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. (Citation1925, 7–8)
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.