Psychoanalysis and Jewish Life

The Enlightenment signaled diminished popular reliance on the religious “cure of the soul,” and witnessed the emergence of psychoanalysis. From its inception, Freud’s psychoanalysis was accused of being a “Jewish science,” and he countered by including non-Jewish Swiss psychiatrists in his movement. Carl Jung eventually broke with Freud due to differences concerning psychoanalytical theory and practice. This text explores the religious underpinnings of psychoanalysis, contrasting the textual and mystical traditions of Judaism with those of Christianity. It convincingly demonstrates that differences in the fundamental tenets of Judaism and Christianity have had a profound and continued influence on psychoanalysis.

Inquiry, questioning, and wonder are defining features of both psychoanalysis and the Jewish tradition. The question invites inquiry, analysis, discussion, debate, multiple meanings, and interpretation that continues across the generations. If questions and inquiry are the mainstay of Jewish scholarship, then it should not be surprising that they would be central to the psychoanalytic method developed by Sigmund Freud. The themes taken up in this book are universal: trauma, traumatic reenactment, intergenerational transmission of trauma, love, loss, mourning, ritual—these subjects are of particular relevance and concern within Jewish thought and the history of the Jewish people, and they raise questions of great relevance to psychoanalysis both theoretically and clinically. In Answering a Question with a Question: Contemporary Psychoanalysis and Jewish Thought: A Tradition of Inquiry, Editors, Aron and Henik, have brought together an international collection of contemporary scholars and clinicians to address the interface and mutual influence of Jewish thought and modern psychoanalysis, two traditions of inquiry.

Granddaughters of the Holocaust: Never Forgetting What They Didn’t Experience delves into the intergenerational transmission of trauma to the granddaughters of Holocaust survivors. Although members of this generation did not endure the horrors of the Holocaust directly, they absorbed the experiences of both their parents and grandparents. Ten women participated in psychoanalytic interviews about their inheritance of Holocaust knowledge and memory, and their responses to this legacy. These women provided startling evidence for the embodiment of Holocaust residue in the ways they approached daily tasks of living and being. The resulting narratives revealed that frequently unspoken, unspeakable events are inevitably transmitted to, and imprinted upon, succeeding generations. Granddaughters continue to confront and heal the pain of a trauma they never experienced.

This book offers psychodynamic studies of Holocaust survivors and their families in Israel and the Diaspora. It is a most moving account of the desperate struggles of these survivors to overcome their horrendous experiences in the ghettos and concentration camps and their subsequent attempts to revive their lives after the Second World War. Hillel Klein, the author, was himself one of these Holocaust survivors. Later, as a psychoanalyst, Klein interviewed survivors in Israel and the United States of America and evaluated the consequences of the Holocaust and its aftermath from a psychoanalytic point of view which, together with his own memories contained in this book, gives it a special depth and contributes to making it a most moving account.

In the Jewish tradition, it is incumbent upon every generation to attempt to find meaning in its history. Meaning is co-created within the context of the inter-subjective field of a meeting of minds. Psychoanalysis, in some respects like the Jewish tradition from which it emerged, represents a body of thought about man’s relation to himself and to others, and places great value on the influence of memory, narrative, and history in creating meaning within the dyadic relationship of analyst and patient. In Answering a Question with a Question: Contemporary Psychoanalysis and Jewish Thought, editors Aron and Henik have brought together an international collection of contemporary scholars and clinicians to address the interface and the mutual influence of Jewish thought and modern psychoanalysis.