Psychoanalysis was dismissed as ‘the Jewish science’ expressing racial temperament

Evidence

But if they imagined that by mastering this discourse of the Other, they would somehow be accepted into the non-Jewish establishment which ruled the medical and other scientific faculties of the European university, they had another think coming. Psychoanalysis was from the outset attacked as “the Jewish science,” its concern with questions of infant sexuality, memory, desire, and identity were regarded as symptomatic expressions of the unhealthy and febrile temperament of the Jewish race, or an expression of the neurotic self-hate engendered by their hopeless attempt to assimilate into modern European culture and society. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1249 (#expands, via linked claim)

How far did early psychoanalysis give a gloss to commonsense Victorian thinking about race, biology, and human evolution? Many commentators have noted the tension between, on the one hand, the tactical appropriation of bioenergetic models and discourses drawn from positivistic science (including at this time racial science and anthropology), in order to situate psychoanalysis within the Western Enlightenment tradition, and on the other, the persistence of themes and idioms deriving from Jewish mysticism and German romanticism, which gave psychoanalysis its currency in bohemian, intellectual, and artistic circles (Oilman, 1996; Nandy, 1989; Gay, 1978). The tension can be found, of course, in Freud’s own work; it is there for example in the dissonance between his libido theory and his method of dream interpretation; and in the non sequiturs of his early theory of recapitulation (ontogeny repeating phylogeny as stone age baby transits to civilized man) considered in the light of his later reflections on the culture of modernity and the return of its repressed to be found in Civilisation and its Discontents (Freud, 1962). — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1253 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Hagarism’s Jewish-origins thesis was dismissed as racist nonsense; Psychoanalysis was dismissed by the establishment as a Jewish racial pathology — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1249; Early psychoanalysis simultaneously drew on racial science and Jewish mysticism — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1253

Broader Connections

• Psychoanalysis was dismissed by the establishment as a Jewish racial pathology #expands (0.96) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1249
• Early psychoanalysis simultaneously drew on racial science and Jewish mysticism #complicates (0.74) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1253