ABSTRACT
This collection of essays reflects on the complexity of being understood or seen as different and creating out of this sense of imposed difference a meaningful sense of one's own identity. The center of these essays is Sigmund Freud and these essays reflect on my own sense of Freud's meaning at the close of another century. To begin a volume with an essay on the differences of the voice of the Jew and close it with an essay on the image of the Jew in the (now-antiquarian) West German literature on AIDS in 1989, means moving from the internalization of the sense of being different among Jews to a sense of the difference attributed to Jews. But this is all part of the same loop. For we understand ourselves in psychological terms as a product of our world. There is a creative tension resulting from the attribution of difference. This tension can serve as the model for other primary group identities in cultures such as those of Europe and the United States in which difference is a complex, often stigmatizing factor.
