Did Kabbala provide a framework for Sigmund Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis?
By MORDECHAI BECKSigmund Freud(photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)
SIGMUND FREUD grew up in an antagonistic world. The founder of psychoanalysis suffered from the anti-Semitism, which embittered the lives of Jews in the Austro- Hungarian Empire, restricting their entry to the professions and exposing them to harassment and insult. At university, he was told by one of his professors that he should quit academic life since he would not be promoted because of his Jewishness.However, he set against this hostile outer world a rich, inner world, which nurtured his developing theories of psychological disorder, and the ‘talking cure’ as part of the necessary healing process. This inner world, it has been claimed, also paradoxically kept his sense of Jewishness alive, which Freud denied in his outward role as a professionally ambitious member of the Viennese medical establishment.How strong was this inner Jewish sense? Dr. Joseph Berke, a London-based psychoanalytic psychotherapist, lecturer, and writer, claims that not only was Freud a knowledgeable Jew but was privy to the deepest insights afforded by the mystic tradition.Further, he maintains in a fascinating and rewarding study that Kabbala provided an essential framework for the theory of psychoanalysis.Freud was attempting a novel approach to the analysis of man – he wanted to apply strict scientific criteria to the study of subjectivity. Simultaneously, claims Berke, he was extremely careful that this new understanding of how the mind worked would not be known as a “Jewish science.” This is one of the reasons that he appointed the Swiss analyst Carl Jung, whose father was a Protestant minister, as his successor.The book analyzes Freud’s family background, and claims that during his early years Freud felt abandoned by key family members and family surrogates, who had a religious background in common. Freud’s mother lost her own father just before his birth. A religious and withdrawn personality to start with, she further lost within a couple of years a younger child and a beloved brother, before being admitted to a sanatorium for a while suffering from tuberculosis.Young Freud was given to a nursemaid, a Czech Catholic, who was very attached to him and he to her. When he was about three, his religious older step-brother accused her of stealing money from the family. He had her arrested and sent to jail. Freud, therefore, suddenly found himself parted from the nursemaid. These experiences created in him a negativity toward religion.It has been thought that Freud must have hated his father, because of the central role the Oedipus complex (the young son’s unconscious sexual desire for his mother and consequent fear and hatred of his father) played in psychoanalytic theory. In fact, Berke shows that he loved his father and his father loved him. When Freud was 35 years old, his father had the family Bible bound and presented “to my darling son.”The main dynamic in the family, claims the author, was not jealousy sparked by the Oedipus complex, but guilt. This guilt stemmed from Freud’s paternal grandfather, a Hasid who left the strictly religious life to learn German and traveled away from home to engage in business. Freud’s father felt guilt at the grandfather’s abandonment of Judaism, and this guilt was internalized by the grandson.On a recent visit to Israel, Berke spoke to The Jerusalem Report, and had this to say about psychoanalysis’s origins: “I think Freud developed psychoanalysis as a means of overcoming depression brought on by these situations. For the same reason he turned to cocaine for ten years.He was a divided self. He hated the rituals of religion. On the other hand, if he wanted to be a respected German intellectual, why did he marry his deeply religious wife? He was very ambitious, so why not convert? At the very least he could have married someone from an assimilated Jewish family; that was the way to professional success.It appears that the negativity was directed at religion, his brothers etc., but the positive side of him leaned toward his wife. We can see this ambiguity in relationship to his wife. On the one hand he promised her that he would keep up all the traditions of Judaism.Yet after he died in 1939, his wife met the Oxford philosopher, Isaiah Berlin, and when he asked her about Freud she said: ‘That mamzer, he wouldn’t even let me light Shabbat candles.’ After he died, she lit Shabbat candles for the rest of her life.”How much did this inner conflict express itself in psychoanalysis itself? Berke explains, “He rejected organized religion; on the other hand, he created the psychoanalytical movement, which was very much like a Hasidic court. His first biographer, Ernest Jones – tongue in cheek – called it a new secular religion. It was this element that gave rise to the criticism. Psychoanalysis took on much of the nature of a religious movement in which Freud was the Pope to whom everyone owed obeisance; his written words were the sacred text, decrees which had to be obeyed while he himself was infallible. Anyone who didn’t agree was excommunicated. Jones says there was an element of truth in this. From my point of view, if you accept these metaphors then you have a fairly accurate description of how a Hasidic court worked.“Jones, [Ronald] Clark and [Peter] Gay [other Freud biographers] all say that Freud was an assimilated Jew. But the evidence clearly shows that the opposite is true. There is the hidden and revealed Freud. He appeared to be a secular Jew, but he remained connected to his background. His wife, Martha, was a granddaughter of the Chief Rabbi of Hamburg. His mother-in-law was so religious she wouldn’t have even a drink of water in a non-kosher household. It was unlikely that they would have allowed the marriage had Martha’s family not come into bad economic straits at the time. After they got married and the family visited, Freud made a point of turning on the lights on Shabbat, to get his own back at them! “In terms of his ideas – he drew everything from Kabbala. The theory of free associations, for example, was very close to what the 16th-century Kabbalist Abraham Abulafia talked about as ‘skipping and jumping.’This famous patient of his, Hanna O (in real life, Bertha Pappenheim) who was helped by Josef Breuer (his colleague at the time) used the talking cure (what she termed ‘chimney sweeping’). She felt cured by this and Breuer thought he could cure all sorts of mental illness using this method.“Interestingly, Pappenheim’s grandfather was a businessman in Pressberg and a student of the famous rabbi, the Hatam Sofer.They went together for walks every Tuesday.The grandfather had many pressing demands on his time but whenever he met the Hatam Sofer, the rabbi would let him talk about whatever he wanted. This was a talking cure!” This was not the only way in which Freud was connected to his Jewish roots.“Freud lived all his life in a Jewish milieu. He lived in a very Jewish neighborhood. He was a member of the B’nai B’rith lodge for decades and gave many important papers there. He was a Zionist, and was happy when his sons joined the Zionist group, Kadima. He wasn’t angry so much at Jews as at Jewishness and at organized religion.David Bakan pointed out in his 1958 book “Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition” that psychoanalysis was a secular Kabbala. That’s a contradiction in terms – to have a Kabbala without God.”Nonetheless the ideas and techniques were very reminiscent of Kabbala. Early on in the book Berke avers that Freud knew Kabbalistic texts: “Freud was familiar with Jewish mystical texts ...He had a meeting with Chaim Bloch, a Lithuanian rabbi and distinguished student of Judaism, Kabbala, and Hasidism.” Bloch translated into German the works of the 16th-17th century Kabbalist Chaim Vital, a leading student of the mystic Rabbi Isaac Luria. When he showed the manuscript of his translation to him, Freud exclaimed, “This is gold!” Moreover, according to Bloch, Freud’s library contained several books on Kabbala in German and French.“The references to sexuality [in psychoanalysis] are very reminiscent of the Kabbalistic idea of a sexual connection between the shekhina [the Divine Presence] and the Godhead. Freud was accused of being oversexed; he was constantly talking about sexuality and sexual conflicts in his patients.This also helps explains the anti-Semitism of many of his opponents; they hated the idea that their conflicts had sexual origins.”Berke admits his debt to Bakan’s book, but he observes, “Bakan was criticized when his book came out. But that’s because, after describing the connection between psychoanalysis and Kabbala, he made the comment that he thought Freud was a secret Sabbatean (a follower of the heretical 17th-century false Messiah Shabbetai Zvi).I found this hard to accept myself. In the meantime I thought about it and thought more about Shabbetai Zvi’s work. He broke all boundaries. He broke all the rules. Instead of restraining oneself from sex you had to have plenty of sex, instead of a fast, you had to have a feast, etc. This in a way was what Freud did. It wasn’t that he was a Sabbatean, but he did break all the rules. In this sense Bakan was correct.”Berke, himself a baal teshuva, may have had certain misgivings about Freud. Nevertheless, “during the writing of this book, as well as reading other biographies of Freud, I became more enthusiastic about him and his genius. He survived growing up in an extremely hostile environment. In the last 20 years of his life he had to cope with cancer of the jaw. He had extremely painful operations, but he kept on. Some of his best papers came out of this period. In this sense he’s a hero.”According to Berke, the impact of Freud was simultaneously open and obvious yet also hidden. Quoting the British professor of sociology and psychology, Stephen Frosh, he points to the influence of Freud as surreptitiously bringing Kabbala into Western thought. “Freud acted by way of tzimtzum, or restriction, that allowed Kabbalistic thought to permeate Western thought, which up to then had been very wary of it. Freud was able to act as a conduit for Kabbala.“Freud's lasting legacy is enormous,” summarizes Berke. “His creation, psychoanalysis, is a method, a way of thinking, a discipline through which we can find meaning in the experiences which make us human. It is a science of subjectivity enhanced by the ‘skipping and jumping’ process of ‘free association.’ Nowadays practitioners call this ‘listening with the third ear.’ It is a listening, which is very attentive, nonjudgmental and highly sensitive to nuances of thought and feeling.“Psychoanalysis itself carries the added value of opening a door to the many discoveries and mysteries of Kabbala. It is the means by which the Jewish mystical tradition has entered and enriched the mainstream of society. Kabbalistic ideas include the concept of bisexuality, methods of dream interpretation, the interplay between good and evil, theories of repression and depression (“lowness of spirit”) and the significance of reparation, tikkun, perhaps the most important imprint of them all.”If Berke’s thesis is correct, then much of what has been taken as a purely secular discipline will have to be reexamined. It remains to be seen if psychoanalysts will reject it, or embrace a more spiritual path to deal with human beings’ unexplored, hidden self.
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