Religion, Society, And Psychoanalysis

Readings In Contemporary Theory

Janet L Jacobs, Donald Capps

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429977343
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Distinguished contributors provide an overview of three generations of psychoanalytic theory, including the  work of Freud, Horney, Winnicott, and Kristeva, and discuss  the evolution of psychoanalytic thought as it relates to the role that religion plays in modern culture. }Religion clearly remains a powerful social and political force in Western  society. Freudian-based theory continues to inform psychoanalytic investigations into personality development, gender relations, and traumatic disorders. Using a historical framework, this collection of new essays brings together contemporary scholarship on religion and psychoanalysis. These various yet related psychoanalytic interpretations of religious symbolism and commitment offer a unique social analysis on the  meaning of religion.Beginning with Freuds views on religion  and mystical experience and continuing with those of Horney, Winnicott, Kristeva, Miller, and others, this volume surveys the work of three generations of psychoanalytic theorists. Special attention is given to objects relations  theory and ego psychology, as well as to the recent work from the European tradition. Distinguished contributors provide a basic overview of a given theorists scholarship and discuss its place in the evolution of psychoanalytic thought as it relates to the role that religion plays in modern culture. Religion, Society, and Psychoanalysis marks a major, interdisciplinary step forward in filling the void in the social-psychology of religion. It is an extremely useful handbook for students and scholars of psychology and religion.

Part One
Freud

1
Freud and Hasidism

Dan Merkur

In rabbinical Judaism, the body was regarded as the vehicle of the intellect. The body was not in opposition to the spirit, as it was in Christianity, but it did not contribute to the intellect either (Roith, 1987). The body was “cared for, cleaned, maintained, without joy, without love, and without shame—like a machine” (Sartre, 1965, pp. 121–23). Women were viewed with contempt. The midrash, or rabbinical commentary on the narrative portions of the Bible, has God state:

I will not create her [Eve] from the head, lest she be swelled-headed; nor from the eye, lest she be a coquette; nor from the ear, lest she be an eavesdropper; nor from the mouth, lest she be a gossip; nor from the heart, lest she be prone to jealousy; nor from the hand, lest she be lightfingered; nor from the foot, lest she be a gadabout; but from the modest part of man, for even when he stands naked, that part is covered [.Midrash Rabbah, Genesis 18:2].

Romantic longing, which has its basis in the unavailability of the beloved, was avoided through the arrangement of early marriages (Roith, 1987). The religious obligation to procreate emphasized male ejaculation while discouraging forepleasure. The midrash similarly attributed a practical purpose to women’s orgasms:

If the woman issues seed first, she bears a male; if the man issues seed first, he sires a female.… R. Hiyya bar Abba said: Therefore, the male is dependent [for his procreation] upon the woman; and female, upon the man [.Midrash Buber Tanhuma, Lev. 4:4].

The rabbinical “denial and suppression of the erotic as opposed to the sexual” (Roith, 1987, p. 130) was also consistent with the ritual practice of infantile circumcision, with its violent aggression against the penis and its implied threat to male sexual pleasure.

Freud’s basic attitudes to sexuality were consistent with these traditional Jewish prejudices (Simon, 1957). “For all the candor about sexuality in his writing and culture critique, Freud personally practiced the most puritanical sexual morality” (Loewenberg, 1971, p. 364). He explained love as narcissistic identification, that is, as an unconscious self-interest (Freud, 1921). He never discussed the need to give pleasure to the loved one, and only rarely mentioned tenderness. He does not seem to have regarded either love or sex as ever involving fun. He chose to be completely celibate from the time he was 41 onward. On 31 October 1897, Freud (1954) wrote Fliess: “Also sexual excitation is of no more use to a person like me” (p. 227). In his view, sexuality was an irrational instinctual drive. His program of therapy aimed at the autonomy of reason and its acquisition of mastery over the passions (Roith, 1987).

A key question, then, is why Freud expanded the idea of sexuality to fill the entire category of natural impulses (Rieff, 1979). Since he sought the liberation of reason from sexuality, why did he expand rather than restrict the theoretical significance of sexuality? Other theoretical options were conceivable, as the object relations theories of W. R. Fairbairn (1952), Daniel Stern (1985), Christopher Bollas (1987), and others attest. Even if one holds, as I do, to the validity of libido theory, it is not enough to say that Freud, like Moses, saw the Promised Land but was unable to enter it. Since Freud had conventional Jewish attitudes about verbal candor and circumspect sexual behavior, how did he ever come by the idea of extending the concept of sexuality? It is easy to imagine a libertine arguing that sex underlies everything. But how are we to understand a prude like Freud?

In Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition (1958), David Bakan argued that the sexual preoccupations of psychoanalysis had a historical forerunner in the Kabbalah. “Freud, consciously or unconsciously, secularized Jewish mysticism; and psychoanalysis can intelligently be viewed as such a secularization” (p. 25).

The Kabbalah (“tradition”) is a distinctive school within Jewish mysticism that arose in the late 12th century as an esoteric concern of learned rabbinical Talmudists in Provence and Spain (Scholem, 1954). The Kabbalah rapidly eclipsed older forms of Jewish mysticism, and popularizations were developed. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the Kabbalah became the vehicle of mass revival movements. One movement, known as Hasidut (“Pietism”), grew into a conservative sect that eventually commanded the allegiance of most eastern European Jews. Freud acknowledged that his father had been raised as a Hasid (Roback, 1957). Like his father, his mother too hailed from Galicia, but whether of Hasidic or Orthodox stock is unknown.

Bakan (1958) noted that “there are two principal areas in which Kabbalah and psychoanalysis show striking similarity: techniques of interpretation and the importance and meaning attached to sexuality” (p. 245). Critics have rightly objected that the Jewish practice of dream interpretation has its basis in the Bible and was an integral component of the rabbinical tradition that all European Jews shared (Lorand, 1957; Handelman, 1981; Frieden, 1990). Dream interpretation was practiced by Kabbalists (Bilu, 1979), but it was not their exclusive possession. The same cannot be said, however, of their sexual doctrines and practices.

Although historians of the Kabbalah have only recently found the courage to acknowledge “the centrality of sexuality in the Kabbalah” (Tirosh-Rothschild, 1991, p. 182), an extended concept of sexuality has been present in the Kabbalah throughout its history. The doctrine was given its classical formulation in the multivolume Sefer Ha-Zohar in the late 13th century, and Freud’s library in Vienna contained a full set of the Zohar in French translation (Bakan, 1960).

The Talmud states that God created the world through 10 sayings. Sefer Yetsirah, “Book of Creation,” introduced the term sefirah (pl. Sef rot) to approximate the idea of a hypostasis in Neoplatonism: a discrete rank or stage in the hierarchic emanation of being, which is simultaneously a modality of divine manifestation. In Sefer Yetsirah₃ the 10 sefirot are spirit, wind, water, and fire—the substances of Intellect, Soul, hylic matter, and form—and the six directions of space. Each derives from the sefirah preceding. The 10 hypostases are simultaneously 10 letters of the Hebrew alphabet; the further letters were each regarded as products of two primary letters—and two directions of space—taken together. The system of correspondences goes on to include the parts of the human body, the astronomical structure of the cosmos, the temporal divisions of the year, and so forth. Importantly, the sefirot are also 10 value criteria: “the value of life/death, the value of peace/evil, the value of wisdom/folly, the value of wealth/poverty, the value of fertility/desolation, the value of beauty/ugliness, the value of dominion/slavery” (Yetsirah, ed. Gruenwald, 1971, par. 37).

The Kabbalah built on these foundations. God was termed the ‘Ein Sof (“Infinite”) and regarded as wholly transcendent and ineffable. The ten sefirot of Sefer Yetsirah were harmonized with the Talmudic attributes of God and explained, in order of emanation, as the Supreme Crown (Keter), Wisdom (Hokhmah), Understanding (Binah), Loving kindness (Hesed), Judgment (Din), Mercy (Rahamim), Endurance (Netsah), Majesty (Hod), Righteous One (Tsaddik), and Sovereignty (Malkhut). Like the term ‘Elohim (“God”), the godhood of the divine was often regarded as an attribute whose existence was contingent on the existence of humans for whom God is God. Godhood tended to be identified either with the first sefirah, Keter; or with the 10 sefirot as a group.

From its late 12th century beginnings in the anonymous Sefer Ha-Bahir (“Book of Luminescence”), the Kabbalah attributed sexuality to the sefirot. The doctrine was predicated on the Talmudic statement that Adam had been an androgyne prior to Eve’s creation from his rib (Babylonian Talmud [BT], Hagigah 14a). Unimportant to rabbinical tradition, the motif became central to the Kabbalah, which referred to the sefirot collectively as Adam Kadmon, “primordial Adam,” or “Adam [as he was] at first.” This conception of an androgynous macroanthropic being was used to explain the scripture that “God created humankind in his image … male and female he created them” (Gen. 1:27). Kabbalists derived two inferences from the biblical verse: 1) God is both male and female; and 2) primordial Adam, who was similarly androgynous, was the image of God that the ‘Ein Sof had used as a model in creating humankind.

Different Kabbalists developed a great many variations on the basic theme of the androgyny of the macroanthropos. The androgyny of God in his totality extended to the sefirot in their individuality (Tirosh-Rothschild, 1991), and different passages in single texts might ascribe different sexual significances to single sefirot. Importantly, the archetypal significance that Kabbalists attributed to the sefirot did not extend to the names, terms, symbols, and images by which they referred to them. Kabbalists recognized and exploited the fact that terms and symbols may be applied in multivalent ways, meaning different things in different contexts. On the other hand, because the sefirot were regarded as the divine powers responsible for the creation, anything and everything could be interpreted in terms of the sexuality of the sefirot.

Because the Kabbalah postulates the latent sexuality of everything we know, it was only for the world of science that Freud (1905) was responsible for extending the concept of sexuality. Within the world of Judaism, Freud can instead be seen to have psychologized a concept of sexuality whose extent was already universal. A similar process of psychologizing—in Freud’s (1901) phrase, of converting “mythology into metapsychology” (p. 259)—may be seen in his handling of German Romanticism (Merkur, 1993). Freud did not interpret sexuality Kabbalistically as the actual constitution of the universe. He located sexuality in its mental representation.

Bakan (1958) speculated that Wilhelm Fliess may have mediated Kabbalistic influences to Freud. “Fliess … combined three important Kabbalistic elements: the notion of bisexuality, the extensive use of numerology, and the doctrine of the predestination of the time of death—the doctrine of ‘life portions’” (p. 62). Freud’s theory of psychic bisexuality was definitely inspired by Fliess (McGrath, 1986). Unlike Fliess, however, Freud dispensed with the Kabbalah’s traditional ascription of masculinity to the right side of the body and femininity to the left.

Donald Capps (1970) drew attention to the influence of Eduard von Hartmann, who was “not simply a German philosopher but an exponent of Jewish mysticism” (p. 175). In Philosophy of the Unconscious (Eng. tr., 1931), which Freud cited in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Hartmann outlined a technique for provoking unconscious creative insights that was intermediate between Kabbalistic meditative practices and Freud’s free association. In the same book, Hartmann attributed mysticism to “the desire of the Ego for self-annihilation” (Vol. I, p. 364); the notion anticipated Freud’s death instinct. In The Sexes Compared (1895), Hartmann expressed the Kabbalistic concept of sexuality in locating heterosexuality in both “the entire physical and spiritual life of Mankind” and “the teleological design of Nature” (pp. 1–2).

Freud’s association with Fliess and his reading of Hartmann both occurred in the 1890s, on the eve of his development of psychoanalysis. Bakan (1958) suggested, however, that Freud first encountered the Kabbalah simply by being the son of his father. No systematic indoctrination is implied. Bakan speculated that Freud may have absorbed Kabbalistic ideas casually through “the kind of transmission which takes place when a parent or grandparent makes a comment on this or that problem of the day” (pp. VIII–IX). The comments do not have to have been statements of deep convictions. Kabbalistic lore could have been transmitted through remarks about prior beliefs that had since been abandoned, or about other people’s superstitions.

Freud’s biographers agree that Freud enjoyed a close and affectionate relationship with his father, Jacob (Jones, 1953; Schur, 1972; Clark, 1980; Krüll, 1986; Gay, 1987, 1988). Although Freud’s parents were married in a Reform Jewish service, Jacob Freud seems to have abandoned Hasidic customs only some time after his migration to Germany. In Interpretation of Dreams, Freud (1900) related:

I may have been ten or twelve years old, when my father began to take me with him on his walks and reveal to me in his talk his views upon things in the world we live in. Thus it was, on one such occasion, that he told me a story to show me how much better things were now than they had been in his days. “When I was a young man,” he said, “I went for a walk one Saturday in the streets of your birthplace; I was well dressed, and had a new fur cap on my head. A Christian came up to me and with a single blow knocked off my cap into the mud and shouted: ‘Jew-Get off the pavement!’” “And what did you do?” I asked. “I went into the roadway and picked up my cap,” was his quiet reply. This struck me as unheroic conduct on the part of the big, strong man who was holding the little boy by the hand [p. 197].

Simon (1957) and Bergmann (1976) remarked that the “fur cap” was probably a streimal, a special hat that was obligatory for Orthodox Jews, then as now. For Jacob Freud to have been wearing a new one in Freiberg indicates that he did not leave Hasidism behind him when he left Eastern Europe. His Westernization was a more gradual process, and his second marriage, with Freud’s mother, Amalia, continued to preserve a significant measure of tradition.

Freud acknowledged that his father taught him the Bible as a child, and hired a tutor to further his Jewish education. Freud remembered the tutor with affection. In a letter to Eduard Silberstein, dated 18 September 1874, Freud (1990) discussed the different festive foods that his “modestly pious family” ate on the Jewish New Year, the Day of Atonement, Purim, and Passover (pp. 62–63). In the spring of 1883, when Freud was still courting Martha Bernays, Martha’s mother was a house guest of Freud’s parents. Because Mrs. Bernays, an Orthodox rabbi’s daughter, was herself strictly observant—for example, she wore a sh eitel, or ritual wig—we may safely assume that Freud’s parents kept a kosher house. Orthodox Jews will not so much as drink a glass of water in an unkosher home; the glass itself is a defilement (Rice, 1990).

Freud’s niece, Judith Bernays Heller (1956), who lived for several years in her grandparents’ home, remembered that Jacob was in the habit of studying the Talmud on his own, in its original Aramaic. She was also impressed at Passover when, during his conduct of the Seder ritual, Jacob recited the liturgy of the Haggadah by heart. Like the elegant command of the Hebrew language and biblical allusions that Jacob Freud exhibited in inscribing the family Bible to his son Sigmund (Rice, 1990), both Jacob’s solitary Talmud study and his memorization of the Passover liturgy are notable achievements. The Talmud is not ordinarily studied alone; it is rehearsed alone, after classes with a teacher versed in its traditional exegesis. And unlike daily prayers, the Haggadah liturgy is not recited sufficiently frequently to be memorized without deliberate effort. At least in the Hasidic period of his youth, Jacob Freud must have been both highly observant and decently educated.

Although Bakan’s thesis has its supporters, it has also met considerable resistance. Marthe Robert (1976) objected that “no parallel can be drawn between Freudian theory and any mystical tradi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part One Freud
• Part Two Psychoanalysis and the Second-Generation Theorists
• Part Three Contemporary Psychoanalytic Perspectives
• About the Book and Editors
• About the Contributors
• Index