The Jewish Science: Exploring the Kabbalistic Roots of Modern Psychology (Part One)

“We have stripped all things of their mystery and numinosity; nothing is holy any longer.” - Carl Jung, Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist (1875-1961)

Living as we do in an age of existential dread — a dread precipitated by media-manufactured pandemics and carefully contrived climate crises, “systemic racism” as well as the eminently more plausible prospects of war, economic collapse, and technocratic tyranny — it now seems all but undeniable that the turmoil of our times has taken a ruinous toll on our collective mental health.

The reader has likely witnessed this deterioration firsthand. When once the reality of psychological illness was confined to the occasional troubled soul seen screaming on a city street corner, today, diagnosable disorders represent the defining feature of entire generations, from the legions of depressed young men retreating into isolation to the outbreak of anxiety afflicting their female counterparts; from transgender delusions and a worsening drug epidemic to the veneration of decadence, degeneracy, and wholesale erasure of moral and ethical standards.

Given this society-wide derangement, it is perhaps unsurprising — some would argue, commendable — that ever-growing segments of the population are pursuing redress for their psychological ills. As of 2024, more than half of all Gen Z and millennial Americans admitted to undergoing some form of therapy, while a great many more have sought solace in the sudden proliferation of mindfulness apps, self-help books, and pseudo-spiritual influencers, all of which encourage adherents, despite their varying new-age veneers, to examine the innermost reaches of the mind — and by extension, the totality of human experience — through a framework first devised by a small but fiercely ambitious group of early 20th-century Jewish intellectuals.

The Roots of Modern Psychology

Although still heralded as one of the crowning achievements of the European Enlightenment, intellectually refined and culturally cosmopolitan, Vienna at the dawn of the 1900s nonetheless faced an uncertain future. Capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire — itself a sprawling, multiethnic patchwork steadily being eroded by nationalist sentiments — the city, conceivably the most diverse on the continent, churned with apprehension and distrust, as Hungarians, Czechs, Poles, and a dozen other semi-assimilated nationalities lived in increasingly uneasy accord. Economic inequality only heightened these tensions. Between the ornate palaces and gilded opera houses, the tree-lined boulevards and marble-clad coffeehouses, the squalor of its slums was seeping rapidly into bourgeois reality, murmurs of revolution exchanged beneath a skyline still pulsing with imposing imperial authority.

This atmosphere, as many literary inhabitants of the time noted, was fundamental in transforming Vienna from a traditionalist stronghold into a petri dish of emerging ideas and new forms of artistic expression. Its musical history is possibly its most renowned. Home to composers such as Brahms, Mahler, and Johann Strauss (and formerly Mozart, Schubert, and Beethoven), so too did the city make enormously outsized contributions to the domains of visual art (via the Vienna Secession movement), science and philosophy (through Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle) as well as, of course, politics (Trotsky and Hitler having spent some of their most ideologically formative years there).

Alongside these developments, however, brewed a far stranger force — a movement rooted not in Greek rationalism or the Roman honor code, but instead its practitioners’ near-universal Jewishness.

The first meeting of the Wednesday Psychological Society was held in 1902 as an informal gathering of psychiatrists and physicians aimed at systematizing the human mind. Many of the attendees are no doubt familiar to the reader. Among the most noteworthy was Josef Breuer, whose work effectively laid the groundwork for the formalized study of the subconscious, while of arguably more lasting impact was Alfred Adler, his holistic approach to talk therapy still forming the basis of most modern counseling strategies. Other participants included Otto Rank, the earliest advocate of so-called “birth trauma”, as well as Melanie Klein, known for her radical “Object Relations Theory.” Beside them sat the similarly pioneering figures of Victor Tausk and Sándor Ferenczi, Heinz Kohut and Wilhelm Stekel, although there was unquestionably one name which towered high above the rest: that of the committee’s enigmatic founder and uncontested chairman, Sigmund Freud.

Freud’s Peculiar Jewishness

Within the general public and indeed, contemporary academic circles, Freud’s legacy remains that of a resolutely secular thinker, a man whose unwavering commitment to reason and scientific determinism comprised the bedrock of his studies. Unlike philosophers and mystics before him, the unremarkable neurologist-turned-Father of Psychoanalysis felt it possible to view the mind through a strictly empirical lens, regarding the unconscious, not as the realm of the abstract and unknowable, but as a substructure of observable, quantifiable, and thus decipherable patterns. It was this conviction, his mythos goes, that compelled Freud to explore even the most controversial, often distasteful, aspects of the human psyche — incestuous desires and infantile sexuality, patricide and implicit suicidality — without concern for either societal or ethical norms, much less the era’s restrictive religious taboos. “The Jews have celebrated me as a national hero,” he wrote toward the end of his life, “although my merit in the Jewish cause is confined to the single point that I have never denied my Judaism.”

Despite this claim, as well as his prevailing reputation, there is ample evidence that Freud’s lineage played a far more central role in his life and ultimately, his work, than is conventionally acknowledged. Born in the small town of Freiberg (modern-day Příbor, Czechia), the bright but frequently withdrawn child was, if not exactly immersed in the faith, then most certainly imbued with its cultural ethos. Both his grandfather and great-grandfather had been rabbis. At home, Freud’s mother exclusively spoke a Galician dialect of Yiddish, the family bookshelves furnished with some of Judaism’s most foundational texts. One of these was to prove particularly sentimental, Freud keeping for the remainder of his life, the same copy of the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, which his father Jakob had gifted him on his 35th birthday, the inscription reading not “to Sigmund” but rather “Shlomo” — the psychoanalyst’s Hebrew name reserved for ceremonial occasions.

Freud, age eight with his father Jakob.

Several observers have suggested that it was Freud’s complex, often antagonistic, relationship with his more observant patriarch, as opposed to the extent of any assimilation into Viennese society, that prompted his readiness to obfuscate his Ashkenazi heritage. Most, however, attribute this to his concern that the psychoanalytic movement would be dismissed, within the tinderbox of the late Austro-Hungarian Empire, as an innately Jewish discipline.

Either way, what seems irrefutable is that Freud’s ties to his forebears would survive, albeit in irreligious form, this early familial friction. When, at thirty years of age, Sigmund at last chose to marry, he did so to a lady named Martha Bernays, the deeply devout granddaughter of Hamburg’s Chief Rabbi. In fact, Freud’s mother-in-law was purportedly so puritanical that she refused to accept so much as a drink of water in a non-kosher household, while perhaps more telling still is the couple’s second son Ernest, who, in addition to being a well-respected architect, was also an avowed and vitriolic Zionist — none of Freud’s children ever shedding their de facto Judaism, despite their allegedly atheistic upbringing.

Of course, all this would remain wholly circumstantial if not for sentiments espoused in his private writings. In a 1931 letter to the Chief Rabbi of Vienna, the then 75-year-old luminary conceded, “In some place in my soul, in a hidden corner, I am a fanatical Jew,” also confessing that he found “the attraction of Judaism and of Jews so irresistible, many dark emotional powers, all the mightier the less they let themselves be grasped in words, as well as the clear consciousness of inner identity, the secrecy of the same mental construction.” Throughout his correspondences, especially with his ideological allies, Freud would often allude to his admiration for the Jews, noting their resilience and self-professed intellectual prowess, sometimes venturing to imply, if not categorically state, that fate had bestowed upon his people, a special role in the modern world.

In his published work, Freud was considerably more circumspect. Indeed, most of his most explicitly philosemitic statements did not see print until his final book, Moses and Monotheism, in which the author offers a psychoanalytic assessment of Judaism’s one-God revolution, asserting that it “forced upon the people a progress in spirituality which, significant enough in itself, further opened the way to respect for intellectual work and to further instinctual renunciations.” In contrast, he depicts gentile religions as primitive and reliant on sensory idols, suggesting that Christianity, while inheriting the elevating monotheistic traditions of Judaism, had succeeded only in distorting these with resentment and guilt-laden narratives about the Crucifixion — the underlying awareness of their inferiority fueling the intrinsically gentile trait of anti-Semitism.

Freud’s Jewish Supremacism and Sexual Rehabilitation of the Gentiles

Pervasive throughout Moses and Monotheism is the impression that Freud’s self-imposed exile from Judaism was borne not merely of his opinion that all religions stemmed from the same neurosis, but rather a confidence that the doctrine had long ago served its essential function, molding as it had, a people of unmatched moral, cultural, and intellectual stature.

This flagrant supremacism was demonstrated quite expressly in his personal dealings. Behind the closed doors of his study groups (which Freud had since rebranded as the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society), the psychoanalyst was keen to assure his exclusively Jewish discipleship that they shared a natural affinity for the field due to their "racial kinship," while in conversation with Joseph Wortis, a Brooklyn-born psychiatrist, he was candid enough to state, “Ruthless egotism is much more common among Gentiles than among Jews, and Jewish family life and intellectual life are on a higher plane.” Not even Carl Jung, Freud’s most celebrated student (and one of only two goyim ever admitted to his meetings) ever assuaged these prejudices. Throughout their infamously fractious relationship, Freud remained dubious of his Swiss protégé’s capacity to fully grasp the intricacies of the mind based solely on his Teutonic lineage, never quite shedding the suspicion that Jung harbored “inherited Christian and even anti-Jewish biases.”

It was Ernest Jones, however, a Welsh psychoanalyst and the discipline’s first English-speaking proponent, who bore the brunt of these misgivings. By his own admission, Freud perceived his sycophantic underling with a sense of "racial strangeness,” whose Celtic ancestry rendered him "not quite accessible" to the other members of the coterie. At times, this ambivalence would verge on outright abuse. Perhaps the most egregious example of this lay in Freud’s habit of ingratiating himself into Jones’s romantic life, insisting that he perform psychiatric evaluations on the women his apprentice was involved with — evaluations which invariably led to the dissolution of the courtship. Jones’s devotion remained unwavering. Some would say that it is testament to the exclusionary atmosphere generated by Freud that even his most ardent follower was moved to lament it, Jones bemoaning in his three-volume biography of his mentor, “the Jewish belief, which they often impose on other people too, concerning the superiority of their intellectual powers.”

But while Freud’s Judeocentrism might have manifested in skepticism, if not outright hostility towards his gentile students, within his academic writings, this took on a more paternalistic bent. As both beneficiaries and custodians of the Mosaic value system, Jews, he contended, bore primary responsibility for shepherding mankind toward nobler heights — an attitude further illustrated by his membership in B’nai B’rith, a semi-secretive Zionist fraternity upholding the Children of Israel as moral and intellectual exemplars. Many of his associates shared this quasi-messianic conviction, with Franz Alexander commenting that, “The cultural significance of psychoanalysis lies in helping Western man to find his ego identity,” while Otto Rank, a man Freud had lauded as his adopted son, even went as far as to proclaim Jews “The healers of humanity.”

Somewhat predictably, any prospective gentile redemption could only be achieved, their Rebbe maintained, through sweeping sexual liberation. The reader is presumably conversant with Freudian mechanisms such as the Oedipal Complex and Castration Anxiety, Penis Envy and Latent Homosexuality — transgressive, even abhorrent, suppositions which formed the centermost pillars of the early psychoanalytic enterprise. These, it has since been established, were predominantly products of its originator’s own inclinations — inclinations he wrongly extrapolated as a human truism — yet, so vehemently did Freud cling to his hypotheses, that numerous high-ranking members were disbarred for the heresy of having questioned them. Naturally, many were suspicious of his motives. After all, while Freud and his entourage might have affirmed their efforts to be in service of the non-Jewish world, it is not difficult to see how many within a staunchly conservative Vienna considered their psycho-sexual crusade to be an assault on western values, the immorality of gentile culture something to be pathologized, modified, and eventually overcome.

The Influence of Kabbalah on Freud’s Psychoanalytic Theories

As already stated, and not at all controversially, the most accepted explanation behind Freud’s minimization of his Jewish identity was the fear that the movement might be discredited as ethnically oriented. He had every reason to fear this charge. In addition to the racial composition of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, there also existed throughout his work, a palpable undercurrent of Judeo-mysticism, the Kabbalah in particular, seeming to provide a peephole through which Freud scrutinized the human mind.

At the core of his writings, for instance, lies the belief that painfully buried memories and gravely suppressed desires must be brought into conscious understanding in order to facilitate catharsis and healing. But this would not prove a purely personal transformation. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud remarked, “just as a planet revolves around a central body as well as rotating on its own axis, so the human individual takes part in the course of development of mankind,” a passage that hints at the societal and even epochal advancements which might arise upon widespread psychological rehabilitation. Correspondingly, the Kabbalah speaks of tikkun olam, or “repairing the world”, a creed emphasizing the metamorphic power of insight, both for the spiritual well-being of the initiate as well as on the earthly health of the whole.

These processes, needless to say, require one to confront their own inner darkness. For Freud, this meant shining a spotlight on the lowliest, most shameful aspects of our character so that we might at last transcend them, a concept mirroring quite unequivocally, the Kabbalistic notion of the klipot — the metaphysical husks or shells which separate humanity from its Creator. These even exhibit methodological overlap. Writing in The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud suggests that our nocturnal imaginings are in fact expressions of unacknowledged needs striving to imprint themselves upon our cognitive perception, while in the Kabbalah, these constitute nothing less than messages from the Divine.

A yet more concrete comparison lies in Freud’s most comprehensive theory — the Id, the Ego, and the Superego. In essence, these represent the component parts of one’s personality, a blueprint he concocted to articulate the complex interplay of reason, instinct, and morality that aligns near perfectly with the Kabbalah’s idea of Nefesh, Ru’ah, and Neshamah. Both the Id and Nefesh, to put it in the simplest possible terms, embody mankind’s basest, most brutish urges while at the more measured end of the spectrum, the Superego and Neshamah act as either, depending on your perspective, one’s sublimely-inspired moral compass or the internalized voice of societal and parental expectations. Between these competing immensities stands the Freudian Ego and the Lurianic Ru’ah which attempt to navigate the complexities of daily life, striking a balance between our animal impulses and our higher selves.

These are far from the only symmetries. Some scholars, such as David Bakan, have argued that Freud's very conception of the unconscious echoes quite conspicuously, the theosophical arrangement of the Sefirot — ten attributes through which the Infinite and Eternal interacts with the physical world. Others like Sanford Drob have highlighted commonalities between Tzimtzum (God’s “Diminution”) and the therapist’s preoccupation with psychological repression, while a yet more pertinent analogy may be found in Eros and Thanatos, his so-called Life and Death Drives, and Kabbalistic depictions of Chesed and Gevurah.

Given the prevalence and indeed, the precision of such parallels, it would seem the only matter left for debate is whether Freud — who reportedly kept a German translation of the Zohar on his desk — drew these deliberately, or whether, in a feat of almost unfathomable irony, he was guided to his conclusions by the dim light of his own subconscious.

As goes without saying, this is all a matter of conjecture. Now, some ninety years after his death, the Father of Psychoanalysis endures as a more paradoxical figure than ever, celebrated and derided in equal measure. But no matter if one remembers him as a visionary or a charlatan, a man of science or a “Godless Jew”; a pervert, pioneer, or intellectual demigod, what few can deny is that his legacy has been of almost peerless impact. In the second and final installment of this series, we will delve into the ways and means by which Freud’s acolytes refined and propagated his ideas, before unpacking how, as a consequence of their ingenuity and insidiousness, the field of modern psychology remains an inescapably Jewish Science.