This chapter argues that the rhetorical choices Jewish second-wave feminists made in critiquing Sigmund Freud reveal how even in an activist, feminist context, Jewish community protective politics dictated that Freud be depicted as white and not Jewish. Jewish second-wave feminists challenged Freud, but in so doing cast him as a universal and Victorian patriarchal figure, almost never mentioning his Jewishness. These rhetorical choices, which had the effect of de-Judaizing Freud, functioned as a form of secular excommunication. In order to accommodate second-wave feminist critiques of Freud, Jewish community protective politics whitened Freud, a rhetorical act that effectively protected the image of Jewish male patriarchy by ensuring that Freud and his flaws were discussed as representative of a universal, white patriarchy. Second-wave feminists criticized Freud for a number of reasons, but I focus on the role his theorization of incest played in this criticism because of the intersection of the Jewish incest stereotype and Freudâs ostensible culpability for facilitating men getting away with incestuous transgressions on account of his widely accepted revision of his own incest theorization.
While Freudâs incest theorizing is most famous for the Oedipus complex, a flawed theory based on the notion that children universally sexually fantasized about the parent of the opposite sex, Freud initially proposed the âseduction theory,â a flawed theory based on the notion that adult trauma could be traced to childhood sexual abuse (inclusive of, albeit not limited to, incest).1 In essence, anxiety about Freudâs status as a Jewish progenitor of misogynistic and patriarchal ideas and, crucially, specific anxiety about his theorization of incest incentivized second-wave Jewish feminists to accentuate his white, or âVictorian,â qualities in order to avoid the appearance of holding a Jewish male icon responsible for societyâs misogynist failings.
While the majority of this study focuses on the 1990s, I begin with the 1970s for three reasons: first, to show how Jewish community protective politics operate in activist circles. Even for feminists dedicated to critiquing misogynistic attitudes among men, negotiating Jewish identity often resulted in ambivalent concessions to Jewish community protective politics. Second, this community protective whitening of Freud, which emerges among otherwise progressive and secular Jews, happens concurrently with a displacement of the incest stereotypes from Jewish men onto Black men and Black families, prefiguring the displacement of stereotype that occurs with Jewish community protective politics in the 1990s. And third, this chapter harks back to how Freud himself negotiated the problem of the Jewish incest stereotype in the 1890s, revealing how Jewish community protective politics function across eras.2
That Freudâs whiteness would be asserted by his most ardent critics, among them many Jewish women, calls attention to how race (and anti-Blackness in particular) intersected with considerations of sexual antisemitism for Jews across eras and across the political spectrum. By analyzing the ways that Jewishness was invoked, or conspicuously left unspoken, in Jewish authored second-wave feminist texts dealing with incest and child abuse, as well as texts that were specifically critical of Freud, this chapter shows how anxieties about Jewish male vulnerability impacted how Jewish feminists levied their critique of patriarchy, and how authors implicitly protected Jewish men even as they critiqued white men and pathologized Black men. Regardless of intent, these choices had the effect of displacing sexual stereotypes from white Jewish men onto Black men. I do not contend that this was done consciously, but even in an otherwise progressive movement, Jewish community protective politics found Jewish second-wave feminists protecting some patriarchal interests, such as the image of white Jewish masculinity. They accomplished this via whitening (and de-Judaizing) Freud and refraining from any engagement with culturally Jewish components of male patriarchal behavior (even as this framework was used for Black men). This keen, deeply felt awareness of Jewish male vulnerability to sexual antisemitism informed how Freud was discussed and functionally secularly excommunicated in these texts.
In examining Freud criticism, we will see how Jewish community protective impulses were personal and central to second-wave feminist activism and scholarship that rhetorically protected masculine Jewish vulnerability and, in so doing, helped whiten ethnoracial Jewish identity. These veiled community protective politics informed groundbreaking works that levied vital criticisms against white male patriarchy, while avoiding mention of the particular vulnerabilities and exploitative acts of white Jewish patriarchy, even as they unambivalently voiced criticisms of Black patriarchy. I do not suggest that these authors should have differently invoked their Jewishness in levying their critiques, or that the minimal mention of their Jewish subjectivity was in and of itself problematic. I do, however, find these choices meaningful as it relates to the content of their writing, specifically, the corresponding inattention to Freudâs Jewishness, especially when juxtaposed with the racist presuppositions observable in how these authors deconstructed Black patriarchy. In comparison to Jewish second-wave feminists, Black feminist authors of this era (such as Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, and Gayl Jones) addressed incest and criticized Black patriarchy in specifically Black terms. The rhetorical choices that forged these second-wave feminist movements thus muted the association of incest with Jews and ultimately realigned it with the pathologized Black family. And, concomitantly, these rhetorical choices discursively facilitated Jewish womenâs continued integration into the more empowered construct of âwhite women.â
Second-wave feminismâs consequential integration of secular Jewish identity into whiteness essentially protected Jewish men from ethnoracial pathology, establishing the terms for subsequent discussions regarding Jewish white figures and incest and helping displace that pathology onto Black men. For all its insight, this criticism of Freud failed to straightforwardly negotiate his Jewishness, Jewish vulnerability, or problematic incest theorizing in the context of his anxiety regarding the Jewish incest stereotype. While Freud was rightly criticized by second-wave feminists for building a psychoanalytic structure that too often cast daughtersâ testimonies as fantasy, identifying him as Jewish while accusing him of this moral failure risked branding him as an antisemitic stereotype writ large: a Jewish man responsible for societal failure to deal honestly with the reality of incest.
In building this argument, I contextualize Freudâs own Jewish racial identity amid the pervasive geopolitical antisemitism of its era and examine how numerous classic Jewish-authored second-wave feminist texts, with the notable exception of Betty Friedanâs The Feminine Mystique, consistently cast Freud as a Victorian, while never presenting him as Jewish. Considering how these authors articulated their own subjective Jewish perspectives reveals how that invocation (or lack thereof) conspicuously operated alongside anti-Black cultural logics that accommodated postâcivil rights white Jewishnessâs further incorporation into whiteness. The chapter concludes by contrasting these patterns with how Black feminist authors dealt with incest in their novels, memoirs, and poetry.
When Did Freud Become White?
Asking âWhen did Freud become white?â is certainly anachronistic. Applying âwhiteâ as a racial construct signifying power and privilege extending to and enveloping European Jews during Freudâs lifetime threatens to elide the ubiquity of antisemitism during that era. And yet, Freud today is commonly discussed as white; he is often invoked in popular American discourse as a figure representative of a sort of hegemonic, supposedly universal, ânormativeâ racial quality. Jewish feminist criticism of Freud during the 1970s went a long way toward cementing Freudâs whiteness, as decades after his death, his critics projected a racial identity onto him.3
Though it goes unmentioned in many Jewish-authored second-wave feminist texts critical of him, Freud lived in a Europe in which Jews were targets of broad societal discrimination and racial violence for the duration of his lifetime. Freud was born in 1856 in the Austrian Empire, shortly before a wave of pogroms across Russia and Eastern Europe. He died in 1939 in the United Kingdom having escaped the Nazis and the fate of six million Jews systematically murdered during the Holocaust. Freud was secular, but his own religious nonobservance would have been irrelevant to the vast majority of antisemites.4 The antisemitism Freud encountered in Vienna clearly impacted his social and professional opportunities.
While contemplating Freudâs Jewishness is imperative to any comprehensive effort at understanding the historical figure, his textual engagement with race (and racism) reminds us that he also helped shape a medical discourse that impacted how Europeans conceived of racial difference. Totem and Taboo (1913), Freudâs anthropological attempt to theorize incest, endogamy, and exogamy, relies on Indigenous Australians to consider issues of family and partnering. In setting up a dichotomy of âsavagesâ and âneuroticsâ in discussing sexual partnering practices, Freud creates distance between European Jews and non-European âsavages.â An alignment of Jewish identity and normative âwhitenessâ is formulated through sexually othering nonwhite figures around an issue widely associated with European Jews at the time.5 As Alys Eve Weinbaum reminds us, âIn Austro-German medicine and science, as in the immediate sociopolitical milieu of Freudâs Vienna, race invariably called up the constellation Aryan/Jewâ (146). While Freudâs theorizing began rhetorically recategorizing European Jewishness as European, he did this as a Jewish man whose secularity provided no meaningful reprieve from the weight of systematic state-sponsored antisemitism. And yet, as the following section shows, Freud is almost invariably categorized as Victorian by Jewish second-wave feminists, a reinvention that renders him, within the anachronistic logic, as a flawed but iconic white father figure, as opposed to a Jewish man whose theorizing facilitated men getting away with incest.
A Consistently Victorian Freud
This section details how various Jewish second-wave feminists identified Freud according to racial, ethnic, national, and cultural categorizations. Classic second-wave feminist texts authored by Shulamith Firestone (The Dialectic of Sex, 1970), Ellen Frankfort (Vaginal Politics, 1972), Phyllis Chesler (Women and Madness, 1972), and Susan Brownmiller (Against Our Will, 1975) all levy significant criticisms against Freudâs patriarchal theorizing, and while each of the aforementioned authors identifies as Jewish (even if not in these texts), none of these texts mention Freudâs Jewishness. Instead, they depict Freud as culturally âVictorian,â as Viennese, and, ironically, as a sort of religious father figure for secularism. But in contrast to brief but meaningful comments depicting Freud as Jewish in Betty Friedanâs The Feminine Mystique (1963), these influential texts never identify Freud as Jewish. The subsequent close readings examine how each text represents Freud and consider how Friedanâs language reveals an alternative choice that might have rendered Freud vulnerable to ethnoracial pathologizing.
Jewish second-wave feminist authors often characterized Freud as a product of a repressed Victorian society and framed their criticisms of his patriarchal theories on that formative culture. Ellen Frankfort published Vaginal Politics, a thorough condemnation of various systemic instances of sexism and misogyny within the health-care industry. Addressing Freudâs influence on medicine, Frankfort writes, âLike many older doctors practicing today, Freud was, however, the products [sic] of a repressed Victorian upbringing and an authoritarian educationâ (202). Phyllis Cheslerâs Women and Madness indicts sexism in psychology and the categorization of women as âmadâ as a historical tool for oppressing women. Chesler identifies Freudâs tone in the âCase of Doraâ as âcold, intellectual, detective-like, controlling, sexually Victorianâ (80). Chesler never identifies Freud as Jewish, nor does she identify either Anna O. or Dora as Jewish. In Against Our Will, a touchstone of rape scholarship and history, Susan Brownmiller labels the psychoanalyst Helene Deutsch a âtraitor to her own sexâ (350) for her thesis on female masochism; Brownmiller considers both Deutsch and Freud as products of their culture, defined quite narrowly; Deutschâs âattitude was in keeping with the Victorian times in which she and Freud livedâ (351). Brownmiller makes no reference to Freudâs Jewishness, despite her analysis of Jewish women as victims of rape in Europe during pogroms and the Holocaust. Instead, she marks Freud as âVictorian,â subsuming his Jewishness with a shorthand for a broad-brushed mainstream culture that Frankfort describes as ârepressed,â and Chesler describes as âcoldâ and âcontrolling.â
References to Freud as a father figure were also commonplace. Brownmiller calls Freud the âfather of psychoanalysisâ (Against Our Will, 305), and Judith Lewis Herman, in her comprehensive study Father-Daughter Incest (1981), describes Freud as âthe patriarch of modern psychologyâ (9). While Herman sets Freud up explicitly as a cultural father figure, she never roots him in any specific historical cultural context; she marks him as neither Jewish nor Victorian.
No text does more to present Freud as Victorian, father figure, and culturally iconic, while still avoiding any mention of his Jewishness, than Shulamith Firestoneâs The Dialectic of Sex. Firestoneâs influential text outlines socialist terms for feminist revolution and spends a chapter analyzing Freud and Freudianism, labeling the phenomenon a âmisguided feminismâ (38). Firestone distinguishes between Freud and Freudianismâthe contemporaneous mainstream popularity and influence of a watered-down version of psychoanalysis. But despite asserting that she interrogates Freudâs âcultural biasâ (13), the chapter focuses almost entirely on his American cultural impact. Firestone writes, âIf we had to name the one cultural current that most characterizes America in the twentieth century, it might be the work of Freud and the disciplines that grew out of itâ (38). Indeed, the chapter mocks American preoccupation with Freud by considering him as a cultural phenomenon wholly extracted from his historical context: âFreudianism has become, with its confessionals and penance, its proselytes and converts, with the millions spent on its upkeep, our modern Church. We attack it only uneasily, for you never know, on the final day of judgement, whether they might be rightâ (38).
Firestoneâs acerbic writing, throughout her chapter on Freudianism, punctures the image of Freud as godlike figure. But the extent to which she draws our attention to Freud as a religious figure also reinforces the association. Firestone says of Freud, âat the end of each new critique we find a guilt paean to the Great Father who started it all. They canât quite do him inâ (39). Numerous constructions identify him as a recognizably Christian figure (references to church, confessionals, and proselytes all contribute to this imagery), revealing a fascinating contrast with the manâs historical secular Jewishness. Firestoneâs diminishment of Freud also enshrines him: his singular impact constitutes the one cultural current characterizing twentieth-century America and simultaneous evidence of his false godhood. Yet Firestone consistently engages Freudâs âcultural biasâ in limited terms: âBoth Freudianism and feminism came as reactions to one of the smuggest periods in Western civilization, the Victorian Era, characterized by its family-centredness, and thus its exaggerated sexual oppression and repressionâ (41). Throughout, Firestone anchors her assessment of Freudâs âculturalâ characteristics with familiar nods to âWestern civilization,â âVictorian Era,â and Vienna. His Jewishness never comes up.
And yet, despite her criticism of Freudianism, Firestoneâs assessments of Freudâs failings are, occasionally, sympathetic: âGiven [Freudâs] own psych...