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Thou hast seen in this Book the vision of he Almighty,
thou hast heard willingly, thou hast done and hast tried to fly high
upon the wings of the Holy Spirit. Since then I have preserved the same Bible. Now, on your thirty-fifth birthday I have
brought it out from its retirement and I send it to you as a token of love from your old father.16
Certainly this passage suggests that Freud’s upbringing was far from totally devoid of religious influence; in particular, it contained a belief God and a respect for the Bible. However, as Bergmann points out, the passage shows Jakob Freud’s “enlightenment” or liberal form of Jewishness: “No orthodox Jew would speak lightly of the Spirit of God speaking to a seven-year-old. Nor would any religious Jew see the Bible as belonging to mankind as a whole.”17 (It is also possible that Jakob’s belief in God was stronger in his old age when he wrote this inscription than it had been 30 years earlier when he and his young son had read the Bible together.) A piece of correspondence from Freud’s very early years shows at least nominal religious influence. In this short letter, written when he was about seven years old to his brother Emanuel, Freud wrote, “I and my dear parents and sisters are, thank God well.”18 Most importantly, Freud himself acknowledged in An Autobiographical Study: “My deep engrossment in the Bible story (almost as soon as I had learnt the art of reading) had, as I recognized much later, an enduring effect upon the direction of my interest.”19 In fact, the reading of the Bible with his father was in many respects the single most important intellectual experience for Freud. Théo Pfrimmer, in his book Freud, Lecteur de la Bible, has given a remarkably detailed, almost 500-page scholarly summary of the impact of the Bible on Freud. For example, Pfrimmer has identified 488 different Biblical references found in Freud’s writings and letters (and more are apt to come to light in the future).20 Many of these references have already been spotted by various scholars, but others seem to have been first observed by Pfrimmer. Above all, what Pfrimmer shows is the profound impact on Freud of his early Biblical reading. It was the Bible as literature, as psychology, as cultural history, and as religion that formed the mind of Freud. In contrast, there is little evidence that young Freud had any real interest in physical or biological science. Freud scholars single out Samuel Hammerschlag as a significant religious influence during Freud’s adolescence.21 Hammerschlag was responsible for Freud’s liberal Jewish instruction during his “high school” years in the Gymnasium, and Freud always had fond memories of film, as evidenced by his remarks in a letter to his fiancée years later. He wrote Martha Bernays: |