Slavoj Žižek declares in his latest opus, In Defense of Lost Causes (Verso), that while postmodernism has caused (or allowed) every other kind of racial, social, and cultural identity to be in flux, Jewish identity appears to have become fixed in a simple equation in which Jews=Zionists=racists (thank you, UN). Jews are expected, he says (in his usual difficult prose) to “yield with regard to their name”—that is, “in the liberal multiculturalist perspective, all groups can assert their identity – except Jews, whose very self-assertion equals Zionist racism.”

Žižek, an internationally reknowned intellectual, has been at the cutting edge of social and political theory for almost two decades, and apparently strives to be an outsider. It is therefore no surprise that he has developed an interest in Jews, as such. Žižek cares so much about Jewish identity because he identifies as Jewish. Not literally. He is no more a Jew than Joe Lieberman is a liberal. Rather, Žižek, a product of Slovenia, a country torn by the last century’s wars, sees in the Jewish experience a representation of contemporary experience that is far more subtle than a chaotic and relativistic mash-up of identity politics. Was it not, as Žižek says, that “in the history of modern Europe, those who stood for the striving for universality were precisely atheist Jews from Spinoza to Marx and Freud?

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Naughty Jews: Frum foreplayAfter yesterday’s post about the mikvah, I was contacted by a psychologist named Mark Guterman.  Mark is working on a related study at UC Berkeley, and he asked me to help him get the word out.  I promptly took the survey, and I’m glad I did.  It was pretty interesting.

So, for the sake of helping them get a cross section of the Jewish world, I urge you to take the survey too. It only takes 3 minutes, and you get to answer questions about whether you like to do it it the naughty way.

But here’s the catch to all this fun…the language Mark sent in his email:

Niddah and Negiah play an important role in the every day lives of Jewish men and women. … Anecdotal evidence and our previous research have led us to conclude that many couples and individuals are experiencing difficulties with this aspect of the Halacha.

Niddah and Negiah?  I’m pretty unlikely to respond to a survey about something I’ve never heard of.  If they want to reach a cross-section of Jews, they need to define their terms.

Later on in the intro to the survey, these terms get rephrased for us as “family purity”. But discussing “purity” is tricky too, when it gets made clear in the beginning that you’re “impure.”  I mean, how many orthodox Jews want to take a survey on being “out of touch with the real world” or “uptight”. 

I’m okay with being impure, but I don’t like being CALLED impure by someone who is asking for my time.

Regardless, I suggest that you take the survey, for a quick lesson in all the impure things you do.   Then come back and tell me what you thought.  I also suggest that Mark rewrite his intro.  Though I still can’t get over the idea that my husband can’t hold my fucking hand while I give birth.  That’s as wacky as silent birth. 

But let’s face it… religion is crazy, kids.

The NY Times published an intriguing article about The Father of Psychoanalysis (and all our latent sexual desires) Sigmund Freud. According to the piece, there is now concrete proof, in the form of a Swiss hotel log, that Freud was in fact having an affair with his wife's younger sister, Minna Bernays. While many have alluded to the indiscretion, including Freud protege, Carl Jung, until now, it was simply idle gossip, with psychoanalytic proponents claiming that this rumor (which includes a possible abortion) was intended to undermine Freud's contributions to the field of psychology.

On a weekend getaway with his sister-in-law in 1898, Freud signed the hotel register, "Dr. Sigmund Freud & Wife." Freud's wife, Martha, knew of the trip, but not its sexual nature. Indeed, perhaps suffering from his own form of sexual repression, even Sigmund had difficulty remembering certain key aspects of his liaisons with Minna.

While in Switzerland with Miss Bernays, Freud had trouble remembering a name. Dr. Maciejewski theorized that the lapse involved some secret guilt of Freud’s, but he could not get to the bottom of it. However, while reading the proofs of his book last spring, he said, “a feeling of you forgot something crept over me.”

Sometimes an icon is still an iconIt is true that the only ones spouting things like "Oedipal complex," "castration anxiety," and "penis envy" in psychiatrists' offices today are the patients. What Freud giveth, Jung taketh away. The hip new subfield now is cognitive behavioral therapy, where repeating the same set of actions over and over again actually changes brain chemistry and thus, one's whole disposition.

If Freud endures, however, it's not for some ineradicable love of fascistic explain-it-all theory Ronald Dworkin argues in this Sun review of a new Freud bio. This is just plain silly:

Freud lies somewhere in between. When he writes, "We shall in the end conquer every resistance by emphasizing the unshakable nature of our convictions," he sounds like any fascist or a commissar. But, of course, Freud was a doctor and not a politician — he lacked police powers — and he could only hurt people so much.

First off, where would Wilhelm Reich or Max Weber be without Freud? And it's a little unseemly to compare his work as a doctor of the mind to the thugs of state who ran him out of Europe in the thirties.

The man may stand bruised and bloody before posterity (his unethical way with couchtrippers; his rocky personal relationships; etc.) but his work is still a testament to understanding the hidden wellsprings of human endeavor -- and human failure. Freud's influence on the liberal arts was worth the price of admission: Edmund Wilson got a lot of literary critical mileage out of Freud, not least from the allusions to Greek mythology. (See The Wound and the Bow.) And Wilson's old friend Nabokov never tired to mocking the "Viennese witchdoctor" whose "sick dreams" the author of Lolita never condescended to have himself.

Freud did not discover the unconscious. Other doctors had written on the subject before him. Nor did he discover phenomena like Freudian "slips," "displacement," and "transference." What he did was give these mental phenomena names, turn them into symbols, and then use these symbols to create road signs and boundaries in the vast infinite of the human mind. He was just one more man of letters who tried to tame that monster of energy: life.

Giving names to things have been around forever is the height of intellectual activity. Dworkin contradicts himself by stating in the paragraph just before this one that Freud's meaningless, chimerical concepts have value only for having names.

And our reviewer's not so original himself. Auden, in his lovely elegy on Freud, indicated how just how time-honored, though not prosaic, were the ideas the founder of psychoanalysis popularized:

He wasn't clever at all: he merely told
the unhappy Present to recite the Past
like a poetry lesson till sooner
or later it faltered at the line where

long ago the accusations had begun,
and suddenly knew by whom it had been judged,
how rich life had been and how silly,
and was life-forgiven and more humble,

able to approach the Future as a friend
without a wardrobe of excuses, without
a set mask of rectitude or an
embarrassing over-familiar gesture.