Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

In memory of Michael Porder I   September 29, 1939, 20 Maresfeld Gardens, Hampstead, London: on the first Friday after Sigmund Freud’s death, having accepted more than a half-century’s imposed impiety at her husband’s insistence, the seventy-eight year old Martha Freud started to light the Sabbath candles again. Licht-bentshn, as the ceremony is called. You light a pair of candles just as the sun goes down; circle your hands in a sweeping motion three times to gather the light and savor the candles’ warmth — the spirit of restfulness that they are meant to convey — and then you cover your eyes with your hands while reciting the blessing in which God is thanked for sanctifying us with the commandment to light these candles. Enter Shabbat the Queen, as the Sabbath is known in Jewish tradition, a presiding feminine presence in a patriarchal environment where most of the active, time-specific commandments, such as the wearing of tefillin or phylacteries (a pair of small black leather cubes, containing pieces of parchment inscribed with Biblical verses, one of which is strapped around the left arm, hand, and fingers and the other is strapped above the forehead) for the morning prayers, fall on men, since women are presumed to be busy with other priorities, such as housekeeping and childcare. And now here was the widow of one of the most formidable enemies of religion fulfilling one of the few obligations incumbent upon women under Jewish law. It was, surely, a form of poetic justice — or perhaps a testament to the hold of the past, however abjured it may be.  She was born Martha Bernays on July 26, 1861 in the German port city of Hamburg, into a highly regarded and intellectually advanced Jewish family to whom such recurrent observances meant a great deal. With her performance of the act of lighting candles at a prescribed moment on the Jewish calendar, one might argue that Martha Freud was being more than assertive: she was being defiant. In doing so, she was re-establishing her autonomy by renouncing a pattern of submission to her husband’s wishes. She was taking a deliberate step backward, toward her family ethos and the traditionalism of her origins before she became the compliant, devoted caretaker that Freud desired her to be, the “adored sweetheart in youth” who became “the beloved wife in maturity.” And she was also taking a step forward, towards the post-spousal woman she would become after the death of her husband, and reclaiming a small part of the ancient ritual-laden religious tradition that had been instilled in her while growing up.  It was a tradition that her fiercely anti-clerical husband, whom she always referred to as “Professor,” as though she were his eternal student, ridiculed, forbidding her to light the Sabbath candles when they set up their own home. A cousin of Martha’s once recalled “how not being allowed to light the Sabbath lights on the first Friday night after her marriage was one of the most upsetting experiences of her life.” And Isaiah Berlin, who visited the couple at their house in exile in London, recalled that husband and wife were still arguing the issue of lighting candles, however playfully, as late as 1938: “Martha joked at Freud’s monstrous stubbornness which prevented her from performing the ritual, while he firmly maintained the practice was foolish and superstitious.”  The Freuds’ fifty-three years of marriage are reputed to have been exceptionally harmonious — one of their few disputes was said to have been about the correct way to cook mushrooms — but the couple’s divergent attitudes toward Judaism remained a source of underground conflict. On the face of it, they were wholly deracinated Jews in a golden age of Jewish deracination. They celebrated Christmas and Easter, and their son Martin, in his memoir Sigmund Freud: Man and Father, testified that none of the six children had ever entered a synagogue. Freud, a confirmed atheist whose work was dedicated in part to the debunking of the monotheistic worldview as a neurotic illusion, delighted in ribbing Martha about her religious attachment, pretending not to know the Hebrew name for “candelabrum,” for example, in a note he wrote her in 1907 after visiting the Roman catacombs: “In the Jewish [catacombs] the inscriptions are Greek, the candelabrum — I think it’s called Menorah — can be seen on many tablets.”  As if he didn’t know that it was called a menorah! He had learned the Bible as a child, after all, and it is doubtful that he lost his grasp of basic Hebrew or religious objects. Freud never denied his Jewishness, and went so far as to credit his religion for his own lack of prejudice and his uncowed single-mindedness. Yet he was always highly ambivalent about his Jewish identity. He demanded that Martha not fast on Yom Kippur, arguing that she was too thin to fast, and the only one of his books in which he referred overtly to his Jewish connection was Moses and Monotheism.  In this regard he maintained a firm distance between his public and private allegiance — insisting, for instance, that psychoanalysis was not in any way a “Jewish science,” or judische Wissenschaft, which is how the Nazis and earlier anti-Semites had disparaged it. In a letter to Ferenczi, Freud wrote that “there should not be such a thing as an Aryan or Jewish science. Results in science must be identical, though the presentation of them may vary.” His awareness of the danger in having a specifically Jewish quality attached to his work, which could lead to antisemitic resistance to the psychoanalytic movement and render it less universally applicable, led him to court the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung, despite Jung’s very different ideas about psychoanalysis — and more curiously, despite Jung’s own anti-Semitism and racial theories. Freud put all his hopes into Jung, whom he called his “son and heir,” until they had a disagreement about the uses of mythology which led to a permanent estrangement.