European Judaism

This issue continues a tradition in this journal of devoting issues to the broad theme of ‘Judaism and Psychotherapy’. It began formally in autumn 1982, but the journal had already explored the topic earlier with occasional writings as noted by Howard Cooper.¹ The dedicated issues grew out of a series of lectures on the topic initiated by Leo Baeck College and were subsequently continued in collaboration with the Raphael Centre, a Jewish counselling service. The origin of this exploration belongs in large part to the influence of Irene Bloomfield z'l, who became involved, together with Dr Wendy Greengross z'l, in the establishment of a pioneering programme of ‘Pastoral Care and Counselling’ for the rabbinic students at the College. It is a privilege to be able to include in this issue a previously unpublished paper by Irene, together with Gaby Glassman, her partner in pioneering work on the impact of the Holocaust on the second generation of survivor families.

This article draws on pioneering work in studying the impact of the Holocaust on second and third generation children of survivors of refugees from Nazi persecution. It describes the formation of the first ‘Second Generation’ groups in 1989, followed in 1991 by ‘intergenerational groups’. The work revealed issues that included transgenerational trauma, feeling different, problems with separation, children not expressing their feelings, guilt, the child as a ‘memorial candle’, attitudes towards Jewishness. As a result of their experience with first and second generation Holocaust survivors and refugees in London, the authors were invited, in 1994, to provide ‘supervision’ for a group of first and second generation psychotherapists in Prague. There, it took time for group members to address their own issues, particularly in connection with their Jewishness, which they had suppressed while living under a totalitarian regime.

An appendix addresses early work on communication in perpetrator families.

The term ‘identity’ has come to be associated with our membership of various groups based upon gender, sexuality, race, religion, culture and class. A psychological perspective moves beyond identity politics and emphasises both group and the individual. The selves we become are based upon who we internalise through identification. An aspect of this is our ancestral history. The author uses a personal story to illustrate the dynamic interrelationship between our group and personal identities. Our identities can be a badge of honour or a burden. How we are treated according to the labels applied to us shapes the sense we have of ourselves. Psychological work aims to help a person distinguish between who they truly are and what was forced upon them in the course of their lives. This requires a dual focus on the group legacies we carry and the individual as the unit for understanding identity.

There is a troubled legacy that is visible in so many of the illiberal populisms that currently seem to plague our democracies. One thing they have in common is the idea of a return to a period hazy in memory which was somehow better, greater than the present. Transposed to an individual level, we are evoking emotions attached to a childhood home. Freud's ideas on the unconscious and its important place in our everyday lives emerged at the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century. After 1918 he became increasingly preoccupied by groups, societies and nations. Under the pressure of Nazism, he turned his attention to antisemitism, exploring the impact of repression and ‘the return of the repressed’. Born in Poland shortly after the war, the author, in what was a 2019 Keynote Lecture in Warsaw, explores the after-effects of her parents’ wartime history and her own angry responses to an experience of loss and mourning.

Is there any reason for calling psychoanalysis a ‘Jewish science’? There is one, particularly significant: the affirmation of the act of birth thanks to which there emerges a new individual psychic life. In this article, I argue that the psychoanalysis which takes a positive view on the issue of separation is natalistic: it offers a particular philosophy of life, which chimes with the existential tenets of Jewish tradition. The Jewishness of psychoanalysis would thus manifest itself not so much in being a ‘science’, but in the way in which it follows the Jewish torat hayim, the ‘teaching of life’. The gist of this teaching lies in the specific attitude towards the human condition of natality: instead of trying to undo the trauma of birth, the Jewish singular life walks away from the place of its origin and never indulges in the phantasy of virtual return.

The article begins with a summary account of some major trends in the co-location of psychoanalysis and Judaism, relating particularly to: the origins of psychoanalysis; antisemitism directed towards, and within, psychoanalysis; links between Jewish mysticism and psychoanalysis through notions of ‘tikkun’ and reparation; hermeneutics and interpretation; and the transmission of knowledge through intense personal relationships. Psychoanalytic interpretation has also been applied to some Jewish (especially biblical) texts. The article then offers an account of Jewishness as rooted in ambivalence and contradictory ties – and particularly as a way of being that is fundamentally interrupted by otherness. I give an example of this and try to show that what one author I draw on calls ‘the backward pull of love and accidental attachment’ is constitutive of Judaism and of psychoanalysis as well. As such, it is a powerful ethical claim to say that ‘Judaic’ psychoanalysis exists.

The early accounts of Freud's life and the history of psychoanalysis tended to marginalise Jewishness and antisemitism. It is not that Ernest Jones, Henri F. Ellenberger and Richard Wollheim excluded them altogether. There were passing references to Freud's Jewish background in Moravia, antisemitism in late nineteenth-century Vienna, his largely Jewish circle, his fascination with Moses and the psychoanalytic exodus after the Anschluss in 1938. However, there was a big shift after the 1980s and ’90s in the historiography of psychoanalysis. First, there was a growing interest in the culture and politics of fin-de-siècle Vienna and in Budapest and Prague. Second, there was a growing interest in the world of Jewish Orthodoxy in central and east Europe and its influence on Freud's generation, and a new concern with antisemitism and race in nineteenth-century medical science and how psychoanalysis can be seen as a response to these new discourses.

Sabina Spielrein was a Russian psychoanalyst who worked in Zurich, Berlin, Geneva, Moscow and Rostov-on-Don. She influenced many well-known thinkers in psychoanalysis and psychology, including Jung, Freud, Piaget, Claparède, Vygotsky and Luria. After her death in the Shoah, her life and works were largely forgotten until the discovery of correspondence revealing her erotic relationship with Jung. She was then reinvented as a ‘femme fatale’ in popular culture. It is only in the twenty-first century that the details of her life have been properly reconstructed and that psychoanalysts have recognised her stature as an original thinker in many areas, including the death instinct, child development, attachment and evolution. This article gives an account of her life, explores the reasons for her erasure, and examines her two most significant papers.

At least seventy-two first- and second-generation women psychoanalysts emigrated to the United States as Nazism came to dominate Europe. There – largely in Vienna, Berlin and Zurich – from the early 1900s to the beginning of the Second World War, they had been at the forefront of the psychoanalytic movement; after emigrating, they were decisive in shaping the development of Freudian theory and practice in the US. Their contributions notwithstanding, today they are neglected and at risk of being marginalised or falling into oblivion. Using both historical materials and personal-history documents, including memoirs, interviews, correspondence and personal communications, this article revives and reconstructs the individual and professional biographies of eight first-generation analysts – Frances Deri, Helene Deutsch, Salomea Gutmann-Isakower, Clara Happel, Karen Horney, Flora Kraus, Mira Oberholzer-Gincburg and Christine Olden – and focuses on their complex multiple identities as professional women (the Jewish New Women of their milieu), pioneers of psychoanalysis, Jews, refugees, German-speaking emigrants, mothers and more.

The Catholic theologian Hans Küng spent a lifetime studying philosophy and theology, studies marked by an unusual ability constantly to question and to re-examine his own faith and to enquire into the faith of others. In the first half of his life he had seen world religions ‘only as a horizon with which to view Christianity’, but as time went on, his views became both broader and deeper. This led him to formulate the widely published dictum:

No peace among the nations without peace among the religions.

This brief survey explores some of Küng's writings about other faiths, including Tracing the Way: Spiritual Dimensions of the World Religions (2002), on Judaism (1992), on Christianity (1994) and Islam (2004).

Jonathan Sacks and I had known each other from Cambridge in the 1960s. We maintained a unique working relationship throughout our careers, despite the enflamed intra-communal divide. That enables me to move beyond obituary hyperbole to respectful assessment. This article is framed by a cartoon of two-headed Sacks. He succeeded as none before him in establishing Judaism as a wise and cogent voice in the public square. He was a towering intellectual who contributed as no rabbi before him in the UK to public policy. Sacks was less successful in his equally cherished aim of holding together the mainstream United Synagogue and authoritarian ultra-Orthodoxy. He never gave up, but any softening of the line between Orthodoxy and Reform he may have once wished for was sacrificed to this overriding objective. Sacks only once ventured, unconvincingly, into theology. But his personal relationship with me took precedence over past behaviour when attending my wife's funeral.

Michael A. Meyer, Rabbi Leo Baeck: Living a Religious Imperative, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020, £48.00

Harvey Shoolman, Naturalistic Explanation in Spinoza's Ethics: Being Mind-Full of Nature, Lexington Books, 2019, £46