Das Vaterland was a real Catholic periodical, although I believe it might have been discontinued by 1903. Liebermann’s explanation (to his father) of how dreams work can be found in Lecture 14 (Wish Fulfilment) of Freud’s Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. The idea of a collective unconscious was current many years before Jung made the idea popular. Freud, and many others, considered the possibility of its existence throughout the nineteenth century (see The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry by Henri F. Ellenberger). Lurian cosmology is paraphrased and quoted from two scholarly works on Jewish mysticism: Kabbalah: A Very Short Introduction by Joseph Dan and On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism by Gershom Scholem. The subjects of demonology and animation are also considered in these works. The rite for keeping Lilith away from the marriage bed is quoted by Scholem in the chapter titled “Tradition and New Creation in the Ritual of the Kabbalists.” More specific information about Isaac Luria, his ministry, and the practice of metoposcopy can be found in Physician of the Soul, Healer of the Cosmos by Lawrence Fine. Information about B’nai B’rith was based on passages in Jewish Origins of the Psychoanalytic Movement by Professor Dennis Klein. The golem legend and its variants are described in The Prague Golem: Jewish Stories of the Ghetto (a miscellany including the writings of Chajim Bloch) and The Golem and the Wondrous Deeds of the Maharal of Prague by Yudl Rosenberg. The idea that Freud was a closet kabbalist (or at least a secret enthusiast) is explored in Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition by David Bakan. The 1965 edition contains a revised introduction by the author that suggests that Freud owned a collection of Judaica including kabbalistic writings (absent from the official Freud Library catalogue). There were two waves of pogroms in Russia. The first was between 1881 and 1884. The second started in 1903 (the year in which Vienna Secrets is set) and went on until 1906. All the atrocities described by Professor Priel are based on authentic accounts. Moreover, all the references to anti-Semitism are historically accurate (see Karl Lueger: Mayor of Fin de Siecle Vienna by Richard Geehr). The wall inscription celebrating the Holocaust of 1421 can be found at Judenplatz 2. Anna Katzer and Olga Mandl’s description of their women’s refuge is based on Bertha Pappenheim’s lecture “Welfare for Female Youth at Risk,” an excerpt of which can be found in The Enigma of Anna O: A Biography of Bertha Pappenheim by Melinda Given Guttmann. Other facts relating to prostitution and the white slave trade are also drawn from the same source. Miss Lyd — gate’s account of the building of Santa Maria del Fiore and “On the Tranquility of the Soul” borrows substantially from Brunelleschi’s Dome by Ross King. Song translations (including the poem “Silent Grief” by Ernst Koch) were taken from Richard Stokes’s The Book of Lieder. Freud’s speech on thumb-sucking is an almost exact transcription of a passage in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Freud’s views on Mozart’s Magic Flute can be found in the celebrated Ernest Jones biography. Ivo Poppmeier’s condition has been documented by physicians for centuries but is known today as couvade syndrome, a term first coined by Tylor (1865) in an anthropological context. The article that Schmidt reads in the Wiener Tagblatt-concerning Arthur Schnitzler-is an almost verbatim transcription from a real article published on January 14, 1903. Schnitzler’s anecdote about Director Lautenburg is taken-with slight changes-from his memoir My Youth in Vienna.
Freud’s Secret Books
Sigmund Freud wasn’t a very good Jew. He opposed his wife’s desire to establish a Jewish home, and his son Martin wrote that the Freud children were raised “without any traces of… or instruction in Jewish ritual.” None of them, as far as Martin could remember, ever attended synagogue. Even worse, the Freud family celebrated Easter and Christmas! Freud dismissed religion as an illusion, published a critical work on Judaism at a time when thousands of Jews were being transported to concentration camps, and was concerned that psychoanalysis might become a parochial branch of medicine practiced only by Austrian Jews. He didn’t want psychoanalysis to become-as he put it-a “Jewish national affair.” Indeed, this concern led him to name Carl Gustav Jung (known in psychoanalytic circles as the Teuton) as his successor.
Yet Freud had another, rather different side. He was an active member of a Jewish lodge, B’nai B’rith, played cards with Jews every Saturday night, and loved Jewish jokes. He is remembered today, of course, as a great “Jewish” thinker.
Where then did Freud really stand on the subject of his own religion?
In biographies of Freud, the word ambivalence appears repeatedly in this context. But really, there was nothing truly ambivalent about Freud’s position. He thought religion was nonsense but at the same time had many of what Dr. Dennis B. Klein of Kean University has described as Jewish attachments. These attachments were encouraged and strengthened by the anti-Semitism that had become so widespread in fin-de-siecle Vienna. Freud once remarked that Jews had “no choice but to band together” for as long as they were being persecuted. Thus, his “Jewishness” was largely expedient rather than natural.
Yet, commentators have often remarked that it is impossible to think of Freud without registering-at some level-that he was a Jew, and psychoanalysis is frequently described as a Jewish phenomenon. The laws of motion would have been the same whatever creed Sir Isaac Newton had professed. If he had been a Hindu, then force would always equal mass times acceleration, and no one would ever have described the second law as an example of “Hindu physics.” The same, however, cannot be said of Freud. Even though he rejected Judaism, the fact that he was a Jew still seems relevant to his system of psychology. There is undeniably something about psychoanalysis that “feels” Jewish. This isn’t a racist proposition. Many historians of psychoanalysis have made this point, and Freud himself would have agreed, which is why he wanted Jung-the Teuton-to legitimize psychoanalysis for global consumption.
So what are we talking about here? What’s so Jewish about psychoanalysis? It’s relatively easy to identify resonances between psychoanalytic theory and Jewish stereotypes. Take, for example, the Oedipus complex and the attitude of Jewish mothers toward their sons. The following Jewish joke illustrates the point: How do we know that Jesus was Jewish? He lived at home until he was thirty, he went into his father’s business, and his mother thought he was God.
The Jewish roots of psychoanalysis may, however, be far deeper. To explain the Jewishness of psychoanalysis, we must get beyond superficial stereotypes and journey into the world of Jewish mysticism.
Although Freud was a rational man, he was fascinated by religions and the myths of antiquity. That is why his consulting room was crammed with ancient figurines and statuettes-little gods and goddesses. He also wrote works on the origins of religious thought, Moses, totemism, the supernatural, and a seventeenth-century case of demonological neurosis. It should come as no surprise, therefore, to discover that such an individual was acquainted with the kabbala-a body of Jewish esoteric teachings dating back to the twelfth century.
When David Bakan’s Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition was first published in 1958, the author wrote a preface in which he argued that we cannot fully appreciate the development of psychoanalysis unless we view it against the history of Jewish mystical thought. There are indeed many similarities between kabbalistic writings and psychoanalysis: dream interpretation, symbolism, an interest in sexuality, and close attention to language. Kabbalists study the texts of holy books in much the same way as psychoanalysts study people. In both cases, small things-minute details-matter. Bakan’s problem, however, was that there wasn’t much direct evidence to support his thesis. That is, until he was contacted by Chaim Bloch, an eminent student of Judaism, kabbalah, and Hasidism, and a one-time acquaintance of Sigmund Freud.