Research Catalog

Title

The case of Sigmund Freud : medicine and identity at the fin de siècle / Sander L. Gilman.

Author

Gilman, Sander L.

Publication

Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, [1993], ©1993.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

xiii, 298 pages : illustrations; 24 cm

Summary

• "There is no category of supposed human beings that comes closer to the orangutan than does a Polish Jew," said a Bavarian writer, reflecting the eighteenth-century view that Jews were profoundly flawed. The Jewish body, popular opinion held, was malformed - from feet to nose - and predisposed to a host of illnesses ranging from the plague to hysteria. The Jewish soul had a peculiar stench. The Jewish libido had a tendency toward incest.
• .
• Focusing on the new science of psychoanalysis, Gilman looks at the strategic devices Sigmund Freud employed to detach himself from the stigma of being Jewish and shows how Freud's work in psychoanalysis evolved in response to the biological discourse of the time.
• In The Case of Sigmund Freud, Sander Gilman traces the "medicalization" of Jewishness in the science and medicine of turn-of-the-century Vienna, and the ways in which Jewish physicians responded to the effort to incorporate this racist biological literature into medical practice.
• In order to circumvent the prevailing debates about race, Gilman argues, Freud carefully formulated the particular biological charges against the Jew into a universal definition of a human being. As a consequence, his early psychoanalytic theories transcended the controversies about biological determinism, and yet remained framed by them.
• The Jewish gaze was pathological, and precluded the possibility of unbiased observation. By the close of the nineteenth century, these ideas had found their way into European medical journals, and the medical establishment was convinced that Jews were both diseased and perverted. It was an interesting time to be a Jewish physician.

Subject

• Antisemitism > Vienna > History
• Cultural Characteristics
• Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939 > Religion
• Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939
• History, 19th Century
• Identification (Psychology)
• Jews > psychology
• Judaism and psychoanalysis
• Medicine > Vienna > History
• Psychoanalytic Interpretation

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. 227-287) and index.

Contents

Introduction: On Medicine and Race. The Covert Meaning of Race. Freud as a Jewish Physician-Scientist -- 1. Psychoanalysis, Race, and Identity. The Anthropological Construction of the Jew and the Meaning of Disease. The Jews' Diseases. The Cultural Construction of Jewish Difference and the Discourse on Disease. Representing the Jewish Body in the Literary Culture. The Gaze of the Jew. Jews in the Medicine of Nineteenth-Century Vienna -- 2. Conversion, Circumcision, and Discourse. Conversion as a Biological Act. Conversion as Madness. Jewish Converts. Penises and Noses. Language and the Classical World -- 3. The Degenerate Foot and the Search for Oedipus. The History of the Jewish Foot. Freud's Footwork. Freud's Autopsy of Gradiva's Foot. Degeneration -- 4. Seduction, Parricide, and Crime. Jews and Criminal Sexual Activity. The Statistical Arguments about Incest. Mixed Marriages: No Answer to Incest. Freud, Incest, and Blood -- Conclusion: The Life of a Myth.

ISBN

0801845351 (hc : alk. paper)

LCCN

92039662

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries