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Comparing Sigismund Freud's Jokes And Their Relation To The Un

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Sigismund Schlomo Freud lived in the "crowded jewish quarter" of Vienna for most of his life that spanned from 1856-1939. He saw the build up of Anti-Semitism that came to prominence in Nazi Germany. He was alive during the french Dreyfus Affair in 1895, where it became known that a Jewish man was imprisoned on account of his religion. Freud saw Anti-Semitism in his own Vienna, with the election of Karl Leuger as Mayor in 1897. This year was also the birth of both Infantile Sexuality and the Oedipus Complex. Freud lived through World War 1, and saw the rise of Adolph Hitler and his message of Anti-Semitism. Freud’s most famous ideas include; the Oedipus Complex, the Tripartite mind and Psychoanalysis. His work is outdated now, but his ideas …show more content…

Unlike Christianity, Judaism is not passed on by faith alone but through the Mother. Growing up in Jewish Vienna, Freud was immersed in Jewish culture. He had mostly Jewish friends, and loved Jewish jokes. Freud often told Jewish jokes in his works. In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Freud uses a story about a Galician Jew in his book. Freud often did this, his friend Ernest Jones, noted that Freud had a “fondness for relating Jewish jokes and anecdotes”. He also believed in the superiority of the Jewish people. Freud said that because “10 or 12 of Nobel winners are Jews” and because of “their other great achievements in the sciences and the arts, one has every reason to think them superior”. Freud also believed in “the democratic mode of thinking of Jews, which recognizes no distinction between lords and serfs”. To Freud, Jews were culturally superior because they left the archaic Feudal system behind. Despite his hatred of religion, Freud kept his cultural ties to …show more content…

The Tripartite Psyche is the idea that a person's personality is made up of three parts; the Ego, Id and Superego. Freud first introduced this idea in his 1920 essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle. He expanded on the topic in his 1923 book, The Ego and the Id. The ego is the self. It is driven by reality and compromises the Superego and the Id. Both the Ego and Superego are conscious, while the Id is unconscious. The Id deals with primitive desires and is based off the pleasure principle. It is unconscious, and is rooted in desire, aggression and instinct. The Superego is opposite to the Id and is an ideal. The Superego deals with morality, and controls the Id. This ties into Judaism because the Id is similar to people’s stereotypes of Jews in Freud’s time. The Id is based in material desire, like how caricatures portrayed Jews. Freud saw the Id as a way to prove that this stereotype of Jews was wrong. Since all men have Ids, then all men “are Jews” so, “The Id, in other words, was a moral equalizer legitimizing ‘scientifically’ social equality between Jew and Gentile”. This is based off of Freud’s identity as Jewish warrior proving the equality of Jews, that he developed in his

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