ABSTRACT
Is psychoanalysis a “Jewish science”? We have shown that as Jews living in an anti-Semitic milieu, Freud and his colleagues were at the margins of society, caught between their German and Jewish identities, situated between two worlds. Bergmann (1995) has argued that only someone on the margins could have invented psychoanalysis, and we have discussed the unique contributions arising from “optimal marginality.” Our focus until now has not been on the question of whether there is anything inherently Jewish about Freud’s development of psychoanalysis, but rather on the binary structure of German/Jew or anti-Semite/Jew that was at its core. In this chapter, we turn to our remaining question: Is there any truth to the claim that psychoanalysis is a “Jewish science”? More specifically, is there something about Jewishness itself—aside from its marginality, its treatment by non-Jews, or its reaction to anti-Semitism—that contributed to the development of psychoanalysis? Is there anything about psychoanalysis that is inherently Jewish?
