By Alex Gordon
HAIFA, Israel — Ernst Jones, one of Sigmund Freud’s few non-Jewish students, wrote in an obituary that his teacher’s achievements would not have been possible without his national characteristics, among them “a special national insight” and “a skeptical attitude toward illusions and deception.” Psychoanalysis shaped a new way of thinking that made important contributions to psychology, medicine, philosophy and literature. Jews are proud of Freud, but Freud was not always proud of Jews. In 1926, in a letter to the leaders of the Jewish organization B’nai B’rith, he wrote: “I was not bound to Jewry either by faith or by national pride, because I have always been a non-believer and was brought up without religion, although not without respect for the requirements of human culture called ‘ethical’. I have always tried to suppress national enthusiasm because I considered it pernicious and unjust, and I was frightened by the cautionary example of the peoples among whom we Jews live.”
Freud’s attacks on religion, which he called a neurosis in Totem and Taboo, crystallized into an attack on Judaism by secularizing Moses and turning him into an Egyptian who sought the people to impose the monotheistic religion of Pharaoh Ehnaton on them. In 1933 Freud began writing a book called A Man Called Moses (later the title was Moses and Monotheism). The book contained the assertion that the Jews killed Moses the Egyptian in protest against his rigid moral demands. The murder of the “father” was a typical element of Freud’s teachings, which he chose to apply to an analysis of Jewish history.
Freud saw himself as the new Moses, the discoverer of the “Promised Land” – the unconscious life of mankind. He believed that, like Moses, he was introducing humanity to the promised land – the promised land of the unexplored and misunderstood unconscious, which completely possessed man and humanity and whose unraveling would lead humanity out of mental slavery, as Moses had led the Jews out of Egyptian slavery. Freud rivaled Moses in saying that the founder of the Jewish religion haunted him for years as “an unexiled ghost.” And to free himself from the “ghost,” he wrote this fantasy book in which he cited an ill-founded hypothesis about Moses’ origins. It was published at one of the most difficult moments of Jewish life – in 1939 – and horrified many Jews and even the author himself (the first two parts of the book were published in 1937 in Austria, and the third in 1939 in England). In this book Freud, without repeating Nietzsche’s dictum “God is dead,” made the biblical account of the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt a secular account of a non-Jewish and non-divine origin. He explains Moses’ ideas and actions in a rational way, presenting the Tanakh in a spirit of “liberalism” and in accordance with psychoanalysis.
Moses apparently won Freud over with his rationality. He was attracted by the assertion that God must have no name or appearance. This prohibition was at first a precaution against the tricks of magicians and sorcerers (all magic is based on incantations and the utterance of names, meaningless in the case of the concept of an invisible, nameless God). It meant the subjugation of sense sensations to an abstract idea. It was the victory of the spirit over the senses that Freud himself actually sought in his method of treatment. Through Moses’ injunction, God was elevated to the highest level of spirituality. The progress of spirituality undoubtedly led to an increase in human self-confidence, to the fact that the Jews were beginning to feel superior to the Gentiles, who remained at the mercy of the immediate senses.
By “dematerializing” God, Moses fostered in the Jews a tendency toward the spiritual. The later failures of the Jews taught them to value their religious books as their greatest spiritual possessions. Since then, the Book and its study have remained the only thing that has sustained the unity of a dispersed people. Books are more important than buildings, a lesson, according to Freud, that the Jews learned from Moses. The belief in a purely spiritual, intellectually rather than sensually comprehended God provided the Jews with a progression of spirituality and opened the way to their reverence for intellectual activity of all kinds. For Freud, Moses’ approach was the quintessential victory of reason.
Freud was an atheist who founded the religion of psychoanalysis. He was the founder of a quasi-religious psychoanalytic movement and the leader of a secret society intolerant of any opposition. He expelled from the “movement” anyone who in any way opposed him. He fought the “heretics,” that is, the disciples and colleagues who had first been his supporters and then expressed disagreement with the “cult of the leader’s personality”. The Viennese music critic Max Graf said that the atmosphere in the circles of Freud’s disciples was like the “making of a religion.” When Alfred Adler, one of the most prominent disciples of the creator of psychoanalysis, dared to criticize Freud, he was expelled. Graf describes the event as follows: “It was a trial and an accusation of heresy. […] Freud as head of the church banished Adler; he excommunicated him from the official church.” In his approach to the Jewish problem, however, Freud behaved like a liberal who looked down on tradition, religion and nation and regarded all these values as prejudices.
Freud was an atheist, did not recognize Jewish rituals, and none of his three sons were circumcised, yet in an interview in 1935 he stated, “I have always remained faithful to my people and have not pretended to be something I am not: a Jew from Moravia whose parents are from Austrian Galicia.” In spite of this statement, Freud distanced himself from his Jewish ancestors from Galicia, leading the typical German way of life of his cultural compatriots. This “liberal” worldview was also transferred by Freud to his attitude toward the Promised Land.
On January 28, 1934, Freud wrote from Vienna to Haifa to the writer Arnold Zweig: “It has now become known to me that you have been cured of your unrequited love for the imaginary country of your fathers. Such enthusiasm does not suit a man of our type.” Europe was burning in the fire of Nazism, Freud was doomed to flee Austria because of his Jewishness, but, in his view, a Jewish intellectual was not fit to be a nationally-minded man, but a neutral cosmopolitan. Freud called the Land of Israel “the imaginary country of the fathers.” He considered Austria, from which he was forced to flee five years later, to be his real fatherland. Jones, a student and friend of Freud’s who flew from London to Vienna, tried to persuade him to leave the Nazi-ruled country. The scientist replied, “Austria is my home. […] I cannot leave my home country. It would be like a soldier deserting his post.” In June 1938, Freud and his family left Vienna. They settled in London, where the scientist lived until his death on August 25, 1939.
Freud excluded the significance of his own fatherland for the Jews, with disdain for national culture and tradition. The state of Israel had not yet been formed, but for Freud it was already imaginary. According to Freud, Europe-Austria, in which the real, not imaginary, Shoah of the European Jews matures, is the land of the fathers; in Freud, Moses is ̶ an imaginary Jew. The scholar was frightened by the onslaught of Nazism, but did not realize the extent of its danger to the Jewish people. When he learned in 1933 that the Nazis in Berlin were publicly burning his books, he uttered: “What progress! In the Middle Ages they would have burned me myself, but now they are content to burn my books. He did not realize that it would come to the burning of the Jews.” He did not live to see the extermination of his four sisters in the Nazi camps.
Freud identified with Moses, the creator of the people he belonged to and the religion he did not recognize. Severely ill and preparing to stand before a God he did not believe in, he longed for immortal glory, the glory of Moses. He respected Moses, worshipped him, though he expressed doubts about his historical existence. Freud carried a new kind of knowledge of humanity, Moses carried not only a new religion but also the highest spirituality. The spiritual height of Moses’ religion fascinated Freud, a man who had spent his life trying to understand the spiritual and psychic in man by the quite material method of psychoanalysis he had created. Like Moses, Freud wanted to be the creator of a new people, a people without neuroses and complexes, or a people capable of overcoming neuroses and complexes. However, he belonged to a people with a large number of complexes, among which was the desire to shed the weight of Jewishness. One of Freud’s methods of dealing with Jewish complexes, like Marx’s, was secular messianism. In his subconscious, he felt himself to be the Messiah, and perhaps this was the neurosis of his psychoanalytic religion.
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Alex Gordon is a native of Kiev, Ukraine, and graduate of the Kiev State University and Haifa Technion (Doctor of Science, 1984). Immigrated to Israel in 1979. Full Professor (Emeritus) of Physics in the Faculty of Natural Sciences at the University of Haifa and at Oranim, the Academic College of Education. Author of 9 books and about 600 articles in paper and online, was published in 79 journals in 14 countries in Russian, Hebrew, English, French, and German.