On Freud's Jewish body : mitigating circumcisions / Jay Geller.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Geller, Jay, 1953-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939.

Freud, Sigmund.

Judaism and psychoanalysis.

Sex (Psychology).

Physical Description:

xii, 355 pages ; 23 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Fordham University Press, 2007.

Summary:

Through a symptomatic reading of Freud's corpus, from his letters to Fliess through the case of Little Hans to Moses and Montheism, this book demonstrates how "circumcision"--the fetishized signifier of Jewish difference and source of knowledge about Jewish identity--is central to Freud's construction of psychoanalysis. Jay Geller depicts Freud as an ordinary Viennese Jew making extraordinary attempts to mitigate the trauma of everyday antisemitism. He situates Freud at the nexus of antisemitic, misogynistic, colonialist, and homophobic discourses, both scientific and popular. These held in place the double bind of post-Emancipation and pre-Shoah Viennese Jewish life: the demand for complete assimilation into the dominant culture, accompanied by the assumption that Jews were constitutionally incapable of eliminating their difference. Incarnate in the figure of the circumcised (male) Jew, this difference haunted the Central European cultural imagination and helped create, maintain, and confirm Central European identities and hierarchies. Exploring overlapping layers of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and race in identity construction, theories of trauma, fetishism, and writing, Geller looks at Freud's representations of the Jewish body--especially circumcised penises and their displacements onto noses. He shows how Freud reinscribed the virile masculine norm and the at once hypervirile and effeminate Jewish other into the discourse of psychoanalysis.

Contents:

Introduction: Freud's Jewish question and mine

The psychopathology of everyday Vienna: familiarity breeds psychoanalysis

Not "is psychoanalysis a Jewish science?" but "is it une histoire juive?"

"A glance at the nose": Freud's displaced fetishes

A case of conscience: clippings from Little Hans's nursery

Freud v. Freud: Entmannte readings on the margins of Daniel Paul Schreber's Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken

From Männerbund to Urhorde: Freud, Blüher, and the Secessio Inversa

A paleontological view of Freud's study of Judentum: unearthing the Leitfossil of an unlaid ghost

Afterword: a forensic analysis of Sigmund's rod, or cracking open the gewachsene Fels of psychoanalysis.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 295-339) and index.

ISBN:

9780823227815

0823227812

9780823227822

0823227820

OCLC:

154762646