Psychoanalysis was born from migration and racism in multicultural Vienna

Evidence

Freud’s work was born out of two of the critical experiences of the twentieth century: migration and racism. Fin de siecle Vienna, as Carl Schorske (1988) shows so brilliantly in his book, was nothing if not a multicultural city, inhabited by large numbers of refugees from Russia, Poland, and Eastern Europe. The founding members of Freud’s circle were predominantly from Jewish backgrounds, and, as such, were multilingual in a triple sense. They spoke and read German (amongst other European languages), as well as Hebrew; many used Yiddish to converse amongst themselves on everyday, nonscientific topics; even more importantly they were teaching each other a quite new foreign language, one which had never been spoken in this way before, the language of the Unconscious. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1248 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Issues of race and ethnicity were thus current, if largely disavowed within the psychoanalytic circle itself. Long before Kristallnacht and the book burnings, long before the trains began carrying Jews back from their asylum in the West to torture and death in the East, race was the largely unacknowledged touchstone of the early psychoanalytic debates. Yet with the fall of Vienna to the Nazis and the dispersal of the founding psychoanalysts to other countries, mainly of course to Britain and the USA (but also in some cases further afield to Latin America and South Africa), race paradoxically disappeared from the agenda. In so far as psychoanalytic concepts were applied to the analysis of racism it was largely by others, by sociologists, anthropologists, or historians, themselves often Jews and exiles from Nazism (viz. the Frankfurt School/New School for Social Research) who were sympathetic to Freud’s ideas. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1254 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Psychoanalysis was born from the migration and racism experiences of Jewish refugee scholars — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1248; Psychoanalysis repressed racism and colonialism to assimilate into host societies — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1255; Psychoanalysis abandoned race as a topic after its founders fled to the West — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1254 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Psychoanalysis was born from the migration and racism experiences of Jewish refugee scholars #corroborates (0.95) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1248
• Race vanished from psychoanalysis precisely after the Nazi diaspora #complicates (0.82)
• Psychoanalysis abandoned race as a topic after its founders fled to the West #complicates (0.80) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1254