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.
Freud’s Jewish Proteges
Despite these authoritarian tendencies, few could dispute that Freud evoked, both as a man and a luminary, plenty of genuine, heartfelt devotion. Following a spate of notable defections and fearing the movement might dissolve into factionalism, he set about convening die Geheime Kommission, a secret (and secretive) cadre of his most faithful adherents. The function of this council was to discourage insubordination within the wider alliance as well as to deal with more problematic elements, in effect, forming a bulwark between the group’s informal yet uncontested president and its internal political strife. “The Master” (as he was semi-affectionately known) even went so far as to present these loyalists with matching intaglio rings – gifts which carried enormous symbolic weight, denoting, as they did, the recipient’s commitment to Freudian doctrine.
This doctrine, as outlined in Part One, was suffused with — and built expressly upon — a myriad of intrinsically Jewish suppositions. Needless to say, these are far too extensive to reiterate in their entirety, yet in the briefest serviceable terms, the fundamental veracity of psychoanalysis rests on Freud’s claim that humanity exists as an unwitting conduit for a vast interplay of unconscious forces, the awareness of which would bring about catharsis for the individual as well as harmony for civilization as a whole — a hypothesis mirroring the Kabbalistic notions of the Sefirot and tikkun olam. Even his foundational model of the psyche (the Id, Ego, and Superego) bears a startling resemblance to the Zohar’s tripartite depiction of the soul, while taken together with his belief that Jews possessed unrivalled spiritual, cultural, and intellectual facilities, it would seem all but unfathomable that Freud failed to recognize these analogies.
What pushes this beyond the limits of plausibility, however, is that his unanimously Jewish entourage remained just as oblivious. With his focus on guilt, ritual, and moral introspection, Theodor Reik, one of Freud’s earliest acolytes and certainly his most Judeocentric, often framed exploration of the mind in terms starkly reminiscent of rabbinic tradition — his National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis, still one of the most prestigious training centers, continuing his mission of placing the study of selfhood within a Kabbalistic framework. Of a more political bent was Max Eitingon. The Russian-born son of a wealthy fur trader known as the “Leipzig Rothschild,” he played a crucial role in propagating Freudian maxims throughout Europe by way of his Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, the lifelong Zionist financially supporting his teacher for many years prior to his immigration to Palestine. From a strictly cultural standpoint, individuals such as Hanns Sachs and Erich Fromm maintained that the field offered a secularized language through which Jewish values could be rearticulated in a period growing evermore hostile toward them while the work of Melanie Klein, best known for her development of Object Relations Theory, is imbued with themes of internalized judgment, moral accountability, and symbolic thought — motifs explicitly aligned with Talmudic concerns over ethical development and the struggle for inner reconciliation.
These were far from Freud’s only followers to harbor such sympathies. Once more, it would require far more space than can here be justified to properly examine how the Jewishness of Isidor Sadger, Eduard Hitschmann, and Siegfried Bernfeld; Herbert Silberer, Felix Deutsch, and Paul Federn helped shape their lives and their intellectual outputs. Nevertheless, its prevalence alone must surely suggest that this Jewishness — whether of the cultural, political, or spiritual variety — was integral to one’s capacity to grasp psychoanalysis. Freud himself would frequently espouse such sentiments, and yet, in spite of his prejudices—in spite, even, of the ethnically homogenous atmosphere he fostered — it was to prove one of the few gentiles within his discipleship who would be chosen to replace him as figurehead: Carl Jung.
Passing the Torch
This was hardly a coincidence. Freud had long been keen to shed psychoanalysis’s notoriety as a parochially Jewish science and so, in an effort to nullify these accusations, had deliberately sought out a successor who might engender trust throughout the German-speaking world. Jung seemed to fit the bill perfectly. A Swiss Protestant from a distinguished line of scholars and clergymen, “the young Teuton” was not just a brilliant thinker and engaging personality but a clinician who had already garnered considerable acclaim within mainstream psychiatry.
That is not to say Freud was without reservations. From the outset of their relationship, he had expressed concerns about “Jung’s inherited Christian and even anti-Jewish biases, indeed his very ability as a non-Jew to fully understand and accept psychoanalysis itself.” In his private correspondences, the avowed atheist would go so far as to dub his apprentice “the man of God” — a derisory allusion to Jung’s outspoken interest in alchemy, astrology, and assorted strains of esotericism. On several occasions, he would even confess doubts over his “crown prince’s” loyalty, once a banishable offense. But facing mounting charges of despotism and with his own health faltering, Freud would set these misgivings aside to appoint Jung president of the International Psychoanalytical Association, and by extension, heir to his intellectual legacy.
Ostensibly, this appeared a radical new direction for the movement. Ever since first formalizing his ideas, Freud had gone to great lengths to paint psychoanalysis as scientifically grounded and unflinchingly rational, an image he risked by naming a replacement known among fellow practitioners as “The Mystic.” Yet, for all Freud’s outward disdain for Jung’s psycho-spiritualism, the Kabbalistic concepts concealed within his own work were not just shared by his gentile understudy but indeed, would prove significantly amplified.
In perhaps his most celebrated thesis, Jung presented what he called “Archetypes” — manifestations of the transpersonal reality imprinted onto the human psyche. These truisms, he contended, were continuously striving to break into awareness via myth, art, and dreams, the proper interpretation of which would guide one toward “Individuation” — the psychodynamic version of enlightenment. Not that he had achieved this revelation alone. Jung’s Archetypes, as with many of his theories, were but an extension of insights Freud had already laid down — psychic determinism and wish fulfillment, repression and dream analysis — insights which he in turn had derived from the Kabbalah.
But while his predecessor had sought to obfuscate the origins of his thinking, Jung would acknowledge these quite openly. Writing to an admirer, he commented that in order to understand Freud’s work, which is to say, the very rudiments of psychoanalysis, “one would have to take a deep plunge into the history of the Jewish mind… This would carry us beyond Jewish orthodoxy into the subterranean workings of Hasidism… and then into the intricacies of the Kabbalah.” In formulating his notion of Synchronicity, the meaningful coincidences beyond cause and effect, Jung would do just that, his claim of a hidden order to the universe all but indistinguishable from the Zohar’s illustration of Sod. More obviously Kabbalah-inspired still is his exploration of the Anima and Animus — the feminine (Shekhinah) and masculine (HaKadosh Baruch Hu) aspects of the individual which need be integrated in pursuit of psychological and spiritual wholeness.
The Legacy of Jewish Mysticism in Modern Psychoanalysis
It might even be said that while Jung’s stewardship of the Psychoanalytic Association superficially distracted from the organization’s Jewishness, on a purely theoretical level, it instead brought this much further to the fore. After Freud’s efforts to obscure the metaphysical underpinnings of his work, Jung’s tenure would see the field reinfused with cosmic significance and sense of the mind’s place within the Eternal, alongside methods clearly rooted in Rabbinic tradition.
In this regard, there can be little doubt that his philosophy has supplanted Freud’s. Although the Father of Psychoanalysis remains synonymous with institutionalized introspection, his legacy is nonetheless marked by a striking duality: at once lauded as a genius and secular prophet, and simultaneously dismissed as both a flawed man and thinker whose formerly canonical decrees have wilted under academic scrutiny. Jung’s stature, on the other hand, only continues to grow. His development of Analytical Psychology, a far more holistic doctrine, recontextualized inner life as a landscape to be cultivated and tended to rather than simply excavated, while so too did he contribute the still practical tools of word association and psychological types, the basis for the widely used Myers-Briggs test. From a broader societal perspective, Jung’s ideas have also permeated far more profoundly than Freud’s ever managed, filtering into popular discourse through music, marketing, media, art, and cinema, as well as the rapidly burgeoning New Age movement.
It is unsurprising then, for all its 120 years of maturation, the psychological establishment has yet to cast off its reputation as an innately Jewish science. The reasons for this seem self-evident. While official figures are difficult to come by — indeed, conspicuously difficult to come by — it is clear that Jews, though far from the monolith they once were, still comprise an enormously outsized segment of the profession.
In a list of the ninety-nine leading psychologists of the twentieth century, over forty percent were Jewish.
A similar study found that almost half of all citations in academic literature were made by Jews, a number even higher for introductory textbooks, the psychological division of the US National Academy of Sciences currently boasting an almost one-to-one Jew to gentile ratio.
Most prominent clinical theories were codified by Jews.
Within elite U.S. universities, approximately one third of psychology departments are Jewish, as are many of social media’s best-known mental health influencers, Jonathan Haidt, Steven Pinker, and Gabor Maté to name but a few. Some might even contest that far from escaping the early stigma, the discipine has actually embraced its status as a Jewish science, Freud’s daughter Anna, addressing the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, declaring it nothing less than a “title of honor.”
How this translates to our collective mental wellbeing is all but impossible to say. Though psychoanalysis and its subsequent offshoots might tout themselves as beacons leading us out of the chaos of the subconscious, looking around at the state of Western society, it would appear we are deeper in its clutches than ever. Anxiety has risen to epidemic proportions. Depression is now equally widespread. Grief, anger, loneliness, and despair — once viewed as the normal fluctuations of emotional life — have today been reduced to a series of diagnosable disorders, while the all-consuming obsession with the self, manifested in carefully curated online personas and increasingly niche micro-identities, has led only to fragmentation, atomization, and the dissolution of the bonds we once shared.
Whether Freud and his cohorts ever envisaged this civilizational unraveling is all a matter of conjecture. Whether this was their unspoken goal remains even more speculative. What appears irrefutable, however, is that beneath their veneer of rationality and clinical detachment, what this secular priesthood was in fact upholding, in unleashing their Jewish science upon the world, was a philosophical tradition and metaphysical inheritance whose origin lies not in early 20th Century Vienna, but rather in the ancient mysticism of the Kabbalah.