Childhood and Student Days: 1860-1882

Chapter Two Childhood and Student Days: 1860-1882 RELATIVELY LESS is known about this period than about others in Freud’s life. Nevertheless, we do know about a number of quite important events and pieces of information bearing directly on Freud’s relation to religion. Vienna Childhood: 1860-1872 Freud described the first years in Vienna as “hard times and not worth remembering.”1 No doubt he missed the open fields and woods, his playmates, and, as we have seen, most especially his “Amme-Anna” of the Freiberg years.2 The psychological difference between the two worlds of Freiberg and Vienna was described by Freud: When I was three years old, I left the small town of my birth and moved to a larger city. All my memories occur in the town in which I was born. In other words they fall in the second and third year. They are mostly short scenes [as we have seen], but they are well preserved and possess clear details of all senses … after my third year the recollections are fewer and less distinct.3 Jones also mentions that Freud’ s continuous memories began at the age of seven. In other words, Freud’ s early Viennese experience, from ages, four to seven, was one of few memories; what memories there were, as Jones and others have noted, were “evidently unpleasant.”4 As far as separation anxiety goes, the early years in this period would have encompassed grief and mourning, followed by detachment and, defense building.5 Here, Freud’ s formula for the development of the ego is particularly relevant: “The ego is a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes.”6 Certainly, the first, and in many respects the only, abandoned cathected person (lost object of love) for Freud was his nanny, and thus the earliest development of his own ego would have come out of this experience — coping with his grief over the loss of his functional mother, and of the surrounding Freiberg environment. Bowlby’s evidence shows that such childhood sorrow can often have life-long consequences, and that defensive processes are 1 Jones (1953, p. 15). 2 Freiberg was much smaller and much more rural than Vienna, but when the Freuds first lived in Vienna there was still a good deal of space in open parks (such as the Prater). Only later did the Jewish section become crowded and completely urban (Krüll, 1979, p. 178; Swales, personal communication, 1984; see also Schnitzler, 1970). 3 S. Freud (1899a, S.E., 3, p. 312). 4 Jones (1953, p. 15). 5 Bowlby (1973, pp. 9-22). 6 S. Freud (1923a, S.E., 19, p. 29). a regular response to mourning at all ages: “In infants and children, it appears, defensive processes once set in motion are apt to stabilize and persist.”7 Ricoeur well characterizes the Freudian notion of the ego as the result of the psychological work of mourning. That is, as Freud saw it, mourning or sorrow is the underlying emotion of the ego, and the ego itself is developed through the need to adapt to the loss of the objects (primarily people) that have been loved. Ricoeur expands on this further by pointing out that Freud’s theory “brings absence into the very make-up of the ego,” and that “it is impossible to separate the ego’s coherence and structural autonomy from the work of mourning without also abandoning the peculiar field of speech in which psychoanalysis operates.”8 One of the essential characteristics of Freud that is elaborated throughout Chapter Three is his underlying mood of sorrow-his pervasive pessimism and lack of joy. This feeling originated in the loss of his nanny and the lost “Eden” of Freiberg; because of the nanny’s religious significance, Freud’s sorrow, bitterness, and longing were all intermixed with Christianity. The religious situation in Vienna, according to Jones, was that Freud’s parents were “secular Jews” who maintained little Jewish observance in the home. “It is certain that in practice they were free-thinking people.”9 This interpretation is something of an overstatement. For example, one of Jakob’s grandchildren has reported: It was not a pious household but I do remember one Seder at which 1, as the youngest at the table, had to make the responses to the reading of the song about the sacrifice of the kid: I was greatly impressed by the way grandfather recited the ritual, and the fact that he knew it by heart amazed me.10 Hence, the Passover Seder was certainly celebrated in Jakob Freud’s household, at least some of the time.11 Reuben Rainey reports. There is no information concerning the family’s synagogue attendance or Sabbath observance in the home.… Rosh Hashona, Yom Kippur, Pasach and Purim were observed in the household as late as 1874, when Freud was in his second year of medical studies.12 Jones writes that the Freud family did not observe the Jewish dietary laws, and there is no reason to think otherwise.13 However, the religious atmosphere in the Freuds’ home was consistent with the liberal or Reform Judaism of 19th-century Vienna. Jakob and Amalia were married by Isaac Noah Mannheimer, a leading rabbi of the Reform Movement.14 In addition, the Philippson Bible (Old Testament) (see Figure 2-1) that Jakob Inscribed for his son on the occasion of Sigmund’s 35th birthday was translated and edited by a leading scholar of the Reform Movement, Ludwig Philippson. (Freud became familiar with this Bible very early, and its great importance is discussed later.) Jakob inscribed this Bible as follows (in Hebrew, even though Sigmund was 7 Bowlby (1973, p. 21). 8 Ricoeur (1970, p. 372). 9 Jones (1957, p. 350). 10 Heller (1956, p. 419). 11 See also Drobin (1978). 12 Rainey (1975, p. 10). 13 Jones (1957, p. 350). 14 Rainey (1975, p. 13). unable to read that language)15: My dear Son, It was in the seventh year of your age that the spirit of God began to move you to learning. I would say the spirit of God speaketh to you: “Read in my Book; there will be opened to thee sources of knowledge and of the intellect.” It is the Book of Books; it is the well that wise men have digged and from which lawgivers have drawn the waters of their knowledge. Thou hast seen in this Book the vision of he Almighty, thou hast heard willingly, thou hast done and hast tried to fly high upon the wings of the Holy Spirit. Since then I have preserved the same Bible. Now, on your thirty-fifth birthday I have brought it out from its retirement and I send it to you as a token of love from your old father.16 Certainly this passage suggests that Freud’s upbringing was far from totally devoid of religious influence; in particular, it contained a belief God and a respect for the Bible. However, as Bergmann points out, the passage shows Jakob Freud’s “enlightenment” or liberal form of Jewishness: “No orthodox Jew would speak lightly of the Spirit of God speaking to a seven- year-old. Nor would any religious Jew see the Bible as belonging to mankind as a whole.”17 (It is also possible that Jakob’s belief in God was stronger in his old age when he wrote this inscription than it had been 30 years earlier when he and his young son had read the Bible together.) A piece of correspondence from Freud’s very early years shows at least nominal religious influence. In this short letter, written when he was about seven years old to his brother Emanuel, Freud wrote, “I and my dear parents and sisters are, thank God well.”18 Most importantly, Freud himself acknowledged in An Autobiographical Study: “My deep engrossment in the Bible story (almost as soon as I had learnt the art of reading) had, as I recognized much later, an enduring effect upon the direction of my interest.”19 In fact, the reading of the Bible with his father was in many respects the single most important intellectual experience for Freud. Théo Pfrimmer, in his book Freud, Lecteur de la Bible, has given a remarkably detailed, almost 500-page scholarly summary of the impact of the Bible on Freud. For example, Pfrimmer has identified 488 different Biblical references found in Freud’s writings and letters (and more are apt to come to light in the future).20 Many of these references have already been spotted by various scholars, but others seem to have been first observed by Pfrimmer. Above all, what Pfrimmer shows is the profound impact on Freud of his early Biblical reading. It was the Bible as literature, as psychology, as cultural history, and as religion that formed the mind of Freud. In contrast, there is little evidence that young Freud had any real interest in physical or biological science. Freud scholars single out Samuel Hammerschlag as a significant religious influence during Freud’s adolescence.21 Hammerschlag was responsible for Freud’s liberal Jewish instruction 15 Letters (p. 395); Ostow (1982, p. 21). See also the preface of the Hebrew translation of Totem and Taboo (e.g., cited in Bergmann, 1976/1982, p. 119). Falk (1978, e.g., pp. 386-387) claims Freud was taught Hebrew by Hammerschlag. Nevertheless, Falk proposes that as an adult Freud was unable to read it, probably in large part because he rejected being associated with such a distinctive form of Jewish religiousness. 16 Jones (1953, p. 19). 17 Bergmann (1976/1982, p. 116). 18 E.

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