The Jewish Science: Exploring the Kabbalistic Roots of Modern Psychology (Part Two)
“They don’t realize we’re bringing them the plague.” - Sigmund Freud in 1909, upon his arrival to America.
One of the subtler symptoms of religious decline and society’s wholesale embrace of the secular has been the attempt to demystify the human condition — itself an impossible task — through the scientification of the language used to discuss it. Talk of “defense mechanisms” and “trauma responses,” “emotional labor” and “attachment styles,” once confined to $150-per-hour therapy sessions, is now as prevalent on dating apps as it is within corporate HR meetings, terms such as “boundaries,” “gaslighting,” and “self-care” long ago integrated into common parlance. TikTok influencers diagnose narcissistic abuse in 30-second vignettes. Legions of new-age gurus promise to help heal our “inner child,” while bestselling books like The Body Keeps the Score and Atomic Habits have been canonized as near-sacred texts — the intricacies of the human mind (some might even say, the human soul) commodified, pathologized, and condensed into easily digestible mantras.
Of course, this is far from a uniquely modern phenomenon. In the first installment of this series, we explored how the early psychoanalytic movement, headed by the imperious figure of Sigmund Freud, did not merely emerge out of the intellectual milieu of 1900s Vienna, but in fact mirrored much of its essential Jewishness. These purposefully obscured parallels would see Kabbalistic teachings injected throughout the Western zeitgeist – principles which still represent, despite the field’s ongoing evolution, the centermost pillars of psychological inquiry.
Freud the Tyrant
By virtually all accounts, both those of his contemporaries as well as his many subsequent biographers, Freud commanded a peerless presence within the fledgling psychoanalytic enterprise. Revered as a visionary, feared as an authority, and often resented for his insistence on intellectual orthodoxy, meetings of the “Wednesday Psychological Society” invariably saw its founder assume, both in the figurative and literal sense, his position at the head of the table, setting the agenda, presiding over discussions, and serving as the final arbiter in debates.
Dissent was met with undisguised hostility. Otto Rank, initially one of Freud’s closest confidants, would go on to describe the group as “hierarchical,” noting how members were expected not just to accept their leader’s theories but to internalize the tenets of his worldview. Ernest Jones, typically regarded as an unwavering sycophant (and consequently one of the few non-Jews admitted into Freud’s inner circle), acknowledged that his mentor could be prone to “coldness and rejection,” recounting the case of Wilhelm Stekel, once the committee’s de facto second-in-command, who would find himself summarily dismissed for the rather cryptic infraction that his “psychological smell was not right.”
Excommunication in this vein remained an ever-present threat. Arguably the most high-profile was that of Alfred Adler, an Austrian psychologist and pioneering contributor in his own right, who broke from Freudian dogma to advocate a more socially grounded conception of psychoanalysis. For this heresy, he — like the similarly apostate voices of Wilhelm Reich, Rudolf von Urban, and Fritz Wittels — would be either marginalized from the society or expelled altogether, yet the most telling and undoubtedly most tragic story belonged to Viktor Tausk, whose suicide at the age of just forty was precipitated, at least in part, by the withdrawal of Freud’s patriarchal support. "I confess that I do not really miss him,” the analyst would write a few weeks after learning of his colleague’s death. “I had long realized that he could be of no further service; indeed that he constituted a threat to the future."
Scholars have long disputed the drivers behind this ruthlessness. Some, such as Frederick Crews, generally considered Freud’s most virulent modern-day critic, have asserted it to be a function of the neurologist’s own psychological makeup, deriding his subject as a “saturnine self-dramatizer [for whom] advancing the fortunes of his movement was… an imperative that overrode all others.” More charitable interpretations have placed emphasis on cultural factors, specifically the tide of antisemitism rising throughout fin-de-siècle Vienna, with Élisabeth Roudinesco noting, “[Freud] cultivated the idea that by being excluded, as a Jew, from the ‘compact majority,’ he would be capable of preserving an independence of judgment that would enable him to defend himself more effectively against prejudices.”
The most conventional explanation for this well-documented absolutism, however, is that it was borne of Freud’s reflexive protectiveness toward the movement he had started — a movement still struggling to establish credibility among the empirically-driven academics of the Habsburg Empire. Among those to adopt this reading was Paul Roazen, a political scientist turned historian of psychoanalysis, who portrayed the father of the field as “a battling innovator [whose] warrior side… has to be appreciated if we are to make any sense at all of his career in the round.” Given Freud’s lifelong affinity for Hannibal — a Semitic general who famously crossed the Alps to wage war with Rome — this is an assessment he likely would have shared. Behind the closed doors of their meetings, the chair of the Wednesday Psychological Society was far from reticent in expressing his desire to morally and intellectually overthrow Europe, while few could deny, in his willingness to malign (and often pathologize) opposing viewpoints, a decidedly militaristic approach to leadership. These expulsions, after all, reflected more than just personal ruptures. As both custodian and self-appointed epicenter of the discipline, Freud’s diktats bound not just the opinions of his coterie, but also those of publishing houses, training institutes, clinics, and editorial boards, ensuring that psychoanalysis, right from its inception, embodied less a legitimate area of study and more a vehicle for his own personal ambitions.