Judaism’s Effect on Psychoanalysis on 20th Century Critical Theory

Kaley Vestal, Adam Komisaruk
Department of English, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV 26506

Presentation Category: English

Student’s Major: International Studies

The purpose of this research is to examine the way the school of psychoanalysis in contemporary literary theory has been influenced by Judaism. In order to evaluate how the scholarship deals with perceptions of Jewishness, we rely on reading primary sources from Jewish psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. We then reviewed secondary sources from late twentieth-century theorists, Jay Geller, Sander Gilman, and Slavoj Žižek, to determine the way the nineteenth-century scholarship is being interpreted. For many of the theorists, the way Jewish discourse is presented in the nineteenth-century centers around using race and gender as a way to combat the antisemitic stereotypes being presented around a very antisemitic Europe. The findings suggest we rethink the way Freud’s scholarship can be defined by the way he argues against the feminization of male Jews. He agrees, however, that the Jewish people could never assimilate fully into the “aryan” culture at the time due to their innate Jewishness.

Funding: SURE Enrichment Funding; Project 10011078

Program/mechanism supporting research/creative efforts: a West Virginia SURE program