The present paper follows Freud’s reading of a joke excerpted from the Reisebilder or Travel Pictures of H. Heine (1826, p. 124) in illustrating the action of doubling between unconscious and conscious registrations as fundamental within psychoanalytic psychology. Whether through the one-person psychological act of reflection observed in dreams or joke construction (1900, 1905) or through the two-person psychological acts present both within the apprehension of jokes and within the clinical discernment of symptomatic meanings (1901, 1905, 1927), Freud’s examples of psychological doubling present transformations akin to literary translation.2 His initial recognition of the Hirsch–Hyacinth vignette compresses Heine’s wit to what appears in “Standard Edition” English to be a neologism3; but the illuminative meanings of Hirsch–Hyacinth remain deceptively complicated, audaciously defiant of Freud’s linguistic explanation.

This paper is divided into two parts. The first, “(No)Joke”, illuminates Freud’s identification with Heine as signaled by the Hirsch–Hyacinth example. The second, “Arabic Curse and Jewish Malady”, drawn from the same literary text as the Hirsch–Hyacinth joke, conveys a doubling within Heine’s writing similar to Freud’s illuminative interpretations of Hirsch–Hyacinth: as if two scansions are equally present in a single expression, addressed to two different levels of apprehension. In addressing Hirsch–Hyacinth while following Heine’s doubled literary form of presentation, Freud’s descriptive demonstration mirrors the multiple levels of experience and meaning continuously emergent in the daily work of psychotherapy (Miller and Sweet, 2018).

Freud overtly turns away from his culturally “beloved mother-tongue” (Freud, 1915, p. 177) in the service of developing the objective, scientific practice of psychoanalytic method (Gilman, 1990). Rhetorically, he consigns the civilizational elements inherent in multiple Jewish languages to oblivion. He reduces Jewishness to the unlanguaged essentialism of commonly shared large group assumptive fantasy, “the more powerful the less they could be expressed in words” (Freud, 1926, p. 274). Effectively, Freud’s strategic move parallels Austro-Hungarian political definition of Jews as a people with neither territorial nor linguistic status. Jay Geller observes

Following Article 19 of the 1867 Imperial Constitution, the Jews, unlike other nationalities such as the Ruthenians and the Czechs, were recognized as a people (Volksstamm) but not as a nation (Nationalität); hence, they had neither language nor territory rights. Every recognized nationality had the right to teach its children in the “language customary to the land”—Croat, Czech, German, Magyar etc. Austria-Hungary recognized 11 national groups and their languages, but the state did not confer such status on either the Jews or their languages, Hebrew and Yiddish (Geller, 2004, p. 1211).

This disability, uniquely extended to Jewish citizens of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, antedates Freud’s similar cultural reduction of Jewishness; but is background to the emancipated Austrian Jewishness in which Freud had grown up, from the age of 11. In this light, Freud’s ambivalent depictions of Jewishness resemble the defensive posture later psychoanalysis recognizes as “identification with the aggressor”, in the sphere of Gentile–Jewish relations (Ferenczi, 1933; Freud, 1936; Howell, 2014). Yet, as Freud demonstrates, such identification is incomplete. Freud’s strategic definition of a Jewishness depleted of its cultural voice is contradicted by his counter-narrative through which vibrantly living forms of Jewish expression, such as those comprising the bulk of his 1905 Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, as well as his own literary mirroring of Heine’s overtly ambivalent Jewish preoccupations, continue from Hirsch–Hyacinth to Moses and Monotheism (Gilman, 1990; Yerushalmi, 1991). Within this persistently repetitive doubling, Freud undercuts his formal identification with the conventional Austro-Hungarian portrayal of Jewishness as an unheimlich, ghostly carapace of antiquated civilization in exactly the same way the unconscious illumination of a joke’s doubled meaning undercuts its initial premise. While contemporary categorical definition of such cultural emotional striving was unavailable to Freud, its historical, psychological, and associative mnemic currents become culturally discernable by the late 20th century in the particular expressive forms that Yerushalmi recognizes as, “the faith of fallen Jews” (Yerushalmi, 1982, p. 101).

Significantly, the Hirsch–Hyacinth joke functions to illustrate Freud’s discernment of psychoanalytic auto-emancipation through interpretive method reliant on subjective particularity but oriented toward illuminating the universal human condition; and at the same time models Freud’s cautiously audacious use of doubling to address the ongoing psychological situation of cultural prejudice, particularized in his participant-observer role as Austro-Hungarian Jew. Freud conveys his doubled psychological reference to a Jewishness he defines as inexpressible in words yet at the same time, actively demonstrates through its particularisms of language and expressive forms, as well as through his personified identification with Heine, the creator of Hirsch–Hyacinth.

(NO) JOKE

We begin with a joke told by Freud. In actuality, Freud doesn’t tell the joke; but rather gestures to the joke in summary. In this way, the disclosure in enlightenment that is the yield of the joke, both for teller and listener, lies obscure and distant from its initially conscious surface. Freud as raconteur is aware not only of the conscious and unrecognized levels of the joke’s meaning but is also mindful of its intended effect upon the listener. He pays attention to the joke itself in its polyphonic meanings, as well as to his participatory actions in its conveyance to an audience (Freud, 1927). Freud’s skillful presentation parallels the manner in which a joke works through revelation of its doubled meanings. In abstracting from the complex specificity of the joke’s contents, Freud describes its mechanics in precise prose.4 He discerns the triggers that evoke recognition and laughter as an interpersonal psychological creation, through the infusion of the joke’s surface by a doubling of underlying meanings.

But in reading Freud more than a century after the writing of this densely-constructed text, contemporary readers face a challenge that is also central within clinical practice. We engage an experiential field defined between amnesia and oblivion, with amnesia representative of the generative pole from which memory might be evoked (Freud, 1910). Oblivion represents its opposite pole, evocative of nothing at all, as the requisite experience upon which recognition depends is missing or obscured by gestural repetitions operating beneath linguistic vocalization (Bion and Bion, 2005; Miller, 2015; Miller and Sweet, 2018). As in the practice of psychotherapy, where “living through” or “learning from experience” must be wrested from meaningless repetition (Bion, 1962; Ferenczi and Rank, 1924; Waelder, 1951), so too, the integration of what has become dissociated from within literary, historical memory, is crucial in recovering meaning from textual oblivion in psychoanalytic history.

Contemporary psychoanalysis, mindful of annihilative human destruction, societal dislocation, large group social dynamics, xenophobia, the binocularity between individual subjectivity and external group experience, and the necessity of integrating history’s external facts within internal subjectivity (Boulanger, 2015; Davoine and Gaudillière, 2004; Ferenczi, 1932, 1933; Fromm, 1973; Grotstein, 2007; Kogan, 2017; Mucci, 2014; Volkan, 2017) extends a psychoanalytic method founded by Freud into a 21st century future of which Freud had no experience.

Unlike Freud’s registration of societal racism in its characterization of Jewishness as genetic infirmity, believed through Lamarckian distortion to have been transmitted by the intergenerational covenantal practice of male circumcision, in fascinated focus upon the Jewish phallus as congenitally feminized within the Habsburgian social imaginary (Boyarin, 1997; Geller, 2004; Gilman, 1990, 1992), today’s psychoanalysis celebrates civilizational aspects of Jewishness in relation to their wealth of psychoanalytic contribution (Aron and Henik, 2010). To the end of Freud’s life, he would express an oscillation of regard and disdain for Jewishness, repeating in his own Moses and Monotheism, Heine’s poetic dedication to “The New Israelite Hospital in Hamburg”, writing of Jewish disease that Jewishness itself is

The thousand-year-old family affliction

The plague they carried from the grim Nile valley,

The old Egyptian faith so long unhealthful (Draper, 1982, p. 399; Freud, 1939, pp. 30–31).

Heine’s intergenerational hope for Jews, conveyed textually to Freud, continues with a question, suggesting that Bildung, or the German-language educative practice of self-formation (Mosse, 1985; Bruford, 1975; Sorkin, 1983, 1987) might generate a solution through Enlightenment’s rationality, in curing this “great incurable malady”,

Will Time, eternal goddess, some day end it,

Root out this black misfortune that the fathers

Hand down to sons? And some day will the grandsons5

Be healed and whole, and rational and happy? (Draper, 1982, p. 399).

Heine’s disruptive and provocative voice, sometimes darkly condemning, sometimes praising, and frequently mocking both Jewish and Gentile cultures, articulates the mid-twentieth century epitome of “marginal man”, partaking variably and ambivalently in multiple cultural identifications (Stonequist, 1937, pp. 153–154). His voice is relatively unknown today, especially within Anglophone psychoanalysis (Miller and Sweet, 2018); but not for Freud, who recognizably enlists Heine

as his own rhetorical double—the object of his study as well as the voice into which he can slip. What is uncanny in Freud’s text is the regularity with which Heine’s voice appears in this manner. Freud’s poetics of quotation reveal themselves to be a politics of quotation. His appropriation of Heine’s voice in the ‘scientific’ context of psychoanalytic theory reveals itself to be a dialogue with the voice of the Jew within a discourse initially labeled as scientific, but also understood by Freud within his thought-collective as Jewish as well. Heine remains for Freud the sign of the double bind of being both the authoritative voice of the observer and the ever suspect voice of the patient, a voice which remains one of the signs and symptoms of the disease from which Heine and Freud suffered, their Jewishness (Gilman, 1990, p. 94).

Recognizing this of Freud and Heine, we turn to Freud’s joke sample, his literary case presentation of Herr Hirsch–Hyacinth. Freud begins this particular academic demonstration of the joke with concentration upon a single aspect of humor, “the factor of bewilderment and illumination” (Freud, 1905, p. 12). He then leads the reader through an allusion to Kant upon the general nature of the comedic before proceeding to G. Heymans’ 1896 commentary upon bewilderment and illumination, itself elaborating a dimension of the comic made by T. Lipps (Freud, 1905, p. 12; Gilman, 1990, p. 89). Boldly, Freud now reveals his active participation in this imagined debate, his own mental representation of an academic symposium about the dynamics of psychology, extending across a century of Enlightenment. Freud reintroduces a joke used as an example by Heymans by writing that Heine

makes one of his characters, Hirsch–Hyacinth, the poor lottery agent, boast that the great Baron Rothschild had treated him quite as his equal—quite ‘familionairely’. Here the word that is the vehicle of the joke appears at first simply to be a wrongly constructed word, something unintelligible, incomprehensible, puzzling. It accordingly bewilders. The comic effect is produced by the solution of this bewilderment, by understanding the word. Lipps (1898, 95, citation as in Freud’s text) adds to this that this first stage of enlightenment—that the bewildering word means this or that—is followed by a second stage, in which we realize that this meaningless word has bewildered us and has then shown us its true meaning. It is only this second illumination, this discovery that a word which is meaningless by normal linguistic usage has been responsible for the whole thing—this resolution of the problem into nothing—it is only this second illumination that produces the comic effect (Freud, 1905, p. 13).

Freud next gestures to a more pointedly if particular form of doubling in the Hirsch–Hyacinth sample through revelation that this example of wit is no joke at all, but a statement of an uncomfortably borne societal alienation within which both Heine and Freud are embedded respectively, to their bewilderment. Addressing this issue obliquely if boldly, within the context of his imagined symposium with Kant, Lipps, and Heymans, Freud writes

What Heine has put into Hirsch–Hyacinth’s mouth is a correct and acute observation, an observation of unmistakable bitterness, which is understandable in a poor man faced by such great wealth; but we should not venture to describe it as in the nature of a joke. If anyone is unable in considering the translation to get away from his recollection of the shape given to the thought by the poet, and thus feels that nevertheless the thought in itself is also in the nature of a joke, we can point to a sure criterion of the joking character having been lost in the translation (Freud, 1905, p. 17).

Freud recognizes that this joke discloses a significant fact, Heine’s poetic observation of the bitterness of Jewish suffering, emitted through the vehicle of Hirsch–Hyacinth’s mouth. But now cautious, Freud goes no further. Indeed, his silence is deafening as he leaves the reader only marginally advanced along the path from bewilderment to illumination. Perhaps the particular suffering to which he alludes might genuinely concern one Jew’s envious desire for another Jew’s wealth? This interpretation would be congruent with traditional anti-Semitic derogation (Nirenberg, 2013), so probably sufficient to make the Heine example laughable for some. But knowing Freud as we do, such limitation while sufficient, lacks necessity.

Alternatively, Freud seems engaged in the psychological action of doubling, of demonstrating a ghostlike and uncannily unheimlich resonance which remains inexplicit, so formally undisclosed. Like the dynamism of the joke itself, it is as if an alter-ego undoes the ostensible placidity of social presentation (Freud, 1919; Frosh, 2013; Kilborne, 2014; Rank, 1914). If so, Freud signals one rendition of his interpretative story at one level while signaling a counter-rendition of the story at another level: exactly the disruptive marker of the psychoanalytic double. Here, Freud,6 mindful of Heine’s original contextual location of Hirsch–Hyacinth in the “The Baths of Lucca”, stylistically mirrors Heine’s subversive presentation of doubling discussed below in section “Arabic Curse and Jewish Malady” (Freud, 1905, p. 77; Heine, 1826, p. 183), as if with an insider’s wink that those in the know will recognize what is meant.

Modern readers are aware that historically Austrian Jewry was caught in a double bind. The Viennese society into which many sought admission demanded complete assimilation, even to the point of obliterating any traces of Judentum7; yet, often accompanying the demand was the assumption that Jews were constitutionally incapable of eliminating their difference (Geller, 2004, p. 1210).

The man who Freud considered his contemporary literary doppelgänger, Arthur Schnitzler, observed that such Jewishness remained conspicuously and painfully present in everyday Viennese life where there was neither respite nor exit from this social condition. This societal force induced a hyper-conscious state of self-awareness upon the individual, the sense of one’s own threateningly sinister alter-ego imposed socially, psychoanalytically framed by Rank as a double (Rank, 1914), such that

it was not possible, especially not for a Jew in public life, to ignore the fact that he was a Jew; nobody else was doing so, not the gentiles and even less the Jews. You had the choice of being counted as insensitive, obtrusive and fresh; or of being oversensitive, shy and suffering from feelings of persecution. And even if you managed somehow to conduct yourself so that nothing showed, it was impossible to remain completely untouched; as for instance a person may not remain unconcerned whose skin had been anaesthetized but who has to watch, with his eyes open, how it is scratched by an unclean knife, even cut into until the blood flows (Schnitzler, The Road to the Open, quoted in Geller, 2004, p. 1220).

The situation described by Schnitzler and lived by Freud and Heine, has been described as an “existential aporia”, placing Jews in a “no man’s land” of cultural homelessness: resident in Germany or Austria but with a socially induced self-consciousness through racial objectivization as society’s “Other” in a dichotomized and xenophobic social world, split into mutually negating depictions of “us” and “them” (Kogan, 2017; Schlesier, 1990; Volkan, 2017).

Immediately recognizable to the fin-de-siècle German readers of the Hirsch–Hyacinth joke is the character’s hyphenated name. Hirsch is the original Jewish name and Hyacinth, the post-baptismal name of the character, just as its author, another H–H, was originally known as Harry Heine and after baptism, Heinrich Heine. The social–psychological context for Freud’s Hirsch–Hyacinth is within Heine’s sarcastic depiction of German–Jewish bourgeois pleasure in the Tuscan Spa Resort of Lucca. Here, Heine archly observes, is where imperfectly acculturated Jews have opportunistically fantasized an escape route to the inescapable Gentile–Jewish dilemma through baptism as the “entry ticket to European culture” (Schlesier, 1990, p. 39). This attempted, if impossible, escape reduces confessional faith to the throughput of “religious conversion companies” (Heine, 1826, p. 182) as newly Christian, Heine’s characters now revel in hopeful awareness that the freedoms and pleasures of societal acceptance will be theirs, ambivalently self-conscious that the “Jews have cornered the Christian market” (Heine, 1826, pp. 182, 190).

Freud’s own “Signorelli” dream specimen, presented both in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), reflects contextual similarity to Heine’s depiction of assimilated German–Jewish interaction in “The Baths of Lucca”. Freud arrives at the universal nature of dream dynamics via the elemental particularities of the dreamer’s specific associations. Here, the associative framework is particularized by Freud’s narrative context of two Austro-Hungarian Jews from different regions of the Empire, expertly discussing the nuances of church art as they sit in a Mittleuropean train carriage (Freud, 1901, pp. 6–7). Creating his narrative setting, Freud blends two discernable forms of Jewish linguistic expression. The first is his utilization of the train motif that is a mainstay of 19th century Jewish humor; and that is explicitly depicted in his 1905 text (Freud, 1905, p. 80; Wisse, 2013). Combined with this familiar set-piece is a motif resonant of Heine, whose hyphenated Jews of Lucca, educated in secular European culture, observe

You can bind my eyes and take me to an art gallery in Florence and every painting you put me in front of I can tell you the painter who painted it or at least the school he belonged to (Heine, 1826, p. 106).

Uncannily present in its absence from Freud’s dream associations is the recognition that Signorelli’s first name is “Luca”, similar in pronunciation to the setting of Heine’s story (Freud, 1900; Miller and Sweet, 2018).8

Sardonically, Heine reduces what in earlier times had been the idealized domain of transcendent religious faith, to its down-to-earth value as practical utility in daily life, a unique marker of an adaptive Jewish social form also recognizable in the 350-year-old culture of Iberian Conversos, the descendants of forcibly baptized “New Christians”, under the lethal force of the Spanish Inquisition, still operative during Heine’s lifetime (Gilman, 1972; Yovel, 1989, 2009). Self-consciously aware of a similar social imperative, facing societal contempt and disability rather than the auto-de-fé, Heine’s newly Christian Jewish characters affect a similar pragmatic stance.

The fin-de-siècle German reader of Freud’s Hirsch–Hyacinth joke immediately recognizes the impossibly obstructed societal dead-end of Jewish striving, whether for character Hirsch–Hyacinth or author, Harry–Heinrich Heine. Heine’s vocalization of Hirsch–Hyacinth’s contempt shifts the narrated locus of Jewish suffering, highlighting its interior dimension of self-hatred. Hirsch–Hyacinth’s rebellion turns against Jewishness itself, whereas Freud’s interpretive sensitivity toward “the shape given to the thought by the poet”, addresses Heine’s more expansive critique of insoluble cultural prejudice in regard to the problem of being Jewish in enlightened Europe (Heine, 1826, 1840).

You can keep your old Jewish faith Doctor, I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. Gives you nothing but scorn and shame. I tell you, its no religion at all, just a lot of hard luck. I try to avoid anything that could remind me of it, and since Hirsch is a Jewish word and means Hyacinth in German, I even gave old Hirsch his walking papers and now sign my name: “Hyacinth, Collection Agent, Operator Extraordinaire and Taxator”. Fortunately, my signet ring already has an H on it and I don’t have to get a new one engraved. I assure you, your name matters a whole lot in this world, your name is everything. When I sign, “Hyacinth, Collection Agent, Operator Extraordinaire and Taxator,” it sounds altogether different than if I’d just signed Hirsch, and nobody can treat me like a common ragamuffin (Heine, 1826, p. 127).

Whether as Hirsch–Hyacinth or as Harry–Heinrich Heine, the unsuccessful assimilation of Jews to cultural acceptability through the baptismal ticket of admission is doomed to fail. The German or Austrian Jew as socially imagined, was stuck within an irremediable racial category from which there was no exit. This is Freud’s tacit social critique in the Hirsch–Hyacinth interpretation, a subsidiary illumination requiring further inquiry along the path of primary illumination, Freud’s discernment of the psychoanalytic method.

Freud’s self-formation as a scientist would pivot upon the same exclusionary social dynamic. Jewish definition within the German cultural imaginary was externally imposed rather than resultant intrinsically from Jewish civilizational contents.9 Indeed, identification with this environmentally aggressive racial definition, was also reflected in Jewish self-representation. Heine himself is recognized as the epitome of this marginal situation, oscillating between idealized and denigrated states of identification, at times celebrating Jewish identity, at times in self-hatred, and at times, aligned in non-Jewish identification with the secular environment (Gilman, 1990, 1992; Stonequist, 1937) in a manner resembling today’s contemporary psychoanalytic observations upon self identity relative to external environments (Boulanger, 2015; Howell, 2014; Mucci, 2014; Volkan, 2017).

Freud’s affirmation of the scientific role allows him the social status of observer wherein his societal definition as Jew permits him the access to the experience of society’s Other, believed in his time and place to be equivalent to society’s congenitally-diseased patient (Gilman, 1990). Freud obliquely addresses this doubled assumption of biological incapability relative both to Jewishness and to emotional suffering in his 1909 Clark University lectures. There, he upsets the characterization of the hysteric as genetically impaired, through two contrasting images. The first is the biologized pictograph of hysteric as overwhelmed shopper, incapable of supporting multiple parcels. Freud’s counter-image is of Bertha Pappenheim’s fluid facility in expressing herself verbally, together with Josef Breuer, across multiple European languages (Freud, 1910). Jews and their languages remain markers for Freud, in demonstrating universal capability against the 19th century anti-Semitic claim of Jewish cognitive and emotional incapacity (Makari, 2008; Geller, 2004; Gilman, 1990, 1992).

However, Freud strategically heightens his observational position by favoring the then-common Jewish identification with the Gentile social imaginary through characterization of Jewishness as “unheimlich” or ghostlike (Geller, 2004). As Rank later documents through psychoanalytic interest in the “double” (Rank, 1914), this ghostlike quality is imputed to be an internal, pathological characteristic rather than either an external projection upon a socially-demeaned group (Volkan, 2017) or the result of complex individual identifications within a traumatizing social environment. Thirty-five years before Freud’s own work on the unheimlich or uncanny, Jewish nationalist Leon Pinsker had argued that the parasitic and ghostly Jewish condition that he termed unheimlich, would require the remedial action of auto-emancipation through realization of national territory and language (Freud, 1919; Geller, 2004; Pinsker, 1882).

Freud’s interpretive method provides a very different route to the self’s auto-emancipation, accessible universally both to Jew and Gentile, along the Bildung path of self-formation (Mosse, 1985; Bruford, 1975; Sorkin 1983, 1987). For Freud, this requires a strategically reductive turning from Jewish civilizational contents in the service of elevating the psychoanalytic method. Such orientation extends beyond our contemporarily popular, if limited, faith-based understanding of Freud as “Godless Jew” (Gay, 1988). Indeed, it is Heine, as cited by Freud in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious who links such Godlessness to Spinoza as Heine’s and Freud’s “fellow un-believer” (Freud, 1905, p 77); and Heine, too, who construes the modern individual’s self-authorizing autodidactic thinking as reflective of “Godless self-gods” (Schlesier, 1990, p. 26).

Heine also articulates a philosophical turn that is enacted by Freud as assumptive behavior: the modernist idea of individual self-formation. Freud’s developing method derives from observation of the world through the individualistic lenses of identity determined by Heine, to have been “ground” by Spinoza.10 Definition of the individual is the basis of Bildung ideology of self-formation (Sorkin, 1983), in contrast to the late medieval social definition of the individual within the context of confessional or legal large-group social definition (Nadler, 1999).

But powerful cultural definition of the Other continues in social reality, despite modernity’s post-Spinozan shift. Freud accommodates this contradiction by generating one of his own: he reduces Jewish particularity and identity to a cipher, while he continues throughout his lifetime, to reference Heine as his literary alter-ego; and so keeps Heine’s “incurable malady” of Jewishness in continuous awareness as a subjectively meaningful form of psycho-social awareness.

Throughout his career, Freud would retain a fine appreciation for Heine’s presentation of the ironic, jarring social contradictions of the German Jew. With escape impossible from the self-consciousness of Jewish racial definition, imposed both internally and externally, Freud identifies with Heine in addressing his own multiple, conflicting forms of social identification (Stonequist, 1937). As Gilman observes “Heine, about whom one laughs, with whom one laughs, is seen as the epitome of both subject and object, both the means of analysis and the object of study” (1990, p. 92).

But where Heine is painfully overt in surfacing the cultural divide in marginality between dominant cultural judgment and the demeaned racialized Jew of the Gentile cultural imaginary with which both Freud and Heine also identify, Freud attempts his own disappearance of Jewishness into an unheimlich silence. Famously, in Freud’s (1926) 70th birthday address to the B’nai Brith, he defines Jewishness as sharing

many obscure emotional forces (viele dunkle Gefühlsmächte), which were the more powerful the less they could be expressed in words, as well as a clear consciousness of inner identity, the safe privacy of a common mental construction (die Heimleichkeit der gleichen seelischen Identität) (Freud, 1926, p. 224; see Gilman, 1992, p. 157).

Freud’s pathway to the scientific discernment of psychoanalysis remains caught in a doubled bind. The first concerns his oscillating personal identifications with Jewish and non-Jewish cultural elements. Contrasting with this personal identification within an obscure and unlanguaged (“the more powerful the less they could be expressed in words”) Jewish mental construction both private and shared, Freud is also remembered for the doubled sentiment that he could not live anywhere else on earth after the World War I collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (Kilborne, 2014). Indeed, in his elegiac “Thoughts for a Time of War and Death”, written at the beginning of that global conflict, he would mourn the passing of universalized freedoms, among the multiple ethnicities representative of Austro-Hungarian citizenry

Relying on this unity among the civilized peoples, countless men and women have exchanged their native home for a foreign one, and made their existence dependent on the intercommunications between friendly nations. Moreover anyone who was not by stress of circumstance confined to one spot could create for himself out of all the advantages and attractions of these civilized countries a new and wider fatherland, in which he could move about without hindrance or suspicion. In this way he enjoyed the blue sea and the grey; the beauty of snow-covered mountains and of green meadow lands; the magic of northern forests and the splendour of southern vegetation; the mood evoked by landscapes that recall great historical events, and the silence of untouched nature. This new fatherland was a museum for him, too, filled with all the treasures which the artists of civilized humanity had in the successive centuries created and left behind. As he wandered from one gallery to another in this museum, he could recognize with impartial appreciation what varied types of perfection a mixture of blood, the course of history, and the special quality of their mother-earth had produced among his compatriots in this wider sense. Here he would find cool, inflexible energy developed to the highest point; there, the graceful art of beautifying existence; elsewhere, the feeling for orderliness and law, or others among the qualities which have made mankind the lords of the earth (Freud, 1915, pp. 176–177).

This, Freud’s mournful recollection of a destroyed civilization, is a dream memory of Bildung, a socially mobile, pluralistic society, providing intellectual and aesthetic challenge and pleasure. Quite passionately, Freud articulates the freedoms of emancipation, only dreamed of by Heine (1840), as the foundation of his own generational experience, two generations later. He articulates a transit between the particularity of Jewish experience to the generality of secular citizenry after Emancipation, with membership in the larger world of universalized enlightened thought. He writes:

From among the great thinkers, writers and artists of all nations he had chosen those to whom he considered he owed the best of what he had been able to achieve in enjoyment and understanding masters of his own tongue. None of these great men had seemed to him foreign because they spoke another language—neither the incomparable explorer of human passions, nor the intoxicated worshipper of beauty, nor the powerful and menacing prophet, nor the subtle satirist; and he never reproached himself on that account for being a renegade towards his own nation and his beloved mother-tongue (Freud, 1915, p. 177).

Here are Freud’s individualized choices of writers and thinkers with whom he wished to identity and from whom he derived the productive contents upon which his own creative thought emerged, as shown above in his intellectual engagement with Kant, Lipps, Heymans, Heine and Spinoza. Freud, the ardent and representative son of Bildung, the German-languaged ideology of educative self-formation, discloses a difficulty that otherwise becomes effaced in his development of psychoanalytic method: the continuing fact of particularistic experiences and civilizational contents (such as language and expression) from and through which, individuals strive to express the universality of the human condition. And with it, his enduring awareness that he never reproached himself on that account for being a renegade towards his own nation and his beloved mother-tongue (Freud, 1915).

In contrast to Freud’s cautious audacity, Heine is strident and direct in expression of Jewish suffering: as forthright as his creation, Hirsch–Hyacinth, the butt of Freud’s (un)joke. Throughout his prose writing, Heine describes a doubled state of socially-induced psychological identity, both German and Jewish. Heine, as Freud’s Jewish muse, rejecting of religious faith and observant of the political rights of man, but himself the imperfect participant-observer of this Jewish dilemma, remained with Freud throughout his career from Hirsch–Hyacinth to Moses and Monotheism (1939). Freud overtly reduces Judentum to the desiccated and unlanguaged, ghostly uncanny, where its contents are disappeared into subjective and collectively shared obscurity, like Freud’s own declared turn from his own “beloved mother tongue”; and then proceeds to illuminate his psychoanalytic journey from German–Jewish particularity to Kantian universality. Freud’s more outrageous alter-ego, through whose voice Freud sometimes speaks, remains Heine, the incurably provocative Jew, consigned to oblivion in Anglophone psychoanalysis (Miller and Sweet, 2018).

ARABIC CURSE AND JEWISH MALADY

Freud is correct in promising the reader, like the audience of the joke, a journey from bewilderment to enlightenment through multiple illuminations (1905, p. 13). The primary illumination of Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), like the Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901) and The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), is in discernment of what clinicians will come to recognize as the psychoanalytic method; and especially in the applicability within clinical psychoanalysis of recognizing the disruption of consciousness by the uncanny emergence of a previously unrecognized, unconscious illumination. This broadly describes the repetitive clinical journey from bewilderment to enlightenment (Miller and Sweet, 2018).

Yet Freud, who fashions himself a 60-year-old “renegade towards his own nation and his beloved mother-tongue” (1915, p. 277), seems anything but. Rather, this written presentation of his thinking, like that of Heine’s, is thickly doubled, like the form of the Hirsch–Hyacinth joke he describes in 1905. Freud writes voluminously and declares much, so it is easy to focus on what he writes as immutably central within our attentions. Escaping our notice, the forms by which he conveys his thoughts in writing become peripheral or unheimlich to us. For example, the self-styled 60-year-old renegade from 1915 repeats his argument 15 years later in a manner that would greatly please Heine (Freud, 1912–1913, p. xv). For Freud does here exactly what he did in his earlier telling of the “Signorelli” dream: he causes the oblivious reader to focus on the central fact of content while ignoring the peripheral fact of context. In “Signorelli”, Freud reprises Heine’s depiction of acculturated Jews at Lucca, down to the last jot and tittle. He addresses two audiences: those he seeks to teach through demonstration of the psychoanalytic method and also those who recognize what he is doing by means of the particularity with which he does it: the fine art of the Jewish storyteller. And Freud should know: he wrote the book on how Jewish stories work.

Later, the 74-year-old Freud’s attestation in the preface to the Hebrew language version of Totem and Taboo (1912–1913) repeats the same pattern. He affirms his programmatic reduction of Jewishness to a vague essentialism, without language or content; and at the same time winks at his own fine contradiction through the particular fact of the written context, signaled by the specific occasion for this address. The location for this extension of Bildung through psychoanalytic auto-emancipation is founded in the particularity of its placement as preface to the Hebrew language translation of Totem and Taboo. Hebrew, of course, is one of the several Jewish languages Freud tactically disappeared as he elided his own Jewish identity into the identity of the objectively “scientific” cultural observer, all the while allowing Heine’s mischievous expressions, complaints, and diatribes, to speak Jewishly, for him. And in 1930, Freud repeats his repetitive claim of absent Jewish civilizational forms in the context of another auto-emancipation, the nationalist revival of the Hebrew language in modern form after 2000 years of survival in textual and liturgical use. Freud’s expressive audacity and hilarious irony faces down his lifelong experience of anti-Semitic racism (1) by affirming the method of psychoanalysis and (2) by affirming the particularity of specific, linguistic Jewish civilizational contents with a comedic irony that rivals Heine’s.

Perhaps the ultimate psychoanalytic Jewish joke is constructed not by a Jew, but by a Gentile, affirming the genuine universalism in the psychoanalytic method through the fact of Jewish particularity, foundational in psychoanalytic thought. Each of us comes from somewhere; and that somewhere shapes the particularities of our experience. Yet, psychoanalysis discerns what is common or universal in the deep patterning of our shared human journeys.

The particular variables that characterize both Heine’s and Freud’s lifetime struggles with the emergence of self in relation to the externally imposed cultural barrier of anti-Semitic definition, become writ large in the translation from German to English of Freud’s 1923 work, Das Ich und Das Es. Here, what is German within German–Jewish relations drops away to reveal what is Jewish (at least from the perspective of Gentile definition) and continuously known both to Heine and Freud. Perhaps mirroring Hirsch–Hyacinth’s earlier neologism, the significance of this fact emerges in “Standard Edition” English through the faux-Latinate neologism adapted by its British Translation Committee; and so remains circumcised within the textual body of Anglophone psychoanalysis.

Writing to his wife, translator James Strachey explains how the contemporary London street derogation for Jews, “Yidd”, is consciously affirmed as the translation of the German word “Es”, the earlier, culturally indistinct agency that Groddeck had termed the “It” (Freud, 1923; Groddeck, 1923; Strachey and Strachey, 1985, p. 83). The Strachey–Jones “(Y)idd” operates unceasingly and persistently until its socialized transformation by the acculturated Ego, a linguistically-marked route familiar both in Heine’s and Freud’s acquaintance with the existential aporia that had denied both awareness and expression of the self’s multiple forms of subjective identity under externally imposed cultural exclusions. However, Strachey’s audacious translation misses the doubled, if internally Jewish aspect of language, perhaps unknown from the external, Gentile perspective. This is that the word, “Id”, as transliterated from Yiddish, simply connotes the Jew as human: the Freudian idea of the Kantian universal.

But the gesture of doubling itself remains in what might be here, Strachey’s greatest (unconscious) appreciation of the psychoanalytic tension between what is conscious and unconscious. For the large group awareness of us/them is an enduring cultural fact whether in the relation of German-to-Jew or in Viennese psychoanalysis-to London psychoanalysis. What remains is for this fundamental splitting to be addressed in its recognition. And here, the following passage from the same Heine text from which Hirsch–Hyacinth is drawn, would not have escaped Freud’s attention. The scene Heine sets is in exit from the Cathedral at Lucca, similar to Freud’s memory in the Signorelli dream, of the Cathedral at Orvieto. Two characters emerge, having visited the church’s interior. Heine writes:

When leaving the cathedral, she dunked her index finger three times into the holy water, sprinkled me each time and muttered, “Damn, Zefardeyim, Kinnim”, which, she maintained, was the Arabic charm wherein sorceresses transformed a man into a donkey” (p. 183).

Here is the essence of Heine’s “Jewish malady” (Draper, 1982, p. 399). For this curse is not an Arabic charm at all. Stylistically, Heine has borrowed from Cervantes, who substitutes Arabic for Hebrew in Don Quixote, transforming the Jewish Maranno in Toledo’s Alcana Market into the Moslem Morisco, both forcibly converted to Catholicism and linguistically mocked through the particularity of Spanish word usage representing foods ritually proscribed under Jewish and Moslem practice, but now demanded to be eaten as a sign of Catholic religious conviction (de Cervantes, 1615, p. 67)

But unlike Heine, who references Cervantes in the same text (Heine, 1826, p. 198), the reader needn’t have read Don Quixote to understand the joke. Indeed, the Cervantes reference only provides literary heft to what is already baldly provocative and weighty. For the three Arabic words uttered are Hebrew; and immediately recognizable to anyone with experience of the Jewish celebration of Freedom, the Passover Seder. They specify the biblical plagues imposed by God upon Egypt, in forcing the conditions for Jewish liberation. Yet under Heine’s usage at Lucca, the doubling of the joke from Hebrew to Arabic is doubled again. The specifically Jewish image of historical freedom is doubled into universal freedoms, in accordance with the revolutionary French, “Rights of Man”. Even the sprinkling of water is doubled: whether of the baptismal font or of the commemoration of the plagues, at Seder, by the gesture of the little finger in spilling tiny droplets of wine. Still, Heine cannot resist another kick at his great bugbear as Godless Jewish Christian: that religion itself turns people into asses.

Yet, Heine’s compressed Jewish meanings, here expressed in a universalized Moslem–Jewish curse against external Catholic religious coercion, endures unrecognized by any except those who recognize it; and this exactly mirrors Freud’s compressed second illumination drawn from within the textual context of the Hirsch–Hyacinth joke. Whether in Heine’s Arabic Curse that expresses the Jewish malady or in Freud’s passionate exegesis of Jewish suffering in the Hirsch–Hyacinth example, even the most acculturated, secular Jew would recognize this broad wink: and this is the doubling of unrecognized meanings, provocatively emergent and discernable in the vocalized, conscious surface of text, either written or verbalized, as in the mechanics of wit.

Freud’s reading of Heine traces the multiple hyphenations of language and culture from linguistic, literary expression, particularized in Jewish forms, to psychoanalytic recognition of universality in what people do. Freud’s 1905 demonstration of a universal psychoanalytic method underlies the functional utility in clinical discernment of the interpretive significant fact (Bion, pp. 208–209; Miller and Sweet, 2018).

Heine’s strong doublings of Jewish reference within German-language literary texts is widespread. Willy Goetschel’s recent essay on Heine’s poem “Jehuda ben Halevy” (Goetschel, 2004, Chap. 18) highlights what, for the psychoanalyst, is an aspect of the untranslatable, evanescent and shimmering quality of psychoanalytic experience. This is the containment of an oscillation in process between instances of history, perceptual viewpoints, at the cusp of meaning and affect.

Goetschel’s focus within this poem is a singular Hebrew word that illuminates through its presence, a transformative aesthetic meaning beyond Heine’s German (or English, if read in translation). This word is shalshelet, which assumes two meaningful or doubled forms in this poem. Goetschel recognizes its meaning as a diacritical symbol within the written cantillation of Torah reading, assigning a quavering musical expression to a particular word or syllable. Together with this vocal quaver, the literal meaning of shalshelet as “chain”, indicating its endurance, strength, and historicity of tradition, forms the leitmotif of Heine’s poem. This is expressed through the imagery of a pearl necklace across ages of historical time.

Heine deploys this single Hebrew word toward a complex plurality of meanings, embedding it in the poem’s German text to establish a transformation that becomes discernable through his quavering homage to the medieval Spanish Hebrew poet Yehuda haLevi; but there is more.

Heine’s homage to Yehuda haLevi gestures to another Shalshelet, participated in by Heine as it was by Yehuda haLevi. This chain of tradition is represented by the prominence of Moses Mendelssohn’s late 18th century translation of Yehuda haLevi’s ode, Tzion Ha’lo Tishali into German (Gillman, 2018, pp. 38–39). Mendelssohn’s transition from haLevi’s 12th century Hebrew text to late 18th century German, effects the reception within Romantic German culture of Jewish literary expression. From here, it becomes a normative current in German literature, where its reference in Heine might be traced either through Mendelssohn or Mendelssohn’s readers because

In fact, philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder later produced his own adaptation of Mendelssohn’s version, which he then shared with Goethe; Herder also mentions Halevi in On the Spirit of Hebrew Poetry (1785) (A. Gillman, 2018, p. 39).

Just as Heine extends his consciousness of the poet’s integrative synthesis of Arabic-language forms into Hebrew poetry, both Mendelssohn and Heine extend Jewish sensibilities into German linguistic expression; and so consciously demonstrate the integrative capabilities of Hebrew language and its literary forms.

Heine’s conscious poetic integration of Hebrew together with German poetry stands in marked contrast with Freud’s strategic consignment of Jewish languages to the domain of the unheimlich. And Heine, being Heine, pushes further: in another poem from the same period as his “Jehuda ben Halevy”, he praises the simple Jewish Sabbath stew, called schalet in Germany, itself an unmistakable onomatopoeic compression of his use of shalshelet, which also extends the shimmering, atemporal depiction of Jewish civilization into the sensuous realm of smell and taste, comparable with the form and expression of high German Romanticism. He writes

Schalet, shining gleam from Heaven,

Daughter of Elysium!–

Schiller’s ode would sound like this if

He had ever tasted schalet (Draper, 1982, p. 653).

Like Heine’s hidden reference to the Jewish celebration and hope for emancipatory freedom in his allusion to the Passover Seder through his misattribution of Arabic nonsense syllables—ironized by his conscious knowledge of Yehuda haLevi’s literary integration of Arabic form in Hebrew expression—the untranslatable Jewishness of such elements in his work are immediately recognizable to his readers. By contrast, Freud’s demonstrated, strategic wit relative to “unlanguaged” Jewish identity, both denies the linguistic bonds of Jewish expression and at the same time, affirms them through his doubled and continued reference to Heine.

What remains, especially within our 21st century awareness of continued traumatization and divisiveness, of racism and splitting between “us and them” (Volkan, 2017), is another, continuously bewildering significance, beyond immediate illumination, as in the quavering sound of the shalshelet. This is the fact that the effects of traumatization eventuate in human suffering. Freud and Heine demonstrate that creative sublimation may be possible in the humorously adaptive addressing of suffering; but that the universal fact of human destruction and traumatization continues to challenge not only the field of psychoanalysis, in recognition of its various psychological forms across the continuum of human adaptability, but also the question of species survival itself (Fromm, 1973).

Psychoanalytic texts themselves bear the scars of institutional intolerance and doubling; and our institutional oblivions to the particularities of psychological experience in different times and places cause us to foreclose consideration of the complex particulars eventuating in clinical presentation, just as Freud (1919) and Rank (1914) imputed the concept of the unheimlich to be an exclusively internal subjective registration rather than an internal response to societal traumatization within Gentile–Jewish relations. Freud’s complex Jewish identification with Heine returns our understanding of psychoanalytic history from the foreclosed ignorance of oblivion to reckoning through the restorations of memory as we consider the complexities of our current psychoanalytic moment.

NOTES

  1. 1.

    Ian S. Miller PhD, is a clinical psychologist/psychoanalyst and writer based in Dublin, Ireland. He is an Associate Editor of the American Journal of Psychoanalysis and Chair of the Section of Individual Members at The International Federation of Psychoanalytic Societies. Dr. Miller is also a Member of the Irish Forum of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy; and a Chartered Psychologist in the Psychological Society of Ireland.

  2. 2.

    Freud’s creative psychological intuition based on internalized and externalized representative forms of vocalized language historically parallels George Herbert Mead’s wresting of individualized and social meanings from Wundt’s Völkerpsychologie (1904), which through an intergenerational transmission of ideas by T.V. Moore becomes the basis of mid-20th century interpersonal clinical conceptions of parataxic forms (Moore, 1921; Mead, 1904; Sullivan, 1953).

  3. 3.

    As Sander Gilman observes (1990, p. 90), the spoken quality of this neologism is immediately recognizable by the German speaker as a dialect joke. Here, the sensuous nature of discordant sound together with distortion caused by the mispronunciation of German from an imperfectly accented “jargon”, the Yiddish employed by Hirsch–Hyacinth with its contemporary (if derogatory) social signification, compounds the cognitive registration of discordant word meaning.

  4. 4.

    In adolescence, Freud would comment to a friend that because of racially imagined, congenital disability, Jews were capable of writing prose but incapable of the creativity required by poetry. In momentary youthful literary enthusiasm, he seems to suppress his own awareness of Heine’s popular range in both forms. Later, Freud would frequently reference both Heine’s poetry and prose (Gilman, 1990, 1992, p. 159).

  5. 5.

    Freud, born in 1856, the same year that Heine died, would be representative of this generation of “grandsons,” relative to Heine.

  6. 6.

    Freud explicitly cites “The Baths of Lucca” within Heine’s Reisebilder, [“travel pictures”] or postcards, later in his Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905, p. 77).

  7. 7.

    Geller (2004, p. 2010) defines Judentum in the following context,

    The tacit familiarity for Central Europeans of Judentum, that condensation of ethnos, ethos and ethic (i.e. of Jewry, Judaism and Jewishness), lay in more than its function as the necessary and proximate other or older would-be superseded sibling by which Christentum, a comparable condensation of the communities, beliefs and practices of Christians, continued to define itself. With the advent of Emancipation, Jewry lost more and more of its manifest difference without losing its structural otherness necessary for first Christian and then German self-definition.

  8. 8.

    Another stylistic similarity between Freud and Heine is in the Jewish childhood fantasy of identification with the Semitic Hannibal in opposition to the Romans. Heine antedates Freud’s telling of this fantasy by about 60 years (Heine, 1840, p. 16), with Heine’s description occurring in relation to his meeting with Ludwig Börne—whose work was also known by Freud (Börne, 1823; Freud, 1914). Heine’s depiction focuses upon the ubiquitous fantasies of ghetto children in Frankfurt, educated not in traditional Hebrew texts but, like Freud, in the secular study of history as counter-cultural, providing subversive childhood role models for addressing Gentile power (Heine, 1840, p. 16).

  9. 9.

    The Heine/Freud characterization of schoolboy identification with Hannibal results from exposure to secular historical study, itself a function of increasing Jewish acculturation in Gentile society. This contrasts sharply with Spinoza’s 17th century education within the faith community of Amsterdam’s “New Jews”, where he represented the first generation of his family after more than a century of living as Iberian “New Christians”, to be educated entirely in traditional Hebrew texts (Nadler, 1999).

  10. 10.

    Heine’s description is an argument in the history of ideas. He writes:

    Nothing is more absurd than ownership claimed for ideas. Hegel did, to be sure, use many of Schelling’s ideas for his philosophy, but Mr. Schelling would never have known what to do with these ideas anyway. He always just philosophized, but was never able to produce a philosophy. And besides, one could certainly maintain that Mr. Schelling borrowed more from Spinoza than Hegel borrowed from Schelling. If Spinoza is 1 day liberated from his rigid, antiquated Cartesian, mathematical form and made accessible to a large public, we shall perhaps see that he, more than any other, might complain about the theft of ideas. All our present-day philosophers, without knowing it, look through the glasses that (optician) Baruch Spinoza ground (Heine, [1826] quoted in Boon, 1989, p. 137).