http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/1284353

Sigmund Freud and the Jewish mystical tradition

"The purpose of this essay is to explore a hypothesis concerning the intellectual antecedents of Freudian psychoanalysis. From the point of view of the history of ideas, psychoanalysis presents a special problem. Movements of thought of the stature of psychoanalysis usually have prominent antecedents in the history of man's thought. Although there are giants in every great movement of thought, rarely do their contributions seem to arise full-blown, like psychoanalysis, as the work of a single person. Freud is sometimes viewed as an inexplicable genius who burst upon the world, left his profound and complicated message, and departed. In seeking to understand the intellectual history of psychoanalysis one can find many features of Freud's thought in the history of ideas in the main streams of Western civilization. Yet the basic mood of psychoanalysis is so radically different from all these other modes of thought, that the question of its origins is still unsatisfactorily answered. The hypothesis of this essay is that a full appreciation of the development of psychoanalysis is essentially incomplete unless it be viewed against the history of Judaism, and particularly against the history of Jewish mystical thought. This does not mean that we will be able to read psychoanalytic propositions directly out of Jewish mystical expressions. Our point is rather that Freud's repeated affirmation of his Jewish identity had greater significance for the development of psychoanalysis than is usually recognized. In attempting to understand the development of psychoanalysis as an expression of Jewish mysticism, it has been our endeavor to emphasize the word mysticism as much as the word Jewish. Jewish mysticism was undoubtedly the major vehicle of transmission. It operated, perhaps, by developing within Freud a certain perceptual and emotional readiness, and by defining some basic patterns of reaction in connection with the problems he encountered. In our attempt to link Freud to the tradition of Jewish mysticism, we have sought to avoid generating the impression that psychoanalysis is reducible to the peculiarities of the mental life of its originator. We have sought to make the essay comprehensible to persons who are well versed neither in psychoanalysis nor in Jewish history. The present essay falls into five major parts and an epilogue. In the first part the question of the development of psychoanalysis as a problem in the history of ideas is raised, and an attempt is made to show some of the relationships between Freud and the Jewish tradition. In the second part a brief sketch of some of the features of Jewish history is provided. In the third part we deal with Freud's writings on Moses, where, we believe, Freud permitted himself to be most revelatory with respect to the role of his Jewishness in his thought. In the fourth part we deal with the image of the Devil, an image which contains, in a metaphorical sense, some of the critical features of the development of psychoanalysis. In the fifth part, we deal with some of the written works in Jewish mysticism in their relevance to psychoanalysis. In the epilogue we have tried to come to a somewhat deeper appreciation of the meaning of Freud's Jewish identification, using as a fulcrum Freud's analysis of "Heimlichkeit"--The word which he also used to characterize his Jewish feeling"--Preface. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2007 APA, all rights reserved).

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