The Many Faces of Exile of a "Jew Without God": The Paternal Inheritance of Sigmund Freud

Abstract

In his self-portrayal Selbstdarstellung (2011 [1924]), Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) underlines the Jewish origin and the exodus that characterizes his family: the road that leads to Vienna and later ends in London. The signs of exile in Freud's writings strengthen the connection to Judaism, an indication of the paternal inheritance. The episode “Cap in the Mud”, described in Interpretation of Dreams (2019 [1900]) as the humiliation of Freud's father Jacob seen through the eyes of a child who aspired to dreams of greatness, as well as the gift of the Old Testament received from his father (Derrida 2001; Yerushalmi 1992), both open doors to other central issues in Freudian theories. The father, as well as his Jewish condition (Fuks 2000), refer to Freud's reflections on religion, in particular in the works Totem & Taboo (2012 [1913]), The Future of an Illusion (2014 [1927]), and Moses and Monotheism (2018 [1939]). Of these, Freud's Moses is the last text whose roots are related to the Jewish people. Other themes, such as anti-Semitism, the advantages of the “universalist theses” of Jewish intellectuality, (Said 2004), and isolation and resistance (Gay 1990), are equally important for psychoanalytic studies. To be a Jew means to be The Other and consequently to cross the psychoanalytic (unknown / non-) territory: the territory of the drive, of listening to hysterics, of children´s sexuality, of the insistence on neurosis, of the value of dreams.