‘Between Darkness and Light’ by Marc Chagall, 1943
ARTICLES
Vestigia Volume 4, Issue 2, 2025, Pages 8-18
Vestigia, Volume 4, Issue 2, 2025, Pages 19-26
The author draws on a series of rumours and fake news stories that have emerged in different parts of the world, all of which depict ‘evil Jews’. He shows that those who repeat these rumours, and thereby further their spread, need not necessarily be consciously anti-Semitic, or even aware of the anti-Semitic implications of the ‘fact’ they are reporting: there is a pervasive form of objective anti-Semitism. He also highlights the ambivalence of those who claim to be not only anti-Semitic but also admirers of Jews—hatred and idealisation of Judaism often coexist in the same individual. Finally, he takes ‘Jew’ to be a signifier in both a logical and psychoanalytical sense, that is, as something without a definitive meaning, sustained by a pure difference. In what he calls the typicalleft-wing narrative, anti-Zionism, which does not originate as anti-Semitism, becomes part of an oppositional framework in which only the oppressor/oppressed dichotomy functions.
Antisemitism in the twenty-first century: can psychoanalytic theories offer any answers?
Vestigia, Volume 4, Issue 2, 2025, Pages 27-37
Antisemitism is as old as recorded history. Many attempts have been made by philosophers and historians to pinpoint its origins and supply with a comprehensive explanation to its persistence and prevalence. In this essay, I shall offer some psychoanalytical ideas to try and illuminate some aspects of antisemitism in recent times. I will also discuss its resurgence since October 7th 2023, following the murderous attack of Hamas on Israel and the ensuing regional war.
Isidor Sadger: a Viennese psychoanalyst killed by the Nazis
Vestigia, Volume 4, Issue 2, 2025, Pages 38-42
Isidor Sadger, one of the earliest members of the Freudian circle, was the only one of the Viennese psychoanalysts to die in a Nazi concentration camp. His analytic career was not without its difficulties and he was closely involved with the tragic Hermione Hug-Hellmuth, the first child analyst. This paper is an outline of his career, writings and interactions with Freud and other members of the early analytic group.
Vestigia, Volume 4, Issue 2, 2025, Pages 43-53
Freud, psychoanalysis and anti-Semitism
Vestigia, Volume 4, Issue 2, 2025, Pages 54-67
Freud’s Jewish identity was a significant factor in his life and had a major impact on the development of psychoanalysis. This identity was forged in part in relation to anti-Semitism, which also contributed to the predominantly Jewish make-up of the early psychoanalytic movement. There is also evidence that psychoanalytic theories, especially that of the castration complex, arose as an intentional response to anti-Semitic ideas. Freud often commented on anti-Semitism, but his most extensive treatment of the subject is in his late work, Moses and Monotheism. The current article explores both the shadow of anti-Semitism as it fell on the early psychoanalysts (paying attention to Jung and Jones) and the arguments put forward by Freud to explain it.
Freud, Jews, and identity politics: reading Moses and Monotheism in 2024
Vestigia, Volume 4, Issue 2, 2025, Pages 68-84
Written during the time of the rise of the National Socialists in Germany, Freud’s Moses and Monotheism can be read today as an effective critique of both conservative ideology and contemporary identity politics. Even though Freud knew that his ‘race’ was under attack, and he was forced to go into exile, he still insisted in producing a text that de-idealizes his own identity group. Ultimately, what this book demonstrates is the need to affirm ambivalence and ambiguity as the foundations of our cultural relationships; instead of trying to idealize the history and leaders of the Jewish people, Freud locates a primary doubling in relation to Moses. In an act of intellectual bravery, he splits Moses into two different people: An Egyptian Moses and a Jewish one. This splitting places at the heart of the Jewish tradition a divided subject, and this division reflects how every identity is ambivalent and ambiguous.
Vestigia, Volume 4, Issue 2, 2025, Pages 85-90
This paper explores the intellectual intersection between antisemitism, exile, and the emergence of structuralism as a transformative theory in linguistics, anthropology, and psychoanalysis. Focusing on the experiences of Roman Jakobson and Claude Lévi-Strauss—two Jewish intellectuals who sought refuge in New York during World War II—the article argues that their exile shaped their theoretical contributions, embedding anti-hierarchical, anti-essentialist principles within their work. Jakobson’s structural linguistics and Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology critiqued Western intellectual traditions that perpetuated ethnocentrism and cultural superiority, promoting a vision of universal structures underlying human language and culture. Through a comparative analysis, the paper draws connections between structuralist theory and Freud’s psychoanalytic work, particularly in understanding the unconscious and cultural systems as relational structures. By examining the ethical dimensions of structuralism, the paper asserts that this intellectual movement—while deeply rooted in the trauma of antisemitism and the Holocaust—offered a progressive framework that sought to dismantle hierarchical distinctions between cultures and races, providing a model for a more inclusive, egalitarian view of human subjectivity. In this context, structuralism emerges not only as a theoretical breakthrough but as a direct response to the intellectual and cultural oppression experienced by Jewish thinkers in the twentieth century.
TEXTS & STUDIES
Vestigia, Volume 4, Issue 2, 2025, Pages 91-99
Vestigia, Volume 4, Issue 2, 2025, Pages 100-113
Vestigia, Volume 4, Issue 2, 2025, Page 114-136
In the modern world, few humans escape objectification and alienation. According to philosopher Michel Henry, this phenomenon finds its source in the advent of the technological world that has facilitated, amongst other things, the development of wild capitalism which is at the root of widening inequalities and the impoverishment of the majority. Ultimately, it leads to the destruction of social bonds through the organization of widespread competition at all levels.
Furthermore, the new technical means of communication, or mass media, disseminate a superficial mass pseudo-culture. Hence individuals find it increasingly hard to develop their inner lives. They lack creativity and become alienated by their obsession with economic performance, developing a false self and losing their capacity of caring for others. Even modern psychotherapies are dismissing humanistic approach becoming pseudo-scientific techniques ignoring the intersubjective bond between the therapist and the patient.
Vestigia, Volume 4, Issue 2, 2025, Pages 137-142
Vestigia, Volume 4, Issue 2, 2025, Pages 143-157
Understanding Medea, one of the female protagonists in mythology for thousands of years, could be the beginning of delving into the roots of the problems women face. Is Medea merely a mythological heroine or does she carry traces from the past regarding what a woman is in her existential journey? Myths extending from ancient societies to the present are perfect data for looking into the future. The similarities between Medea and the golden fleece legend show that Medea was not turned into a child murderer by the patriarchal social order but rather that she sought to fulfill her ambition for power through her male children. The actions of Queen Ino for her own son on the path to the golden fleece contain the reasons for what Medea would do to her family and children. The real-life counterparts of the castration complex that began with Ino and transformed into Maenads, the horrific ends of Pentheus and Orpheus, and the never-ending competition…The new world order has softened the reason for Medea becoming a child murderer, altering the chemistry of her intent. Humanity, unable to bear the consequences, over time changes the intention, turning the crime into an acceptable reality.
Vestigia, Volume 4, Issue 2, 2025, Pages 158-178
Freud’s 1939 interpretation of the basket (Kästchen) as a symbol of the womb and of the woman, in the parallel accounts of Moses’ infancy and in the Babylonian legend of Sargon of Akkad is here reviewed. Some of the background is given. The lexical association of the Hebrew tēbāh (used both for Moses’ basket and Noah’s ark) is also discussed, and the lack of an equivalent parallel in the Sargon legend with the Akkadian flood story. The salvific motif of the biblical account of the flood and its parallels, including the Epic of Gilgamesh is outlined. Various patristic (allegorical) interpretations of it are presented to demonstrate the way exegesis responded to the changing circumstances of the early Church, particularly during the Decian persecution. The symbolism adopted by Rank, Karl Abraham and Stekel and on which Freud drew (1909 and 1914) is also discussed, and Freud’s earlier philological analysis of the English word ‘box’ from 1900. It is argued that while the biblical text signifies salvation (being ‘rescued from’ something), Freud’s interpretation discloses an autobiographical focus on a desire not for flight but for safety, for a refuge (the ‘containment’ of the womb); one that between writing the first part and 1939 he was destined to find in England. His declared foundation for the interpretation reveals a concern not with the basket but with the false biblical etymology of the name Moses taken up by Josephus and Philo which he had already correctly dismissed with the help of Herlitz and Kirchner’s Jüdisches Lexicon IV (1), 303. In contrast to ‘the meaning of the father’ which Lacan rightly identified as the overall focus of Moses and Monotheism, the premise of the first, earliest part of the book, drawn from the shared story of the infancy of Moses and Sargon, is shown to be the meaning of the woman.
POEMS
BOOK REVIEWS & SHORT NOTICES
Contemporary Psychoanalysis and Jewish Thought: Answering a Question with More Questions. Edited by Libby Henik and Lewis Aaron
Antisemitism and Racism: Ethical Challenges for Psychoanalysis. By Stephen Frosh
Critical Theories of Anti-Semitism. By Jonathan Judaken
Anti-Semitism at the Limit: Critical Theory and Psychoanalysis. By Benjamin B. Strosberg
BULLETIN
Vestigia, Volume 4, Issue 2, 2025, Pages 192-297