The Case of Sigmund Freud: Medicine and Identity at the Fin de Siècle
by Sander L. Gilman
On This Page
Description
"There is no category of supposed human beings that comes closer to the orangutan than does a Polish Jew," said a Bavarian writer, reflecting the eighteenth-century view that Jews were profoundly flawed. The Jewish body, popular opinion held, was malformed - from feet to nose - and predisposed to a host of illnesses ranging from the plague to hysteria. The Jewish soul had a peculiar stench. The Jewish libido had a tendency toward incest. The Jewish gaze was pathological, and precluded the show more possibility of unbiased observation. By the close of the nineteenth century, these ideas had found their way into European medical journals, and the medical establishment was convinced that Jews were both diseased and perverted. It was an interesting time to be a Jewish physician. In The Case of Sigmund Freud, Sander Gilman traces the "medicalization" of Jewishness in the science and medicine of turn-of-the-century Vienna, and the ways in which Jewish physicians responded to the effort to incorporate this racist biological literature into medical practice. Focusing on the new science of psychoanalysis, Gilman looks at the strategic devices Sigmund Freud employed to detach himself from the stigma of being Jewish and shows how Freud's work in psychoanalysis evolved in response to the biological discourse of the time. In order to circumvent the prevailing debates about race, Gilman argues, Freud carefully formulated the particular biological charges against the Jew into a universal definition of a human being. As a consequence, his early psychoanalytic theories transcended the controversies about biological determinism, and yet remained framed by them. show lessTags
Recommendations
Member Reviews
Superb work which gives the middle European context from which psychoanalysis was formed.
Members
- Recently Added By
Author Information
58+ Works 1,164 Members
Sander L. Gilman is a prolific author of books on subjects ranging from Sigmund Freud to obesity. He is Distinguished Professor of the Liberal Arts and Sciences and professor of psychiatry at Emory University.
Common Knowledge
- People/Characters
- Sigmund Freud
- Important events
- Fin de siècle
Classifications
Statistics
- Members
- 25
- Popularity
- 1,076,987
- Reviews
- 1
- Rating
- (4.50)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper
- ISBNs
- 2
- ASINs
- 1
