In his recent book Freud, Race, and Gender (1993), Sander L. Gilman sets off to interpret Freudian gender conceptualizations in the context of anti-Semitic inclinations in biology, medicine, and psychiatry in the late 19th and early 20th century. Having published previously on cultural and literary history, and holding positions of professor of Germanic studies and professor of psychiatry (University of Chicago), Gilman seems both professionally and linguistically competent to undertake this ambitious cross-disciplinary task. His analysis is informed by numerous other studies on Freud and his psychoanalytic theory in the fields of cultural and medical history, literary criticism, gender studies, and psychoanalysis itself. In this context, however, Gilman’s study claims to be innovative by refuting many of the common scholarly assumptions about Freudian work (especially what it regards as simplified connections between Freud’s Jewish origin and his ideas), and, more precisely, by identifying the importance of analyzing Freudian conceptualizations of gender and race in close relation to each other.
The opening problem of the book, therefore, is the following: in order to understand the interconnectedness of Freud’s racial, gender, and professional identities, as well as what impact they had on his theory of psychoanalysis, one needs to reconstruct “the meaning of ‘race’ and its relationship to constructions of ideas of ‘gender’ at the turn of the [20th] century” (p. xiii). Gilman embarks upon this task through a profound and fascinating analysis of the history of medical scholarship in the era of fin de siиcle and in particular its appeal to the theory of the distinctiveness of races. In this context he traces the process in which the socio-medical representation of the male Jew became gradually singularized, feminized, alienated, and eventually securitized. The focus of three subsequent chapters is placed on, inter alia, the racial dimension attached to mental illness (primarily hysteria and neurosis), congenital syphilis, and cancer. The argument is not only that Jews were, for a variety of reasons, represented as more vulnerable to these diseases than other ethnic groups in Europe (p. 113), but also that associating these frightful, almost mythical ailments with a Semitic origin signified a certain disturbing racial distinctiveness, a state of disorder they brought about, or a stigmatic curse. This socio-medical image of the male Jew made him therefore an “exclusionary category” and an antithesis to the Aryan race. As Gilman asserts “the Jew defined what the Aryan was not. It was that which the Aryan neither was nor ever would be. The Jew became the projection of all the anxieties about control present within the Aryan” (p. 9, emphasis in the original). One of the most interesting aspects of Gilman’s analysis here is that he presents that Semitic image-creation as an integral element of the broader transformation of modernity, namely from a religious Jewish identification to a secular one. These dichotomous racial categories, which began to dominate not only medicine and biology, but also social and political relations in Europe in the late 19th century, have important parallels in how the Church defined itself in opposition to the Jewish community as both its continuation and fulfillment. In other words, Christian identity was synonymous with accomplished (and discontinued) Jewishness, within which it was nevertheless deeply rooted both historically and spiritually. The difference is that the secularized, modern image of the Jew obliterated this intimate relationship and sense of interdependence – thus enabling the social othering of the Jew.
In addition, Gilman’s book focuses in detail on different socio-medical representations of the Jewish practice of infant male circumcision, in which two elements are of crucial importance: that (i) circumcision “marked the Jewish body as unequal to that of the Aryan” and that (ii) it presented “the male Jew as the exemplary Jew” (p. 49, emphasis added). Very different meanings were attached to circumcision: symbolic, identity-giving, phallic (as an object of a ritual sacrifice), and prophylactic (pp. 56-60); but their common denominator was the dominating social perception of stigmatic inferiority. This medical and ethno-psychological fascination with circumcision was thus part of a wider fin de siиcle discourse that connected race (Jew) with gender (male) and abnormality (bodily mutilation and disease). What is important is that “male Jews, in Vienna as elsewhere in German-speaking Europe, [started to] look on their own bodies as the objects about which the debates over the meaning and source of health and disease were held” (p. 69).
The main argument that Gilman makes in his book is that Sigmund Freud himself was one of these ‘male Jews’ who developed a troubled and protective identity ingrained in the sense of their endangered ethnicity – and sexuality. His psychoanalytic theory is therefore a translation of this prevailing feeling of insecurity and inferiority attached through his racial belonging to his designation of the feminine. In Gilman’s words, Freud “internalized the image of his own difference” (p. 43) so as to project it on his (atavistic) image of the feminine body, mind, and psyche (p. 40). For instance, Freud identified some striking parallels between circumcision and what he regarded as the deepest complex plaguing the feminine, namely penis envy. For Freud “the clitoris was seen as a ‘truncated penis’, [which] within the turn-of-the-century understanding of sexual homology [….] was seen as an analogy not to the body of the idealized male, with his large, intact penis, but to the circumcised (‘truncated’) penis of the Jewish male” (pp. 38-39). Here the close connection constructed between race and gender becomes unmistakable as “this pejorative synthesis of both bodies because of their ‘defective’ sexual organs reflected the […] definition of the essential male as the antithesis of the female and the Jewish male” (p.39).
This feminized conception of the Jew as a “third sex”, but also as bound to the feminine through their common complex of incompleteness, weakness, inferiority, and narcissistic self-concern, is Freud’s (self-)defensive strategy to convert the “exclusionary Other” (the Jew) into the “inclusionary Other” (the woman) (pp. 9, 46, 48). The woman is also the “Other”, but it is an accepted and indeed an indispensable one: “she is a needed and desired object no matter how complicated her image” (p. 49). This act of the inclusion of Jews presented by Gilman in psychoanalytic terms as a fantasy that Freud experienced is very interestingly exemplified in the quoted novel The City without Jews (1922). The author, Hugo Bettauer, describes an imaginary forced exodus of Jews from Vienna, which in turn deprives the city of all its cultural, economic, and scientific merits. The remaining residents realize how essential and indispensable Jews are for their existence, and eventually implore their return.
Gilman’s book consists in fact of two “stories”, (i) the socio-medical representations of Jews at the turn of the 20th century, which illustrate the process of their gradual othering in Europe and (ii) Freud’s linked conceptualizations of race and gender, which run parallel to each other and, as the author insists, are closely connected. Both “stories” are told in an interesting and convincing way, but it is this identified “linkage” (claimed to be the book’s greatest merit and its input into the study of Freudian psychoanalysis) that is at many points problematic. Whereas some interpretations are very interesting (for instance the analysis of Freud’s notes made on Lцwenfeld’s manuscript on racial predilections (pp. 96-97)), others seem artificial and unpersuasive, and are based on conjectures about what Freud must have read, known, discussed, contested, felt, and so on. The reader’s impression is that the author’s aspirations for originality at times prevail over his claims for sound argumentation. In addition, parts of the book are plagued with jargon, such as at page 177 where the author feels obliged to interpret for the reader an anyway very revealing comment by Freud on his tobacco addiction (“[the lack of a cigar] was an act of self-mutilation as the fox performs in a snare when he bites off its own leg. I am not very happy, but rather feeling noticeably depersonalized”)^[1] as “the cigar was a central attribute of his sense of self; without it he ceased being completely human.”
Gilman is very credible in the way he traces different dynamics and stages of the process of othering Jews in the realm of biology, medicine, and ethno-psychology. He is also very analytical and meticulous, and makes use of impressive number of primary and secondary sources in original languages. However, it is when he starts to make assumptions about how these socio-medical images translated into particular political developments in German-speaking Europe from the early 20th century onwards that his study becomes slightly disappointing. He is clearly no longer in his disciplinary comfort zone and the simplifications he invokes will sound cacophonous to anybody familiar with Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1967 [1961]). Gilman pictures natural science as an effective (and primary) instrument in the process of the socio-political exclusion of Jews. For him, the belief in a Semitic predilection to mental illness (supposedly scientifically confirmed) “would have enabled society, acting as a legal arm of science, to deal with Jews as it dealt with the insane, […] to institutionalize the idea of the madness of the Jew”, and thus to dispense with their political claims (p. 113). Arendt’s book rejects the temptation to identify such straightforward cause-effect mechanisms (not to mention that political claims of Jews were not at issue; in fact, the equality of rights for Jews in Germany was introduced in the middle of the 19th century, and they were traditional holders of some additional economic privileges). It also locates the bio-medical fascination with the Jewish race deep within “the Jewish question” that surfaced parallel to the development of the German nation-state. Socio-political anti-Semitism in German-speaking Europe did not follow a simple path of gradual alienation or mounting hostility, as Gilman’s book indicates, but rather inscribed itself in the cleavage between state and society that widened and became politicized in 19th century. Neither was “modern anti-Semitism” (Arendt 1967, 9 passim) synonymous to the hatred or envy of Jews; but rather, and these aspects Gilman overlooks, was motivated by the tensions between the state and different social classes, which invoked anti-Semitism “because the only social group which seemed to represent the state were the Jews” (Arendt 1967, 25). In other words, the objections against the socio-political aspects of Gilman’s book here are (i) that his linear and rather one-dimensional view of history is insufficiently located in a particular view of the development of the German state, (ii) does not take into account the complex inter-class relations between Jews and the rest of society, (iii) and actually tells us little about “modern” forms of anti-Semitism.
Otherwise, of course, Freud, Race, and Gender is an original and highly informative work. I am sure Freud would have read it with interest.