Psychoanalysis was born from the migration and racism experiences of Jewish refugee scholars

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

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in how intellectual movements emerge from marginalization and diaspora — parallels the social-capital material on Jewish trading networks and the reputational economics of outsider communities. — connects to: American intellectual life selectively welcomed refugee thinkers matching its own spirit. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 887; The Frankfurt psychoanalysis institute formed through personal Jewish intellectual networks in 1926