Psychoanalysis and social violence: Civilization and Its Discontents revisited

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

1 I would also point out the experience that Freud himself had of being in a minority throughout his life, in his condition of a Jewish man, in a process of geographical and social dislocation. This is clear in his autobiographical notes:

I was born on May 6th, 1856, at Freiberg in Moravia, a small town in what is now Czechoslovakia. My parents were Jews, and I have remained a Jew myself. I have reason to believe that my father’s family were settled for a long time on the Rhine (at Cologne), that, as a result of a persecution of the Jews during the fourteenth or fifteenth century, they fled eastwards, and that, in the course of the nineteenth century, they migrated back from Lithuania through Galicia into German Austria. When I was a child of four, I came to Vienna, and I went through the whole of my education there. At the ‘Gymnasium’ [Grammar School] I was at the top of my class for seven years … My deep engrossment in the Bible story (almost as soon as I had learnt the art of reading) had, as I recognized much later, an enduring effect upon the direction of my interest. (1925, 7–8)

It is known that Amalie, Freud’s mother, communicated with her children in Yiddish only (Robert, 1974) and that Freud was therefore fluent in this language. Many of the jokes that he refers to come from the lexicon of Yiddish jokes. It was only in 1867 that Jews were awarded equality before the law in Austria, so a few years earlier Freud would not have been able to go to medical school. Even so, the numerus clausus quota for Jews to be appointed as professors at the university was 2%. In the scientific discourse of the time, Jews defined what Aryans were not (Fuks 2000; Gilman, 1995). Although Freud escaped to London thanks to Ernest Jones and to Princess Bonaparte, two of his sisters were taken and killed in Theresienstadt.

2 Reprinted by permission of Sheep Meadow Press.

3 It has been argued that the period of Terror after the French revolution may be viewed an example of the dangers of a society left in the hands of the brothers, without paternal authority.