ABSTRACT
In the wake of studies by Rothman and Isenberg, this chapter distinguishes three ways of escaping from a condition of marginality. The first is the attempt to mix with the majority group and to deny one's specific existence. This, at the level of analysis in particular, is the attitude of those who tend to water down the most uncomfortable truths of psychoanalysis so as to make them more acceptable. The second tendency is to undermine from the inside the false certainties and prejudices of the dominant group—an attitude adopted by Freud at the scientific level against the prejudices and values of his time. The third operation is to transform the minority into the majority. In order to evaluate the degree of internal validity of each operation, the author proposes as a reference the proof of reality. Historically speaking, for example, any line of reasoning involving denial of its own Jewish identity had tragically led a section of contemporary Judaism, especially among the Jews of German culture, to a loss of contact with reality, both internal and external, and, in the most extreme case, to rejection and 134'self-hatred' (the most tragic case being that of Otto Welnlnger). In the case of the culture of the Enlightenment, with its inability to accept real Jews, and not only the abstract picture of them, the situation led Jews towards a form of 'soft guilt-finding', as well as to incomprehension of the underlying mechanisms of the very logic of anti-Jewish feeling and of modern anti semitism, with its strictly political character. Sacerdoti identifies the second attitude as being that of psychoanalysis. As a Jew, Freud always openly acknowledged his closeness to his people and sought to identify in Moses the cultural and psychological roots of the historical evolution that had led Jews to be what they were and to look for explanations for the unjust hostility towards them in the society of that time. Extending the subject to the discipline created by him, Freud never believed in the possibility of transforming psychoanalysis into a majority through an operation of proselytism. From this point of view, Sacerdoti ponders on the meaning of the spread of psychoanalysis during the past twenty years in Italy and in the West in general, and how much of this spread obeys the logic of projective assimilation, tending to empty Freud's work of its contents. The author also wonders to what extent a sort of more or less unconscious complacency of psychoanalysis itself, or of writers representing it, has contributed to a shift in direction of avoidance of marginality by adopting the first method.
[ED.]
