The Myth of Psychotherapy.
Mental Healing as Religion, Rhetoric, and Repression.
by Thomas Szasz
Anchor Press/Doubleday, Garden City, New York, 1978

FROM A CHAPTER ENTITLED:

SIGMUND FREUD: THE JEWISH AVENGER
(p. 138-157)

p. 138-139, "Freud's great-grandfather was Rabbi Ephraim Freud, and his grandfather was Rabbi Schlomo Freud ... Freud himself was born a Jew, was given the name Schlomo after his grandfather, and remained a Jew. The inconsistency between Freud's passionate antireligious tirades and his profound commitment to Jewishness significantly highlights an important aspect of Freud's personality and productions, namely his anti-Gentilism. The popular image of Freud as an enlightened, emancipated, irreligious person who, with the aid of psychoanalysis, 'discovered' that religion is a mental illness is pure fiction ... [Biographer Ernest] Jones successfully merchandised it, with the results that, although the facts of Freud's personal sense of Jewishness and and his anti-Gentilism are duly recorded, mainly in his letters, the significance of these facts somehow disappears in Jones's treatment of them."

p. 139, "Freud was, throughout his life, a proud, chauvinistic, even vengeful Jew."

p. 139, "Freud believed that anti-Semitism was practically ubiquitous in either latent or manifest form; the broad masses in England were anti-Semitic, 'as everywhere'; he was of the opinion that the book on Moses would anger the Jews; he expressed a love of Hebrew and Yiddish, according to Freud's son; he refused to accept royalties on Hebrew and Yiddish translations of his work; he was sympathetic to Zionism from the first days of the movement and was acquainted with and respected Herzl; he had once sent Herzl a copy of one of his works with a personal dedication; Freud's son was a member of the Kadimah, a Zionist organization, and Freud himself was an honorary member in it." -- David Bakan [Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition; Boston, Beacon, 1958, p. 49]

p. 139-140, "Intensely interested in religion and religious studies, Freud indulged in countless speculations about these subjects. In many of these he simply followed his central formula -- which was to become the trick of the psychoanalytic trade -- namely, that everything is something other than what it seems to be or than what the authorities say it is. Oedipus was not a king but a complex; Leonardo was not a heroic painter but a homosexual pervert; Moses was not a Jew, but an Egyptian. It is significant, in this connection, that Freud was satisfied with transforming the founder of his own religion from a Jew into an Egyptian; he did not suggest that Moses was mad. That was an 'interpretation' Freud reserved for patients, dissident colleagues, and Jesus. 'Once in a conversation on the topic [of religion],' Jones relates, 'Freud remarked to me that Jesus could even have been 'an ordinary deluded creature.'"

p. 140, "There is, in short, nothing scientific about Freud's hostility to established religion, though he tries hard to pretend that there is."

p. 142, "One might think that a man who writes about religion as Freud did in The Future of an Illusion and elsewhere would declare himself an atheist or agnostic. Not so. In his Autobiographical Study, Freud declares: 'My parents were Jews, and I have remained a Jew myself.'"

p. 143, "Does deciding that 'Jewish is beautiful' imply that 'Gentile is ugly?' As we shall see, it did indeed for Freud."

p. 143, "In 1882, when Freud is twenty-six, he reaffirms his religious ties: 'And as for us,' he writes his fiancee, 'this is what I believe: even if the form wherein the old Jews were happy no longer offers us any shelter, something of the core, of this meaningful and life-affirming Judaism will not be absent from our home.' From his youth onward, Freud sought strength from his identification with Judaism. In it, he found not only strength but also solace from solitude and a historical-religious transcendence. For example, when in 1895 he felt increasingly isolated from his medical colleagues, he joined the B'nai B'rith Society, a Jewish fraternal organization, to which he belonged for the rest of his life"

p. 143, On July 20, 1908, Freud writes to Abraham: 'On the whole it is easier for us Jews, as we lack the mystical element.' Three days later, he writes: 'May I say that it is consanguineous Jewish traits that attracts me to you? We understand each other ...I nurse a suspicion that the suppressed anti-Semitism of the Swiss that spares me is deflected in reinforced form upon you.' On October 11, he picks up the same theme: 'Just because I get on most easily with you (and also with our colleague Ferenczi of Budapest), I feel it incumbent upon me not to concede too much to racial preference and therefore neglect that more alien Aryan [Karl Jung].'"

p. 144, "Freud's references to Jewishness, his own or his interlocutor's, figure prominently in much of his correspondence."

p. 144, "In a letter to Barbara Low, written in English in 1936, Freud remarks: 'I know that you have not thought that the death of your brother-in-law David [Eder, a psychoanalyst] had left me untroubled, because I had not written at once ... Eder belonged to the people one loves without having to trouble about them ... We were both Jews and knew of each other that we carried that miraculous thing in common, which -- inaccessible to any analysis so far -- makes the Jew.'" As we saw earlier -- in his letter to Abraham in 1908 -- when Freud wants to extol Jews as better fitted for science than Christians, he boasts that 'we [Jews] lack the mystical element.' In this letter to Barbara Low, however, he boasts that being a Jew is something 'miraculous.' The phrase 'inaccessible to analysis' is also worth remarking on. It was one of Freud's favorite terminological inventions, dividing the world into two classes in terms of his own 'science' -- things accessible to analysis and things inaccessible to analysis. Into the latter category he placed not only his own and Eder's 'miraculous' Jewishness, but also the 'genius' of those he respected (the genius of those he didn't respect being reduced, by 'analysis,' to its psychopathological roots.)"

p. 145, "Freud's letter to Enrico Morselli, an Italian author who had sent him a book critical of psychoanalysis, is also of interest in this connection. 'I noticed with regret,' writes Freud, 'that you cannot accept our youthful science without great reservations ... But your brief pro-Zionist pamphlet on the Zionist question I was able to read without any mixed feelings, with unreserved approval ... I am not sure that your opinion which looks upon psychoanalysis as a direct product of the Jewish mind is correct, but if it is, I wouldn't be ashamed. Although I have been alienated from the religion of my forebears for a long time, I have never lost the feeling of solidarity with my people and realize with satisfaction that you call yourself a pupil of a man of my race -- Lombroso.' There are at least two things in this letter that deserve special attention. In the first place, Freud's assertion that he was alienated from the Jewish religion was simply not true; as we saw, his alienation from it was limited simply to his not practicing most of its rituals -- a very different thing. In the second place, why was Freud so proud of Lombroso's Jewishness? Was Lombroso a good man? Cesare Lombroso (1836-1909) was a pioneer forensic psychiatrist whose claim to fame rested on his supposedly scientific psychiatric-genetic 'discovery' that criminals were 'degenerates' who could be identified by certain physical stigma of 'atavism.' His views thus presage those of Nazi geneticists and Soviet psychiatrists, hardly something to be proud of."

p. 145, "Besides testifying to Freud's pride in his Jewishness -- and to his essential, however unformalistic, religiosity -- these examples, of which many more could be included, also illustrate his consistent duplicity with respect to the relations between psychoanalysis and Judaism. In print and in public, Freud insists, with the voice of the wounded savant, that psychoanalysis is a science like any other and has nothing to do with Jewishness. In person and in private, however, he identifies psychoanalysis, with the voice of the prophet militant, as a Jewish creation and possession."

p. 146-147, "One of Freud's most powerful motives in life was the desire to inflict vengeance on Christianity for its traditional anti-Semitism. This idea has been suggested by Freud himself, and alluded to by others. In The Interpretation of Dreams, where Freud tells us so much about himself, he relates one of his dreams in which he is in Rome. To explain it, he offers the following episode about his childhood:

'I had actually been following in Hannibal's footsteps. Like him, I had been fated not to see Rome; and he too had moved into the Campagna when everyone had expected him in Rome. But Hannibal, whom I had come to resemble in these respects, had been the favourite hero of my later school days. Like so many boys of that age, I had sympathized in the Punic Wars not with the Roman but with the Carthaginians. And when in the higher classes I began to understand for the first time what it means to belong to an alien race, and anti-Semitic feelings among the other boys warned me that I must take up a definite position, the figure of the Semitic general rose still higher in my esteem. To my youthful mind Hannibal and Rome symbolized the conflict between the tenacity of Jewry and the organization of the Catholic Church. And the increasing importance of the effects of the anti-Semitic movement upon our emotional life helped to fix the thoughts and feeling of those early days ... At that point I was brought up against the event in my youth whose power was still being shown in all these emotions and dreams. I may have been ten or twelve years old, when my father began to take me with him on his walks and reveal to me in his talk his views upon things in the world we live in. Thus, it was on one such occasion that he told me a story to show me how much better things were now than they had been in his days. 'When I was a young man,' he said, 'I went for a walk one Saturday in the streets of your birthplace; I was well-dressed, and had a new fur cap on my head. A Christian came up to me and with a single blow knocked off my cap into the mud and shouted: 'Jew! get off the pavement!' 'And what did you do?' I asked. 'I went into the roadway and picked up my cap,' was his quiet reply. This struck me as unheroic conduct on the part of the big, strong man who was holding the little boy by the hand. I contrasted this situation with another which fitted my feelings better: the scene in which Hannibal's father, Hamilcar Barca, made his boy swear before the household altar to take vengeance on the Romans. Ever since that time, Hannibal had had a place in my phantasies.'

(p. 147-148) "Hannibal, the African -- whom Freud calls a 'Semite' -- takes vengeance on the Romans who conquered and humiliated the Carthaginians. Freud, the Semite, takes vengeance on the Christians who conquered and humiliated the Jews. Hannibal was tenacious and had a secret weapon: elephants. Freud, too, was tenacious, and he, too, had a secret weapon: psychoanalysis. Hannibal's elephants terrorized his enemies whom the animals then trampled to death. Freud's psychoanalysis terrorized his enemies whom his 'interpretations' then degraded into the carriers of despicable diseases. The story of Freud's life and the story of psychoanalysis in his lifetime are variations on the theme of justified vengeance ... Freud-Hannibal as "Semitic general' would avenge his feeble father against Rome, a Rome that symbolized 'the organization of the Catholic Church' and the Habsburg regime that supported it. This is an extremely persuasive interpretation which, although it deflects some of Freud's animus against the Gentiles to his father, does not negate the pervasive anti-Christian animus behind much of the Freudian opus."

p. 148-149, "It does not seem far-fetched to suggest,' [Stanley Rothman and Phillip Isenberg] write, 'that with the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams Freud felt that he had weakened if not fully conquered the Catholic Church and had thus succeeded in doing what his father had feared to do.' Rothman and Isenberg adduce much additional evidence to support their thesis concerning Freud's 'Jewish marginality' as the reason for his disaffection with the he Christian world in which he lived. 'Is it possible, then,' they ask, 'that some of the motives associated with Freud's discovery of psychoanalysis had their sources in the same drives which led other Jews to Marxism, i.e., the desire to end marginality by undermining the basis of the dominant culture?' They answer this somewhat rhetorical question affirmatively, though cautiously: 'There is at least some evidence that it is and that Freud was at least partially motivated by an animus towards the Catholic Church which informed and profoundly influenced his initial discoveries.' I differ from this view only by holding that Freud was more than partially influenced by such an animus and that it influenced not only his earlier writings but all of his work.' Rothman and Isenberg note that 'Freud's successful (if symbolic) conquest of Rome' -- in The Interpretation of Dreams -- did not 'lessen his dislike for the Catholic Church ... It was in Rome, too, that Freud, some years later, put the finishing touches on Totem and Taboo, which he always regarded as one of his most important and satisfying things he had written. The volume ostensibly deals with the origins of religion. Yet it is Christian practice and ritual that are examined in terms of primitive drive and defense mechanisms."

p. 149, "Finally, Rothman and Isenbeg cite another item from Freud's correspondence that supports quite decisively the view that Freud's anti-Gentilism was a leading motive in his life. 'In 1938,' they write, 'while waiting to leave Austria for England to escape from the Nazis, he wrote to his son Ernst: 'It is high time that Ahasuerus came to rest somewhere.' He was, of course, identifying with Ahasuerus, the wandering Jew, who was compelled to wander, because he would not allow Christ to rest while the latter was carrying the cross to Calvary. It is difficult to believe that the choice of this allusion was purely accidental."

p. 149-150, "That Freud had identified himself, and privately thought of himself, as a Jewish warrior, fighting against a hostile Christian world, has thus been amply documented. What has received less attention, however, is the way Freud always portrayed his Jewish militancy, his anti-Gentilism, as a self-defence, a necessary and legitimate protection against attacks on him, as a Jew and psychoanalyst. While such self-defensive claims are sometimes factually justifiable, they must always be evaluated cautiously: most aggressors, especially the most modern ones, have claimed merely to be defending or protecting what was rightly theirs. In the case of Freud qua psychoanalyst, the claim is patently fraudulent: after all, he had to invent psychoanalysis before he could defend it. Although he was proud to assert that he created psychoanalysis when it came to claiming priority for it, he acted as if psychoanalysis had somehow always existed, as if it were merely a collection of 'facts,' when it came to responding to those who regarded its very creation as an act of aggression against their own interests and values. [Non-Jewish psychoanalyst Karl] Jung's impression of Freud's seemingly defensive vengefulness is pertinent in this connection. According to Ellenberger, Jung felt that Freud's main characteristic was bitterness, 'every word being loaded with it ... his attitude was the bitterness of the person who is entirely misunderstood, and his manners seemed to say: 'If they do not understand, they must be stamped into Hell.'"