Oliver
There are many who think the NWO gathers much of their psycho-sexuality from this source! Subject: Freud: The Jewish Avenger, Anti-Gentilism
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Wed, 22 Nov 2000 07:34:58 EST
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http://users.cyberone.com.au/myers/freud.html

SIGMUND FREUD: THE JEWISH

AVENGER
Ch. 9 of The Myth of Psychotherapy by Thomas Szasz, author of The Myth of
Mental Illness.

Because I regard psychotherapy as a moral rather than a medical
enterprise, it is reasonable to inquire into the religious origin,
development, and self-identification of the founder of
psychoanalysis. Heretofore, such an inquiry was considered
relevant, if at all, only as background material, a part of the cultural
history of individuals and ideas. I consider it relevant as
foreground material, a part of the ethical systems that psychotherapists
and their works constitute, conceal, and convey.

Freud's great-grandfather was Rabbi Ephraim Freud, and his grandfather
was Rabbi Schlomo Freud. It is not known whether these men were
rabbis in the religious sense or whether their titles merely connoted
respect. Freud himself was born a Jew, was given the Jewish name
Schlomo after his grandfather, and remained a Jew.

The inconsistency between Freud's passionate antireligious tirades and
his profound commitment to Jewishness significantly highlights an
important aspect of Freud's personality and productions, namely his
anti-Gentilism. The popular image of Freud as an enlightened,
emancipated, irreligious person who, with the aid of psychoanalysis,
"discovered" that religion is a mental illness is pure
fiction. Freud was extremely fond of this image of himself, and he
did all he could to cultivate it. Subsequently, Ernest Jones
successfully merchandised it, with the result that, although the facts of
Freud's personal sense of Jewishness and his anti-Gentilism are duly
recorded, mainly in his letters, the significance of these facts somehow
disappears in Jones's treatment of them.

Freud was, throughout his life, a proud, chauvinistic, even vengeful
Jew. David Bakan offers the following evidence to support his
contention regarding Freud's positive self-identification as a Jew:
Freud believed that anti-Semitism was practically ubiquitous in either
latent or manifest form; the broad masses in England were anti-Semitic,
"as everywhere"; he expressed a love of Hebrew and Yiddish,
according to Freud's son; he refused to accept royalties on Hebrew and
Yiddish translations of his works; he was sympathetic to Zionism from the
first days of the movement and was acquainted with and respected Herzl;
he had once sent Herzl a copy of one of his works with a personal
dedication; Freud's son was a member of the Kadimah, a Zionist
organization, and Freud himself was an honorary member of it.

Bakan also notes that on "Freud's thirty-fifth birthday, his father
gave him the Bible which he had read as a boy, inscribed in Hebrew,"
and that when "he was in America he sent greetings by cablegram to
his family on the High Holidays." In addition, Freud displayed
his devotion to Judaism in the letters he wrote, in the friends and
enemies he made, in the way he lived, and, last but not least, in his
anti-Gentilism.

Intensely interested in religion and religious history, Freud indulged in
countless speculations on these subjects. In many of these he
simply followed his central formula--which was to become the trick of the
psychoanalytic trade--namely, that everything is something other than
what it seems to be or than what the authorities say it is. Oedipus
was not a king but a complex; Leonardo was not a heroic painter but a
homosexual pervert; Moses was not a Jew, but an Egyptian. it is
significant, in this connection, that Freud was satisfied with
transforming the founder of his own religion from a Jew into an Egyptian;
he did not suggest that Moses was mad. That was an
"interpretation" Freud reserved for patients, dissident
colleagues, and Jesus. "once in a conversation on the topic of
religion," Jones relates, "Freud remarked to me that Jesus
could even have been 'an ordinary deluded creature.'"

One of Freud's many pronouncements on religion is recorded in his The
Future of an Illusion:
We call a belief an illusion when a wish-fulfillment is a prominent
factor in its motivation, and in doing so we disregard its relation to
reality, just as the illusion itself sets no store by verification.
Having thus taken our bearings, let us return once more to the question
of religious doctrines. We can now repeat that all of them are
illusions....Some of them are so improbable, so incompatible with
everything we have laboriously discovered about the reality of the world,
that we may compare them to... delusions.

Voltaire, Nietzsche, and many other thinkers since the Enlightenment have
noted that religious doctrines are not empirically verifiable
observations. What does Freud add to such positivistic
antireligiosity? Only the assertion that religious belief and
conduct belong in the same class as mental disorders; they are madnesses,
medical disorders, matters on which Freud is, or claims to be, an
expert.

There is, in short, nothing scientific about Freud's hostility to
established religion, though he tries hard to pretend that there
is. The same sort of antireligiosity that Freud preached was
rampant in ancient Greece: its character was identified by Plato, and its
significance for the modern age has been reidentified by Eric
Voegelin. Plato's particular wrath, notes Voegelin,
is aroused by the type which combines agnosticism with
rascality....[Most] dangerous is the agnostic who is at the same time
possessed by incontinent ambition, by a taste for luxuries, who is subtle
intelligent, and persuasive; for this is the class of men who furnish the
prophets and fanatics, the men who are half sincere and half insincere,
the dictators, demagogues, and ambitious generals, the founders of new
associations of initiates and scheming sophists. In order to
designate these evils of the age appropriately and comprehensively, Plato
uses the category of "nosos", a disease of the soul.
(Plato's Laws, Book X)

The terms--diviner, fanatic for all kinds of imposture, and contriver of
private Mysteries--fit Freud perfectly. Plato's foregoing
observations are important because they provide some of the basis for
Voegelin's and Karl Popper's, classification of psychoanalysis as a
modern gnostic movement and for their bracketing it, as such, with
Communism and Nazism.

It is ironic that Plato diagnoses as a "disease of the soul"
precisely that mental state which Freud claims characterizes the ideally
mature, psychoanalytically imbued person; and that Freud diagnoses as a
"disease of the mind" precisely that mental state which Plato
claims characterizes the ideally moral, ethically imbued person. In
both cases, of course, mental health and mental disease are defined in
moral terms and reflect the ethical standards of the definer.

....It is open to question whether Freud's assessment of the nature of
anti-Semitism in Central Europe before the First world War was
accurate. Karl Popper offers a quite different view of that
cultural scene:
I believe that before the First World War Austria, and even Germany,
treated the Jews quite well. They were given almost all rights,
although there were some barriers established by tradition, especially in
the army. In a perfect society, no doubt, they would have been
treated in every respect as equals....The proportion of Jews or men of
Jewish origin among university professors, medical men, and lawyers was
very high, and open resentment was aroused by this only after the First
World War....Admittedly, it is understandable that people who were
despised for their racial origin should react by saying that they were
proud of it. But racial pride is not only stupid but wrong, even if
provoked by racial hatred.

Popper's concluding remark, with which I agree, raises another question,
namely: Does deciding that "Jewish is beautiful" imply that
"Gentile is ugly?" As we shall see, it did indeed for
Freud.

From his youth onward, Freud sought strength from his identification
with Judaism. When in 1895 he felt increasingly isolated from his
medical colleagues, he joined the B'nai B'rith Society, a Jewish
fraternal organization, to which he belonged for the rest of his
life. In 1900, he writes: "I spend every other Tuesday evening
among my Jewish brethren, to whom I recently gave another
lecture." In 1908, he writes to Karl Abraham [re Gentile
colleagues], "Do not lose heart. Our ancient Jewish toughness
will prove itself in the end. Our Aryan comrades are really
completely indispensable to us, otherwise psychoanalysis would succumb to
anti-Semitism...On the whole it is easier for us Jews, as we lack the
mystical element....May I say that it is consanguineous Jewish traits
that attract me to you? We understand each other....."

Freud's references to Jewishness figure prominently in much of his
correspondence. An often-quoted example of it is his famous letter
to the Protestant pastor Oskar Pfister, in which Freud writes proudly,
"Incidentally, why was it that none of all the pious ever discovered
psychoanalysis? Why did it have to wait for a completely godless
Jew?" In a 1936 letter to the sister-in-law of a recently
deceased psychoanalyst, he writes: "We were both Jews and knew of
each other that we carried that miraculous thing in common,
which--inaccessible to any analysis so far--makes the Jew."
"Inaccessible to analysis" was one of Freud's favorite
terminological inventions, dividing the world into two classes in terms
of his own "science"--things accessible to analysis and things
inaccessible to analysis. Into the latter category he placed not
only his own and Eder's "miraculous" Jewishness, but also the
"genius" of those he respected.

Freud wrote in The Interpretation of Dreams that Hannibal had been the
favorite hero of his high school days, and that to his youthful mind
Hannibal and Rome symbolized the conflict between the tenacity of Jewry
and the organization of the Catholic church. His father had told
him of a time when a Christian had knocked his new fur cap off his head
as he went for a Saturday walk, and when Freud asked what he had done,
his father replied that he had gone into the roadway and picked up his
cap. Freud thought this was unheroic conduct on the part of his
father and contrasted it with a scene in which Hannibal's father,
Hamilcar Barca, made his boy swear before the household altar to take
vengeance on the Romans. "Ever since that time, " said
Freud, "Hannibal had had a place in my phantasies."

Hannibal, the African--whom Freud calls a "Semite"--takes
vengeance on the Romans who conquered and humiliated the
Carthaginians. Freud, the Semite, takes vengeance on the Christians
who conquered and humiliated the Jews. Hannibal was tenacious and
had a secret weapon: elephants. Freud, too, was tenacious, and he,
too, had a secret weapon: psychoanalysis. Hannibal's elephants
terrorized his enemies whom the animals then trampled to death.
Freud's psychoanalysis terrorized his enemies whom his
"interpretations" then degraded into the carriers of despicable
diseases. The story of Freud's life and the story of psychoanalysis
in his lifetime are variations on the theme of justified vengeance in the
pattern not only of the legendary Hannibal but also of the literary Count
of Monte Cristo: the humiliated but morally superior victim escapes from
dependence on his morally inferior victimizers; he hides, schemes, and
grows powerful; he returns to the scene of his defeat, and there
remorselessly humiliates and subjugates his erstwhile victimizers as they
had humiliated and subjugated him.....

Stanley Rothman and Phillip Isenberg wrote in Encounter (12/74) "It
does not seem far-fetched to suggest that with the publication of The
Interpretation of Dreams Freud felt that he had weakened if not fully
conquered the Catholic Church and had thus succeeded in doing what his
father had feared to do....Is it possible, then, that some of the motives
associated with Freud's discovery of psychoanalysis had their sources in
the same drives which led other Jews to Marxism, i.e., the desire to end
marginality by undermining the bases of the dominant culture?"
They answer this somewhat rhetorical question affirmatively, though
cautiously: "There is at least some evidence that it is and that
Freud was at least partially motivated by an animus towards the Catholic
Church which informed and profoundly influenced his initial
discoveries." I [Szasz] differ from this view only by holding
that Freud was more than partially influenced by such an animus and that
it influenced not only his earlier writings but all of his work.

Rothman and Isenberg note that "Freud's successful (if symbolic)
conquest of Rome did not lessen his dislike for the Catholic Church... It
was in Rome, too, that Freud, some years later, put the finishing touches
on Totem and Taboo, which he always regarded as one of the most important
and satisfying things he had written. The volume ostensibly deals
with the origins of religion. Yet it is Christian practice and
ritual that are examined in terms of primitive drives and defense
mechanisms."

Rothman and Isenberg cite another item from Freud's correspondence that
supports quite decisively the view that Freud's anti-Gentilism was a
leading motive in his life. In 1938, he wrote to his son: "It
is high time that Ahasuerus came to rest somewhere.' He was, of
course, identifying with Ahasuerus, the wandering Jew, who was compelled
to wander, because he would not allow Christ to rest while the latter was
carrying the cross to Calvary. It is difficult to believe that the
choice of this allusion was purely accidental."

That Freud had identified himself, and privately thought of himself, as a
Jewish warrior, fighting against a hostile Christian world, has been
amply documented. What has received less attention is the way Freud
always portrayed his Jewish militancy, his anti-Gentilism, as a
self-defense, a necessary and legitimate protection against attacks on
him, as a Jew and a psychoanalyst. While such self-defensive claims
are sometimes factually justifiable, they must always be evaluated
cautiously: most aggressors, especially most modern ones, have claimed
merely to be defending or protecting what was rightly theirs. In
the case of Freud qua psychoanalyst, the claim is patently fraudulent:
after all, he had to invent psychoanalysis before he could defend
it. Although he was proud to assert that he created psychoanalysis
when it came to claiming priority for it, he acted as if psychoanalysis
had somehow always existed, as if it were merely a collection of
"facts," when it came to responding to those who regarded its
very creation as an act of aggression against their own interests and
values. Jung felt that Freud's main characteristic was bitterness,
"every word being loaded with it...his attitude was the bitterness
of the person who is entirely misunderstood, and his manners always
seemed to say: 'If they do not understand, they must be stamped into
hell.'"

In the early days of psychoanalysis, many of the persons interested in it
were Jewish, and the intellectual life of Central Europe was then heavily
influenced by Jewish journalists, writers, physicians, and
scientists. Thus, Freud's vengefulness toward personal enemies in
particular and Gentiles in general, as well as the potential
destructiveness of psychoanalysis as a rhetoric of execration and
invalidation, found a secure sanctuary behind the walls of the unwritten
rule: "If it is Jewish, it is liberal, progressive, scientific,
humane, and helpful."....The intellectual-scientific attitude toward
Freud and his work that developed before the First World War, and which
Freud did everything he could to cultivate, was the view that it was in
bad taste to point out that psychoanalysis was not a matter of science
but of Jewishness, or that it was, especially in its actual use by Freud
and his lackeys, an immoral and ugly enterprise. If such a charge
was made by a Christian--so held the supporters of this position--it
revealed the critic's anti-Semitism; and if it was made by a Jew, it
revealed a lapse in his judgment, or grew out of his self-hatred as a
Jews. This attitude in effect exempted psychoanalysis from
effective intellectual or scientific criticism.

Remarking on the persons Freud hated the most, Kurt Eissler--secretary of
the Freud Archives--identifies among them Theodor Lessing, a philosopher
of history killed by the Nazis. Lessing had called psychoanalysis
"a monstrosity of the Jewish spirit." Thinking that the
author was a descendant of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, famous exponent of
Central European enlightenment, Freud wrote him and reminded him of the
memory of his great ancestor. When Lessing replied that he himself
was a Jew, Freud "turned away from him in disgust."
Eissler highlights Freud's double standard in judging critics--a double
standard that has become the stock-in-trade of the loyal analysts: if the
critic was Jewish, he owed loyalty to the Freudian religion just as he
did to the Mosaic one; if he was not Jewish, his opposition to
psychoanalysis was just another manifestation of his anti-Semitism.

The result of such efforts to dismiss or repress criticisms of
psychoanalysis as the symptom either of Christian anti-Semitism or of
Jewish "self-hatred" is the stubborn persistence of a set of
false images about Freud and his doctrine. I refer in particular to
the tendency to see Freud as a humane and forgiving therapist, even when
he uses psychoanalysis not to heal but to harm; and the refusal to see
him as a vengeful enemy of non-Jews and non-believers in psychoanalysis,
even when he uses psychoanalysis not to understand but to
undermine.

Vengeance and forgiveness are important themes in all religions,
especially in Judaism and Christianity. Jahweh is a vengeful god,
punishing remorselessly through the third generation. Jesus is a
forgiving god, redeeming mankind through His own martyrdom.....but
Christians have likewise been vindictive. There was nothing novel
either about Freud's resolution to revenge himself on his enemies,
religious or personal, or about his method of using words to accomplish
this goal....The idea that disagreement is a disease, and that he who
defies authority is deranged and should be disposed of by the methods of
social repression then in vogue, is very old indeed.
The deviant is branded as "demented" and is deprived first of
his language, then of his life. Psychiatry is largely an ideology
and rhetoric of rejection, albeit one disguised, in the vocabulary of
medicine, as diagnosis and treatment.

That Freud was an angry avenger and a domineering founder of a religion
(or cult), rather than a dispassionate scientist or compassionate
therapist, is, I believe, epitomized by his lifelong fascination with
Moses. Righteous indignation is the mood, more than any other, that
characterizes both Moses and Freud. Moses liberated the Jews from
Egyptian slavery; Freud sought to liberate the ego from enslavement to
the id. Moses took revenge against the Egyptians; Freud, against
the Christians. Moses founded Judaism; Freud, psychoanalysis.

"Moses and Monotheism", published in 1939, was Freud's last
creative effort. Written when he was over eighty, Freud was,
especially during the last five years of his life, obsessed with the
Moses legend and the origin of Judaism. He had begun his
intellectual quest with indignation about anti-Semitism and a resolve to
avenge it; he ended it with the same preoccupation and passion. It
is no doubt true that the persecution getting under way in Nazi Germany
played an important role. However, it is one thing to avenge
Medieval Christian or modern National-Socialist anti-Semitism as moral
and political evils; it is quite another to call the linguistic
justification or literary result of such a revenge a science or
treatment.