Marie Jahoda Deconstructing Freud

Abstract

In 1977, in light of the controversy surrounding the relevance of Sigmund Freud to academic psychology in British and North American discourse, social psychologist Marie Jahoda (1907–2001) published Freud and the Dilemmas of Psychology. In her book, Jahoda deconstructs Freud’s personal statements and theories. Her text opens with criticism against Freud’s credibility in relation to his claim that antisemitism had a profound impact on him. Why did Jahoda start her discussion with Freud’s experience of discrimination in Vienna? As a young woman Jahoda had read Freud’s writings and was herself a patient of his follower, the psychoanalyst Heinz Hartmann. After her forced departure from Fascist Austria and her emigration to Britain in 1937, Jahoda had referred sporadically to Freud in her writings, emphasizing the relevance of his humanist and individualist approach to psychology. This chapter examines how Jahoda’s choice to processing Freud’s own experiences of antisemitism at the beginning of her book was integral to her arrival at a self-awareness about her own identity and her own belonging to categories such as “Viennese,” “Jewish,” and “psychoanalysis.”