Seidman’s Freud

We are lucky that Naomi Seidman is fascinated by Freud. But in her historically and geographically wide ranging treatment of Freud’s relationship to Jews, Judaism, and Jewish languages, Translating the Jewish Freud, she doesn’t give us a straight answer to the question, “Why Freud and Jewish languages? Why this book?”

This is, of course, the point. The relationships between Freud, Hebrew, Yiddish, Jews as individuals and Jews as institutions (including political entities) are not just (or not primarily) connected along pathways of rational implication or causality, but also bound up intimately with each other, and with communities, in a multitude of ways that Seidman explores and, reciprocally, that form the background out of which this book emerges.

These different connections, routes to the Jewish or unJewish Freud, are referenced by Seidman, explicitly and implicitly: affective pathways, surface associations, and networks of relationships (Introduction, p.11) that connect Freud and Jewish languages, Freud’s work and their translations into Hebrew and Yiddish, and readers of Jewish languages.

She further draws a link between these connections and “the phatic dimension of language,” which “maintain[s] connections within a collective, whether or not any individual ‘knows’ these [Jewish] languages” (p. 13). The relationship between Freud and Jewishness, and Freud and Jewish languages, observes Seidman, is like that between the dream and the dreamer – the latter does not know the former, nor does decoding the former enable us to know the latter. They exist along points of contact, both opaque and transparent.

The considerable achievements of this book include its wide ranging survey of the relationship between Freud and Judaism, as well as Freud and Jewish languages, and its detailed acquaintance with the secondary literature that addresses this connection. The work brims with references to figures of importance to Jewish culture history that might have been considered secondary, but highlighted in this context by their relationship to Freud, as if illuminated by a different light or from the side, they emerge more fully, in a Freudian dimension. Prominent in this regard was A. A. Roback, a psychologist and Yiddishist in the US, who (beginning in February, 1930) initiated what can fairly be described as a one-man charm offense to get Freud to divulge, own up to, or affiliate with Jewishness and Jewish languages in an explicit way, sending him half-a-dozen books over ten years of correspondence.

As is customary, and I think still refreshing and salutary, in works of cultural history in Jewish studies, Seidman also makes plain her own personal relationship to the material. Seidman’s Freudian approach to Freud, that is, her ability to engage at the same time both in surface readings of the Freudian literature and in psychoanalytic readings of what Freud said about his relationship to Judaism and Jewish languages, is the correlative of the physical objects that Seidman has kept in a closet at home – Freud pens, tchotchkes, mugs and the like. They can be unpacked, sorted, and compared to each other for edification and curiosity. Born out of such marginal goods, like a Yiddish Venus, Seidman’s book should be the first address for anyone seeking to understand these relationships, and also performs a useful theoretical intervention in bringing notions of speech communities and the affective importance of language into the discussion of Freud and Jewishness.

Because this work is not centered on individual assertions or even on undiscovered facts (though her notes make for edifying reading, touching both on intimate anatomy and literary history), but rather networks of affinity and association, it is difficult to choose a single emphasis of Seidman’s book, or even a chief focus of the work. Like the connections within the collective connecting Freud’s work and presence to Jewish languages and the Jewish community, Seidman’s book is about the phatic dimensions of her own relationships to Freud, which means the chapters are loosely related to each other, and a linear narrative is not present.

However, among the numerous through-lines that can be identified in this material, the topic of translation stands out (or, at least, is the topic that stands out most for me, in a phatic way). What is the relationship between Freud in German and Freud in Hebrew or Yiddish? What is the relationship between Freud, Jews, and psychoanalysis? And what is Seidman’s goal in this book? Is she translating Freud’s Jewishness for a Jewish studies audience? (And, if so, what gap would that fill, what work would that do?)

The goal of translation is, in a surface reading, to succeed (to render one text into a target language). Translation as a successful act is not meant to be parapraxis. The explicit goal of the translator is to produce a fluent text in the target language on the basis of the source language. But in a deeper reading it is to fail, because no translation can actually accomplish what it sets out to do – the rendering is conditioned by the limits of its own possibility. Thus translation is a kind of parapraxis, what Freud called a Fehlleistung in his 1901 book on the Psychopathology of Everyday Life.

Every translation founders eventually on the differences between the source and the target language that cannot be bridged. The translator is expected to execute a performance (Leistung) that is characterized by error (Fehl). Seidman’s exploration of the Jewish renderings of parapraxis (both the word, in translation, and the concept) is deep and broad, and illuminates how Jewish texts were used initially, in the earliest years of translations of Freud, and in recent decades. Officially supported and institutionally recognized Yiddish translations of Freud’s works tailed off, of course, after the Holocaust with the near-extermination of the literary culture in Yiddish that was flourishing in Eastern Europe and continued for some decades elsewhere. These translational attempts thus continued in full force, predominantly, in Hebrew, and Seidman obviously focuses on them. However, I would have liked to see some consideration of contemporary psychological — and psychoanalysis-adjacent — literature in the Yiddish of contemporary Hasidim, and how it relates to Freud.

Because any translational act is in relationship with omission and error, Seidman’s successes are highlighted by the parts of the book in which she makes tentative forays into related material which might seem at first glance more tangential but on further examination are bound up in the same networks of Jewish reading and (psycho)analysis that course through the book. Such an example of the tangential-at-first-glance is the chapter “The Yiddish (Un)Conscious”, interacting with an area that is very close to my heart and ideology, viz., a discussion on this very website (In geveb) about the proper rendering of the phrase “Black Lives Matter” in Yiddish. This is merely part of a chapter in which Seidman (per her personal style throughout the book) narrates her own uncertainty, coupled with her own consistent politics as a progressive, that led her to participate, or perhaps displace herself, as an ivory tower academic in the midst of Black Lives Matter protests in California. The historical moment of BLM gives Seidman, as well, an opportunity to analyze how Ashkenazi Jews have, or have not, categorized themselves as white, and how such acknowledgment, sublimation, or discomfort with racism has played out in the work of Jewish scholars attentive to sociology, psychology, and race. What does it mean for Yiddishists, who so often see Max Weinreich as a kind of rebbe, to acknowledge Max Weinreich’s excursus on race and brushes with/involvement in racism? Weinreich’s Der veg tsu undzer yugnt (1935), as is well known, is the high-water mark of his engagement with psychology as his attempt to diagnose and treat the crisis of Eastern European Jewish young people. Whether Yiddishists’ engagement with BLM and its dogmas is illuminated by this connection might be clearer after a greater historical interval. Seidman’s attempts to tie these concerns together illuminate the continued challenges of how canonical texts are received in new contexts and moments.

In the second to last chapter, Seidman touches briefly on an area which might be more deeply treated in a successor volume to this one, or perhaps by critical extensions of Seidman’s work. Her narrative of networks takes her and readers on a voyage to the Congress of the International Psychoanalytic Association held at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in August, 1977. “Freud’s homecoming to Israel,” points out Seidman, “was not a settled matter.” (Indeed, the various attempts to get Freud to Israel for a visit, or a chair, or – after his demise – in spirit, in a named chair, is a thread that Seidman expertly weaves through this book, a tragicomic motif that never reaches denouement.) Such a congress was meant to provide a homecoming as accompaniment to the establishment of a chair of psychoanalysis at the university.

Shortly after the conference, a writer in the Jewish publication “Midstream” brought up a particular topic that is relevant today; Seidman addresses it only glancingly. As quoted by Seidman, the Midstream writer observes, “[B]y meeting in the Jewish State, would psychoanalysis compromise its neutrality? Bluntly, would it seem to be siding with the Israelis over the Arabs?” (238)

In 2024, in the midst of a war on Palestinians and in the aftermath of a massive attack on Israelis, both of which have led not to liberation or a challenging of status quo but merely more death and the reinforcement of death-dealing regimes, one might wonder whether both groups can be understood through Freud’s so-called death drive. We do not learn, in Seidman’s book, about translations of this concept into Hebrew or Yiddish (or into Arabic, to mention a Jewish and non-Jewish language mentioned only briefly), which means that something is left for future researchers to consider. Seidman’s closet of Freudiana, in the form of this book, will remain, crammed full of interesting oddities, to be opened and reopened for the benefit of future generations, following the author’s and their own networks.