ABSTRACT
Because Sigmund Freud's break with the degeneracy model eliminated all significant differences between Jews and gentiles, commentators have been tempted to depict it as part of his Jewish self-assertion in the face of rising anti-Semitism. In 1886 the French racist Edouard Drumont referred in La France Juive to what he called Charcot's 'curious revelations' on Russian Jews, which he invoked as scientific evidence to support anti-Semitic claims. Marthe Robert claims that Freud's work represents a distinctly Jewish response to modernity and nationalism, and that its theoretical innovations originated in Freud's deep ambivalence about his Jewish origins and his social position as an outsider. Clinical and theoretical works on psychopathology form the fourth grouping of Freud's writings. Their content constitutes the crucial test to examine claims which refer Freud's Jewishness to the origins of psychoanalysis. Freud's silence on ethnicity and Jewishness in the context of psychopathology is a telling one.
