Psychoanalytic knowledge, Jewish identity, and Germanic anti-semitic legends.

Freud's life and thought were in part molded by the desire to aid the dispersed secular Jew. The Jew, warped and minified by the cruel paradoxes to which his life situations rather uniquely exposed him, would be returned to an adaptive life style by psychoanalysis. In particular, the analytic work of arriving at the unconscious sources of his imagery of himself and the world, along with developing rational concepts of each, would give the Jew a degree of emancipation from fantastic and undermining labels from the host population. Anti-Semitic legends extant in the Germanic culture of Freud's day depict the corrosive impact by a hostile host population upon the Jew's sense of identity. Psychoanalysis tendered the demeaned Jew a means of refurbishing his identity and strengthening its boundary.