Naomi Seidman, "In the Freud Closet: Psychoanalysis and Jewish Languages" (Stanford UP, 2024)

New Books in Intellectual History

There is an academic cottage industry on the "Jewish Freud," aiming to detect Jewish influences on Freud, his own feelings about being Jewish, and suppressed traces of Jewishness in his thought.

In Translating the Jewish Freud: Psychoanalysis in Hebrew and Yiddish (Stanford University Press, 2024), Naomi Seidman takes a different approach, turning her gaze not on Freud but rather on those who seek out his concealed Jewishness. What is it that propels the scholarly aim to show Freud in a Jewish light? Naomi Seidman explores attempts to "touch" Freud (and other famous Jews) through Jewish languages, seeking out his Hebrew name or evidence that he knew some Yiddish. Tracing a history of this drive to bring Freud into Jewish range, Seidman also charts Freud's responses to (and jokes about) this desire. More specifically, she reads the reception and translation of Freud in Hebrew and Yiddish as instances of the desire to touch, feel, "rescue," and connect with the famous Professor from Vienna.

Interviewee: Naomi Seidman is the Chancellor Jackman Professor of the Arts at the University of Toronto, a National Jewish Book Award winner, and a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow.

Host: Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.

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