ABSTRACT
Our exploration of the controversy between Charcot and Bernheim and its impact on the development of Freud’s early clinical thought led us to emphasize Freud’s position as being situated between contrasting and irreconcilable poles. As we continue to examine the early pre-history of psychoanalysis, we repeatedly encounter a series of tensions and polarities with Freud positioned on the border, mediating the binaries of inside and outside, gentile and Jewish, phallic and castrated. In this chapter and those that follow, we will examine in detail the impact on psychoanalysis of Freud’s strong identification as a Jew living within a viciously anti-Semitic milieu. We will show how the perception of Freud’s Jewish body, as seen by himself as well as through the eyes of his larger cultural surround, reverberated within psychoanalytic theory. Following Dimen (2003), who has articulated the need for a conversation among psychoanalysis, social theory, and feminism in order to rethink our ideas about gender and sexuality, we emphasize an overall cultural history using these approaches. In this chapter, we will examine some of the material realities underlying the dualities masculine/feminine, active/passive, clitoral/vaginal, professional/personal, and doctor/patient. In the process, we uncover a wide range of related variables, including class, race, sexual orientation, and the inevitably associated varieties of classism, racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, and misogyny. Warning: you might find some of this material shocking, but we do believe you will be stimulated.
