Freud and/in Yiddish

• In Event: Translation and Yiddish: New Approaches

Abstract

The translation of Freud's work into Yiddish in the interwar period was, in one sense, a marginal phenomenon, of much less importance to the development of psychoanalysis as an international movement than the translations of Freud into French, English or Spanish. Nevertheless, these translations (five of Freud's works were rendered in Yiddish in the 1920s and 1930s) also played a special role in the history of psychoanalysis, as Freud himself acknowledged, given the unique status of Yiddish in Freud's family history. Indeed, Yiddish could be read as a kind of suppressed original language of psychoanalysis. The connection between Yiddish and the unconscious is implicitly drawn in a number of Freud's works, and appears as well in the Yiddish reception of psychoanalysis. This paper will lay out the basic history of the interaction between Freud and Yiddish, attempting to determine the psychic status of Yiddish for such figures as Max Weinreich, the best known of Freud's Yiddish translators, who described Yiddish in its New York period as "the unconscious" of American Jews.

Author

• Naomi Sheindel Seidman, University of Toronto