The Search for Sigmund Freud’s Hidden Jewishness

Almost from the moment Sigmund Freud rose to fame in Europe, he encountered fellow Jews who were curious about the extent and nature of his Jewish upbringing, education, and commitments, and whether Jewish religious text shaped his ideas about psychoanalysis. Since his death, numerous books have been written trying to answer these questions. Naomi Seidman—who herself believes that such concepts as sublimation have clear talmudic antecedents—poses a slightly different question: why do Jews care so much about whether Freud’s ideas had a Jewish genealogy? In her forthcoming book, she finds a partial answer to this question in the first Hebrew and Yiddish translations of Freud’s work, which mined traditional religious vocabulary to find equivalents for such terms as id and psyche. She discusses her research with J.J. Kimche. (Audio, 72 minutes.)