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Dennis G. Shulman

Sigmund Freud was a secular Jew of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, a movement particularly popular in Vienna at the time of Freud's childhood and university years, which encouraged Jews to study secular subjects and learn European languages as well as Hebrew. Like other Haskalah Jews in Europe during the early twentieth century, Freud did not repudiate Judaism, but rather (a) rejected Jewish ritual practice and the fundamentalist view of the Bible and Talmud, (b) valued intellectuality and open-mindedness, (c) was concerned with issues involving social justice, and (d) developed a tenacious personality in the face of anti-Semitism.

Sigmund Freud's Judaism was not the Judaism of the massive populations of Orthodox and Chasidic immigrants entering Vienna from the small towns and villages throughout the Austrio-Hungarian Empire. Similar to immigration patterns to the United States during the same period, Jewish immigration to Vienna from Galicia, Hungary, and Bukovina dramatically increased during Freud's lifetime. When Freud's family arrived in Vienna from Moravia in Czechoslovakia (Sigmund was three years old at the time), the Jewish population of the city was fifteen thousand. In 1923, when Freud was almost seventy years old, Vienna was the third largest Jewish community in Europe (over two hundred thousand Jews, approximately ten percent of the general Viennese population). Emanuel Rice indicates that Sigmund Freud, like many first generation immigrants to a new urban setting in both the USA and Europe, attempted to distance himself from his own immigrant father and the "unwashed" immigrant population "flooding" his city; and that this explains some of the negative aspects of Freud's attitude toward his Judaism.

Not the Judaism of the Chasidic and Orthodox "unwashed," Sigmund Freud's Judaism was the fiercely Jewish Judaism of the recently-emancipated secular urban Jew, the fiercely Jewish Judaism of the Haskalah.

Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi writes that just as Freud is a godless Jew, so too is "psychoanalysis is a Godless Judaism." How is psychoanalysis a godless Judaism? What aspects of Judaism impacted Freud's theory and practice? The answer can be found in the underlying assumptions of the midrashic literary tradition and method.

First and foremost, in both the psychoanalytic situation and the rabbinic study of the Torah, for the psychoanalyst and the rabbi, there is no such thing as nonsense. Ben Bag Bag, a rabbi of the first century C.E., quoted in a tractate of the Mishnah, taught, speaking about the sacred text, "Turn it, turn it, for all is within it, and contemplate it, and grow gray and old over it, and stir not from it." In the same vein, Freud, almost two thousand years later, describing what he had learned from his neurology professor, Jean Martin Charcot, and summarizing both Freud's and Charcot's approach, wrote that the psychoanalytic method involved looking "at the same things, again and again, until they themselves begin to speak." This midrashic/psychoanalytic stance in relation to the sacred text/clinical material is the hallmark of the method they share. Freud made this explicit in Interpretations of Dreams when he referred to the patient's dream as a "sacred text."

In both the midrashic commentary and the psychoanalytic situation, the task involves filling in the spaces between, behind, around, and below the words. Sometimes, this process involves listening to the silences that are deafening, e.g., Abraham rising early in the morning to sacrifice his son after receiving the command from God the night before, with no words of protest from Abraham or description of his sleepless night. Then sometimes, this process involves uncovering the disguise that lurks behind the words, e.g., discerning what is meant by a specific patient's dream symbol or biblical image, a jewel case, a wolf, a serpent, a ladder, a bush. Other times, this process involves raising questions about the consistency of the narrative or the character of the protagonists, e.g., if Isaac is a wealthy man and sends his son, Jacob, away with a blessing, why is Jacob on this terrifying wilderness journey with neither possession or servant; or wondering why a male patient, whose father became ill when the patient was four-years old, is preoccupied with self-punishing fantasies and sexual impotence. Writing about this process, Lawrence Kuschner describes the midrashic method this way, "It is the act of filling in the spaces between the paragraphs and words and letters of the Bible (I would add the patient's clinical narrative as well) in such a way as to make one long intelligible word which ... will be the name of God."

For both the rabbi and the psychoanalyst, the method also has a shared purpose -- by exploring each nuance of the material under scrutiny, no matter how seemingly trivial or irrelevant, the rabbi and psychoanalyst relate to the material, actively struggle with it, and ultimately discover multiple meanings within it. Whether analyzing a patient's dream or reconciling two discrepant biblical texts, it is the midrashic inquiry that gives life to, and honors its subject and object.

As we have seen, psychoanalysis and Judaism share an approach to the "text." Drawing on this rabbinic metaphor, for the psychoanalyst, the patient is the Torah and psychoanalysis is midrash. A review of Freud's writing on biblical and religious subjects (see especially Moses and Monotheism, Totem and Taboo, Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices, and The Moses of Michelangelo) reveals that also the converse is true. For Freud, the Torah and religion are neurotic patients -- requiring psychoanalytic scrutiny of their details, and can be best explained by theories developed to understand individual psychopathology. For Freud and his early students, a biblical story is a "dream of youthful humanity."

Like the dream, the biblical account (and this is especially true for the Genesis stories) is a complex multileveled and disguised narrative which conveys a truth about the nature and quality of human character and experience. Multileveled, each biblical story and each dream is the modern city of Rome--its train stations, restaurants, churches, apartment and office buildings built upon the medieval city, which is built upon the city of the Caesars, which is built upon the city of the Etruscans. So, as layman or rabbi or psychoanalyst, when we hear a dream described or the torah chanted, what we are privileged to experience is only the "modern city," the final form of the narrative that has been permitted, or happens to survive, what Freud referred to as the "manifest content of the dream."

For example, the biblical account of Noah's flood is a children's story about a smiling Mr. and Mrs. Noah, watching over their happy children and animal couples; and, at the same time, a moral story about the sin of the Generation of the Flood; and, at the same time, a story of hope and covenant in which God promises never to destroy the world again; and, at the same time, a spiritual story in which the world is cleansed and re-created; and, at the same time, a historical story hinting at a great flood in Mesopotamia and its environs; and, at the same time, a mythological story that shares and transforms a narrative concerning the troublesome and conflictual relationship among the gods, and between the gods and man; and, at the same time, and most disturbing, the world's first genocide, in which God, only six chapters following His declaration that the world was very good, orders a global cleansing. Each biblical story, like each dream, is the complex sum of its coexisting layers--and more.

In addition, each biblical story and dream not only expresses, but also disguises its themes, its lessons, and its message. Freud understood that the work of the dream was to hide the true dream thought, "the heart of the artichoke," within a set of elaborate symbols and distortions. Therefore, on the clinical level, Freud would not only listen to what the dream and dreamer were saying, but also contemplate what they were not.

The biblical narrative also expresses, while it disguises, and reveals what it hides. When examining a biblical text, therefore, like Freud when he listened to a dream, it is important to not only hear in the biblical verses and phrases what is being spoken, but also what has been silenced.

Clinical psychoanalysis, with its attention to the nuance, its reverence for the material and for the process of inquiry, its appreciation of the inconsistency and incongruity, its listening for what exists below what is being stated and its sensitivity to what is not being spoken, is midrash.

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FYI: Calendar of Dennis Shulman's Upcoming Media Appearances, Book Signings and Public Lectures

Tuesday, 9-16-03: Listen to a WNYC Radio Interview

Dennis Shulman will be interviewed about The Genius of Genesis; "The Brian Lehrer Show," WNYC AM-820 and FM-93.9 (the flagship NPR stations in NYC); 11:05-11:30 A.M. and rebroadcast in the wee hours of the morning, at 2:05 A.M. on 9-17-03. For those who live outside of the New York area, WNYC also broadcasts its programming on the Web at www.WNYC.Org. After 9-17-03, Shulman's interview will be digitally archived at the WebPage for "The Brian Lehrer Show" at www.WNYC.Org. You can also find the first chapter of The Genius of Genesis there.

Wednesday, 10-15-03: All Invited; Free NYC Public Lecture and Book Signing

Where: The National Institute for the Psychotherapies, 330 west 58^th Street (between Eighth and Ninth Avenues), NYC, Suite 204; 7:30 P.M.; for information and reservations, E-mail OfficeManager@DennisShulman.com.

Three Wednesday Evenings Beginning 10-22-03: All Invited; NJ Synagogue Seminar

"Freud, Moses and Job: Three Geniuses and What They Teach Us;" Temple Sinai, 1 Engle Street, Tenafly, NJ; 7:30-9:30 P.M.; for information and reservations, telephone Sara Kaplan (201) 568-3075.

Monday, 11-10-03: All Invited; Jacksonville, Florida Public Lecture and Book Signing

The Jewish Book Month Meet the Author Series; The Jewish Community Alliance, 8505 San Jose Boulevard, Jacksonville FL; 8:00 P.M.; free for members, $5 admission for nonmembers; for information and reservations, telephone Selma Nied, (904) 730-2100 x. 227.

Sunday, 11-16-03: All Invited; Free Kansas City, Missouri Public Lecture and Book Signing

The Kansas City Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis; Time and place of lecture to be announced; for information and reservations, telephone Dr. Richard Abloff (816) 444-7800.

Monday, 12-8-03: All Invited; Long Island, NY Public Lecture

The Psychoanalysis of the Akedah (Abraham's binding of Isaac); Institute for Adult Jewish Studies, Woodbury Jewish Center, 200 South Woods Road, Woodbury, NY; 7:30 P.M.; free for members, $5 admission for nonmembers; for additional information, call (516 496-9100).

Thursday, 1-29-04: All Invited; NJ Public Lecture and Book Signing

The Jewish Community Center on the Palisades, 411 East Clinton Avenue, Tenafly, NJ; 7:30 P.M. for reservations and information, telephone Dr. Vivian Kanig (201) 569-7900 x. 253.

Five Thursday Evenings Beginning 2-5-04; All Invited; NYC HUC Kollel Seminar

"Freud, Moses and Job: Three Geniuses and What They Teach Us;" The Kollel Program, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, 1 West 4^th Street, NYC; 6:30-8:30 P.M.; for information and reservations, E-mail RGais@HUC.edu.

Each Shabbat Morning: All Invited

Dennis Shulman leads the Shabbat Morning Minyan and discusses the weekly Torah portion at Chavurah Beth Shalom in Alpine, NJ, Saturday mornings at 9:30 A.M. For information about the Minyan, E-mail Shabbat@DennisShulman.com.

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