A violent attack on Professor Sigmund Freud is coupled with an equally violent one on the Old Testament in this week’s issue of the Nazi “Illustrierter Beobachter.”
The writer of the article attempts to show that the sources of much of Freud’s “ghastly” work are to be found in the Old Testament. He connects Freud’s “Father and Son Complex” with Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis, and says the “few religious histories contain such frightful monsters as this old Abraham, who, obeying a mere daydream, was quite willing to butcher his son Isaac, and was only held back from committing this atrocity by another ‘vision’.”
“Freud’s work,” the article goes on, “is neither scientific nor original. He merely looked at all the phenomena of life from the point of view of an erotomaniac.” His work is “pseudo-scientific” and “a corruption of the soul.” Freud is accused of having exercised a most pernicious influence on German literature and the famous authors Trebitsch, Jacob Wassermann, Arthur Schnitzler and Leonard Frank are mentioned as some of the many who have fallen under this “pernicious influence.”
Returning to the Old Testament, the writer accuses it of being “crammed to saturation point with human vices, such as Revenge, Hate, Bloodthirstiness, Envy and Lust.” By reviving this “shameful stain on the Jews” and by his “pseudo-scientific transfiguration of old Hebrew ideas” Freud has done “incalculable harm to the spiritually unsettled post-war generations.” “The Freudian theories have liberated an underworld, a spiritual gangsterdom, which only the religious and historic ideal of the great German resurrection could conquer and suppress.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
