Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

CHAPTER ELEVEN. PATTERNS OF ENGAGEMENT– JEWISH
PERSPECTIVES
The relationship between Judaism and psychoanalysis has always been complex and
profound (Geller 2006). The reasons for this can be found in the sheer complexity of the
debates, the difficulty in separating out what is not Jewish in psychoanalysis (Frosh 2005)
and the varying acknowledgments, denials and ambivalences concerning anti-Semitism
within psychoanalysis (Frosh 2004). Jewish identity is profoundly shaped by religion, yet it
can be lived as a secular, ethnic, cultural, philosophical and political identity without
orthodox or liberal religious belief (Meghnagi 1993; Oppenheim 2006). 269 Early attempts
to engage psychoanalysis with Judaism either adopted a specifically religious approach with
particular appeal for the mystical (Bakan 1958; Ostow 1995), or saw, in Moses and
Monotheism, Freud’s adoption of a new Oedipal identity that transcended his Jewish and
Austrian/German backgrounds (Robert 1977). However neither approach was fully
convincing or accepted in wider religious and psychoanalytic contexts (Gay 1987; Bernstein
1998). Of particular importance in facilitating new developments was a research group on
the psychoanalytic study of anti-Semitism established by Ostow in 1980, based in New
York. This brought together fifteen psychoanalysts and from 1981, a historian, Yosef
Yerushalmi, who was to later produce an authoritative and acclaimed work on Freud’s
Moses and Monotheism. Yerushalmi argues that Freud’s vision of human nature intertwines
Jewish and psychological dimensions, which mutually enrich each other (Yerushalmi 1991).
269
Zaretsky offers a different perspective in examining how the history of the Jews has been shaped by
psychoanalysis (Zaretsky 2006).
120