General Hospital. While working in the clinics of the hospital, Freud continued to conduct research. During this period he tinkered with the use of narcotics such as cocaine, becoming addicted, then suffering withdrawal. With his career sullied by rumors of his addiction, Freud left the hospital for studies with Jean Charcot, a prominent French neurologist in Paris. During this period he wrote over twenty articles on the nervous system.
When he returned to Vienna, reacting to the need to support his new wife, Martha Bernays, Freud set up a private practice as a neuropathologist. He began to work with another Jewish doctor, Josef Breuer, fourteen years his senior, who was conducting experiments in the treatment of hysteria through hypnosis. Together they attempted to treat a young woman by trying to purge her of her worst memories. In their classic text Studies in Hysteria, published in 1895, Breuer and Freud dubbed her “Anna O.” (Her real name was Bertha Pappenheim, and she would later do much to establish early German social welfare organizations.) Their cathartic method was a primitive precursor of later psychoanalytic techniques, but they attempted to show “Anna O.” that her repression of feelings and hysterical state were the result of a defense mechanism hiding the truth from herself.
Working from Breuer’s lead, Freud began to develop theories of sexuality that the older physician could not accept. Their friendship ended bitterly. This was to be the first of several important friendships Freud would enjoy, then angrily end over philosophical disagreements (Wilhelm Fliess, Carl Jung, and Alfred Adler, to name the three most famous). Freud acted like a biblical prophet when his ideas were questioned, surrounding himself with followers like a Hasidic rebbe uttering Talmudic wisdom to disciples hanging on every word.In 1900 Freud published arguably his greatest book, certainly his most influential. The Interpretation of Dreams revealed that people act without being fully conscious of their desires. By analyzing dreams, unconscious thoughts hidden from awareness can be uncovered and deciphered.
Freud proposed new theories about what causes the way people feel and act. Regression, repression, displacement, transfers of emotional reactions, were all psychological states he first acknowledged. Freud made us think differently about the way we view ourselves and the words we use to describe those thoughts.With Sigmund Freud, a whole new vocabulary entered common language. Slips of the tongue (“Freudian slips”), infantile sexuality, sexual drive, reaction formations, the id, the ego, the superego, libido, Oedipus complex, inhibitions, phallic symbols, death wish, pleasure-pain principle, gratification, reality principle, attraction and repulsion, sublimation, anxiety avoidance, behavior modification, metapsychology—are all terms he coined in a treasury of psychological writings. He often used the lives of great men to prove his psychoanalytic theories.
In particular, Freud was fascinated with the lives of Moses, Leonardo da Vinci, and William Shakespeare. Freud posited the theory that Moses was really an Egyptian and the true founder of Judaism (not Abraham). According to Freud, Moses took an Egyptian theory of monotheism and preached it to Jewish slaves. In a great confusion the Jews murdered Moses, carrying with them to this day an unconscious, never-ending guilt. Jews and non-Jews vilified Freud for his Moses tale, ignoring its implications for humanity.
Freud was not only a path-breaking scientist, but also a great literary stylist. A revolutionary thinker, he was quite conservative in his artistic tastes, his personal habits rigid (strict schedules caring for patients, conducting research, walking, meeting with his beloved B’nai B’rith) and comfortably middle-class. Assimilated though he was, Freud was a proud and defiant Jew, never capitulating to the Nazis after the Anschluss. On exiting Vienna in 1938 for London, in great pain from the jaw cancer that would kill him a year later and forced to make a positive public statement about his treatment by the Nazis, Freud wrote, “Ich kann die Gestapo jedermann auf das beste empfehlen” (“I can highly recommend the Gestapo to all”). Freud’s own life proved the dual nature of the psychological man.