(Haaretz) — On March 13, 1938, the executive committee of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society met for the last time; it called on members of the group to flee Austria, which German troops had entered the day before. According to biographer Ernest Jones, Sigmund Freud opened his remarks by noting how, after the destruction of the…
Seventy-five years after his death, Sigmund Freud still remains an eminent figure of Western culture. The Viennese doctor’s theories about the workings of the human psyche, from dreaming to homosexuality, are considered outdated by many researchers and practitioners. But various forms of psychotherapy including psychoanalysis, also known as “the talking cure” live on. “Becoming Freud,”…
Thieves have tried to steal an ancient Greek urn containing the ashes of psychoanalysis founder Sigmund Freud, leaving the container severely damaged, police said on Wednesday. The urn was on display at Golders Green crematorium in north London, alongside memorials to other famous names such as Dracula author Bram Stoker and actors Sid James and…
As Father’s Day approaches, I thought it would be fun to visit with three modern Jewish patriarchs. Here are some remarkable bits of tape with voices (one is sound-and-video) from the past that sort of embody the arc of contemporary Jewish thought. Hat tip to Seton Hall theologian and ethicist Rabbi Alan Brill, who got…
Even as it was happening, some appear to have understood the Holocaust as a new chapter in the old biblical story of the Exodus: The uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto began, history books tell us, on Passover eve, April 1943. The Passover holiday has certainly apprehended that history in hindsight. In their meditations on the…
WHERE’S THE TRUTH? Letters and Journals, 1948-1957 By Wilhelm Reich edited by Mary Boyd Higgins and Brian Boyd Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 288 pages, $40 Being a prophet is an arduous profession, and one should by all means steer one’s children away from it. It is lonely, the hours are long, the pay is shabby…
The Cairo-born French Jewish ethnopsychiatrist Tobie Nathan previously published a novel, “Who Killed Arlozoroff?” about the 1933 murder of left-wing Israeli political leader Haim Arlosoroff, as well as a book-length essay last year criticizing Sigmund Freud’s 1899 “Interpretation of Dreams.” Now the ever-iconoclastic Nathan, born in 1948, has written his memoirs “Ethno-Novel,” to explain how…
One historian wrote: “If, metaphorically, Sigmund Freud was the father of psychoanalysis, Sándor Ferenczi was the mother.” If so, then every day is Mother’s Day for the analyst born Sándor Fränkel in northeastern Hungary to Polish Jewish parents in 1873 (the family name was later changed to sound more Hungarian). In January, Karnac Books published…
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