The Parting of the Ways How Esoteric Judaism and
Christianity Influenced the Psychoanalytic Theories of
Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung
Visit the link below to download the full version of this book:
https://medipdf.com/product/the-parting-of-the-ways-how-esoteric-judaism-and-chr
istianity-influenced-the-psychoanalytic-theories-of-sigmund-freud-and-carl-jung/
Click Download Now
The Parting
of the Ways
How Esoteric Judaism
and Christianity Influenced
the Psychoanalytic Theories
of Sigmund Freud
and Carl Jung
RICHARD
KRADIN
Boston
2016
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
A catalog record for this title is available
from the Library of Congress.
Copyright © 2016 Academic Studies Press
All rights reserved
ISBN 978-1-61811-422-8 (cloth)
ISBN 978-1-61811-423-5 (electronic)
On the cover: “Prima facie,” by Siobhan Cashman.
Published by Academic Studies Press in 2016
28 Montfern Avenue
Brighton, MA 02135, USA
[email protected]
www.academicstudiespress.com
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1. Sigmund Freud: “Godless Jew”
Chapter 2. Carl Gustav Jung: A Preacher’s Son
Chapter 3. Anatomy of Psyche, Anatomy of Soul
Chapter 4. The Judeo-Christian Ethic
Chapter 5. Boundaries: Discerning What Is Holy from What Is Profane
Chapter 6. Law and Spirit
Chapter 7. Mysticism: Word and Image
Chapter 8. God and the Unconscious
Chapter 9. Revelation and Psychoanalysis
Chapter 10. Eros and Sexuality
Chapter 11. The Symbolic Realm
Chapter 12. Dreams and Midrash
Chapter 13. Transference: Personal or Not?
Chapter 14. Trauma, Psychopathology, and Jewish Mysticism
Chapter 15. Obsessionality and Historical Traumas
Chapter 16. Master and Disciple
Chapter 17. Losing Oneself: Narcissism and Bitul
Chapter 18. Oedipus and Supersession
Chapter 19. Psychoanalysis and Altered States
Conclusion
Figure Legends
References
Index
Acknowledgements
TFreudian
his book is the culmination of my years of training in both
psychoanalysis and religion. I wish to thank all of my teachers of
and Jungian psychoanalysis, especially Robert Bosnak and the
late Ann Alonso for their interest in my ideas during training and
beyond. I wish to acknowledge my Harvard University thesis advisor Paul
Hanson for his help in integrating ideas from early Judaic and Christian
history. I acknowledge my heartfelt appreciation for Rev. Michael
Domba, z”l, who taught me how to approach a Talmudic text. My thanks
to R. Nehemiah Polen, R. Ebn Leader, Barry Mesch, and R. Arthur
Green of Hebrew College for their teachings and wisdom. My
appreciation is extended to my various teachers in the Chabad Hasidic
movement, Rabbis Yossel Polter, Shmuel Posner, Yosef Zaklos, and Yosef
Goldberg, who live the lives that some of us merely write about. My
thanks extend to my editor, Lew Aron, for giving me the opportunity to
author this text and sufficient license to express some controversial ideas.
And of course to family and friends—you know how I feel about you.
Shalom /Peace.
Preface
LbothikemyaSigmund Freud and Carl Jung, I am a physician. I chose to pursue
interests in psychoanalysis after having first established a career as
pulmonologist and pathologist at the Massachusetts General
Hospital (MGH), where I continue to practice in all of these areas. I
trained in Freudian psychoanalytical psychotherapy at the Boston
Institute of Psychotherapies and at the MGH, and served in the MGH
Psychopharmacology Clinic where I gained a firm footing in biological
psychiatry. I subsequently trained at the C. G. Jung Institute in Boston
and received my diploma as a Jungian analyst.
However, I found myself often at odds with my Jungian colleagues.
Some had little or no background in clinical psychology or psychiatry, and
had received a classical Jungian training in Zurich. Their mode of analysis
was focused on dream interpretation and active imagination, which,
although fascinating, was in my opinion questionably effective in dealing
with the neurotic problems of many patients. Many of my Jungian
colleagues expressed little interest in developmental psychopathology, and
there appeared to be few mutually agreed upon rules concerning how to
conduct the treatment of patients, and a notable resistance towards
instituting any.
This was antithetical to my Freudian training. If anything, I had
found my Freudian colleagues overly focused on maintaining boundaries
and on the analysis of Oedipal issues. Their approach to patients at times
seemed formulaic and constrained. I began to suspect that the differences
between my Freudian and Jungian approaches had identifiable roots in
the tenets of Judaism and Christianity.
I was born into a family of first-generation American Jews and raised
in a secular home, but one with strong ties to observant Judaism. My
parents were not strictly kosher, although my mother only purchased
meat from a kosher butcher, and the idea of mixing meat with dairy at
the dinner table was anathema. Unleavened foodstuff ( chametz ) was
inadmissible to our house during Passover, yet we celebrated no family
Seder. The major religious holidays of Sukkot and Shavuot were ignored,
yet our home assumed an aura of scrupulous religiosity during the High
Holy Days. We did not observe the Sabbath. In retrospect, I cannot
explain why certain tenets of Judaism were firmly held while others were
ignored by my family, except to say that the desire to assimilate into
American culture and the atrocities of World War II had left traditional
Judaism in disarray and in search of new directions.
I was educated in the Conservative synagogue, and taught to read
Hebrew, but with little understanding of what I was reading. Like many
of my peers, I did not adhere to my religion after my Bar Mitzvah, but
neither did I abandon it. When my mother died in 1983, I began to say
kaddish , the traditional prayer for the dead, and attended the synagogue
service twice each day for eleven months. I read voraciously about
Judaism but frankly found its legalisms arid. When I asked my teacher,
Rev. Michael Domba, a survivor of the Holocaust who had been a
student at the Slobodka yeshiva in Lithuania before the war, whether it
would be possible to study the Kabbalah, the mystical writings and
practices of Judaism, his answer was that it was an area best avoided. I
was curious about his reply, and as to why Judaism needed to be limited
to Talmudic study and ritual observance.
According to family lore, we were related to the Gaon of Vilna, the
great Lithuanian scholar who had opposed the burgeoning Hasidic
movement in the eighteenth century. As a physician and medical
scientist, I had little inclination to associate with a sect whose members
dressed like they were still living in the eighteenth century and who lived
in a “world apart” from others. However, one day I decided to attend a
Sabbath service at a local branch of Chabad, a Hasidic sect that welcomes
Jews of all levels of observance. It was there that I found the spiritual
underpinnings of Judaism that I had been searching for.
In order to explore the religious roots of psychoanalysis, I attended
Harvard University and graduated with a master’s degree in religion. My
thesis explored Jesus’ healing practices in the New Testament. I
subsequently attended the Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts,
where I studied the Kabbalah and Hasidic thought, writing a master’s
thesis on the influence of Jewish mysticism on psychoanalysis. Through
my journeys into psychoanalysis and religion, I have become convinced
that Freudian analysis is in many respects a secular reworking of the
tenets of Rabbinic Judaism, with Jungian analysis comparably indebted to
Christianity. The present text is an effort to elucidate this thesis.
Introduction
Revolutions are a resolute and conscious attempt . . . to
break with the past
—Alexis de Tocqueville
Iconceptions
n the early twentieth century, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung developed
two distinct theories of psychoanalysis based on their differing
of the unconscious mind. Their schools of psychoanalysis
remain active today, although they have witnessed substantial
modifications. As secular psychological approaches, neither is based
directly on religious tradition. Freud specifically rejected any link
between psychoanalysis and religion, whereas Jung viewed his mode of
analytical psychology as within the tradition of ancient religious healing
practices.
The history of ideas includes an examination of conceptual
borrowings. Secular thought did not spring de novo from the enlightened
mind; instead, it emerged out of two millennia of religious tradition in
the West. It would be naive to presume that this lengthy heritage has not
contributed to how modern minds see the world. This is particularly
evident in the field of psychology, where values and modes of thought can
be traced back to once-prevalent religious ideas.
The discovery of the unconscious (Ellenberger 1970) has in fact been
a process, not an event. It has been nothing less than the slow unfolding
of ideas, some of which have gained the light of day only to sink back
again into a barely perceptible darkness. As will be discussed below, the
Judeo-Christian ethic continues to inform our modern conceptions, and
often without our awareness. This extends to the modes of
psychoanalysis developed by Freud and Jung, whose debt to religious
ideas has never been fully acknowledged.
Scholars have referred to the partitioning of Judaism and
Christianity as the “parting of the ways” (Boyarin 2006). This was a
process that took place over centuries, and was determined by mutual
positive and negative influences, which tended to polarize the positions
of the rival religions. It will be demonstrated here that a comparable
process has sculpted, and in many respects also distorted, the positions
taken by Freud and Jung. Following their final rift in 1912, Freud’s
writings were for a brief time aimed at refuting Jung’s unorthodox ideas
concerning the psyche. Jung, in turn, continued to take exception to
Freud’s notions concerning the unconscious, and he abandoned the
domain of personal psychology in order to focus on the collective features
of the psyche. While there are indications that each man kept abreast of
the other’s work, in their later years they rarely referred to each other.
This has been the legacy for their intellectual heirs, as well.
Unfortunately, such purposeful neglect has tended to limit the scope of
their respective approaches.
PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT
Secular thought tends to obscure dependence on religious ideas by
clothing them in the language of scientific empiricism. In order to discern
the religious motifs that inform secular thought, this veil must be
penetrated. Claims that new ideas arise de novo must be dismissed as
incorrect, as they emerge necessarily from older ones, and continue to
carry the latter’s indelible impressions. According to the philosopher
Amos Funkenstein:
The “new” often consists not in the invention of categories or
figures of thought, but rather in a surprising employment of
existing ones. Of the variety of ways in which a new theory can
be said to have been prepared by an older one, two ideal modes
are particularly pertinent . . . the dialectical anticipation of a
new theory by an older, even adverse one . . . and the
transplantation of existing categories to a new domain.
(Funkenstein 1986, 14)
This conclusion applies also to the debt that psychoanalysis owes
religion. But identifying the religious underpinnings of psychoanalysis is
complicated by a paucity of direct acknowledgements of the latter’s
borrowings, especially in Freud’s writings, which convey a distinctly
negative attitude towards religion. However, as will be demonstrated,
this belies Freud’s reliance on religious ideas, so that one must look
carefully past Freud’s manifest narratives in order to identify the latent
motifs of religion. For Freud, religion, and specifically Judaism, is the
unconscious element that must be defended against, yet manifests in
much of his thought.
CURE OF THE SOUL
Until relatively recent times, religious practice was the dominant mode of
countering psychological disturbances. The religious “cure of the soul”
was the dominant mode of psychotherapy. Carl Jung acknowledged the
therapeutic role of religion as follows:
What are religions? Religions are psychotherapeutic systems.
What are we doing, we psychotherapists? We are trying to heal
the suffering of the human mind, of the human psyche or the
human soul, and religions deal with the same problem.
Therefore, our Lord is a healer; he is a doctor. He heals the sick
and he deals with the trouble of the soul, and that is exactly
what we call psychotherapy. (Collected Works , vol. 18, para.
181)
In his Eight Chapters (Pirke Shemoneh ) the twelfth-century Jewish scholar
and physician Maimonides (R. Moshe ben Maimon) (Figure 1 ) outlines
how psychologically troubled individuals should be approached, offering
prescriptions that read like modern cognitive-behavioral therapy (Bakan
et al. 2009). Maimonides opines, like Aristotle, that actions are virtuous
when they achieve a “middle path” between extremes. Accordingly, an
individual who has become mentally unsound is encouraged to practice
the extreme opposite of his undesirable behavior until the fault had been
remedied. For example, if a man is a miser, he is encouraged to spend
extravagantly until his niggardliness has been extinguished. Only then
can he be persuaded to be generous in moderation. Maimonides’
approach is active, directive, symptom-based, and highlights the
importance of behavioral change in the cure of the soul.
Figure 1. Moses ben Maimon or Maimonides was a twelfth-century rabbinic
scholar and Jewish philosopher who compiled the Mishneh Torah and authored
Guide of the Perplexed . His standing as a sage is essentially unrivaled.
RELIGION AND PSYCHOANALYSIS
Other scholars have previously examined the influence of religion on
psychoanalysis. During Freud’s own lifetime, A. A. Roback argued that
psychoanalysis was peculiar to the make-up of the Jewish mind (1929), a
suggestion that Freud rejected. 1 The historian David Bakan opined that
mystical Judaism had played a role in the development of psychoanalysis
and that Freud had been a crypto-Sabbatean, i.e., a member of a
messianic sect that secretly followed the banned teachings of Sabbatai
Tzvi, although this claim has been rejected by most scholars (Bakan et al.
2009). The psychoanalyst Ana-Maria Rizzuto addressed Freud’s
ambivalent relationship to God, arguing that unresolved Oedipal issues
with his father’s Judaism were the primary cause of Freud’s atheism
(1998).
The psychologist Sanford Drob has examined the role of the
Kabbalah in both Freudian and Jungian analysis (2000), and more
recently Karen Starr (2008) and Michael Eigen (2012) have addressed
parallels between mystical Judaism and psychoanalysis. Many of these
ideas are revisited in the present text. Whereas several neo-Freudian
psychoanalysts, including Steven Frosh (2009) and Lew Aron and Karen
Starr (2013), agree that Freud’s Judaism influenced the directions of his
thought, they are wary about labeling psychoanalysis a “Jewish science,”
as they are justifiably concerned that this might fuel anti-Semitic
prejudice. Others have addressed the influence of Christianity on Jung’s
ideas, and in this regard the works of the Jungian analysts Edward
Edinger (1976) and Murray Stein (2012) are noteworthy.
The present text demonstrates that the religious underpinnings of
psychoanalysis are both more specific and extensive than have been
previously entertained, and that the distinct tenets and practices of
traditional Judaism and Christianity account in large measure for the
differences that emerged respectively in the theories and practices of
Freud and Jung.
RELIGION AND PSYCHOLOGY
Jung, a onetime disciple and colleague of Freud, 2 suggested that all
aspects of human experience, including religious ones, are
“psychological,” and should be considered as such: “Everything to do
with religion, everything it is and asserts, touches the human soul so
closely that psychology least of all can afford to overlook it” (CW 11,
para. 172). Jung’s notion that religion is psychological raises few
objections; however, the converse invariably raises many. This in part
results from Freud’s having viewed religion as steeped in superstition and
metaphysics, whereas psychoanalysis was, in his opinion, necessarily
scientific and devoid of metaphysical underpinnings. Jung’s stance on
religion, to the contrary, was generally benevolent, and he agreed that
religious ideas informed psychoanalysis. But neither man chose to address
how their own religious beliefs influenced their theories of
psychoanalysis, and this is the aim of the present text.
Whereas the Judeo-Christian ethic has contributed to modern
psychotherapeutic thought, it must be acknowledged that Judaism and
Christianity are complete soteriologies in their own right, 3 and they
continue to compete with psychotherapy. There are large numbers of
