“The Newest Jewish Affliction”

It’s true that people are still arguing about this, though the consensus now seems to be that he knew more Yiddish than he was willing to admit. My own take is to ask why it matters to us, why we (or at least some of us) want Freud to be a Yiddish speaker. What does Yiddish signify in this desire? These are some of the questions I’ve been asking.

In my book on the topic, I traced the continued fascination with Freud among Yiddish speakers primarily to Buenos Aires and secondarily to Paris, where Yiddish-speaking psychoanalysts continue to read and discuss Freud in Yiddish. But I’ve since discovered that psychoanalysis also played a role in the unpublished work of Max Weinreich (Freud’s “authorized Yiddish translator”) in post-Holocaust New York, where he began a psychoanalytic inquiry into the American Jewish psyche. This is new research for me that I’m eager to share.

Yiddish also had a broad audience of formerly religious Jews, who devoured the book as if it was written for them. I read it myself in the course of my own journey out of Orthodoxy. This is a very Jewish story!

Everywhere there were psychoanalysts, there were Yiddish-speaking psychoanalysts, though generally Yiddish was not the explicit language of the analysis. It perhaps continued to exert its influence under the surface, as a shared unspoken language between analyst and analysand.

There are many examples, but we can point to two particularly important ones. A. A. Brill was a native Yiddish speaker and Freud’s first English translator. Wilhelm Stekel was among Freud’s first disciples, and Stekel’s first case appears to have been the fifth Lubavitcher Rebbe, who came to Vienna to be treated for a (hysterical) paralysis of the right side. My guess is that Freud assigned Stekel to the case on linguistic grounds, since Stekel had spent his boyhood summers in the Hasidic court town of Boyan. Freud himself, in the only surviving case notes, recorded the Yiddish curses directed at him by the Rat Man (Ernst Lanzer).

Freud’s Yiddish translators were not, however, psychoanalysts, though it would be interesting to know whether collective psychoanalytic research of the sort Weinreich was doing helped shape the translation. I have to think about that.

These are two very different questions. Yiddish is quite close to German, as we know, while Hebrew is from an entirely different language group. The proximity of Yiddish and German isn’t always a help, because these relationships occasionally create “false friends” (apparent cognates that have developed different meanings in each language). This happened with the very important words bewusst and unbewusst (conscious and unconscious): early translators took the easy route of translating these as bavust / umbavust, but, as Weinreich recognized, bavust had come to mean “well-known,” as in famous (so that umbavust would read as “unknown” in that sense rather than “unconscious”). He therefore sought a different word in the deep history of Yiddish, a brilliant choice (visik / umvisik) that was nevertheless forgotten after the war.

As for the surprises: one was that both Hebrew and Yiddish had a perfect term for the concept of Trieb (drive, mistranslated as “instinct” by the Standard Edition) in the biblical and rabbinic concept of yetzer, which opened vistas on how Jewish psychology and anthropology might connect with Freud’s view of human nature.

The current seemed to have flowed only in one direction. While there were and are many researchers into Freud’s Jewishness and his concept of Jewishness, the fact that there were Yiddish attempts to understand what Jewishness was remains almost completely unknown outside of the smaller world of Yiddish Studies. This is partly what I hoped to remedy in doing this work.

Freud had an outsized effect on Yiddish culture with these translations, but also with articles covering him in the popular and highbrow Jewish press. Writers brought a psychoanalytic perspective into their novels and poetry, and ordinary people streamed to lectures about psychoanalysis and followed stories about Freud, the most famous Jew in the world, with fascination, even if they didn’t entirely agree with his ideas. He even found his way into Orthodox spheres, with his ideas circulating, for instance, in the pedagogical curriculum of the Bais Yaakov movement, a girls’ school system I also study.

Fascinating! I tried to track down that citation but couldn’t, so I appreciate hearing it here. Of course, new and old are not so very different from Orthodox and secular, or East and West, but I agree that these are a series of translations. As a translation theorist, I’ve been taught not to overly privilege the first appearance, the source, or the original. Things continue to mean as they are translated and as they change.

The French translator of Freud, Jean Laplanche, connected the temporality of translation, its character as afterwardness, with the productive possibilities of translation, where you go back to things you may not have understood and by revisiting them, clarify them and heal from them. Not to say that this is what happens in this case, but Kraus was tapping into something deep even as he was skeptical of the “depths” psychoanalysis claimed to be plumbing. More to think about.