This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. The Yiddish Forward is producing a series of classic Yiddish jokes presented in Yiddish by Leana Jelen, a young Yiddish-speaking sign-language interpreter. This joke was the favorite of none other than Sigmund Freud, the founder of modern psychoanalysis who spent years collecting and studying Jewish jokes. While…
(JTA) — A Los Angeles auction house will offer a handwritten letter by Sigmund Freud detailing his family history and education. In it, the father of psychoanalysis describes how his parents came from Galicia in present-day Ukraine to the Moravian town of Freiberg, now the Czech Republic, where Freud was born. According to Nate D. Sanders Auctions,…
Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, didn’t often dish about his personal life. Even when he used his own family as subjects for his anecdotes — such as his grandson Ernst, who played a famous game of “fort-da” in Freud’s “Beyond The Pleasure Principle” (1920) — he was careful to refer to them simply as…
Gideon Rubin wasn’t expecting a package on that spring morning a year ago, although his wife, Silia Ka Tung, had been having strange things delivered to their London flat for months. Rubin, an Israeli-born painter, was working on a project that would be exhibited at London’s Freud Museum for the 80th anniversary of the psychoanalyst’s…
— Two elderly women in Britain said that they had been sexually abused, one of them as a child, by a late lawmaker who was a grandson of the Austrian Jewish psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. The accusations were leveled against Clement Freud, a celebrated British broadcaster and politician, to ITV in a documentary scheduled to be aired Wednesday, the television…
Here’s a really short history lesson. In 1880, a 21-year-old Jewish Viennese woman went to Sigmund Freud’s colleague, Dr. Josef Breuer, for help because she felt suicidal. Breuer diagnosed Anna O — whose real name was Bertha Pappenheim — with hysteria, a common label for distressed women in the late 1800s. I suspect that given…
Vienna’s Sigmund Freud Museum, a Jewish French cemetery and a Polish watchdog on anti-Semitism all were hit by vandalism in recent days. In France on Sunday night at least six tombstones were smashed at a Jewish cemetery in Lille, northern France’s largest city, according to a report sent out Thursday by France’s National Bureau for…
The intellectual historian and trained lay analyst Peter Gay, who died on May 12 at age 91, won renown as an admiring, if not uncritical, biographer of Sigmund Freud, to whom he devoted several thought-provoking books analyzing how Freud’s status as an atheist German Jew may have led to his achievement. Gay’s persuasive arguments were…
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