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The Freudian Orient: Early Psychoanalysis, Anti-Semitic Challenge, and the Vicissitudes of Orientalist Discourse

Author(s) : Frank F. Scherer

Reviews and Endorsements

‘Frank F. Scherer’s meticulous accounting of the fate of Freud’s Orient – through its metaphors, reaction formations, conflicts, repression, and return – opens the intricacies of debates on Freud today with speculations on Freud’s transpositions of his own confrontation with anti-Semitism. Through a careful reading of the reception of the Freudian Archive and its translation erasures, Scherer’s provocative thesis takes shape: Freud transformed European debates against the Oriental and the Jew into the emotional landscape of psychoanalysis. Oriental discourse then serves as both touchstones for the development of Freud’s psychoanalytic concepts and as Freud’s resistance to the anti-Semitism of his time. Scherer’s symptomatic reading of psychoanalytic sensibilities contra post-colonial history presents new theories for exposing the ambivalent reception of an archaeology of antiquity with the psychoanalytic destiny of “The Jewish Question”.’
- Deborah Britzman, Distinguished Research Professor, York University, Toronto and author of A Psychoanalyst in the Classroom: On the Human Condition in Education

‘The multicultural empire of Freud studies is engaged in continual skirmishes along its frontier with Judaism and orientalism. Frank F. Scherer brings this contested border to the centre of our attention. In blazing his trail, or via regia, through psychoanalytic historiography, he exposes new conceptual landscapes. And, like the best travellers, he makes us realize that what was apparently our most familiar territory opens into terra incognita.’
- Michael Molnar, former director of the Freud Museum, London, and author of Looking Through Freud’s Photos