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A comment on anti-semitism




(1938)

A COMMENT ON ANTI-SEMITISM

 

In the course of examining the remarks in the press and in literature provoked by the recent persecutions of the Jews, I came upon one essay which struck me as so unusual that I made précis of it for my own use. What its author wrote was approximately as follows:

‘By way of preface I must explain that I am not a Jew and therefore I am not driven into making these observations by any egoistic concern. Yet I have felt a lively interest in the anti-semitic excesses of to-day and have directed my particular attention to the protests against them. These protests come from two directions - ecclesiastical and secular - the former in the name of religion, the latter appealing to the claims of humanity. The former were scanty and came late; but they did come in the end, and even His Holiness the Pope raised his voice. I confess that there was something I missed in the demonstrations coming from both sides - something at their beginning and something else at their end. I will try now to supply it.

 

‘All these protests, I think, might be preceded by a particular introduction, which would run: "Well, it’s true, I don’t like Jews either. In some sort of way they seem strange to me and antipathetic. They have many disagreeable qualities and great defects. I think, too, that the influence they have had on us and our affairs has been predominantly detrimental. Their race, compared with our own, is obviously an inferior one; all their activities argue in favour of that." And after this what these protests do in fact contain could follow without any discrepancy: "But we profess a religion of love. We ought to love even our enemies as ourselves. We know that the Son of God gave His life on earth to redeem all men from the burden of sin. He is our model, and it is therefore sinning against His intention and against the command of the Christian religion if we consent to Jews being insulted, ill-treated, robbed and plunged into misery. We ought to protest against this, irrespectively of how much or how little the Jews deserve such treatment." The secular writers who believe in the gospel of humanity, protest in similar terms.

 

‘I confess that I have not been satisfied by any of these demonstrations. Apart from the religion of love and humanity there is also a religion of truth, and it has come off badly in these protests. But the truth is that for long centuries we have treated the Jewish people unjustly and that we are continuing to do so by judging them unjustly. Any one of us who does not start by admitting our guilt has not done his duty in this. The Jews are not worse than we are; they have somewhat other characteristics and somewhat other faults, but on the whole we have no right to look down on them. In some respects, indeed, they are our superiors. They do not need so much alcohol as we do in order to make life tolerable; crimes of brutality, murder, robbery and sexual violence are great rarities among them; they have always set a high value on intellectual achievement and interests; their family life is more intimate; they take better care of the poor; charity is a sacred duty to them. Nor can we call them in any sense inferior. Since we have allowed them to co-operate in our cultural tasks, they have acquired merit by valuable contributions in all the spheres of science, art and technology, and they have richly repaid our tolerance. So let us cease at last to hand them out favours when they have a claim to justice.’

 

It was natural that such determined partisanship from some one who was not a Jew should have made a deep impression on me. But now I have a remarkable confession to make. I am a very old man and my memory is no more what it was. I can no longer recall where I read the essay of which I made the précis nor who it was who was its author. Perhaps one of the readers of this periodical will be able to come to my help?

A whisper has just reached my ears that what I probably had in mind was Count Heinrich Coudenhove-Kalergi’s book Das Wesen des Antisemitismus, which contains precisely what the author I am in search of missed in the recent protests, and more besides. I know that book. It appeared first in 1901 and was re-issued by his son in 1929 with an admirable introduction. But it cannot be that. What I am thinking of is a shorter pronouncement and one of very recent date. Or am I altogether at fault? Does nothing of the kind exist? And has the work of the two Coudenhoves had no influence on our contemporaries?

 

Sigm. Freud

 


 

LOU ANDREAS-SALOMÉ

(1937)

 

On February 5 of this year Frau Lou Andreas-Salomé died peacefully in her little house at Göttingen, almost 76 years of age. For the last 25 years of her life this remarkable woman was attached to psycho-analysis, to which she contributed valuable writings and which she practised as well. I am not saying too much if I acknowledge that we all felt it as an honour when she joined the ranks of our collaborators and comrades in arms, and at the same time as a fresh guarantee of the truth of the theories of analysis.

 

It was known that as a girl she had kept up an intense friendship with Friedrich Nietzsche, founded upon her deep understanding of the philosopher’s bold ideas. This relationship came to an abrupt end when she refused the proposal of marriage which he made her. It was well known, too, that many years later she had acted alike as Muse and protecting mother to Rainer Maria Rilke, the great poet, who was a little helpless in facing life. But beyond this her personality remained obscure. Her modesty and discretion were more than ordinary. She never spoke of her own poetical and literary works. She clearly knew where the true values in life are to be looked for. Those who were closer to her had the strongest impression of the genuineness and harmony of her nature and could discover with astonishment that all feminine frailties, and perhaps most human frailties, were foreign to her or had been conquered by her in the course of her life.

 

It was in Vienna that long ago the most moving episode of her feminine fortunes had been played out. In 1912 she returned to Vienna in order to be initiated into psycho-analysis. My daughter, who was her close friend, once heard her regret that she had not known psycho-analysis in her youth. But, after all, in those days there was no such thing.

 

Sigm. Freud

 

February, 1937.7

 

FINDINGS, IDEAS, PROBLEMS

(1941 [1938])

 

London, June.

June 16. - It is interesting that in connection with early experiences, as contrasted with later experiences, all the various reactions to them survive, of course including contradictory ones. Instead of a decision, which would have been the outcome later. Explanation: weakness of the power of synthesis, retention of the characteristic of the primary processes.

 

July 12. - As a substitute for penis-envy, identification with the clitoris: neatest expression of inferiority, source of all inhibitions. At the same time disavowal of the discovery that other women too are without a penis.

 

‘Having’ and ‘being’ in children. Children like expressing an object-relation by an identification: ‘I am the object.’ ‘Having’ is the later of the two; after loss of the object it relapses into ‘being’. Example: the breast. ‘The breast is a part of me, I am the breast.’ Only later: ‘I have it’ - that is, ‘I am not it’...

 

July 12. - With neurotics it is as though we were in a prehistoric landscape - for instance, in the Jurassic. The great saurians are still running about; the horsetails grow as high as palms (?).

 

July 20. - The hypothesis of there being inherited vestiges in the id alters, so to say, our views about it.

 

July 20. - The individual perishes from his internal conflicts, the species perishes in its struggle with the external world to which it is no longer adapted. - This deserves to be included in Moses.8

 

August 3. - A sense of guilt also originates from unsatisfied love. Like hate. In fact we have been obliged to derive every conceivable thing from that material: like economically self-sufficient States with their ‘Ersatz products’.

 

August 3. - The ultimate ground of all intellectual inhibitions and all inhibitions of work seems to be the inhibition of masturbation in childhood. But perhaps it goes deeper; perhaps it is not its inhibition by external influences but its unsatisfying nature in itself. There is always something lacking for complete discharge and satisfaction - en attendant toujours quelquechose qui ne venait point¹ - and this missing part, the reaction of orgasm, manifests itself in equivalents in other spheres, in absences, outbreaks of laughing, weeping, and perhaps other ways. - Once again infantile sexuality has fixed a model in this.

 

August 22. - Space may be the projection of the extension of the psychical apparatus. No other derivation is probable. Instead of Kant’s a priori determinants of our psychical apparatus. Psyche is extended; knows nothing about it.

 

August 22. - Mysticism is the obscure self-perception of the realm outside the ego, of the id.

 

¹ [‘Always waiting for something which never came’]9

 

ANTI-SEMITISM IN ENGLAND

(1938)20 Maresfield Gardens

London, N.W.3.

16.11.1938.

 

To the Editor of Time and Tide.

I came to Vienna as a child of 4 years from a small town in Moravia. After 78 years of assiduous work I had to leave my home, saw the Scientific Society I had founded, dissolved, our institutions destroyed, our Printing Press (‘Verlag’) taken over by the invaders, the books I had published confiscated or reduced to pulp, my children expelled from their professions. Don’t you think you ought to reserve the columns of your special number for the utterances of non-Jewish people, less personally involved than myself?

 

In this connection my mind gets hold of an old French saying:

 

Le bruit est pour le fat

La plainte est pour le sot;

L’honnête homme trompé

S’en va et ne dit mot.¹

 

I feel deeply affected by the passage in your letter acknowledging ‘a certain growth of anti-semitism even in this country’. Ought this present persecution not rather give rise to a wave of sympathy in this country?

 

Respectfully yours

Sigm. Freud.

 

¹ [‘A fuss becomes the Fop

A Fool’s complaints are heard;

A Gentleman betrayed

Departs without a word.’]

 




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