ABSTRACT
Esther Menaker had been one of the last analytic candidates at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute in the 1930s who had contact with the Freuds. In a seminar conducted by Helena Deutsch in 1933, the class was interrupted by a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute who came into the room to announce that Sandor Ferenczi had died. Ever since Freud's publication of his book Moses and Monotheism questions have been raised about the importance of Freud's Jewish background for his ideas and practices. In the film, Trembling Before G-d, a 2002 award-winning documentary about Orthodox Jewish gay men and lesbian women, there is a particular touching and dramatic example of the playing out of a father disowning his son because he is homosexual. Balint's attempt to counter the Todschweigen experience, however, was significant. He revised and extended Ferenczi's Confusion of Tongues ideas about trauma in an attempt to integrate them with Freud's Oedipal theory.
