From its inception, psychoanalysis has had a complicated relationship with Judaism. Freud himself was anxious to prevent the association of his new science with Jews for fear that it would not be taken seriously by an anti-Semitic establishment. And yet, until Jung joined it, the psychoanalytical association was almost exclusively composed of Jews. As one contemporary, a British professor at Harvard, observed,

It is by no means only those hostile to the therapeutic system who regard it as some sort of Jewish science (as the Nazis notoriously referred to it). Anna Freud herself once described it as such, and David Meghnagi has suggested that the birth of psychoanalysis should be understood as ‘a cultural event within Judaism’, as a sublimated answer to the problems posed by secularisation and as a rejection of an authentic integration of Jews into Christian European society. He argued that it is best appreciated when it is set alongside the rise of the sociopolitical movements of Zionism and the Bund, that is, alongside Jewish nationalism and Jewish socialism.