The Riddle of Freud

Jewish Influences on his Theory of Female Sexuality

Estelle Roith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134609734
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In The Riddle of Freud Estelle Roith argues that certain important elements of Judaic culture were so integral a part of Freud's personality that they became visible in his work and especially in his attitudes to and theories of femininity. Freud's formulation of femininity, which the author contends is mistaken, is seen not as a simple error but as resulting from a complex bias in which personal and social factors are interrelated. The author proposes that the considerable ambivalence experienced by Freud about his sexual, cultural, and social identity, in which both overt and covert aspects of his Jewish culture survived, could not be surmounted by him in the case of women.

Estelle Roith describes Freud's theory of femininity and its implications for psychoanalytic theories of human development and motivation in general. She examines Freud's relationships with his women disciples and also the social and political conditions that obtained for Jews of Freud's time. Finally, her book helps illuminate the reasons for Freud's emphasis on the paternal power within the Oedipus complex. It is essential reading for psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, for students of women's issues, and all those interested in Freud's impact on contemporary Western thought.

1
The scope of the enquiry

Freud’s theories about women have proved highly controversial from the earliest days of psychoanalysis. With his insistence on penis envy as the central motivating force in the female’s development and character, he defined femininity entirely in relation to masculinity. Consequently he saw female sexuality in terms of a deficiency as opposed to assigning to it any intrinsic value of its own. Freud believed that as a result of this deficiency women tended to be intellectually handicapped, morally deficient, envious, and vain. They were also more passive and masochistic than men, had weaker sexual drives, and less self-esteem. At the same time, he emphasized the paternal power within the Oedipus complex in a way that neglected to an important extent the influence of the mother’s role in the development of the infant and young child.

The theories have aroused a great deal of opposition on various grounds. Criticism has come from different sources, including many psychoanalysts, not least because they neglect important areas of male psychology, for example that of male, or indeed female, envy of and identification with feminine attributes. Various reasons have been invoked to explain what is usually seen as a strong bias on Freud’s part.

It has been alleged that he persistently took behaviour acquired through experience, as well as sexual attributes, to be the function of biology and genetics, equating them with the respective activity and passivity of sperm and ova, penis and vagina. This attitude has been variously ascribed, by early and more recent critics, to the fact that he was a male product of patriarchal culture and, more particularly, to the fact that he was a Victorian who adhered to the popular stereotype (Horney 1924; Thompson 1941; Moulton 1974; Jahoda 1977).

Another view accusing Freud of biologism looks to his early training and starting-point in neurology and Helmholtzian physics and the need to establish for psychoanalysis the biological and physiological infrastructure that he deemed would qualify it as a ‘science’. This latter view was given some support by Freud himself at different points in his work. Ernest Jones writes that it was in the Brücke Institute in Vienna, ‘an important part indeed of that far-reaching scientific movement best known as Helmholtz’s School of Medicine’ (E.Jones 1956, vol. 1:45) that Freud spent what he termed the happiest years of his youth. ‘It was there that he developed the particular physiological framework into which he tried later to cast his discoveries in psychology’ (E.Jones 1956, vol. 1:48).

None of these arguments seems plausible when we consider the extent to which Freud was able to reject so many conventional scientific views of his day. Indeed explanations in terms of his Zeitgeist simply beg the question.

In this book I shall try to show that Freud was profoundly influenced in his views by themes and conflicts surrounding certain aspects of his Jewish consciousness which, while frequently acknowledged and affirmed, were also often repressed and denied and have not been linked by him or by others to his theories of femininity. I believe that Freud clung to what was indeed the popular, stereotypical view of women but that he did this by virtue of a powerful, unconscious need on his part that was closely related to these themes and conflicts. This factor helped determine his preferences with regard to both the data on which he focused and his resulting theories. Thus Freud’s perception of women and femininity will be seen to be a function of a complex bias in which personal, social, and cultural factors are interrelated and in which certain overt and covert elements of his culture survived.

It seems clear then that for any systematic understanding of the history of Freud’s theories of women we must take into account his familial and subcultural origins which, of course, were not those of the fin-de-siècle Viennese Christian bourgeoisie, as is so often assumed. Freud was a man of great cultivation and scholarship, a brilliant classicist and scientist, a spiritual son of Helmholtz, Brücke, and Charcot as well as Darwin and Frazer, and, he would himself have said, of Goethe and Schiller. But his first experience was that of the son of Jewish parents, both of whom were born in the kind of provincial ghetto or hamlet of Eastern Europe where Jews had lived, in the main, in isolated communities and in a state of strict religious orthodoxy for hundreds of years. Of the many studies made so far both of Freud’s background and origins and of his theories of sex and gender, none seems to have come to grips with the complex relationship between the two or to have looked at them together in any systematic way, an omission which Freud would probably have been the first to note in the case of another. The omission is one which is particularly remarkable in the case of the psychoanalytic profession since, as well as having important implications for the theories themselves, the internal relationship between the two areas—that of Freud’s Jewish origins and his theories of women—has implications for the history of the development of psychoanalysis as a whole.

First, let us review some of the studies dealing with the influences and effects of a Jewish background on Freud (and on other Jews of his time) and a few of the many interpretations of his theories of female personality. It is not intended to provide here a detailed summary of these works but merely to indicate some of the views and interpretations that have guided my reading of Freud’s texts while, at the same time, introducing the ideas central to this study.

Marthe Robert’s book, From Oedipus to Moses: Freud’s Jewish Identity, puts forward a powerful argument in favour of the Jewish influences in Freud’s background and thought. While his debts to science and to the classical and humanistic ideals of his education are apparent and acknowledged, Robert emphasizes that the primordial murdered father in Freud’s Oedipean drama was not a legendary Greek king but a gentle, unsuccessful Hasidic merchant from Galicia. She suggests that Freud’s professed disappointment and resentment concerning his father were not only to do with infantile sexual motives—that is the Oedipus complex—but also to do with his own situation of ‘perpetual material and moral insecurity’ poised as he was between cultures and communities (Robert 1977:117).

Robert finds the relationship between the Jewish ‘spirit’ and the principles of psychoanalysis to be one so intimate that the latter could, as Freud himself hinted, only have been invented by a Jew (Robert 1977:5). But it seems that it had to be an ‘irreligious Jew’, that is one who was marginal to and, to a certain crucial extent, alienated from both his Jewish roots and the wider Gentile culture. It was by means of this position that Freud was able to devise psychoanalysis and establish in the process a new and distinct order of knowledge as well as bridging the conscious and unconscious parts of the mind (Robert 1977:134).

One drawback of Robert’s affectionate and scholarly study is the insistence that Freud’s psychic drama was a consequence only of his intensely ambivalent feelings for his father. ‘Since his father was the main and perhaps the only source of his psychic difficulties, it was with his father that he had to begin’ (1977:122). I think that with this view, Robert falls victim to Freud’s own propaganda for, as I shall try to show, it was his unwillingness to confront the issues surrounding his relationship with his mother that led both to his neglect of the importance of the mother in his theoretical account of infantile development and to his subsequent failure to achieve a satisfactory theory of women.

The idea of psychoanalysis as the product of an encounter between two cultures is one that John Murray Cuddihy has explored in great depth. His thesis is that Freud’s lifework was to make sense out of the trauma experienced by Jewish intellectuals in the process of emancipation who found themselves increasingly involved in Gentile society in political, economic, and cultural spheres while remaining excluded from the social sphere. Cuddihy believes that Freudianism—like Marxism and Reform Judaism a post- Emancipation ideology—was designed to transform the ‘normative “social conflicts”’ of the awkward, modernizing Eastern European Jew into ‘cognitive, “scientific problems”’ (Cuddihy 1974:6). Psychoanalysis was concerned to show that behind the civility required by the rules of Gentile society, all men, like the uncouth upstart Jew, were pariahs since all were motivated by the untamed forces of the id. From this viewpoint, psychoanalysis is seen not only as documenting the process whereby the unsuitable affect ‘passes’ or fails to ‘pass’ the psychic censor but also in terms of the unruly Jews’ difficult domestication in the bourgeois-Christian West. Freud’s interest in the ‘discontents of civility’, Cuddihy writes, ‘preceded his concern with Civilization and its Discontents’ (1974:19).

While I find that this represents an overemphasis of the social and political factors motivating the development of Freud’s thought, Cuddihy is one of very few writers to do more than remark on the significance of the fact that the psychoanalytic sexual doctrine originated in a meeting between two cultures whose sexual ideologies differed radically from each other in their most important respects. Nothing could be further removed from the spirit of any of the Christian Romantic movements than the attitude of suspicion and cynicism with which Judaism has traditionally regarded the aesthetic ideals of courtship and love and the ascetic ideal of Christian chastity. The whole phenomenon devolves on delayed consummation, Cuddihy argues, which Freud consistently deplored (1974:69).

On the other hand, the Jewish sexual ethos has been described by Max Weber as being characterized by ‘the marked diminution of secular lyricism and especially of the erotic sublimation of sexuality’ (Weber 1964:257), whose basis he finds in the ‘naturalism of the Jewish ethical treatment of sexuality’. This, I suggest, is closely related to the ancient Jewish perception of women as spiritually and intellectually inferior. These features should be seen as important contributing factors to Freud’s sexual doctrine notwithstanding the undeniably important influence on him of classical, Romantic, and scientific currents of thought. The whole question of pleasure and the price to be paid for it by civilized man constitutes a moral as well as a physical and psychological problem that is of great doctrinal importance to Freud, and it is one that he confronts at many different levels in his individual and group psychologies and in his theories of culture. I believe that there is a difficulty on Freud’s part to comprehend eroticism in adult sexuality which is connected with a similar and closely related problem wtih the idea of pleasure. Thus there is a profound critique of romantic love embodied in his work and these attitudes, combined with his insistence on both the need for sexual gratification and the destructive potential of sexuality, are fundamental to his thought. Together they suggest that the main source of his sexual ethic lies in that of traditional Judaism.

Some of these Jewish attitudes, particularly those surrounding women and romantic love, are illuminated by Theodor Reik in his book analysing Jewish humour (Reik 1962). This is a rare account of Jewish dispositions and traits employing a classical psychoanalytic framework. Its additional value lies in the fact that it also presents, sometimes inadvertently, the viewpoint of an Eastern European male who was also a member of Freud’s circle. Reik’s accounts of Jewish attitudes to women and to romantic love and his depiction of the Jewish mother’s relationship to her son add a great deal of support to my arguments. They emphasize the need—particularly in relation to what we know about Freud’s mother—to question the usual view of Freud as a ‘Victorian’ who merely addresses the contemporary female stereotype.

The centuries-long Jewish emphasis on intellectual and spiritual values and the curious relationship that the Jew, partly as a result, has had with the body and its expressions, have important implications for Freud’s doctrines, especially for his theories of sex and gender. These values, some of which were both acknowledged and prized by him (Freud 1939, SE 23:115), are intimately bound up with the differential perception and treatment of the sexes in Judaism and with patterns of child-rearing in Jewish families, a topic that I shall explore in some detail.

The problem of pleasure in the Jewish sexual ethic is also discussed by Ernest van den Haag, who explains that while the body is not seen as being in conflict with the spirit—an attitude that is often seen as positive compared with the Christian—neither is it thought to be in harmony with the intellect and this is an idea which is central to the understanding of Freud. In an important and longstanding tradition of Judaism, sexual needs were to be gratified at an early age and the body’s tensions thus defused, so that, it is claimed by some writers, sex became ritualized and a certain ‘joylessness’ ensued. Within this tradition physical pleasure for its own sake was always subordinate to that derived from study and prayer (van den Haag 1977:148–49). Thomas Szasz, Roslyn Lacks, and Jean- Paul Sartre all find important implications in this quality of joylessness. Szasz argues that Jews have ‘spoiled eroticism’ by making marriage and procreation compulsory and that the prescribed and systematic nature of sexual pleasure in Juadaism finds its counterpart in the Christian reaction of voluntary chastity (Szasz 1981:111–12). Lacks also finds that the Jewish sexual regulations suggest and contribute to the proscription of sexual pleasure (Lacks 1980) while Sartre writes of the Jewish tendency to treat the body ‘rationally… without joy’ (Sartre 1965:121–23).

The question of pleasure is also important to the study of Freud’s views of women because his theories of gender-differentiation rest on the issues of renunciation or gratification of instinctual impulses. Judith van Herik argues that the theories of gender and those of religion form the two parts of the Freudian theory of culture and are linked by this relationship to the question of illusionary wishes and thus to the pleasure and reality principles. The development of an objective super-ego and the capacity for sublimation—both prerequisites for social and cultural achievement—are traced, in Freud’s schema, to their source in the renunciation of Oedipal desires and, thus, to thinking according to the reality principle. This is possible and capable of achievement for the boy but not for the girl. Her orientation remains closer to pleasure and to wish than to reality, closer to fulfilment than to renunciation. She is less able to transcend infantile narcissism and the passive libidinal tie to paternal authority. Since Freud’s entire cultural endeavour, including the moral sense and the capacity for scientific achievement as well as his individual psychology, is dependent on the qualities and achievements that define ideal masculinity, his theories of gender are inseparable from his total system (van Herik 1982).

In his celebrated book Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, Philip Rieff also notes the problem that Freud has with the idea of sexual pleasure. ‘Pleasure is defined, after the manner of Schopenhauer, as a negative phenomenon, the struggle to release oneself from unpleasure, or tension’ (Rieff 1979:155). Rieff points to a basic opposition between sex and intellect in Freud’s doctrine of human nature and to a ‘muffled aversion’ towards the former. This view of the Freudian idea of love as inherently subversive, with women represented as an anti-cultural force (148–85), is particularly significant in the light of some Eastern European rabbinic attitudes in Freud’s background.

However, while Rieff allows that many of Freud’s most important qualities had their source in his ‘perennial Jewish character’, finding him to be so ‘intensely Jewish’ as to retain even more ‘loyalty to his Jewishness than his doctrine permits’ (258–62), in seeking for an explanation of Freud’s ‘misogyny’, he construes him as a representative of the ‘Russo-German’ type. This type of misogyny, Rieff explains, is based on the intellectual deficiency of women and on their anti-cultural and sensual role as opposed to the ‘Franco-British’ version in which women are idealized as innocent and high-minded and seen as sexually deficient (182). Rieff’s account of Freud’s attitude to femininity is detailed and illuminating but he neglects his own wealth of evidence in attributing it to an idiosyncratic nineteenth-century moral attitude.

There is another reason why it is a mistake to attribute to Freud the ‘Russo-German’ type of misogyny. For while he assigns women an anti-cultural and even anarchic role as enemies of civilization (Freud 1930, SE 21:103–04), he also declares them to be sexually deficient. Women are characterized by a poor libidinal endowment (1908, SE 9:192); Freud writes, ‘it is our impression that more constraint has been applied to the libido when it is pressed into the service of the feminine function’ (1933, SE 22:131). Moreover, the curious mixture of aversion and respect, the punitive construction of woman’s existence and the phallic and patriarchal strains in the Freudian doctrine, seem to me to be far more evocative of certain influential rabbinic attitudes than of any nineteenth-century European movement.

Of course, the viewpoints of these rabbis represents just one aspect of traditional Judaism’s orientation to women and sex. Also, they are, as usual, mediated by conscious and unconscious checks and balances so that the actual role and function of women within Judaism is a far more complex matter. Judaism, like most religions of antiquity, has oscillated between the idealization of women and the feminine and their designation as inferior in the order of creation and society. This ambivalence represents an important strand in the history of Jewish attitudes to women. I will explore this topic in later chapters and give some account of the differential treatment of the sexes in the Eastern European Jewish family. Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog’s unique study, and the somewhat less idealized and nostalgic one by Landes and Zborowski, furnished invaluable data on the culture of the now-destroyed shtetl (ghetto or hamlet), the kind in which both Freud’s parents were born and raised (Zborowski and Herzog 1962). Freud’s position as the first-born son of a Jewish mother, who was herself raised along conventional Eastern European Jewish lines, must be deeply significant for his perception of parent—child relationships and sex and gender roles. Thus the Jewish family structure must have played a far more important role in the formulation of the Oedipus complex than Freud himself appears to have appreciated. Indeed his idealization of the mother-son relationship, in comparison with that between husband and wife, resembles a typical Jewish pattern far more closely than that of the patriarchal German family (Meadow and Vetter 1967:151–65).

It is surely ironic that, although Freud was able to reconstitute the universal drama of childhood only by means of his own typically Jewish one, psychoanalysis has nevertheless retained so little understanding of the situation that gave it birth (Robert 1977:134–35). One reason for this, according to Mortimer Ostow, is that in the psychoanalytic movement, religious belief was traditionally considered as evidence of neurosis, and dedication to universalistic humanitarian as opposed to sectarian beliefs became the ‘unspoken convention’ among Jewish analysts. Judaism was also regarded as a political impediment to the advancement of psychoanalysis, as is clear from Freud’s conviction that without Jung, it would become ‘a Jewish national affair’. There is no doubt as to the strength of his feelings on this matter: ‘Rest assured’, he wrote to Karl Abraham, ‘that if my name were Oberhuber, in spite of everything my innovations would have met with far less resistance’ (Ostow 1982:12–19).

The rationale for ‘playing down’ the Jewish elements was a part of the earliest psychoanalytic ideology and it is one that may have been inherited, albeit often unconsciously, by successive generations of psychoanalysts. Ostow, for example, writes of an ‘unspoken gentleman’s agreement’ at his training institute in New York not to discuss Jewishness, ‘except to demonstrate to an occasional religious patient that his piety is a sign of n...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• 1: The Scope of the Enquiry
• 2: Freud’s Theory of Female Sexuality
• 3: Freud’s Women Disciples
• 4: Freud’s Vienna
• 5: Jewish Family Psychodynamics
• 6: Freudian and Rabbinic Sexual Doctrines
• 7: If Oedipus Was an Egyptian
• Bibliography