The Ordeal of Civility

The Matrix of Freud’s Theory: The Jewish Emancipation Problematic

Sigmund Freud’s lifework, and especially his masterpiece, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), concluded one phase in the great nineteenth-century debate on “Jewish Emancipation”: as the unruly wish can fulfill itself only in the form of a disguised dream, so the Ostjude is not admissible into the civil society of the Gentile unless he submits to social censorship, disguising his unruly importunity in socially acceptable ways. Just as we may find the clue to Marx’s outlook in his first published article, his “Comments on the Latest Prussian Censorship Instruction” (1842),¹ so also in Freud’s early work it is censorship that blocks the primary process—the primary or Jewish socialization—and produces the compromise which is the assimilating Jew.

Though some dreams are undisguised wish-fulfillments, asit was the dream that dissimulates a wish which intrigued Freud, and that leads to the core of his interpretation of dreams:

In cases where the wish-fulfilment is unrecognizable, where it has been disguised, there must have existed some inclination to put up a defensé against the wish; and owing to this defense the wish was unable to express itself except in a distorted shape. I will try to seek a social parallel to this internal event in the mind. Where can we find a similar distortion of a psychical act in social life? Only where two persons are concerned, one of whom possesses a certain degree of power which the second person is obliged to take into account. In such a case the second person will distort his psychical acts or, as we might put it, will dissimulate.²

Then, at last, Freud gives us the social parallel he has been leading up to all along: “The politeness which I practise every day,” he confesses, “is to a large extent dissimulation of this kind; and when I interpret my dreams for my readers I am obliged to adopt similar distortions”³ (my emphasis).

As for conservatism, not all Muslims are terrorists, but most terrorists are Muslims. Similarly, not all conservatives are cretins, but most cretins are conservatives. The modern American conservative movement—which is paradoxically much younger than the progressive movement, if only because it had to be reinvented after the Roosevelt dictatorship—has been distinctly affected by this audience. It also suffers from the electoral coincidence that it has to despise everything that progressivism adores, a bizarre birth defect which does not appear to be treatable.

It is my contention that Freud in fact began with his everyday social life, and then found a “dream parallel.” Freud moves quickly from social censorship—politeness—to the effects of political censorship, and he writes of it in a way astonishingly similar to what the young Karl Marx had written fifty-eight years earlier. Freud continues:

A similar difficulty confronts the political writer who has disagreeable truths to tell those in authority. If he presents them undisguised, the authorities will suppress his words—after they have been spoken, if his pronouncement was an oral one, but beforehand, if he had intended to make it in print. A writer must beware of the censorship, and on its account he must soften and distort the expression of his opinion … or … speak in allusions in place of direct references, or he must conceal his objectionable pronouncement beneath some apparently innocent disguise…. The stricter the censorship, the more far-reaching will be the disguise and the more ingenious too may be the means employed for putting the reader on the scent of the true meaning.⁴ The fact that the phenomena of censorship and of dream-distortion correspond down to their smallest details justifies us in presuming that they are similarly determined.⁵ [My emphasis]

In 1919, after World War I, Freud added a footnote to this passage using the analogy of postal censorship: “The postal censorship makes such passages unreadable by blacking them out; the dream censorship replaced them by an incomprehensible mumble.” In the dream illustrating this—the dream of a cultivated and highly esteemed widow of fifty who wished for sexual intercourse—a staff surgeon “mumbles” some unintelligible proposal and is soon ushering her “most politely and respectfully,” Freud notes, up a “spiral staircase.”⁶

Thus, if there is one agency in the dreamer that constructs the dream-wish, there is another that softens or distorts “the expression of the wish.”⁷ This agent is the “censor,” which stands at the borders of consciousness and says: “Thou shall not pass.” All through the nineteenth century, the Eastern European Jew had sought admission to bourgeois Western civil society. At first he experienced economic and political exclusion; by Freud’s time he was seeking social acceptance and experiencing social rejection. This importunate “Yid,” released from ghetto and shtetl, is the model, I contend, for Freud’s coarse, importunate “id.” Both are saddled with the problem of “passing” from a latent existence “beyond the pale” of Western respectability into an open and manifest relation to Gentile society within Gentile society, from a state of unconsciousness to a state of consciousness. Freud’s internal censor represents bourgeois-Christian nineteenth-century culture: “Not only moral standards, but all the components of the common culture are internalized as part of the personality structure,” writes Talcott Parsons in crediting Freud with the discovery of the phenomenon of “internalization”⁸ (Parsons’s emphasis). The internal censor, writes Freud, “allows nothing to pass without exercising its rights and making such modifications as it sees fit in the thought which is seeking admission to consciousness.”⁹ It is the phenomenon of Jewish “passing” and its cognate, the “Jewish joke,” that lie behind Freud’s discovery of “internalization.” An examination of these allows one to glance “behind the scenes” of Freud’s discovery.¹⁰

Freud began his study of the unconscious by examining the psychopathology of everyday life: slips of the tongue and pen, awkward “parapraxes” which violate the decorum of public places, and jokes—especially Jewish jokes—which he often exchanged in correspondence with his friend Fliess. Freud was fascinated with the phenomenon of “unsuitable affect,” its expression, suppression, and repression, and of how it “passes” or fails to “pass” the censor. He was an expert on the status of the emancipated Jew in the late nineteenth century; he studied how he coped or failed to cope with the ambiguity involved in the terminal (and most difficult) social stage of Emancipation. Freud deals directly, Erving Goffman notes, with the whole range of feelings, thoughts, and attitudes “that fail to be successfully held back and hence, only less directly, with the rules regarding what is allowed expression” (my emphasis). A slip, a neurotic symptom, an incivility, Goffman continues, “first comes to attention because it is an infraction of a rule regarding affect-restraint during daily encounters.”¹¹ Freud was interested in pariahs, especially in what could be called “pariah affect,” the unruly, coarse “id” and the vicissitudes of its difficult domestication in the bourgeois-Christian West. His interest in the discontents of civility preceded his concern with Civilization and Its Discontents (1930). The “primary component” in the socialization and self-image of Jews, writes James A. Sleeper, “is the pintele yid, that ineradicable … Jewishness which surfaces at least occasionally to Create havoc with carefully calculated loyalties and elaborately reasoned postures,”¹²

For 150 years, in fact, a whole genre of post-Emancipation Jewish humor has been predicated on the “sudden havoc” that the involuntary eruption of Ostjude identity from beneath the skin of the “passing” exception-Jew can create in a public place. Freud’s interest in “slips” can be seen as deriving from interest in this archetypal “slip.” A recent example of such humor goes as follows: “A nouveau riche Jewish couple moved to a non-Jewish neighborhood, changed their name from Cohen to Cowles, and sought admission to the country club that frowned on Jews. Finally admitted, they show up at the Sunday night club dinner, Mrs. Cowles, née Cohen, decked out in all her jewels and a brand new gown. The waiter serving soup slips and it lands in Mrs. Cowles’s lap. She lets out a shriek: ‘Oy Gevalt, whatever that means.’”¹³ A story such as this has different “functions” depending on the context in which it is told. If told by a member or representative of the Jewish community, as this one was, it is an “instrument of social control,” a whimsical warning to Jews not to try to assimilate and leave the Jewish community because, in a pinch, it will fail.¹⁴ (Like the function of gossip in life—or in a Balzac novel—such jokes both are enjoyable in themselves and serve to keep people in line by citing the informal sanctions of self-defeating behavior.) If told by an assimilating Jewish intellectual, however, such a joke serves as an objective correlative of his subjectively ambiguous situation. A revolutionary Jew like Marx refused with solemn “prophetic” anger the obliquity and gentle irony of the Jewish “joking-relation” to their post-Emancipation situation; for him, such humor was a compromise, a “copout,” a substitute for direct, virile attacks on Western institutions.

I argue that a classical genre of Jewish joke, the inner structure of Freud’s theory of dreams, and the public discussion in nineteenth-century Europe of the eligibility of the Eastern European shtetl Jew for admission to civil society—the so-called Jewish Emancipation problematic—all have the same structure: there is (a) the latent “dark” id or “Yid” pressing for admission to consciousness or civil society; (b) there is the social-moral authority—the censor (external or internalized)—insisting that to “pass” properly into Western awareness or Western society the coarse id-“Yid” should first disguise itself (assimilate) or refine itself (sublimate)—in a word, civilize itself, at whatever price in discontent; and finally, (c) there is the id-“Yid” in the very act of “passing,” its public behavior in Western public places carefully impression-managed by an ego vigilant against the danger of “slips,” in which the unseemly pariah will show through the parvenu. This isomorphism of structure (in joke, dream theory, and civil emancipation) reflects the fact that for the Jew—a latecomer to the modernization process—to leave the Middle Ages which were his ghetto or shtetl and to enter modern Europe was to experience the modernization process and the civilizational process as one thing: he could not become a citoyen without becoming a bourgeois. In theory, these dimensions were analytically distinct (after all, the act of voting is not the act of speaking German or French, say); in practice, they were a “package” since, fortunately or unfortunately, Jewish Emancipation occurred in the bourgeois liberal era of the West. No one realized this more than Freud, born in culturally peripheral Freiberg, Moravia, in 1856, but soon to move to Pfeffergasse Street in the largely Jewish quarter of Vienna called Leopoldstadt. Sophisticated and cosmopolitan Vienna was to become Freud’s reference group.

Freud records the following joke in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905): “A Galician Jew was travelling in a train. He had made himself really comfortable, had unbuttoned his coat and put his feet up on the seat. Just then a gentleman in modern dress entered the compartment. The Jew promptly pulled himself together and took up a proper pose. The stranger fingered through the pages of a notebook, made some calculations, reflected for a moment and then suddenly asked the Jew: ‘Excuse me, when is Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement)?’ ‘Oho!’ said the Jew, and put his feet up on the seat again before answering.”¹⁵ All the elements are here: the public, social place (a train); the identification of the Jew as an Ostjude (Galician); the relaxed, “regressive” behavior (misbehavior) in a public place; the advent of the “gentleman” stranger as the modernizing West (“in modern dress”); the “pose” of good manners struck, and, finally, the polite intrusion: “Excuse me….” The sudden disclosure of a shared ethnicity reconstitutes the premodern Gemeinschaft which knew no “public places” with their “situational proprieties,” which encountered no strangers, which made no private-public cleavage.

Freud returns to this train joke later and, instead of the natural “feel” of its immanent meaning we get a lumberingly apologetic “interpretation” written with the Gentile reader in mind. This anecdote of a Jew in a railway train “promptly abandoning all decent behavior when he discovered that the newcomer into his compartment was a fellow-believer … is meant to portray,” Freud hastens to assure us, “the democratic mode of thinking of Jews, which recognizes no distinction between lords and serfs.”¹⁶¹⁷

And there, embalmed in its edifying, obviously apologetic interpretation, the train joke was to remain for nearly fifty years, until it was resurrected by one of Freud’s surviving disciples, Theodor Reik, reinterpreted—one should say, restored—and placed at the center of his book Jewish Wit. Clearly, Freud had been uncomfortable remaining on the level at which the joke had been told, the social level. It is decisive for any understanding of Diaspora Jewry’s encounter with the West in the era of social Emancipation that we recognize how difficult it is for us to get from them (except via an assimilator like Simmel) a view of the social category that is inward to the social—i.e., a member’s—viewpoint. The social nature of society is either politicized, psychologized or economized (i.e., construed on the model of the market). (Hannah Arendt is but the latest in a long line of European Jewish thinkers to experience society as a “curious, somewhat hybrid realm between the political [polis] and the private [oikos].”¹⁸)

Reik maintains that this Jewish train anecdote derives from Artur Schnitzler’s novel The Way to the Opera, in which it is told by the Jewish writer Heinrich Berman to his aristocratic friend George von Werkenthin. Heinrich explains this “deep” joke to his friend as expressing “the eternal truth that no Jew has any real respect for his fellow Jew…. Envy, hate, yes, frequently admiration, even love … but never respect, for the play of all their emotional life takes place in an atmosphere of familiarity, so to speak, in which respect cannot help being stifled.”¹⁹ Reik later returns to the train story, and—in a section on “The Intimacy of Jewish Wit’—finds that the anecdote does indeed show”that once it is recognized that the other person is also Jewish, one need not ‘behave*’“²⁰ (my emphasis). But then, shifting his focus, Reik prefers to stress not the absence of respect but the presence of intimacy in intra-Jewish relations, in Jewish wit. Not a”democratic way of thought," as Freud contends, but a certain kind of familiar intimacy is the “distinguishing and decisive mark of Jewish jokes. The closeness, immediacy, and warmth that exists between priest and penitent, analyst and patient, teacher and student is different,” for “the intimate relationship of parishioner and priest, of student and teacher includes a certain measure of respect.” [#17]_ Eastern European Jewish intimacy, stemming from the high moral density of “life-is-with-people” in theshtetl*, excludes “respect.”

Reik, to define this intimacy, then isolates an aggressive component in this genre of jokes, in which (for example) there is mocked a “too quick and artificial adjustment to the capital of Berlin and its manners.” With the addition of this aggressiveness, he writes, “we are approaching the core of that intimacy whose character we tried to define. Yet we cannot grasp its peculiarity.” The derisory aggression expresses, somehow, “not bitter hostility and estrangement, but confidence and intimacy. More than this … it is precisely that familiarity which results in the courage to criticize, to attack. But how about that? Intimacy as a premise of aggression? That is psychologically difficult to grasp.”²¹ In this genre of joke “aggression does not produce estrangement, but puts an end to it, cancels it. A pathos of distance will not be tolerated in this group of jokes.”²²

What Reik is saying here is that the famous Jewish social “impudence”—there is no faithful translation of the Yiddish heart-word, chutzpah—works at once to destroy aggressively the artificiality of Western “passing” and to restore the old familiarity of the pre-Emancipation shtetl Jew. The ambiguity of the European social distance-relation of “respect” is overcome and dissolves in the Polish Jew’s “Asoi!” It is the Jewish conviction of the unreconstructed “Yid” beneath the civil appearance of Jews who are “passing” that Freud turns into a “science.” In psychoanalysis, the “id” is the functional equivalent of the “Yid” in social intercourse: on the train, the discovery of a shared ethnicity legitimates abandoning the later-acquired, “higher,” more “refined” forms of Gentile social intercourse. Yiddishkeit ²³ is “old equalizer.” For Freud, the “id” is “old equalizer.” The whole business of courtship and the sexual courtesies deriving from the feudal court are confronted, by Freud, with the “reality” of an erect penis. (With Marx, the myth of another set of “brute facts” is used in an attempt to subvert the “hypocrisy” of “appearance.”)

“A neurotic patient I treated was impotent with his wife,” Reik relates, “except when he first addressed her in vulgar sexual terms. In this downgrading, an emotional mechanism similar to that in the Jewish jokes, is performed in order to bring the object closer to yourself. The significant difference is that in this case the aim is sexual in its nature, while in the Jewish joke social intercourse is facilitated or rather made possible by such levelling.”²⁴ The person can be either downgraded to one’s own level, or degraded beneath one’s own level. The latter will express sadistic tendencies. What Freud does is to take the mechanisms at Ms work in this genre of Jewish wit and “kick them upstairs,” turning them into an “objective” science. Reik cites an old Eastern European joking question: “How grows man? From below to above—because below all people are alike, but above the one is taller and the other smaller.”²⁵ It is irrelevant in this type of wit whether it “concerns a person from an alien culture [read: Gentile] or a Jew who seems to disavow his Jewishness [read: an assimilator]”;²⁶ the intention to dissolve aloofness, remoteness, gentility, and the distantiations of “respect” is the same.

Helene (Rosenbach) Deutsch (b. 1884), one of the Freudian pioneers, recalls an incident from her childhood in Przemysl, Galicia (Poland), before the turn of the century, when the Jewish wood dealer, the one-eyed Mr. Stein, barged into the upper-middle-class Rosenbach apartment without knocking, with nobody home but little “Hala” lying on the dining room couch reading, practically naked but for a light robe: “I jumped up and demanded angrily, ‘Mr. Stein, couldn’t you knock first?’ The answer Was: ‘Why? Isn’t this a Jewish house?’ All the Jewish tradespeople we”dealt with had this same feeling of solidarity with us despite the fact at we were members of the ‘aristocracy.’"²⁷

Ernest Jones remarks that Freud “felt himself to be Jewish to the core, and evidently it meant a great deal to him,”²⁸ and notes his “fondness for relating Jewish jokes and anecdotes”’—jokes, incidentally, that often turned on a punch line that revealed Jews to be Jewish only at the core, not to the core. Consider, for example, Freud’s version of the famous joke about the Baroness Feilchenfeld’s confinement: “The doctor, who had been asked to look after the Baroness at her confinement pronounced that the moment had not come, and suggested to the Baron that in the meantime they should have a game of cards in the next room. After a while a cry of pain from the Baroness struck the ears of the two men: ‘Ah, mon Dieu, que je souffre!’ Her husband sprang up, but the doctor signaled to him to sit down: ‘It’s nothing. Let’s go on with the game!’ A little later there were again sounds from the pregnant woman:”Mein Gott, mein Gott, what terrible pains!“—‘Aren’t you going in, Doctor?’ asked the Baron.—‘No, no. It’s not time yet.’ At last there came from next door an unmistakable cry of ‘Aa-ee, aa-ee, aa-ee!’ The doctor threw down his cards and exclaimed: ‘Now it’s time.’”²⁹³⁰

While Freud’s analysis makes no mention of the baroness’s Jewishness, but merely speaks of the cries of pain uttered by “an aristocratic lady in child-birth,”³¹ we note that it is her third and last cry that Freud calls the “unmistakable cry” that discloses her true identity. For Freud the joke “demonstrates” two things: it shows how pain causes “primitive nature to break through all the layers of education” and how an important decision can be properly made to depend “on an apparently trivial phenomenon.”³² It is my conviction that we have here the prototype of Freud’s concepts of “sublimation” and “regression.” If so, once again we see how Freud began with a social psychological phenomenon—better, a phenomenon of sociological psychology, namely, the phenomenon of “passing,” -and psychologized it. The French layer is peeled away, then the German layer, finally laying bare the “mama-loshen” ³³ of primary socialization “underneath.” Freud’s “primitive nature” that breaks through the cultural restraints of a Westernized superego is the premodern Jew of the preemancipated shtetl. Freud turns it into a quasi-biological “id.” He well knew that these “slips” were by no means trivial phenomena, but revelatory of primordial identities upon which cultural strata had been superimposed. In Reik’s account of the same joke, the transition from French to German to Yiddish cries is of interest because the return to the mother tongue or to the jargon once spoken restores the emotional atmosphere of childhood and “sweeps away all the superstructure.”³⁴ Here we have the paradigm for Freud’s concept of the “superego”: that baggage of secondary socialization—morals, “education,” language, taste, and affect-restraint—needed by shtetl Jewry to “make do” and “pass” socially into the modern West. Thus it is that there is a long history behind Freud’s view, in the case of the pain of the baroness, that it causes “primitive nature” to break through “all the layers of education.”³⁵ “Education” (Bildung) is the nineteenth-century German burgher’s word for “rising,” as it was the nineteenth-century German Jew’s word for the mind-work of “passing.”

Jacob Katz informs us that a famous Berlin actor, Albert Wurm, excelled in representing Jewish characters not only on the stage but in the houses of the Berlin burghers: “His favorite piece was his imitation of a Jewish woman who wished to entertain her guests by rendering one of the well-known poems from the German classics. The Jewess makes a tremendous effort to sustain the standard of High German in pronunciation and intonation. At the beginning she does indeed succeed. In the process of the performance, however, she gets carried away and reverts to the common Judendeutsch she has been trying so hard to avoid. The whole business becomes a farce.”³⁶ Our conviction that with this Jewish variation of the social parvenu we are in the presence of the (Lockean) sociology-of-knowledge “original” of several of Freud’s core concepts is confirmed by Freud’s own account of his reaction to Austria’s declaration of war in 1914. At first, he was elated. For the first time in thirty years—he was fifty-eight at the time—he felt himself to be an Austrian, But scarcely two weeks had-passed before Freud, as Jones writes, “came to himself. Very characteristically he described this by means of a Jewish anecdote in which a Jew who had resided in Germany for many years and adopted German manners returns to his family where the old grand- father, by examining his underclothes, decides that the German part was only veneer”³⁷ (my emphasis).

Three years before Freud in Vienna used this primordial, “primitive” identity beneath the “superimposed” identity of the assimilating Jew to construct his ideology of psychoanalysis, Durkheim in Paris was using it to found sociology as a science. In his Suicide (1897) Durkheim’s law of positive correlation of the frequency of “egoistic suicide’ with increasing education and reflection collides with the conspicuously low suicide rate of Jews—lower than Catholics and Protestants. For Durkheim the premodern,”medieval" self of his fellow Jews was literally, as he called it, “privileged” in its “immunity” to the solvent of modernity. What for modernizing Catholics, even more for modernizing Protestants, had been an immanent, autotelic change was, for Jews, largely accommodative, allowing the “mechanical solidarity” of Jewish identity to continue relatively undisturbed “beneath” the modernization process (a kind of sociological “marranoism”). Far from being the norm, as it was to become in the form of Freud’s normative id, this Jewish resistance to the suicidogenic forces of modemity was, for Durkheim, the anomalous exception. For Durkheim, the exception proves the rule. Unlike the modernizing Protestant or Catholic,

the Jew … seeks to learn ’not in order to replace his collective prejudices by reflective thought, but merely to be better armed for the struggle. For him it is a means of offsetting the unfavorable position imposed on him by opinion and sometimes by law. And since knowledge by itself has no influence upon a tradition in full vigor, he superimposes³⁸ this intellectual life [superpose cette vie intellectuelle] upon his habitual routine with no effect of the former upon the latter. This is the reason for the complexity he presents [la complexité de la physionomie]. Primitive [primitif] in certain respects, in others he is an intellectual man.of culture [un cérébral et un raffiné]. He thus combines the advantages of the severe discipline characteristic of small.and ancient groups with the benefits of the intense culture enjoyed by our great societies.³⁹

He has all the intelligence of modern man without sharing his despair. Accordingly, if in this case, intellectual development bears no relation to the number of voluntary deaths, it is because its origin and significance are not the usual ones. So the exception is only apparent; it even confirms the law. Indeed, it proves that if the suicidal tendency. is great in educated circles, this is due … to the weakening of traditional beliefs and to the state of moral individualism resulting from this.⁴⁰ [My emphasis]

The Jewish social parvenu, who “tried at a bound to bridge the gap between his aspiration and his real social status” became a permanent figure on the stage, “much laughed at by the Gentiles and resented by Jews.”⁴¹ It was these value-laden social slips and gaffs, betraying the pariah id-“Yid” beneath the awkward parvenu, that Freud was to transform into value-free medical symptoms. ⁴² Social unease became mental dis-ease. Psychoanalysis was to be a forensic medicine for a difficult time (the era of Jewish social Emancipation). Gaffes defined as symptoms invite neither Jewish shame nor Gentile laughter.

In Paris, in the same year as Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and one year before his Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), the Franco-Jewish philosopher Henri Bergson published his book on laughter, Le Rire. He was working with the same phenomenon: the problem of social maladaptation with its “slips” and “parapraxes.” To Bergson, “the comic expresses, above all else, a special lack of adaptability to society.” The comic is that element by which the person “unwittingly betrays himself—the involuntary gesture or the unconscious remark.”⁴³ (The demonstration of the connection in Bergson between the ridiculous and the unsociable, and of both with the prolongation into the elastic “organic solidarity” of modernizing society of a premodern “mechanical solidarity”—i.e., Jewish ethnic identity—which is derived in turn from Durkheim’s Division of Labor in Society: A Study of the Organization of Superior Societies (1893), awaits further examination.)

Hannah Arendt notes how closely the assimilation of Jews into society “followed the precepts Goethe had proposed for the education of his Wilhelm Meister, a novel that was to become the great model of middle-class education.”⁴⁴ The young burgher is educated by noblemen and actors in the “presentation of self” (as we might say today) so that he may learn “to present and represent his individuality,” since, for the middle classes and the Jews—i.e., those outside high aristocratic society—“everything depended upon ‘personality’ and the ability to express it…. The peculiar fact that in Germany the Jewish question was held to be a question of education … had its consequence in the educational philistinism of both the Jewish and non-Jewish middle classes, and also in the crowding of Jews into the liberal professions.”⁴⁵⁴⁶ This educational program of German idealism, in its effort to “spiritualize” the middle class, instructed the son of both burgher and Jew in two things: the stage taught him “to coordinate his body, practically forgotten in schoolrooms and offices, with his inner being and to make appearance and gesture express some meaning,” while the noblemen set the example of a fuller development and use of his personal faculties together with greater “confidence and courage.”⁴⁷

Let us return to the passage in Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams where he first broaches the idea of a psychic censor which defends the self against contents entering consciousness by disguising them, just like “the politeness which I practise every day is to a large extent dissimulation”;⁴⁸ a form of “affect restraint” prevents the expression in behavior of uncivil ideas and affect, or affect expressed coarsely and directly. Freud’s earliest reference to “the process of censorship” is in connection with “affects of shame, of reproach, of psychic pain, or the feeling of injury.”⁴⁹ The next year, in a paper entitled “Further Remarks on the Defense Neuro-Psychoses” (1896), the concept moves a step closer to its meaning in The Interpretation of Dreams. In this paper, in consequence of “the censorship exercised by the repression,” there is effected “a compromise between the resistance of the ego and the strength of the idea under repression” which results in “distortion.” Freud writes of Frau P., a patient, that her words always had the character of “diplomatic indefiniteness; the distressing allusion was usually closely hidden, the connection between the particular sentences being disguised by a strange tone of voice, unusual forms of speech and the like … [a] compromise-distortion” (my emphasis). Whenever she would recount the threats from her husband’s relatives, these threats “were always so mildly expressed” as to stand in remarkable contrast to the pain they had admittedly caused her.⁵⁰ Sometimes, especially in discussing neurotic symptom formation, Freud uses the language of compromise. This, too, of course, has social parallels: an interpersonal compromise to mend a quarrel, a political or parliamentary compromise in which each side must compromise with others in order to protect one’s interests. Repressed material, too, must submit to “a compromise which alone makes its entry into consciousness possible.”⁵¹

In a paper written four years later, “Screen Memories,” in which he disguises his own memories, imputing them to “a man of university education, aged thirty-eight,” Freud writes of the compromise “on the analogy of the resultant in a parallelogram of forces,”⁵² in which a later unconscious fantasy of lust is “toned down into” a synthetic childhood memory: “It is precisely the coarsely sensual element in the phantasy which explains why it does not develop into a conscious phantasy but must be content to find its way allusively and under a flowery disguise into a childhood scene.”⁵³ The fantasy is “transformed,” expressed “figuratively”; the “raw material” is “remodelled,”⁵⁴ and “the raw material of memory-traces out of which [the screen memory] was forged remains unknown to us in its original form.”⁵⁵

Freud’s theory, then, is a theory of the relation of the coarse to the refined, of the raw to the sublime. It aroused indignant opposition by asserting that all men have. ids (that is, all men are Jews). His theory refused to the fine arts—that is, to the arts that refined—all autonomy. His theory of sublimation unmasked the autonomy of the fine. Freud knew that his theory offended not so much because it sinned against truth but because it sinned against good taste. “He had fallen in love,” Philip Reiff writes, “with a coarse Galatea.”⁵⁶

In the Emancipation process in the nineteenth century, the Eastern European Jew had been “refined.” Freud was very ambivalent about that “achievement.” As the emancipated Jew moved out from ghetto and shtetl and “passed” into Gentile society, he moved up from ghetto and shtetl and “passed” into middle-class Gentile society. In Warsaw, Vienna, Berlin, and Paris, assimilation into Gesellschaft life had not been easy. Ambition, impulse, self-expression—all had to submit to the censorship of Western norms, to the tyranny of bourgeois-Christian decorum; affect-restraint, idea-restraint, in real life as in dream life, was the rule. In 1882, Freud writes his fiancée: “I have such unruly dreams.”⁵⁷ A year later, he writes her—in a passage, Ernest Jones notes, “pregnant with ideas that came to fruition half a century later, particularly in Civilization and Its Discontents”⁵⁸—that “the mob give vent to their impulses [sich ausleben], and we deprive ourselves. We do so in order to maintain our integrity, … we save up for something, not knowing ourselves for what. And this habit of constant suppression of natural instincts,” he concludes, “gives us the character of refinement”⁵⁹ (my emphasis). Of all the connections Freud was later to establish—between sick and healthy, trivial and important, ordinary and extraordinary, “the wound and the bow’—none was so offensive as his linking of the coarse to the refined (or, if you will, finding the coarse in the refined: Freud’s metaphor for finding the pariah Jew in the parvenu Jew, or the”Jew" in the Gentile gentleman). It was this particular unmasking operation of psychoanalysis that gave rise to what Rieff calls the “vulgar accusations of vulgarity.”⁶⁰ Freud had encountered Weber’s Protestant Ethic; but he had experienced it—like others from the subculture of the shtetl or its equivalent—as the Protestant Etiquette. It is a task of historical sociology to understand (verstehen) that particular inner experience for what it was, and still is.

Freud’s lifework was to make sense of the Jewish Emancipation experience. His basic unspoken premise can be put in lapidary if vulgar form as follows: the id of the “Yid” is hid under the lid of Western decorum (the “superego”). Again, put crudely: Freud’s “psychologism” systematically “translated” the problematic of Jewish social intercourse with Gentiles in the Diaspora into problems of sexual intercourse. The public misbehavior of emancipating Jewry, slips and parapraxes, lapses—lapsus linguae and lapsus calami—or public backslidings into Yiddishkeit (the “Jewish fundamentalism”) revealing the “unseemly” premodern “Yid” were universalized into revelations of Everyman’s “id.” In the West, Hannah Arendt remarks, the pariah Jew “was masked,… he concealed his true nature wherever he went, and through every hole in his costume his old pariah existence could be detected.”⁶¹ Freud, a conscious pariah, was a connoisseur of these “holes” in Viennese parvenu Jewry. But his was not to be a “Jewish science”—one of his deepest forebodings—precisely because of his conviction that coiled beneath the highest refinements of the high-minded goyim lay this same uncivilized and essentially unreformable “id.” The id, in other words, was a moral equalizer legitimating “scientifically” social equality between Jew and Gentile in late nineteenth-century Europe. The mind of a moralist had used science to construct a “scientific psychology” as Marx before him had constructed a “scientific socialism.” Freud’s theory was one more ideology of the Emancipation process, joining socialism, Zionism, Reform Judaism, assimilationism, and communism. Freud’s theory, like Marx’s, had its praxis or therapy. It was to be a liberal-stoic strategy for “living-the-Diaspora.” We now turn to it.