Three Jewishly-conflicted
German speakers changed the course of modern history. By the time the first,
Karl Marx, had died in 1883 Sigmund Freud and Theodor Herzl were rising stars in
their 20s; later, incredibly, they came to be neighbors living a few doors
apart on a Vienna Street.
Herzl determined
that solving the Jewish problem necessitated sovereignty and statehood. While Marx
and Freud held that fixing what ailed universal man could not be achieved merely
by tinkering with where or how their polities were organized. Marx believed that
character could not overcome social and economic reality. Freud said that no
matter the political system, the human instinct of aggression and
self-destruction was omnipresent.
All three men had
acolytes in Palestine during the British Mandate who tried to harmonize some or
all of their disparate views.
How Freud's ideas
and those of his German-speaking followers fared in pre-state Palestine is the
subject of Freud in Zion by the Tel
Aviv-based psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and historian Eran Rolnik.
The book's subtitle: "Psychoanalysis and the
making of modern Jewish identity" is a bit of a tease. We really don't get
any straight answers about the impact psychoanalysis had on shaping modern
Jewish and Zionist identity. Instead, we are given to ponder whether there is a
contradiction between "psychoanalytic man" and "Zionist man."
What this book, intended mostly for a professional readership – the 2007 Hebrew edition was well-received by the Journal
of the American Psychoanalytic Association – does offer is a deeply
researched history of the coming of the psychoanalytic idea to Palestine.
Nineteenth century
political Zionism understood the Diaspora as being mentally, physically,
politically and culturally injurious to a healthy Jewish life. Recovery could
only come by negating the galut. In contrast, in developing
psychoanalysis Freud's goal was universal, to help people understand their drives,
themselves and thereby ameliorate emotional pain.
With Hitler's
coming to power in 1933, hundreds of German-speaking Jewish doctors came to
Zion mostly because they had no other choice. Rolnik's history of the psychoanalytic
profession in the Yishuv explores the challenges faced by its early
practitioners in adapting to a non-European environment and tells how they
competed for Freud's affections while feuding among themselves.
All the while Freud's
overriding fear was that anti-Semitic attitudes would tarnish the all-embracing
message of psychoanalysis. He did not want his theories to be seen as a
commentary on the Jewish condition, writes Rolnik. Freud was thoroughly
assimilated – the family celebrated a secular Christmas and Easter though not
Passover – still it never dawned on him to convert perhaps because he came to view all religion as neurosis. Raised
Jewishly illiterate he and Martha Bernays brought up their six children in a
similar fashion (though two sons flirted with Zionism).
Yet he was not an
ashamed Jew. He peppered his letters with Yiddishisms; stayed a member of the
B'nai B'rith lodge where he had first publicly presented his ideas; admired
Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann; and according to Rolnik, was not unsympathetic
to the cultural Zionism espoused by Ahad Ha'am and took pride when his works
first began to be translated into Hebrew in 1928.
But Freud was put
off by any hint of Jewish chauvinism. Perhaps the zenith of his disconnect from
Jewish civilization was his odd last book, Moses and Monotheism which,
as Rolnik interprets it, was Freud's attempt to show that Jewish ethnicity,
nationalism and Zionism were not prerequisites to its main gift to humanity.
It seems that as
Arab opposition to the establishment of a Jewish state became ever more
unyielding, Freud wobbled. He worried that by demanding the British honor the
Balfour Declaration the Zionists were being fanatical. A product of his milieu,
he hoped to ride out Hitler by keeping a low profile in Vienna. Earlier, he had
refused to bequest his papers to the newly established Hebrew University (then riven
by two factions, those who wanted to build the Mount Scopus campus as a Zionist
citadel, and the camp that wanted it as a repository of Diaspora intellectual
capital). Not coincidentally, the university rejected overtures from Freud's
followers to establish a training institute in psychoanalysis. In the end, a Sigmund
Freud chair in psychoanalysis was finally established only
in 1976.
For a lay reader
one of the book's highlights is the section on Freud's foremost and obsequious Hassid
in Palestine Max Eitingon (1881- 1943) who was at once fabulously wealthy, himself
a psychoanalyst, physician, and a pro-Zionist. The Nazi threat compelled him to
move to Palestine in 1933 where he basically transplanted the Berlin
headquarters of psychoanalysis to Jerusalem. It was a move Freud sitting in
Vienna hoped would be only temporary until the Hitler thing blew over. Rolnik
had access to Eitingon's papers and put them to excellent use fleshing out the
rivalries between Freud's various followers, Zionists, non-Zionists and
anti-Zionists.
Despite the
upheaval caused by Arab belligerence and the world war, Eitingon's institute,
which served as a sort of professional guild, conducted regular meetings (in
German) while its members carried surprisingly heavy patient caseloads. They also shared their frustrations. Eitingon,
for instance, complained that neither Palestinian Arabs nor Orthodox Jews were
suitable subjects for psychoanalysis. On the intriguing charge that Eitingon
was -- on top of everything else – also a Stalinist agent, Rolnik comes
down against the idea.
Can
Freud be said to have a political philosophy? In an email exchange, Rolnik
emphasized that Freud never
claimed to be offering a solution to the Jewish people or to any other people. Freud's most
political book, Civilization and its Discontents, addressed the inherent
tension between the individual's quest for freedom and society's need for
discipline, arguing that for a polity to function humans had to sublimate their
desires. In the book, Rolnik writes that "from Freud's point of view, it
makes no difference how humans decide to organize their lives together"
for at the end of the day "inherently irrational components of social
existence" preordain individual behavior.
The
aims of psychoanalysis and the Zionist enterprise did not necessarily
complement each other. Rolnik points to the pedagogical guidelines set by the
HaShomer HaTza'ir youth movement (then infatuated by Soviet Communism) regarding
teenage sexuality which were motivated not by helping the young people achieve psychological
individuation but in enforcing collectivist group dynamics.
Rolnik
wraps up Freud in Zion by airing his own worries – which he insisted to
me were made as a psychoanalyst with no political axe to grind – about contemporary
Israel. He worries about an Israeli political culture "in which violence,
omnipotence…and victimization takes precedence over assumptions of
responsibility." As he looks around, he sees an Israel colored by militant
nationalism and religious fanaticism deluding itself that most of its problems
are not, in fact, self-inflicted. The Shoah and now the existential threat from
Iran have made Israelis ever more myopic. In a back and forth he told me that
while paranoids have real enemies that doesn't make them any less paranoid. He
believes that the psychoanalysis practiced in Israel today does not adequately take
innate aggression into account. What we hate about ourselves is the key.
Israelis, he told me, put too much blame on history which makes us less accountable for our
aggressions. Too many therapists focus on childhood depravations, but Rolnik
argues that Freud taught that unconscious drives within all of us better explain
our antagonistic behaviors.
Freud died at age 83 in London exile just weeks after Hitler invaded
Poland thus outliving the madly optimistic Herzl by 35 years. Freud dreamed about Herzl. The rest of us can
be grateful that Herzl's dream became the emphatic reality. But Marx, Herzl and Freud operated on
different planes and it is only fair to evaluate the founder of psychoanalysis not
by his political acumen but by how he proposed modern man understand his
frailties.
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