Eli N. Evans Distinguished Lecture in Jewish Studies: Naomi Seidman, ‘The Navel of the Dream: Freud and/in Yiddish’

This free community 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?

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. She has written books on the sexual politics of Hebrew and Yiddish, translation as the space dividing and connecting Judaism and Christianity, literature and the modernization of Jewish marriage, and the Orthodox girls’ school system Bais Yaakov.

This lecture is co-hosted by the Duke Center for Jewish Studies.