Freud, Race, and Gender [Hardcover]

Sander L. Gilman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1993

As a Jew in an anti-Semitic world, Sigmund Freud was forced to cope with racism even in the "serious" medical literature of the fin de siecle, which described Jews as inherently pathological, sexually degenerate and linked in special ways with syphilis, insanity and certain types of cancer. Did Freud's internalizing of these images of racial difference shape the questions of psychoanalysis? Here, Gilman argues that Freud dealt with his anxiety about himself as a Jew by projecting it onto other cultural "inferiors" - such as women. In Freud's writings, pejorative distinctions between Aryan males and circumcised Jews found in the medical literature of his day are inscribed on the bodies of women, and beliefs about the difference of the male Jew are paralleled by claims about the otherness of the female. Examining a variety of 19th- and early 20th-century scientific writings, Gilman discusses the prevailing belief that male Jews were "feminized", as stated outright by Jung and others. In Vienna, Freud's image of himself as a powerful, neutral scientist seemed to combine with a wish to subsume Jewishness under the more accepted, "included" (but second-class) status granted to women. And if hysteria and neurasthenia were said by the medical authorities of the time to affect male Jews in particular, paranoia and homosexuality came to be seen by Freud (and other Jewish physicians) as the illnesses of male anti-Semites. The attribution of derogatory meanings to pathological phenomena extended to organic disease. This book ends by examining Freud's reaction to this question when he became a patient himself, with cancer of the jaw. Throughout, the work explores Freud's complex reaction to the medicalization of concepts about race, as revealed in his informal comments and letters, as well as in the rare overt references to those ideas in his published writing. Challenging those who separate Freud's theoretical creativity from his sense of being Jewish, this view of the beginnings of psychoanalysis should interest historians of medicine, as well as a broad range of readers concerned with Jewish studies, gender studies, literature and the intellectual and cultural history of the fin de siecle.

Editorial Reviews

Review

[The book's] power rests in Gilman's understanding of the complex interactions and negotiations that drive the logic of bigotry and in its revelations about the deeper pathological connections between sexism, racism, anti-Semitism, and homophobia. -- Maurice Berger, The Village Voice Literary Supplement



[This work] displays all the familiar hallmarks of Gilman's formidable scholarship ... [and] points to a new direction for Freud studies. Gilman transcends the ultimately sterile disputes ... regarding the birth of psychoanalysis. -- Roy Porter, The New Republic



Freud, Race, and Gender is not . . . simply another study of Freud's multiple Jewish identities. . . . Gilman is principally interested in the unresolved tension between the rhetoric of race and the equally powerful rhetoric of science in Freud's work. -- Times Literary Supplement



. . . as eye-opening as it is myth exploding. . . . [Gilman's] material is often disturbing, and his conclusions are made all the more unsettling by the fact that they are utterly convincing. -- The Forward



Gilman [is] one of the most original and stimulating cultural historians of his generation. -- New Statesman & Society



. . . the most convincing account of how Freud's anxiety about being Jewish is reflected in his work. -- Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, New York Times Book Review



Original and penetrating . . . display[s] all the familiar hallmarks of Gilman's formidable scholarship. . . . richly erudite in the small print of medico-scientific writings of the fin-de-siecle era, showing Freud as a child of his times. -- Roy Porter, The New Republic



This book contains astonishing morsels of European cultural and medical history, the sort of thing you find yourself reading aloud over the breakfast table on a Sunday morning. The author has read widely in all kinds of English and German-language sources . . . and makes free use of them. His most striking examples illustrate the institutionalized racism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The degree to which anti-Semitism, especially, permeated medicine and all the biological sciences during Freud's lifetime comes as a revelation even to those who flatter themselves with some knowledge of the period. -- Rita Goldberg, The Boston Book Review



Gilman synthesizes the work of psychoanalysts, Freud biographers, literary critics, and historians to provide this impressive new reading of the meanings of `race' and `gender' in Freud's time. With admirable scholarship, the author tackles numerous assumptions about the manner in which Freud's Jewish male identity shaped his scientific stance in and against antisemitic culture. . . . The book also has great relevance to contemporary debates on multiculturalism. -- Choice
--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 290 pages
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr; 1ST edition (August 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0691032459
• ISBN-13: 978-0691032450
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #528,965 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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