ANT KATZ

We’ll have the little perv

When she was born, the Anglo-Boer War was about to break out and Sigmund Freud was about to publish his seminal work, “The Interpretation of Dreams”.

Freud is universally considered the father of psychotherapy, the unconscious, repressed memories and the importance of dreams. He was born on May 1856, to Jewish Galician parents in the Moravian town of Příbor which was at the time part of the Austrian Empire and is now part of the Czech Republic.

His father, Jakob, was a wool merchant, who had two sons from a first marriage. Jakob’s family were Hasidic Jews, and though Jakob himself had moved away from the tradition, he came to be known for his Torah study.

He and Freud’s mother, Amalia (née Nathansohn), 20 years her husband’s junior and his third wife, were married by Rabbi Isaac Noah Mannheimer on 29 July 1855. They were struggling financially and living in a rented room, in a locksmith’s house at Schlossergasse when their son Sigmund was born. She would bear Jacob seven more children. Sigmund Freud died in September 1939.

Kvell has Siggy’s rep up and down

On Sigmund Freud, JewOrNotJew.com says that father of modern psychology was a cocaine addict, a sexual deviant and committed suicide.

“As for the kvell, well, Freud’s rep seems to go up and down by the week,” says the website. “Sometimes he’s a mensch. Other times a schlemiel… Anyway, anyone this important is bound to be polarizing. Freud getting dinged for his idiosyncrasies, misogyny, and drug habits just puts him in the same club as anyone else that’s ever been considered important,” they say.

“So, yeah, we’re happy to have the little perv, if anything just to give everyone else a little circumcised penis envy,” says JewOrNotJew.com.