ABSTRACT
The salient characteristic of a monster is that it does not fit neatly into natural categories. It defies boundaries and thus frightens us, threatening the clarity of our own identities. Larry Friedman (2006) celebrates psychoanalysis as freakish, weird, bizarre, and unnatural—a monster. As a monster, psychoanalysis is neither art nor science, not quite a method of research nor a medical treatment. To insist that psychoanalysis is one thing or another is to tame the beast. Similarly, ghosts are not quite alive but not thoroughly dead. In the anti-Semitic imagination of Freud’s day, Jews were viewed as ghosts, a wandering people who had no home. Psychoanalysis is haunted—heimlich and unheimlich, home and not home—and, as Freud (1918b) proclaimed, could only have been invented by a “godless Jew” (p. 63); that is, by a monster, someone who never fit neatly into standard categories.
