This lecture explores the role of Yiddish in Freud’s writings and in the reception and translation of psychoanalysis. Was Yiddish, as the French psychoanalyst Max Kohn suggests, the “unconscious” of Freud’s German works? Were Yiddish translations a minor episode in the dispersion of psychoanalysis, or do they have a special place in this history, as the “lost originals” of Freud’s German writings?

Professor Naomi Seidman is the Chancellor Jackman Professor of the Arts in the Department for the Study of Religion and the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto, and a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow.