Abstract
Naomi Seidman’s Translating the Jewish Freud: Psychoanalysis in Hebrew and Yiddish had a long writing duration, which may explain its shifts in topics, its comments on disciplinary developments, and its wide-ranging sociocultural debates, scholarly citations, and linguistic asides. The book began as a lecture around 2013, and across the nine chapters, as the topic revolves around Jewish languages, Seidman is mindful of the pitfalls of constructing genealogical narratives on the soft sands of translation. Here, translation studies become subject to the transformative designs of cultural developments. The polyglot essayist Yoko Tawada, a Japanese speaker who writes in German and is then translated into English, describes such adventures as exophony, which Tawada (2025) noted as the peripatetic procedures of language affected by borrowed complications that eventually express the general experience of "existing outside of one’s mother tongue” (p. 4). The fate of that outsider experience, so central to the reception of the Jewish Freud, is key to Seidman’s discussion. In the case of Freud’s writing, exophony can also signify the uneven reception of psychoanalysis as a procedure, theory, and movement that exist outside the closed doors of the consulting room and in the hands of translators and the public. This last observation of translation as exemplary of outsideness is not so far from what psychoanalysis may feel like, and Seidman admits that the theories and practices of psychoanalysis serve as her foreign language: “It is not the Jewish words but the psychoanalytic content that registers as the more foreign element to me, culturally if not intellectually” (p. 8).
Seidman is a scholar of Jewish cultural studies and holds the Chancellor Jackman Professor of the Arts in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. Her research was sustained by years of fellowships, university talks, archival visits, and a great many international academic conferences and seminars. Translating the Jewish Freud was published in the Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture book series and edited by David Biale and Sarah Abrevaya Stein. The series “features novel approaches to examining the Jewish past” (Stanford University Press, n.d.). And, indeed, this humanities-based study is novel in methodology, its theoretical eclecticism and postmodern yearnings, its wild psychoanalysis, its question of to whom does Freud belong, and, at times, its tongue-in-cheek observations and subheadings announcing what may or may not have happened in popular attempts to translate Freud the person, along with his writing, into Yiddish and Hebrew. Walter Benjamin’s (1955/1969) often-quoted essay “The Task of the Translator” imagines working from within the transitional space of language aphoristically, if not psychoanalytically: “no translation would be possible if in its ultimate essence it strove for likeness to the original. For in its afterlife . . . even words with fixed meaning can undergo a maturing process” (p. 73). I was reminded of this advice when my book, Freud and Education (Britzman, 2011), was translated into Japanese. Borrowing from Freud, my use of the term “wild education” (p. 19), associated with someone who was not analyzed and wrote about psychoanalysis, was translated, as far as I could tell, into “rough education,” an activity more aggressive, impulsive, clumsy, and, perhaps, closer to the ruthlessness made from the use of psychoanalysis.
The heart of Seidman’s archival work opens onto the “afterlife” of history made from key national and cultural Jewish translators who carried Freud to Yiddish and Hebrew readers in geographic centers of Jewish life, such as Vilna, Israel, and North and South America. Seidman associates the early 20th-century founding of the psychoanalytic movement and the dispersal of Freud’s writing as parallel to the founding of the Institute for Jewish Research (YIVO) in Vilna, Lithuania, and its postwar move to New York City. While YIVO’s archive holds more than Freud in translation, its library reflects the changing tides of Yiddish. Seidman takes care to suggest that the cultural atmosphere of transferring Freud’s writing into Yiddish and Hebrew begins close to home, so to speak, in the fact that Freud’s family, his patients, and most of his colleagues were Jewish. Translating Freud into Yiddish and Hebrew was influenced by this fact and the movements of both languages that carried the histories of displaced Jewish people during the world wars into their various diasporas in North and South America, the southern and eastern hemispheres, Palestine, and then to the founding of psychoanalysis in Israel. Translations of Freud’s writing further shifted with the development of modern Hebrew and with the waxing and waning of Yiddish speakers. Seidman’s research notes that Freud was affected by exclusionary governmental practices and social hostilities of anti-Semitism. Freud identified as a secular Jew and was aware of Yiddish, biblical history, Modern Hebrew, and political debates on Zionism and socialism. These not-so-archaic conflictive traces are woven throughout Freud’s formal and informal writing, and Seidman considers the sights, sounds, and plays of these languages alongside their political forces as affecting points of contact, as well as serving as the hinge mechanism for social, linguistic, psychological, and group association.
Much of Seidman’s book wrestles with a constitutive feature of language as expressions of cultural affairs and as weaves affecting networks of relations loosely governed by the imperfection and slips of meanings and transgenerational transmissions of memories along with the contemporary introjections of voice, accent, and stylistic innuendo that permit words to say more than is said, meant, or understood. In this way, Seideman relates translation close to the Freudian procedures of dreamwork, an affecting condensation, displacement, and working over of linguistic shapes of feeling and experience. Seidman’s narrative style of translating translation is supplemented by extensive footnotes, 48 pages in length, signaling a variety of debates in Jewish cultural studies and in feminist, literary, and queer theory, and with commentary on the emergence of activist politics as character studies of emotional life and its various elations and disappointments. While these footnotes provide the reader access to interdisciplinary fields, many of their arguments flounder over how, why, and whether Freud could read in either Hebrew or Yiddish.
Seidman invites readers into debates over what constitutes the study and reach of Jewish life that may affect the subtle and not-so-subtle pulls in the development of psychoanalysis. Given this swath of research, the book occasionally teeters toward a theory-of-everything Freud. The strength, however, is that in translating Freud’s work into Yiddish and Hebrew for a Jewish readership and Jewish translators, Seidman shows how Freud’s identity as a Jew takes precedence. At times, Albert Einstein’s reputation may have experienced a similar fate of being famous by association. I could not help but recall my own mid-20th-century United States Jewish upbringing, not only filled with the sounds and sights of Yiddish but also made funny by a childhood game of “Guess who’s Jewish” that I obsessively played. It was both my way of being famous and surrounding myself with what I fantasized as the homecoming of my (lost) distant relatives. While Seidman does not mention this game, she admits to being under the sway of what Derrida’s (1995/1998) meditation on memory named “archive fever” (p. 84). In Seidman’s melancholic epilogue, readers are invited to look over her shoulder and glimpse her collection of Freudian objects that include a Freudian slip notepad, a model of a porcupine, house slippers with Freud’s face, toy couches, puppets, and music boxes that play the song “Try to Remember” (Ames, 1965). They serve as associative plays on words and gravestones to the ghost of Freud. As it turns out, translating the translators of Freud runs into these tangled lines of history and, again, repeats Benjamin’s (1955/1969) observation on resistance to translating: “The basic error of the translator is that he preserves the state in which his own language happens to be instead of allowing his language to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue” (p. 81).
Seidman’s study is composed of nine chapters; the first three stage linguistic debates on the ideology of modern Jewish languages, with the question of how Freud’s work might be affected. Seidman’s guide offers readers a neat division “with the first [chapters] focusing on the frame of Jewishness in the study of psychoanalysis and the second focusing on translation as a form of (Jewish) touch” (p. 15). The major method is associative, bridging disparate events and chance resemblances, moving back and forth in history, and using the currency of identity politics as measures for exchange, such as with chapter 4, “The Jewish Freud in an Age of Black Lives Matter,” which rehearses contemporary identity race politics as a lens from which to view anxiety over Ashkenazic Jewish difference in North America. Chapter 4 was written in 2020, while living in Berkeley, California, and after the murder of George Floyd. Seidman wonders whether her study of Freud can matter in the face of anti-Black racism and Black Lives Matter protests and demands. The chapter then recounts university debates on Whiteness and Jewish assimilation to the problem of translating Freud with the urgencies of contemporary political life.
Chapters 5 and 6 are historical literature reviews on the making of popular psychoanalysis and trace the scientific Freud into the field of literary and philosophical debates. Of interest in the treatment of psychoanalysis as translation are Seidman’s comparisons between Freud’s German representations of the psychical apparatus and their translation into English and Yiddish. Seidman’s descriptions of these processes of retranslation are a feat of imagination and a hypervigilant explication: “Citations to Jewish languages strike me as super-conveyors of a range of meanings, affects, and ideologies beyond their narrow signification” (p. 129). Chapter 6 returns to historical presentations of Freud on his 75th birthday in the roughly 50 Hebrew and Yiddish presses of that time in cities such as New York, Warsaw, and Buenos Aires.
Chapter 7, “The Yiddish (Un)conscious,” is a meditation on Yiddish and the early translators from YIVO in Vilna takes Seidman to a novel insight: “German-Yiddish translation invites us to rethink the stock assumption that translation always signifies loss. Yiddish translators regularly took the option of turning Freud’s thoughts in a Jewish direction, one that generated a host of associations” (p. 206). A compelling example concerns the enigma of das Es made universal with the associative reach of the Yiddish terms of es that Seidman explains “as a persistent feature of all human subjectivity, seen in its operations but never grasped in its substance” (p. 206).
Chapter 8, “A Godless Jew in the Holy Tongue,” contains many fantasies of what Freud may have thought and buried through his ambivalent association with religion and cultural Zionism and his virtual reception in the founding of Hebrew University in Jerusalem. While today’s Zionism is often collapsed into the Israeli state apparatus, its theoretical and practical beginnings were far more pluralistic and conflictive. Seidman’s chapter returns to a contemporary postcolonial frame to consider Freud’s last mass psychology, “Moses and Monotheism: A Historical Fiction” (1939/1964), read alongside a brief history of the creation of the Palestine Psychoanalytic Society in the early 1920s and then with rethinking Freud’s Moses along with Edward Said’s (2003/2014) lecture and Jacquine Rose’s response published as Freud and the Non-European. The controversies of that lecture are also significant, as the Vienna Freud Museum canceled Said’s lecture, and later, Said’s lecture was sponsored by the Freud Museum in London.
Chapter 9, “Jews, Dogs, and Other Animals,” may be read as a play on words, although it is well known that the Freud family had dogs. Chapter 9 speculates on the backdrop of translating Freud’s (1909/1955) early case of Little Hans into Yiddish and the significance of his horse phobia. Seidman’s portrait of the 1930s’ Yiddish translator from Vilna and YIVO administrator Max Weinreich is a study of parallelism with Freud. Weinrich was interested in “how Jewish identity was unconsciously formed” (p. 250), and this affected his translation when he argued that Little Hans’s so-called animal phobia was a Jewish trait. Weinrich presents a case of overinterpreting Freud and serves as a fine illustration of Benjamin’s (1955/1969) dangers of translation.
Readers will find the tensions and controversies of popular culture affixed to debates on the status of Freud’s Jewishness across the Freudian field in Jewish studies, cultural studies, and debates over linguistic framing. Seidman writes with fluency about debates on Freud’s Jewishness and the unyielding search for origins to explain Freud’s cultural influences that he himself tucks into his letters, techniques, and case studies. It is no surprise that across Freud’s writing—in his dreams, clinical case studies, mass psychology, volumes of letters, technique papers, prefaces, and obituaries—a susceptibility to personal experience brings troubles to translation. After all, psychoanalysis is to be taken personally. It can be surprising, however, to feel the shrink of experience when attempting to analyze Freud. Given this instability, reflected in both the work of the translator and the history of Freud’s international reception that is now an aspect of psychoanalytic learning, Seidman’s conclusions are difficult to summarize. The modest conclusion is stated clearly: “To this day, the relationship between the Jewish ‘influences’ on Freud and the universalistic and scientific claims of psychoanalysis remains unsettled” (p. 186). That may be the best opening for those interested in the cultural studies of the Jewish Freud.
