Answering a Question with a Question: Contemporary Psychoanalysis and Jewish Thought (Vol. II). A Tradition of Inquiry 9781618114488

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Answering a Question with a Question Contemporary Psychoanalysis and Jewish Thought Volume II A Tradition of Inquiry

SERIES EDITOR: Lewis Aron, PhD, New York University, New York EDITORIAL BOARD: Susannah Heschel, PhD, Dartmouth College, Hanover Arnold Richards, MD, New York University, New York Jill Salberg, PhD, New York University, New York Moshe Halevi Spero, PhD, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan Karen Staff, PsyD, Long Island University at C.W. Post, Brookville, New York

Answering a Question with a Question Contemporary Psychoanalysis and Jewish Thought Volume II A Tradition of Inquiry

Editors

Lewis Aron, Libby Henik

Boston 2015

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Copyright © 2015 Academic Studies Press All rights reserved ISBN 978-1-61811-447-1 (hardback) ISBN 978-1-61811-448-8 (electronic) Cover design by Ivan Grave

Published by Academic Studies Press in 2015 28 Montfern Avenue Brighton, MA 02135, USA [email protected] www. academicstudiespress.com

In loving memory of my maternal grandfather, Zisse Meyerowitz (z"l) 1891-1972 L. A. This book is dedicated to my grandchildren, Sylvia Marie, Ariel Yaakov and Ruby Ann. ‫שיגדלו לתורה לחופה ולמעשים טובים‬ May they grow into a life of Torah, hupah (marriage) and good deeds. L. H.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Lewis Aron and Libby Henik Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 1. DESIRE, LOVE AND TRANSFORMATION OF THE SELF Cheryl Goldstein Rashi and Desire: Reading Rashi’s Reading of Genesis 39. . . . . . . . 27 Ruth Kara-Ivanov Kaniel “The Impressive Caesura” and “New Beginning” in Psychoanalysis and Jewish Mystical Experience—Birth, Creation and Transformation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 William Kolbrener On Abandoning Aristotle: Love in Psychoanalysis and Jewish Philosophy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 Avivah Zornberg Bewilderments: The Story of the Spies.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99 2. TRAUMA AND BREAKDOWN Ofra Eshel The “Hearing Heart” and the “Voice” of Breakdown . . . . . . . . . . 133 Richard Kradin “Have You Seen My Servant Job?” A Psychological Approach to Suffering. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153

Menorah Lafayette Rotenberg On the Use of Selected Lead Words in Tracing the Trajectory of the Transmission of Transgenerational Trauma in the Genesis Ancestral Saga. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176 3. MOURNING, RITUALS AND MEMORY Moshe Halevi Spero The “Coat of Many Colors” as Linking Object: A Nodal Moment in the Narrative of Jacob’s Bereavement for Joseph. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201 Cheryl Friedman Shadows of the Unseen Grief . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 250 Joyce Slochower Across a Lifetime: On the Dynamics of Commemorative Ritual . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 273 4. HOLOCAUST, INTERGENERATIONAL TRANSMISSION AND MEMORY Dori Laub The Testimonial Process as a Reversal of the Traumatic Shutdown of Narrative and Symbolization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 301 Annette Furst Holocaust Memories and their Transmission. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 322 Nirit Gradwohl Pisano In Bed with a Collaborator: Reenactments of Historical Trauma by a Granddaughter of Holocaust Survivors. . . . . . . . . . . 345 Contributors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 367 Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 373

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My thanks to the authors and contributors to this book, many of whom have influenced my thinking about contemporary psychoanalysis and Jewish thought. As always I want to thank my colleagues at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy & Psychoanalysis. The “Postdoc” community is the most supportive, productive, challenging, and invigorating psychoanalytic community in the world and I continue to treasure my colleagues and friends and am privileged to serve as the director of this unique program. This is the second book that I have edited with Libby Henik and I continue to be impressed by her fortitude, intelligence, and good judgement. She has come through for me even, and especially, under the most trying of circumstances. Special thanks and much love to Galit Atlas, PhD for her generous and caring love, encouragement and friendship. I am lucky to be surrounded by loving family and friends. My love to Yali, Emma, and Mia Atlas-Koch, and to my children, Benjamin, Raphi, and Kirya Ades-Aron. L.A.

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Acknowledgments

My thanks to the authors who have contributed to Volume II, whose enthusiasm for the importance of this project and their encouragement added immeasureably to the enjoyment of editing this work. My deepest gratitude to Lew Aron for his continued interest in this series. Lew’s friendship, support and insights transform every encounter with him into a very special learning experience. I look forward to working with Lew on the many future volumes of this series.  A special thanks to our editor, Deva Jasheway. Deva is a pleasure to work with. She has been diligent in editing and formatting our manuscripts and was of enormous help to Lew and myself and to our contributors. I also wish to thank Academic Studies Press for their continued interest in this project. All projects make demands on time. My appreciation to my husband, Willy and my daughters Erika and Audrey and my son-in-law Amihai, for their support and encouragement as this project took shape. My grandchildren, Sylvia, Ariel and Ruby, too young yet to understand, fill me with joy and are our future L. H.

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EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION: TRADITIONS OF INQUIRY Lewis Aron, Libby Henik

What was the first question? Was it “Why?” or “What?” Maybe “Who?” or “How?” Perhaps “When?” Whatever the first question may have been, it was the first attempt of a mind conscious of a “self” in an encounter with an “other” to understand the relationship between the two. The first question that appears in the Torah is “Where?” The question is asked by God of man after he has eaten of the forbidden fruit and becomes self-conscious. God asks (Genesis 3:9), “Ayeka [Where are you]?” All commentators agree that this is not a question of location but one of relationship. In one word the question penetrates the core of relationship: where are you in relation to yourself and to me? With the question “Ayecha?” the Torah is teaching how to open ourselves to self-inquiry and dialogue. It is the same question that patient and analyst bring to each other as we do to all our relationships: Where are you? Where are you just now? Where have your thoughts drifted? Where are you feeling this sadness? Where are you in your dream? Where are you in relation to me? David Wolpe (2011) has highlighted the value of questioning in Jewish tradition. Toward the beginning of the morning prayer service there is a series of powerful questions: “What are we? What is our life? What is our righteousness?” Most well-known in Jewish liturgy are the famous four questions of the Passover Haggadah, to be recited by the youngest child, designed to stimulate curiosity and encourage questions. The Mishnah begins with a question: “From when may one recite the

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Editors’ Introduction: Traditions of Inquiry

Shema in the evening?” Lewis Aron recalls that his mother would send him to elementary school each and every morning, charging him to “Ask good questions,” as she had been taught by the Rabbis that asking good questions was more important than having smart answers. Wolpe (2011) adds that the Rabbis tell us we all end with questions—in the afterlife we will be judged by having questions asked of our lives. The story is told of Rabbi Zusya, who before his death said: “In the coming world they will not ask me ’Why were you not Moses?’ They will ask me, ’Why were you not Zusya?’” Questions have been at the core of Jewish thought and method of understanding. They define the way Torah and Talmud are studied. Adin Steinsaltz emphasizes “the centrality of the query in the talmudic debate ... questions constitute the background to every statement and interpretation…. Inquiry, argument and debate with the text and with others is an act of creation of meaning” (1992, p. 8-9). The twentieth-century biblical scholar and beloved teacher Nehama Leibowitz, when teaching Rashi’s commentary (the most widely read Jewish commentator of the Hebrew Bible), always began with the question “Mah Kasheh l’Rashi?” (“What is Rashi’s difficulty [with this passage]?”) Rashi’s answer, as enlightening as it was, could not be understood without understanding his question, and it was the raising of the question, rather than any answer, that was the critical insight. The question invites inquiry, discussion, debate, multiple meanings and interpretation that continues across the generations. If questions and inquiry are the mainstay of Jewish scholarship, then it should not be surprising that they would be central to the psychoanalytic method developed by Sigmund Freud. Freud, who lived surrounded by Jews and Jewish culture, was an intensely curious child personally educated by his father, a talmudic scholar (see Aron and Starr, 2013). Freud remained a curious adult, a scientific investigator, who recognized the need to ask the right questions in both laboratory research and clinical practice. In his 1908 discussion of the Rat Man case he wrote the following about his technique: The wildest and most eccentric obsessional ideas can be cleared up if they are investigated deeply enough. The solution is effected by bringing the obsessional ideas into temporal relationship with the patient’s

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Editors’ Introduction: Traditions of Inquiry experiences, that is to say, by enquiring when a particular obsessional idea made its first appearance and in what external circumstances it is apt to recur. (p. 186; italics added)

In an important article called “The Questions and Curiosity of the Psychoanalyst,” Boesky (1989) points out that Freud clearly believed that it was not only appropriate, but necessary and important to ask his patient about when something happened and to ask also about the context in which it happened. Unlike the more narrow version of so-called “classical technique” that followed him, Freud did not feel that he adversely disturbed his patient’s flow of free associations with his questions. Quite the opposite, his questions were in his own view essential preparatory interventions which allowed him to formulate useful hypotheses from which he formulated his interpretations. Boesky concluded: Questions are one of the important vehicles of expression of the therapeutic interest of the analyst. Questions are the emblem of his mode of inquiry; they further the development of self-observation which is such an important concomitant, cause, and consequence of structural change. The capacity to be more curious about oneself is not reducible to asking or answering questions, but questions are inseparable from the selfinquiry which must become a part of every analysis for both patient and analyst…. Well-chosen questions may evoke crucially important information leading to enrichment of the insight of the analyst as well as the patient. If answers are the point where the mind pauses and rests, questions can be the occasion for reminding ourselves and our patients of how much we do not know. In this sense, the question rather than the answer is closer to reality. (pp. 601-2)

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Whereas Boesky was contributing to the mainstream classical vision of psychoanalytic technique, questions play an even more obvious role in revisionist psychoanalytic formulations. Many contemporary psychoanalysts have been influenced by Harry Stack Sullivan’s interpersonal method of pursuing a “detailed inquiry” (Sullivan, 1954). For the interpersonalist, much that is considered unconscious is conceptualized as “unformulated experience” (Stern, 1989). Analysts draw patients’ attention to various events in their lives to which they have only selectively attended (out of anxiety) and that have therefore remained unformulated. For Sullivan, dissociation and selective inattention are among the most

Editors’ Introduction: Traditions of Inquiry

common security operations. Because these solutions to the problem of anxiety were problematic and disruptive, Sullivan’s therapeutic inquiry was designed to study them through participant-observation between therapist and patient. The analyst attempts to help patients focus on these events through inquiry into the details of their lives. The analyst’s questions press the patient for further data. According to the contemporary interpersonal analyst Ed Levenson, countertransference, the analyst’s blind spot, may be constituted by those questions that the analyst does not think to ask. According to Levenson, it is the psychoanalytic method, especially the inquiry, the deconstruction of the patient’s text, which is the driving force behind the analytic work. It is the press for ever more data that causes anxiety and promotes the transference. Levenson argues that analysts using the classical Freudian free association method and those using the detailed inquiry, despite their use of different metapsychologies, both “elicit sufficient data, under sufficient pressure” to facilitate a psychoanalytic process (1988, p. 15). For Levenson, forcing the data leads to a deconstruction of the patient’s narrative, which creates “a chaotic flux of meanings, from which new meanings may emerge, forged in a transferential crucible of considerable tension” (p. 12). (For a more detailed methodological discussion, see Aron, 1993.) In describing her clinical supervision with Sullivan, Pearce highlights Sullivan’s use of the detailed inquiry. Most of the content of his therapy was in fact directed toward inquiry into the actual procedure of who said what to whom in some particular situation which was under observation for its anxiety provoking characteristics and into what else might have been going on other than what the patient assumed (1950, p. 2). Sullivan was teaching therapists to ask good questions. When Sullivan describes the psychiatrist as an expert, what he means is that they are experts at asking good questions. In an article titled “What Makes a Good Question?,” Stern suggests that a good question is one that leads to further questioning. “The perfect question, and the question the analyst tries to find, is the patient’s question. It is a question that exists within the region of the patient’s interest and just on the edge of tolerance. The perfect question is a question that the patient has not thought of, but that

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he can fully use, a question the patient himself would ask if he were to press right up against his own limits” (1992, p. 335). In other words, the analyst asks a question in the hope that it will lead the patient to answer with a question of his or her own! To paraphrase James Baldwin’s remark about art, the purpose of [inquiry] is to “lay bare questions that have been hidden by answers.” Consider the following vignette provided by Zucker as an illustration of the detailed inquiry. A patient reports that she went to her friend’s home. “It was quite an evening. We had dinner. And talked quite a bit. After a while I realized I wasn’t really involved. Of course, I joined the conversation a number of times. But I knew I was really detached, thinking about other things” (1967, p. 42). Zucker considers, and would encourage the therapist to ask the patient, any and all of the following questions: Are you this way in other situations? When did you first notice this sort of thing? What other things were you thinking about? What was being talked about? Who does the “we” refer to? Who was actually there? What did you actually say? Zucker suggests that the patient’s summaries and impressions do not provide the necessary detail for the therapist to develop his or her own sense of the situation. Furthermore, the person’s summary might not accurately reflect what actually happened. While this method is strikingly different and both theoretically and practically incompatible with the traditional free association method, in at least one respect they may both further a similar process in the patient. In the above illustration, the therapist’s questions are aimed at “gaps” in the patient’s narrative. There are bits of information that have been omitted, and the inquiry is aimed at these gaps in the patient’s account. These questions force the patient to observe their thoughts and attend to the gaps in their communications. Tenzer writes, “An important part of working through is the stimulation of curiosity with respect to contradictions so that cognitive gaps come into relief” (1984, p. 425). The above patient, as suggested by Zucker, might mention that the evening’s talk was about politics, a topic that she felt she knew little about. This might lead to her recognition that her thoughts became “detached” and focused on other things because of her insecurities and fears of exposure and humiliation. Leaving

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aside the dynamic meanings of the content and even references to the transference, the patient learns a method to figure out what is going on in her mind, in her communications with her therapist, and in her behavior with others. But how does one look for that which is missing? Stern answers that “the analyst pursues an awareness of absence by focusing the most detailed attention on what is present” (1990, p. 460). The patient is led to notice gaps by looking at the details of what she has reported. Her report of detachment follows immediately after the thoughts of trying to enter the conversation. Whether the classical Freudian method or the interpersonal method of detailed inquiry, either psychoanalytic approach is based on pressing the data, searching for gaps, inconsistencies, contradictions, pursuing a “deconstruction” of the text, the patient’s narrative. We ask questions, expressing curiosity in the hope that the patient will become increasingly curious and introspective. That is, we ask questions that we hope will be answered with further questions. Inquiry leads to further inquiry. Psychoanalysis as a field of scholarship and psychoanalysis as a clinical method represent “traditions of inquiry.” In his powerful and thought-provoking study of the philosophy of the Hebrew Bible, Yoram Hazony describes the Tanach (the Hebrew Bible) as a work capturing and reflecting a specific “tradition of inquiry” (2012, p. 65). This expression, “tradition of inquiry,” seems to us a suitable description for a great deal of the commonality between contemporary psychoanalysis and Jewish thought, both of which keep an open-ended inquiry central to their endeavors. Hazony highlights the story of Jacob’s wrestling with the angel, narrated in Genesis 32:25-30. And Jacob was left alone, and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of dawn…. And he said to him, “What is your name?” And he said, “Jacob.” And he said: No longer will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with men and have prevailed.” And Jacob asked him, saying, “Tell me, please, your name.” And he said, “Why is it that you ask my name?” And he blessed him there. (Quoted by Hazony, 2012, 143)

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In these verses we see Jacob becoming transformed into Israel, a key event in the naming of the people of Israel. Hazony points out that Jacob asks a question but receives no answer. Instead, just like a psychoanalyst, his assailant answers him by asking another question, one that befits a competent psychoanalyst, “Why is it that you ask my name?” Hazony describes Jacob as “gently rebuffed” by this “deflection” (p. 244), but it is at least as important to recognize this not only as a deflection but as a redirection of the inquiry into Jacob’s motives and internal world, provoking a tradition of inquiry. God, the angel, the man, the Divine being, answers a question with a question. This is how Jacob becomes Israel. Hazony’s broader and deeper point is that the entire Hebrew Bible, and by extension Torah and Jewish tradition, is made up of questions rather than answers. The purpose of the Hebrew Bible is not and never was to present a single Truth or a singular viewpoint. The Tanach (Hebrew Bible) is a compendium of numerous viewpoints. Truth is approached through a plurality of perspectives. Just as a comprehensive understanding of God is beyond the comprehension of Jacob, so too is God beyond any singular perspective, as ultimate knowledge of God’s thoughts is beyond the powers of human beings. In the Hebrew Bible, encounters with God are repeatedly depicted as elusive and fraught with ambiguity. As Hazony argues, Christianity offered a singular Truth, a catechism of belief, faith in a singular truth, but the Hebrew Bible speaks in “a fragmentary and varied fashion” because man’s mind is limited and his understanding only partial (p. 65). Even Moses does not see God’s face but only his back. …the purpose of the biblical editors, in gathering together such diverse and often sharply conflicting texts, was not to construct a unitary work with an unequivocal message. It was rather to assemble a work capable of capturing and reflecting a given tradition of inquiry so readers could strive to understand the various perspectives embraced by this tradition, and in so doing build up an understanding of their own…. What is created is a space in which a certain discourse arises, and a search for truth that is, in effect, unending. (ibid.)

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The reader of the Hebrew Bible is not commanded to accept a singular truth or belief “on faith,” but is rather “invited and challenged to take

Editors’ Introduction: Traditions of Inquiry

up a place within this tradition of inquiry” (ibid.). In seeking the Truth, in asking questions, we are answered with the invitation to ask more questions. Catechisms are doctrinal manuals often taking the form of questions followed by answers to be memorized. In contrast, the Hebrew Bible, the Talmud, and Jewish tradition, as well as psychoanalysis—both as a field of scholarship and a clinical method—are defined by the creation of space that facilitates questioning and curiosity, examination of multiple perspectives, a tradition of inquiry. “In Judaism truth is not impersonal; truth is interpersonal. It is the truth that exists when two beings separated in space or time relate to one another” (Sacks, 2000). In psychoanalysis, just as in the Jewish tradition, the route to Truth is through a tradition of inquiry. Space is created for curiosity and questioning. Ambiguity is preserved and protected with room for multiple, shifting and conflicting perspectives, self-states, experiences, and perceptions. Singular answers and catechisms are mistrusted and deconstructed. As Amos Oz, the renowed Israeli author, remarked: “Fundamentalists live life with an exclamation point. I prefer to live my life with a question mark” (Sasso, 2007, p. 17). In the first volume, Answering a Question With a Question: Contemporary Psychoanalysis and Jewish Thought, we gathered together an anthology of recent writings that examined the multiple connections between Judaism and contemporary psychoanalysis. Included were chapters that questioned Freud’s Jewishness, the role of psychoanalysis in modern Jewish self-understanding, psychoanalytic understanding of Jewish ritual, Jewish hermeneutics, psychoanalytic understandings of anti-Semitism, and much more. The first volume generated sufficient interest and enthusiasm that the Editors were encouraged to continue with this second volume, which we believe is as engaging and intellectually stimulating as the first. It is with great pleasure that we bring together, once again, a thought-provoking and scholarly collection of articles that demonstrate the intersection of these two traditions of inquiry: contemporary psychoanalysis and Jewish thought. We have grouped the collection into four categories.

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1. Desire, Love, and Transformation of the Self Cheryl Goldstein’s chapter, “Rashi and Desire: Reading Rashi’s Reading of Genesis 39,” examines the exegetical methods employed by the medieval biblical and Talmudic commentator Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki (Rashi) to explore the theme of desire in Genesis 39: the biblical narrative of Joseph’s seduction by Potiphar’s wife. In his explication of Genesis 37–38, Rashi provides an explanation of two narratives that are linked by concerns with female seduction, sexual desire, and the Law. A psychoanalytic reading of Rashi’s commentary considers how Rashi’s exegetical project writes desire into the Law and the Law into desire. Ruth Kara-Ivanov Kaniel’s “’The Impressive Caesura’ and ’New Beginnings’ in Psychoanalysis and Jewish Mystical Experience—Birth, Creation and Transformation” examines the psychoanalytic understanding of the creative process and transformation of the self through the application of themes from Jewish mysticism. She draws attention to several parallel notions that appear in psychoanalytic theory and in Jewish mystical texts, such as the ancient myth of creation and the “new beginning” of analytic work. In Jewish mystical literature, God is called Ein-Sof, which can be translated as “formless-essence.” When the mystics enter into divinity, they take part in a “formless” experience. Similarly the analytic work attempts to capture an amorphic self, still in the process of becoming. The Freudian notion of a “Caesura” and its later theoretical elaborations suggest that formless, chaotic memories can be transformed into new forms through the bridge of language. William Kolbrener’s “On Abandoning Aristotle: Love in Psychoanalysis and Jewish Philosophy” explores the centrality of love and desire in the context of personal development, individuation, and self-transformation. This chapter places the works of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik and the psychoanalyst and philosopher Jonathan Lear in dialogue with one another. Kolbrener demonstrates their common, ambivalent adaptation of Aristotle’s conception of knowledge and then their rejection of Aristotelian conceptions of knowledge, as each of these authors elaborate on their ideas about the individuation of the self, presupposed upon the notion of love. Elaborating the epistemological underpinnings

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of Soloveitchik’s teshuva (repentance) and Lear’s idiosyncratic conception of sublimation shows unexpected affiliations between rabbinic thought and contemporary psychoanalysis. The final chapter in this grouping is Avivah Zornberg’s “Bewilderments: The Story of the Spies.” This chapter deals with the turning point of the Israelites’ wilderness journey, the narrative of the Spies. When the people declare their intention to return to Egypt, is it fear that drives them? Or is it deeper issues of love and hate, trust and skepticism? In this paper, Zornberg explores the language of fantasy in this central narrative through the prism of midrashic literature. Psychoanalytic perspectives on themes of love and hate, goodness and evil, as they relate to the development of the self and of the Israelites as a people yield a radical reading of this formative period in Israelite history.

2. Trauma and Breakdown In Ofra Eshel’s “The ‛Hearing Heart’ and the ‛Voice’ of Breakdown,” the author movingly and powerfully shows how the marvel of the “hearing heart” that King Solomon requested from God (I Kings 3:9) followed her into the psychoanalytic treatment situation. For Eshel, the “hearing heart”—the willingness to dare to open one’s heart and soul to another human being—is at the core of the analyst/therapist’s difficult struggle to give himself/herself over to being within the troubled emotional experience of the patient’s world, particularly when sensing, hearing and feeling the “voice” of the patient’s trauma or breakdown that cries out. Richard Kradin’s “Have You Seen My Servant Job? A Psychological Approach to Suffering” is a psychological analysis of the biblical story of suffering of Job. The biblical book of Job is often viewed as a critique of theodicy. The present paper adopts Job as an example of how to address the compulsive scrupulosity of the obsessional patient in psychoanalysis. Perspectives on Job, from psychoanalytical, as well as classical and modern Jewish commentators, are examined as approaches towards diminishing the harshness of the obsessional patient’s superego within the therapeutic dyad. The role of fostering faith in the salutary aspects

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of the unconscious process is discussed as an effective approach in treatment of the addictive cognitions and ritualistic behaviors in these patients. In bringing biblical exegesis and psychoanalytic trauma theory to the Genesis narrative, Menorah Rotenberg’s “On the Use of Selected LeadWords in Tracing the Trajectory of the Transmission of Transgenerational Trauma in the Ancestral Genesis Saga” sheds new understanding of the central personalities and of the events in Genesis. A close reading of the Genesis Ancestral Saga strongly suggests that it is an account of transgenerational transmission of trauma. The author proposes that the mistrustful and violent nature of the text is accounted for in part by its presentation of God as a destabilizing force for the new Israelite nation. Following selected lead words, the author insists that the transmission of the trauma was not inevitable. It rather rested on the portentous choices our ancestors made. She hopes this analysis will spur us to ask further questions and to create a more benign mythos.

3. Mourning, Rituals and Memory Moshe Halevi Spero’s “The ’Coat of Many Colors’ as Linking Object: A Nodal Moment in the Narrative of Jacob’s Bereavement for Joseph” provides a very interesting examination of the psychic dimensions of Jacob’s bereavement, both for his beloved wife Rachel, and for his son, Joseph, as represented by the ’Coat of Many Colors’ in the biblical narrative. Biblical text and subsequent midrash elaborations surrounding the story of Joseph’s special coat provoke the question “What was the fate of the coat following Joseph’s staged demise?” This is a psychoanalytic question designed to expose a hitherto unimagined possibility: complicated bereavement compelled the envy-arousing coat to persist in Jacob’s mind, and its deteriorative double reappears in an unexpected place, conforming to Volkan’s concept of pathological linking objects. There are striking similarities between how Judaism and the psychoanalytic process deal with grief, loss, and death. Cheryl Friedman’s “Shadows of the Unseen Grief” is a very raw and personal exploration of those similarities. The case material is based on the author’s experience through the death of her younger sister. Friedman uses psychoanalytic

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ideas to help her understand her own bereavement process in response to the death of her sister, and the role of Jewish mourning ritual in helping her through that process. This chapter illustrates in the here and now and in very personal terms what Moshe Halevi Spero is addressing in his analysis of the biblical text. In a way, Friedman is using psychoanalytic theory as a “linking object” in her own mourning process. Joyce Slochower’s “Across a Lifetime: On the Dynamics of Commemorative Ritual” combines a personal account of the author’s mourning for and memories of her parents and grandmother, with a sophisticated psychoanalytic understanding and explication of the therapeutic value of Jewish commemorative ritual. Commemorative rituals serve important psychological functions for us both as individuals and communities. Slochower explores the role of the Yizkor ritual in helping us mourn, remember, and sustain connection. Commemorative rituals allow us to mark absence and create “presence” as we access and sometimes reshape personal memory, while simultaneously creating a linkage to other “like mourners.”

4. Holocaust, Intergenerational Transmission and Memory Dori Laub’s “The Testimonial Process as a Reversal of the Traumatic Shutdown of Narrative and Symbolization” illustrates the failures in narrative formation, symbolization, and psychoanalytic listening and comprehension that occur in the wake of an event of massive psychic trauma, such as the Holocaust. Laub describes the act of remembrance as an attempt to resist erasure from memory and history and discusses clinical implications for working with severely traumatized patients. This paper illustrates the failures in narrative formation and symbolization that occur in the wake of events of massive psychic trauma. The author attempts to explain this phenomenon through the cessation of the inner dialogue with the internalized good object, the “inner Thou,” that is annihilated in massive trauma. The act of remembrance and of keeping record, the Jewish injunction Zachor (remember), is understood as an act of resistance to such erasure from memory and from history. In “Holocaust Memories and their Transmission,” Annette Furst, a child of Holocaust survivors, examines how her parents’ memories of

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their Holocaust experiences were transgenerationally transmitted to their daughter, unconsciously reverberating in her own everyday life and career choice. She describes how her parents’ Holocaust memories profoundly shaped her life through memories that she did not possess. Furst explores how attachment theory and the relationship of agency and trauma as well as Biblical sources on memory can help shed light on the complexities of the intergenerational transmission of memory. Nirit Gradwohl Pisano’s “In Bed with a Collaborator: Reenactments of Historical Trauma by a Granddaughter of Holocaust Survivors” examines the intergenerational transmission of Holocaust trauma and memory to the third generation. She gives an account of an interview she conducted with a member of the third generation (as part of a research project on this subject), and demonstrates the ways in which memories of the Holocaust passed down through the generations were being inexorably and incessantly reenacted in many aspects of this woman’s life, including her romantic partners, her profession, and her relationship with food. The themes taken up in this book are universal: trauma, traumatic reenactment, intergenerational transmission of trauma, love, loss, mourning, ritual—all people and all cultures must deal with these subjects. They are, however, of particular relevance and concern within Jewish thought and the history of the Jewish people, and they are topics of great relevance to psychoanalysis both theoretically and clinically. We are particularly interested in the questions raised by the intersection and inter-engagement of contemporary psychoanalysis and Jewish thought, two traditions of inquiry.

REFERENCES Aron, L. (1993). Working toward operational thought: Piagetian theory and psychoanalytic method. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 29:289-313. Aron, L., and Starr, K. (2013). A Psychotherapy for the People. London and New York: Routledge.

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Boesky, D. (1989). The questions and curiosity of the psychoanalyst. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 37:579-603. Freud, S. (1909). Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis. Standard Edition, 10:153-318. Hazony, Y. (2012). The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levenson, E. A. (1988). The pursuit of the particular. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 24, 1-16. Pearce, J. (1950). Sullivan’s Approach in Therapy with his Comments on Particular Patients. Unpublished manuscript, May 19, 1950. Sacks, J. (2000). Faith Lectures: Judaism, Justice and Tragedy—Confronting the Problem of Evil. http://www.rabbisacks.org/faith-lectures-judaism-justice-and-tragedy-confronting-the-problem-of-evil/ Sasso, S. E. (2007). God’s Echo: Exploring Scripture with Midrash. Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press. Steinsaltz, A. (1992). The Essential Talmud. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, Inc. Stern, D. B. (1989). The analyst’s unformulated experience of the patient. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 25:1-33. ____. (1990). Courting surprise. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 26:452-78. ____. (1992). What makes a good question? Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 28:326-36. Sullivan, H. S. (1954). The Psychiatric Interview. New York: W. W. Norton. Tenzer, A. (1983). Piaget and psychoanalysis: Some reflections on insight. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 19:319-39. Wolpe, D. (2010). “Deep questions.” Off the Pulpit. July, 2010. http://www.sinaitemple.org/learning_with_the_rabbis/writings/070810Deep%20Questions.pdf ____. (2011). “Reading for questions.” Off the Pulpit. http://sinaitemple. org/learning_with_the_rabbis/writings/2011/110411ReadingForQuestions.pdf Zucker, H. (1967). Problems of Psychotherapy. New York: Free Press.

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Rashi and Desire: Reading Rashi’s Reading of Genesis 39 Cheryl Goldstein

Reading Rashi: Theory and Praxis When, in Pirkei Avot, Ben Bag Bag says of the Torah, “Turn it over and over, for everything is within it” (5:26), he describes the enduring and compelling enterprise of biblical interpretation. We continue to approach the Bible from a variety of perspectives—theological, literary, psychological—knowing we have not yet found “everything” within the text. As Jewish exegetical tradition demonstrates, the Bible invites interpretation and analysis. The combination of the Bible’s enigmatic prose style, narratives about the most basic human relationships, and cultural and religious centrality result in multiple re‑readings and interpretations. While many contemporary responses to the biblical text provide ongoing affirmations of the seminal nature of the Bible’s stories, I want to turn an analytic eye upon a traditional approach to reading Torah, one that involves reading the text along with the commentary of Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki, or Rashi. Considered the canonical medieval interpreter of both Bible and Talmud, Rashi’s commentary, along with Onkelos (the translation of the Torah into Aramaic) are the standard exegetical accompaniments to the Torah. Yet Rashi’s venerated status can obscure the innovative quality of his interpretative style. Rashi’s reading is so closely and traditionally associated with the Torah’s text that it can seem like an organic extension of the Torah itself. In fact, Rashi selects material

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from various earlier exegetical sources—Bereshit Rabbah, Tanhuma, and various tractates of Talmud—and weaves them into a coherent and unified whole. The result is a commentary that seems organically in sync with the original text. This sense of complementarity seems to substantiate Rashi’s claim that he is merely presenting the simple meaning (peshat) of the text.1 As modern readers, we recognize that Rashi interprets the biblical text, but we will see that through his selections and combinations of exegetical material he reworks and even develops additional and complementary narratives. We gain some sense of the complex relationship between Rashi’s process and his interpretative purpose when we look at the way he explains his own exegetical project. Commenting upon Genesis 3:8, “[And] they heard [va’yishmu] the sound of the Lord God moving about in the garden at the breezy time of day…,”2 Rashi explicates, “And they heard:3 There are many interpretations of Aggadah, and our rabbis have already arranged them in Bereshit Rabbah and in other [compilations] of midrashim. And I came only for the plain meaning [peshat] of the text, and for Aggadah that establishes the words of the text, word by word in its proper way.” What prompts this particular textual intervention at this point? Why does Rashi provide this explanation here, just as Adam and Eve realize their nakedness, rather than “In the beginning”? The most obvious impetus is the fortuitous wording of this verse. Rashi finds an opportunity to discuss his exegetical plan because of the double meaning of va’yishmu—“and they heard” or “and they understood”—which suggests this digression. It is important to notice that Rashi’s comment contextualizes his interpretation by placing it in relationship to other interpretative texts (Bereshit Rabbah and other midrashim) that reflect how “they [the Rabbis] understood.” Yet for Rashi these previous understandings, while

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The four traditional “levels” of exegetical interpretation are: peshat, the simple or “literal” meaning; remez, a hinted at or allegorical meaning; drash, a meaning through inquiry or comparison; and sod, a hidden or secret meaning. All biblical quotes are from JPS Hebrew‑English Tanakh. The prooftexts or biblical passages that Rashi comments on will be placed in italics within the quotations to distinguish between the words or passages from the Bible itself and Rashi’s commentary.

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necessary, are not sufficient. In fact it is missed understandings that motivate Rashi’s comments on Genesis 3:8 and his commentary in general. In this case, through a series of lexical associations, Rashi inserts himself into the rabbinic chain of transmission,4 a literary projection that evokes and pays homage to past texts while rather audaciously announcing the importance of his own exegetical project. It is also worth noting that just as Rashi introduces and amends the rabbinic chain of transmission, he also introduces and displaces the “simple meaning” he claims to be expounding. In fact, Rashi defers the “simple meaning,” or peshat, of “va’yishmu” (which clearly means “and they heard” in the biblical context) until after he concludes the digression that inserts him and his commentary into narrative and exegetical history. Essentially, Rashi pauses the Bible’s narrative in order to place himself into the historical narrative of rabbinic thought. Rashi’s comment on Genesis 3:8 provides us with an exceptional example of a place where the narrative of the Bible and the narrative of exegetical history meet. This convergence occurs because Rashi exposes a link between the Torah’s text and his own commentary by momentarily preempting or displacing the Torah’s text. It is this displacement that opens up and exposes the association Rashi uses to connect his comment to the biblical text, a connection that creates a narrative about exegetical practice. In simultaneously invoking the text’s simple meaning while deferring it and recalling the history of rabbinic transmission while amending it, Rashi tells a story that relies upon the relationship between displacement and metonymy, qualities Roman Jakobson associates with narrative. These same terms will be elaborated on in Lacan’s discussions regarding language and the construction of desire.

Jakobson, Lacan and Rashi’s Reading Roman Jakobson’s association of displacement with metonymy occurs in a brief comment toward the end of his essay on aphasia in which 4



For an excellent example of the “chain of transmission,” look at the beginning of Pirkei Avot: “Moses received the Torah from Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua; Joshua to the elders; the elders to the prophets; and the prophets handed it down to the men of the Great Assembly” (Pirkei Avot 1:1).

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he pairs particular psychological processes (displacement and substitution) with specific literary tropes (metonymy and metaphor) (Jakobson and Halle, 1956). While the definition of metaphor is fairly standard, some difficulty arises in determining exactly what “metonymy” is. Jakobson correlates metonymy with “difference” and narrative, but these qualities do not provide a definition. David Lodge defines metonymy as the effect “produced by deleting one or more items from a natural combination, but not the items it would be natural to omit […]” (Lodge, 1977). Lodge’s description captures the essential element of absence or omission in metonymy, a quality that was central to what I referred to as “displacement” in my discussion of Rashi’s comment on Genesis 3:8. Additionally, Lodge highlights the centrality of contextual relationships between “items from a natural combination.” By developing, playing upon, or recalling combinations and relationships, like the dual meaning of va’yishmu in Genesis 3:8, metonymy/displacement evokes what is missing and suggests its imminent return. These referential shadows illustrate the relationship Jakobson suggests between narrative and metonymy, since metonymic relationships move the narrative forward through a chain of signification in much the same way that Rashi’s assertion of his authority disrupts the text and projects him into the history implied in the rabbinic chain of transmission. Lacan, taking up Jakobson’s suggestion regarding the relationship between figurative language and constructions of the unconscious, suggests that metonymy and metaphor constitute the linguistic sign, making up “the topography of the unconscious” (Lacan, 1977, p. 163). Lacan describes the structure of displacement/metonymy as “eternally stretching forth toward the desire for something else [...]” (p. 167) creating a structural connection between metonymy, desire, and narrative. This “desire for something else” is articulated, according to Lacan, with the subject’s entry into language, a moment that is marked by a primary displacement. This event, conceptualized as the Father’s denial of the child’s Oedipal desire, radically disrupts and reconfigures the binary relationship of the child and his mother through the assertion of the Law of the Father. This experience, understood by Lacan as the resolution of the mirror phase via the Oedipus complex, inextricably links

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the subject’s language to desire through the chain of signification. The Oedipus complex presents us with a story about desire that transforms the subject’s desire into a story. Rashi’s commentary to Genesis 39 will instantiate the same effect when, through a series of metonymic interventions, he will exegetically invoke an Oedipal scene. In his commentary on Genesis 39 Rashi’s desire to tell the story of Joseph and Mrs. Potiphar gives us textual evidence of these theoretical constructs as Rashi’s desire for narrative leads him to create a narrative of desire.

Re‑Reading Rashi and Genesis 39 The issue of desire is central to Genesis 39. The narrative itself, the story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife, focuses on the desire expressed in Mrs. Potiphar’s request to Joseph, “Lie with me” (Gen. 39:7), and her demand that he “lie beside her, to be with her” (Gen. 39:10). Since such overt expressions of female sexual desire are virtually sui generis in the Torah, it might seem surprising that Rashi makes no comment regarding Mrs. Potiphar’s sexual demands. Instead of addressing Mrs. Potiphar’s behavior directly, Rashi provides an exegetical expansion of the narrative where he develops a full and psychologically complex frame for Mrs. Potiphar’s requests and Joseph’s responses. To do this, Rashi has to situate the story of Joseph and Mrs. Potiphar within a greater narrative context. As with the connections he created in his comment to Genesis 3:8, the associations, combinations, and relationships will hinge upon various types of metonymic association—temporal, lexical, grammatical, and thematic—that displace the biblical text and drive the narrative, the characters, and their desires forward. To get a sense of how Rashi accomplishes this, I will look specifically at his commentaries to Genesis 39:1, 6, 7 and 11, all passages that work together to build narrative continuity and desire of the characters simultaneously. The first comment, Rashi’s reading of Genesis 39:1, begins with an explication of the phrase “And Joseph went down” (ve’Yosef horad) which Rashi uses to contextualize both the events of the previous chapter and those still pending in Genesis 39. Beginning his explication with the claim “It [the story] returns to the first subject,” Rashi implies that the previous chapter—the story of Judah and Tamar—was a digression/

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displacement, and that we are about to return to the narrative’s “original” focus. Rashi uses the trilateral root y,r,d to develop a lexical connection between the biblical text (“And Joseph went down [horad]”), his re‑telling of “the going down [ye’ridato] of Judah to sell Joseph,” and his discussion of the lowering of Judah’s status (horidu’hu) by his brothers. These cognate words help Rashi establish a narrative coherence between Genesis 38 and 39. Both chapters, Rashi explains, involve main characters who share a process of being displaced—Joseph from his father’s affection and the reader’s attention, Judah from his place of filial power. Since “going down” can occur both in terms of geography and social status, Rashi engages the verb as a metonymic link, contrasting the relationship between Joseph and Judah’s characters and their narrative trajectories. Rashi’s next set of associations between the chapters further complicates the metonymic connection between the biblical prooftext and his own narrative construction. “And Joseph went down,” Rashi explains, serves “to juxtapose [literally: set next to] the action of Potiphar’s wife to the action of Tamar to say to you ’This woman acted in the name of Heaven, so this one acted in the name of Heaven since she saw in her astrology that in the future she would be the ancestress of his children […].” There are various consequences to Rashi’s introduction of Mrs. Potiphar at this point, the most obvious being the anticipation of Mrs. Potiphar’s existence before she becomes a narrative fact. Additionally, her introduction in relation to Tamar engages the reader’s interest in Mrs. Potiphar’s sexual behavior, especially since Tamar’s action “in the name of Heaven” involves tricking Judah, her father‑in‑law, into sleeping with her. Although her behavior is eventually validated by her becoming the mother of Judah’s children in the last verses of Genesis 38, the various problems in the story (the death of Tamar’s two husbands, Judah’s withholding of his youngest son from Tamar, his sexual liaison with her) all center around different forms of sexual responsibility. In contrast, Rashi’s commentary implies, we have Mrs. Potiphar, whose actions at this point are still a mystery. Essentially, Rashi presents the reader with Mrs. Potiphar as a narrative and thematic “teaser,” suggesting that the reader think of Mrs. Potiphar in terms of sex and, as we will see, in sexual

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terms. In putting Mrs. Potiphar and her implied behavior ahead of the narrative curve, Rashi’s first comment develops a set of tensions (narrative, thematic, erotic) regarding Mrs. Potiphar that allow the reader to anticipate associations represented by her, at least in part. The suggestion of these associations illustrates how Rashi establishes Mrs. Potiphar as a metonymic displacement for a variety of desires potentially experienced by both the characters and the reader. Continuing with his comment to Genesis 39:6, we see that Rashi again includes Mrs. Potiphar before her arrival in the biblical text. We have just learned of the importance of Joseph in Potiphar’s household, and the fact that God’s pleasure with Joseph redounds upon Potiphar. Potiphar’s trust of Joseph is so great that “[h]e left all that he had in Joseph’s hands and, with him there, he paid attention to nothing save the food [lit. “bread”] that he ate.” Rashi’s explains, “It [the bread] is his wife, but the text speaks in euphemism (lit. ’in clean language’).” By pointing out the Bible’s decorum, Rashi paradoxically emphasizes Mrs. Potiphar’s role as a sexual object before she even enters the scene. It is interesting, however, to consider Rashi’s basis for making this intervention. Is it a question of metaphor/substitution? Is Rashi alluding to the similarities between sensual experiences such as eating and sex? Is Mrs. Potiphar being associated with the assuaging of a craving, so that the male sex drive is associated with a biological need, like hunger? While there may be various metaphorical connections between eating and sex, or bread and Mrs. Potiphar, a closer look suggests that Rashi is not referring to Mrs. Potiphar metaphorically but metonymically, through displacement rather than condensation. Rashi’s comment to Genesis 39:6 looks forward and refers the reader to Genesis 39:9. Consider the two verses: Genesis 39:6: “He left all that he had in Joseph’s hands and, with him there, he paid attention to nothing save the bread [me’umah ki im halechem] that he ate.” Genesis 39:9: “He wields no more authority in this house than I, and he withheld nothing from me except yourself [me’umah ki im otach], since you are his wife.”

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When Rashi reads “bread” as a euphemism, he is not commenting upon a figurative association but a structural one motivated by the similarity in the verses’ grammatical constructions. “Bread,” in this case, is not a metaphorical substitution but a metonymic displacement for “you … his wife” that appears three verses later. The engagement of metonymy here, rather than metaphor, subtly directs the story forward, creating a narrative tension regarding Mrs. Potiphar that is realized in Joseph’s statement in 39:9. Rashi’s explanation here is particularly elegant since it simultaneously develops the view of Mrs. Potiphar as an object of desire for both Potiphar and Joseph while continuing to lure the reader, stimulating his desire with anticipatory hints regarding the narrative. These various forms of titillation are soon addressed when Rashi takes the opportunity to expose Mrs. Potiphar for the carnal object he has suggested she is. By conflating the last phrase in Genesis 39:6 and the first phrase of Genesis 39:7, the situation becomes more complex, as Rashi explains that it is not only Mrs. Potiphar’s nature, but Joseph’s character too that creates this particularly sexually charged scene. The problem that prompts Rashi’s interpretative intervention here is the connection, or lack thereof, between verses 6 and 7. Genesis 39:6–7 reads, “He [Potiphar] left all that he had in Joseph’s hands and, with him there, he paid attention to nothing save the food that he ate. Now Joseph was well built and handsome. After a time, his master’s wife cast her eyes upon Joseph….” The phrase “Now Joseph was well built and handsome” might seem to be a non sequitur, so Rashi’s explanation provides a narrative context for this description of Joseph. “And Joseph was well built and handsome: When he saw himself [as a] governor, he began to eat and drink and curl his hair. The Holy One Blessed Be He said, ’Your father is mourning and you curl your hair! I set a bear upon you.’ Immediately his master’s wife, etc….” The Bible with Rashi’s interpretation has established that Joseph has power over everything in Potiphar’s house except Potiphar’s wife. This power, Rashi explains, leads Joseph to sensual indulgences. God appears to him, and He invokes Joseph’s father, mourning the assumed death of his favorite son. If this were not sufficient incentive for Joseph to amend his behavior, God claims He will send a wild animal, a bear, after him, and “immediately” Mrs. Potiphar begins to eye Joseph.

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It is tempting to see the reference to the bear as another metaphor for Mrs. Potiphar, but Rashi’s comment to 39:7 again emphasizes a structural rather than a figurative association. Commenting upon the phrase “his master’s wife” (words Rashi literally places in God’s mouth) Rashi explains that the word “after” implies an immediate temporal relationship between two events. What’s missing in Rashi’s commentary, what Rashi’s revision displaces, is the introductory phrase of Genesis 39:7 to which he refers, “And it was after a time […].” Rashi substitutes the Bible’s “after” with his “immediately,” and in doing so he creates a particularly compelling psychological drama from this portion of the Joseph narrative. Here is the narrative that Rashi creates. By comparing Tamar’s actions with Mrs. Potiphar’s at the beginning of the pericope, Rashi establishes the story of Mrs. Potiphar as a narrative about sex and context. As his commentary continues, Rashi creates a series of associations that reinforce his reading through metonymic associations both grammatical—the relationship of verses 6 and 9—and temporal—the continuity between verses 6 and 7. Consequently, Rashi focuses less on Mrs. Potiphar as a metaphor for sexuality per se, and more on issues attending to desire, specifically Joseph’s desire for power and the concept of sexual desire as an extension and enactment of that power. However sexual Mrs. Potiphar’s character may be, Rashi insists upon her sexual nature serving the purpose of a greater narrative whole, one that ties Joseph to back to Judah and that will eventually take Joseph to Pharaoh’s court. Although Joseph eventually rebuffs Mrs. Potiphar’s requests “to lie beside her or to be with her,” Rashi’s comments maintain a steady concern regarding the sexual nature of Joseph’s interactions with Mrs. Potiphar. In verse 11 the scene is set for a direct confrontation. Rashi begins by explaining that timing, specifically a pagan holiday, allows Mrs. Potiphar some additional opportunity to be alone with Joseph. In his commentary to Genesis 39:11, Rashi writes, “And it was on this day that is to say, and it was when a particular day arrived, a day of laughter, a holiday, and all of them [the servants] went to the house of idol‑worship. And she [Mrs. Potiphar] said, ’There isn’t a more fitting day for me to associate with Joseph….’” Under the auspices of being ill, Rashi tells us,

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Mrs. Potiphar refuses to go to the celebration. Rashi not only elaborates upon the biblical scene, he understands the Bible as providing Mrs. Potiphar with an opportunity and he provides her motivation and her alibi. Since Joseph’s relationship with God is the basis for his success, it is safe for Rashi to assume that Joseph would not attend a pagan celebration, and thus he arrives at Potiphar’s house on this day in order “to do his work.” Given Rashi’s persistent concerns regarding Joseph’s position of power within the household and Mrs. Potiphar’s propositions, the situation as Rashi has presented it is ripe for impropriety. Rashi’s commentary to verse 11, therefore, takes up the question of what Joseph’s “work” entails on such a special day. Rashi comments, “To do his work— [There is a difference of opinion between the Talmudic sages] Rav and Shmuel. One said his real work, and one said to obey nature’s call with her. But the image of his father appeared to him, etc....” Having seen his father’s image, Joseph roundly rejects Mrs. Potiphar’s unmistakable sexual advance described in verse 12. Mrs. Potiphar takes hold of Joseph’s clothing and propositions him. Leaving his clothing in her hand, Joseph flees. Rashi’s commentary to 39:11 implies that Joseph’s rejection of Mrs. Potiphar is a direct consequence of seeing his father, a visual reminder of paternal authority. Even though he will suffer the humiliation of Mrs. Potiphar’s false accusations and internment in Pharaoh’s prison, the presence of Jacob helps Joseph recognize his potential transgression and allows him to suffer the loss of his narcissistic pleasures so that he can go on to his greater success as an interpreter of dreams in Pharaoh’s court.5 Rashi’s invocation of Jacob’s image as the force that prohibits Joseph’s sexual liaison with Mrs. Potiphar presents Joseph’s story as an Oedipal conflict with its resolution in the institution of the Law (of the Father). This event is anticipated by Rashi’s commentary to verse 6, when Rashi associates Joseph’s sensual indulgences with his position of power in Potiphar’s house for which God scolds Joseph by reminding

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A Lacanian reading of Joseph’s development at this point is obvious. Having accepted the Oedipal prohibition, Joseph rejects his narcissistic position and thereby gains access to the symbolic field, expressed in the biblical narrative through his ability to interpret dreams.

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him of his “mourning father.” Joseph’s interest in his own power (he is a “governor”), his self‑absorbed sensuality (eating, drinking, primping), and his disregard of his father’s concerns (Jacob’s state of mourning) culminate in the mortal threat posed by inappropriate sexual conduct. Mrs. Potiphar’s attentions become both a test and a punishment for Joseph, who has not been keeping his Father in mind. The image of Jacob lets Joseph know the danger of thinking that his “work” involves sexual intimacy (obeying nature’s call) with his master’s wife. Recognizing this Oedipal conflict in Rashi’s commentary on Genesis strengthens and expands Rashi’s suggestion of a narrative connection between Genesis 38 and 39 mentioned in his comment to Genesis 39:1. When discussing both women in his first comment to Genesis 39, Rashi wrote of their behavior, claiming that both women act “l’shem shamayim,” literally “in the name of Heaven.” How can we explain how these two stories share a comparable outcome beyond making generic claims regarding God’s will? Rashi’s inclusion of what we recognize as an Oedipal motif by including the image of Jacob as the image of prohibition suggests a series of additional associations between the two chapters. In Genesis 38, Tamar solicits Judah because he is avoiding his legal obligations by preventing his third son from marrying her. Judah’s first two sons, Er and Onan, were married to Tamar, but God kills both of them. According to Rashi— in another example of his anticipatory exegetical narration in which the first husband’s death foretells the second husband’s demise—Er is killed for wickedness “like the wickedness of Onan… And why did Er destroy his seed? So that she [Tamar] would not conceive and he would [not] ruin her beauty” (Rashi’s commentary to Genesis 38:7). Judah, however, is unaware of God’s motive in killing his sons, and assuming that Tamar kills her husbands, he refuses to allow her to marry his youngest son. He therefore deprives her of her legal right to bear children for his family. When Tamar disguises herself as a harlot and Judah solicits her, she insists that he give her a pledge, specifically his seal, cord, and staff (Genesis 38:18). Subsequently, when Tamar announces her pregnancy after being publicly condemned by Judah, she identifies him as the father of her child by bringing forward the seal, cord, and staff as proof of his

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paternal obligation. In taking possession of Judah’s staff, Tamar takes the Law into her own hands in the form of the Phallus. She therefore preserves the paternal authority as Heaven ordains. In Genesis 39, Mrs. Potiphar’s attempts to seduce Joseph, in conjunction with what Rashi describes as Joseph’s sense of entitlement and narcissistic self‑involvement, an attitude that, like Judah’s presumption of Tamar’s guilt, puts him at significant risk of losing sight of appropriate behavior. Rashi’s introduction of “the bear” in his comment to Genesis 39:6‑7 introduces Mrs. Potiphar as both a test of and punishment for Joseph’s apparent disregard for his father’s concerns, as suggested by Rashi’s inclusion of the image of Jacob in mourning. The scene is then set for Joseph and Mrs. Potiphar to be alone together, but just before Mrs. Potiphar directly and aggressively propositions Joseph, the image of his father appears to him. Consequently, Joseph flees the scene of the seduction, leaving Mrs. Potiphar holding Joseph’s clothes. By rejecting Mrs. Potiphar, Joseph forgoes sexual pleasure and places himself under his father’s supervision. Here, the Law of the Father is maintained just as it is Genesis 38, but where Tamar takes hold of the Phallus, and insists upon maintaining paternal authority, Mrs. Potiphar is denied the phallus in order to assert paternal authority. This inversion of female roles allows for Rashi’s claim that both women act “in the name of Heaven.” Finally, it should not pass unremarked that Rashi’s construction of the Law of the Father repeats his metonymic constructions throughout the commentary. His presentation of the Phallus, represented by the staff in Tamar’s possession, anticipates what we traditionally recognize as the Oedipal conflict, which Rashi develops a chapter later. And as he does so often in his commentary, he uses displacement to urge the reader forward. By telling us that each woman “acts in the name of Heaven,” Rashi suggests a chain of associations between the characters and events. Driven by a desire to tell the Bible’s stories, Rashi writes a story of desire.

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REFERENCES Jakobson, R., & Halle, M. (1956). The Fundamentals of Language. Netherlands: Mouton & Co. http://www.archive.org/stream/ fundamentalsofla00jako#page/n7/mode/2up JPS Hebrew‑English Tanakh: The Traditional Hebrew Text and the New JPS Translation. (1999). Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society. Lacan, J. (1973). Ecrits. (A. Sheridan, Trans.). New York: W. W. Norton. Lodge, D. (1977). The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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“The Impressive Caesura” and “New Beginning” in Psychoanalysis and Jewish Mystical Experience: Birth, Creation and Transformation1 Ruth Kara-Ivanov Kaniel

Introduction At the beginning of the twentieth century, Freud (1908, 1914, 1917, etc.) proposed a correlation between artistic creativity and psychoanalysis, and since then many theoreticians have attested to this phenomenon (Winnicott, Bion, Milner, Balint, Fairbairn, Ogden, and others). Early object relations, re‑lived in the clinic through transference and counter‑transference, emphasize spontaneous and informal aspects of the treatment that encourage the analyst and the patient to bond. Early object relations, re-lived in the clinic through transference and counter-transference, emphasize spontaneous and informal aspects of the treatment that encourage the analyst and the patient to bond and to discover together new sources of the “primal vitality” that is hidden in the soul. This aspect is central especially in new streams such as relational and self‑psychology (Mitchell, Kohut, Aron). The emergence I’m grateful to Iris Felix, Esther Sperber, Biti Roi, Lewis Aron, and Libby Henik for their helpful advice. This paper is part of a larger research project in preparation, entitled: Human Ropes—Birth in Kabbalah and Psychoanalysis (forthcoming).

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of the “authentic self” and the possibility of dialogical creativity were understood to derive from both the patient’s and the analyst’s internal struggles between the life and death instincts (Freud, Klein) and the question of the source of the aggressive impulse, which is still being debated by psychoanalysts (Winnicott, Green). These thinkers have demonstrated that by utilizing ideas that describe the basis of the artistic process and aesthetic experience (such as “formlessness,” “deformation” and “chaos”), we can gain a better appreciation of the development of the self. Artistic expression is achieved through a range of primal experiences related to “unraveling,” the “void,” and the “abyss,” which reflect regressive states of mind (Balint, Litlle, Kristeva, Ehrenzweig, Kris, and others mentioned above). Consequently, the creative process was viewed as founded on a basis of chaos and formlessness. In a similar ways, it has been noted that psychoanalysis can shed light on certain spiritual processes, especially that of the “mystical experience” (Ostow, 1995; Eigen, 1998; 2012; Gamlieli, 2006; Starr, 2008). Although Freud himself was unconvinced of the veracity of an “oceanic feeling” (Freud, 1930, p. 64), many of his followers developed the link between spiritual experiences and the primal mother‑infant dyad (Bollas, Bion, Kohut, Loewald). Positing a deep connection between the analyst and the patient as mirroring the mother‑child relationship, they noted that this substitution of analyst‑as‑mother enables the psychoanalytical process to successfully re‑form behavior and allow expression of the “true‑self” (Winnicott, 1965). In this paper, I suggest that the relationship between artistic creativity and psychoanalysis can be understood through existing mystical concepts. I propose that the mystical idea of “formlessness” is not an “absence of form” but rather a core experience of the self, in its mysterious and unknown dimensions. At the outset, I will draw attention to a few parallel notions that appear both in analytic theory and in Jewish mystical texts. Using ideas such as the “transformational object,” “cosmic narcissism,” “aesthetic conflict,” “new beginning,” “basic unity” and “caesura,” I will show the affinity of current psychological theory to ancient mystical texts. My investigation will focus on two important subjects concerning Jewish mystical experience: myths of Creation and unio‑mystica (in Hebrew,

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devekut, or cleaving to God). These archetypical concepts (Jung, 1965; 1969) can serve as keys for unlocking the riddle of the creative process, as well as primary stages in the development of the self.

Formlessness and “new beginning” In its presentation of the myth of divine auto‑genesis, the Zohar (or “Book of Splendor,” the main Kabbalistic composition written in Spain at the end of the thirteenth century) uses the Neo‑platonic metaphor of “emanation,” or the descent of the cosmic light from its primordial darkness. In the Zohar’s rendition of Creation, everything starts from a single source, a “spot” or “point” in the Godhead. This point is called “Reshit” (beginning, or “head”) since it is located on the highest ontological and epistemological level of emanation. However, the Zohar also assumes that this primordial point, in its amorphous concentration, is the deepest sphere in the creative process. The Zohar emphasizes that before this point there is neither color nor sound, no feeling or wish. Bion similarly calls this the space “without memory or understanding,” a formless origin that is located “before desire.” He claims, “Every session attended by the psychoanalyst must have no history and no future” (1967, p. 273), just like “the act of faith” that “has no association with memory or desire or sensation” (1970, p. 34). In the same manner, the dramatic opening chapter of the Zohar commences with a riddle. It occurs in “other space,” as Freud called the dreamland, or, as Michel Foucault defined the “heterotopias” (1967), in a place without beginning or end, with no past, future, or knowledge: At the beginning of the will of the King, He engraved engravings in the supernal luster, a dark flame issued from the concealed of concealed, from the head of the ein sof2—a cluster of vapor forming in formlessness, thrust in a ring, not white, not black, not red, not green, no color at all. When He measured the span, He created colors to shine within. Within the flame, there went forth one flow from which colors were imbued

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Ein‑Sof [“there is no end”], is an enigmatic term used to describe the most sublime quality of Divinity, which is beyond “limit,” “color,” or “form,” and thus is infinite and endless. Some aspects of the symbolic and psychological meanings of the term and its connections to the mystical experience will be clarified in the course of this paper. See also Valabregue, 2010; Matt, 1990.

“The Impressive Caesura” and “New Beginning” in Psychoanalysis and Jewish Mystical Experience: Birth, Creation and Transformation below. Concealed with all concealment of the secret of ein sof, His light broke and did not break through its aura. It was not known at all until, from within the force of its bursting through, there shone forth a single concealed supernal point. Beyond this point, nothing can be known. Therefore it is called “Reshit,” beginning, the first word, the first utterance/command of all. (Zohar I, 15a; Translation: Scholem, 1949, p. 27; Matt, 2004, pp. 107‑9)

Paradoxically, the cosmological “new beginning” starts from a concealed, regressive and undifferentiated point, with no movement, neither desire nor will.3 The Zohar frequently uses obscure and mysterious terms in order to convey the esoteric nature and secret meaning of its homilies. It is the “vapor” and the formless engravings in the emptiness that, at particular moments, transform themselves, “hitting” the dark flame or the black candle called “buzina de’kardinuta.” Divine power is pictured here as a multiplicity of “empty sources,” “everything which is nothing,” which the Kabbalists called Ein‑Sof. This term can be translated as “Infinite,” “endless,” or “with no limit,” and is understood as “formless essence.” According to the Zohar, then, the basis of the divine creative process as narrated in Genesis 1 was an initial void, “Hylic Matter” without form: In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void (tohu ve’bohu) and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. (Gen. 1:1‑4)

As we will see later, speech and language are born directly from this divine void. For our discussion it is important to underscore that the Kabbalists view this source of Ein‑Sof, which symbolizes “nothingness” or essence “with no end,” as the highest level of divinity (Matt, 1990; Wolfson, 2011). In Sefer Yetzirah, an ancient Jewish mystical composition (whose provenance and date of composition are still a matter for

3



On the development of the idea of “new beginning,” see Balint, 1952a; 1952b; 1968, p. 127‑32; Evans, 1955.

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scholarly debate, but traditionally attributed to Abraham the Patriarch), there appears a distinction between two kinds of primordial “formlessness”: tohu and bohu. As Sefer Yetzirah claims: “From substance out of chaos [He] made nonexistence (tohu) into existence” (II, 5). Sefer ha’Bahir (“Book Bahir”), the first medieval work of Kabbalah, which surfaced in Provence at the end of the twelfth century, further explains this statement of Sefer Yetzirah: the term tohu is interpreted literally as a primary question “is‑anything‑there?” whereas the term bo‑hu implies in its literal meaning “of‑some‑thing” or “He‑is‑inside!”4 The idea that tohu is beyond matter, while bohu already contained basic form and substance, is later developed by the Zohar in the above mystical homily describing the “process of emanation,” which are actually the stages of formation within the Godhead. The divine world transforms from Ein‑Sof in its presentation as the first Sefira of Keter (will or crown), to the second Sefira, the “Reshit,” or the “supernal point,” which is symbolized by the “dot.” This “dot” is seen as the culmination of the divine birth‑process, and the beginning of all worlds. This beginning reaches its peak with the creation of mankind. Consequently, the Kabbalists now adopt the “dot” as their main metaphor for the emergence of the human creative process. “So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them” (Gen. 1:26). This verse states that there exists a structural likeness between God and humanity. The authors of Jewish mystical literature expand this notion to include a “similarity of process” between the divine and human realms. They believed that whatever occurs in the upper world is reflected and mirrored in the human realm. In the biblical creation myth, life begins in a chaotic void: God created Himself out of a void, and so in the paradigmatic creative process man creates from his place of void. Therefore, human and divine origins are based on a mutual foundation, although their relations are not symmetrical—just like the complexity of relationship that exists between an analyst and a patient (Ferenzci, 1932; Aron, 1992; 1996).

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Bahir I, 2. See also: Zohar I, 16a; Tishby 1989, p. 485‑87; Liebes 2000, p. 162‑63.

“The Impressive Caesura” and “New Beginning” in Psychoanalysis and Jewish Mystical Experience: Birth, Creation and Transformation

One might suggest that in Kabbala, God and the human being “reflect” each other in many different ways, which might be similar to the psychoanalytic understandings of “mirroring” (Winnicott, 1971; Stern, 1985). As Kohut and Self Psychology articulate, the experience of functions provided by “another” expands the recognition of the “self,” thus creating a united “selfobject.” According to Kohut, “mirroring,” along with “twinship” and “idealization,” serves as one of the three basic needs for the establishment of the self (1966; 1968; 1978). In analytic terms, the patient’s experience of the analyst as an “extension” or “continuation of the self” is transformed into a reliable self structure. The success of this process is conditioned upon the analyst fulfilling vital functions that had been insufficiently available in the patient’s childhood. When we use the triple structure of “mirroring,” “twinship,” and “idealization” in the context of the relationship between the human and divine, we see that the union with God (Unio‑Mystica) serves as a “self‑object”; that is a necessity not only for human beings, but also for the divine. In general in the Kabbalistic literature, God depends upon humanity as much as human beings rely on Him. As Moshe Halbertal notes, in Jewish mystical traditions, “Along with the mystic’s desire to cross the unknown and see God, there exists the desire of God to show himself” (2001, p. 21). This we learn also from the continuation of the above Zoharic homily: “And the enlightened will shine like the splendor (Zohar) radiance of the sky” (Daniel 12:3)—these are pillars and sockets of the pavilion (palace). “The enlightened” [ha‑maskilim, i.e., the kabbalists are]—the supernal pillars and sockets, contemplating [mistakkelei] in wisdom everything needed by that pavilion…. “They will shine,” for unless they shine and radiate, they cannot contemplate that pavilion…. “The Radiance,” Zohar [splendor]—which illumining the heads [of that beast/Shekhinah]. These “heads” are “the enlightened,” who constantly radiate and shine, contemplating that “sky,” the radiance flashing from there, radiance of Torah, sparkling constantly, never ceasing. (Zohar 1, 16a; Translation: Matt, 2004, pp. 117‑18)

The metaphor of the “gaze” and “light” are used broadly in the mystical literature, in particular in the Zohar. Using biblical verse from the Book of Daniel, the Zohar frequently calls the mystics “enlightened,”

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whose light will shine “like the splendor of the sky,” implying that although they seem like human beings (living here on earth), they are actually situated in the upper realm and their glamour illuminates us, just like the stars in the sky. In many homilies the Zohar insists that a person is obliged to illuminate and shine, comparing his soul to a burning wood that “you have to shake—until the light will rise [from it].”5 The mystical literature treats the “positive aspects” of seeing and reflecting meaning in order to achieve recognition and to build the self; however, at times it also reflects darker aspects of divinity. Those dark sides, called in Kabbala “Sitra Ahra”—the “other side” or the “other reason”6—are akin to the Freudian “id” (1900; 1933) or the Jungian notion of the “shadow” (1914) and present the judgmental powers of God, including His “murderous fantasies” to negate humanity. On the psychological level, these destructive wishes can be related to maternal fantasies of harming the baby (Bloch, 1979). While the medieval Zoharic text emphasizes the “light experience” that is present during the union with God (Wolfson, 1994; Hellner‑Eshed, 2009), ancient mystical literature emphasizes the feelings of fear and awe during the contemplation of God. As the Heikhalot text says, “He who contemplates [God] is immediately torn apart, and he who glances at His beauty is immediately poured out as liquid from a jug” (Enoch 3: P. Schafer Synopsis to Heikhalot Literature, 159: 70). In this description I find legitimization of human and divine destructive energies. Since the emphasis of Freud (1915; 1920) and Klein (1975) on the centrality of the battle between life and death instincts, love and hate, good and evil etc., psychoanalysis has continued the search for meaning in the human integration of ambivalent feelings. Winnicott (1949; 1971) opened a new path when he

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As it is said in Zohar; III 166b: “YHVH said to Abram, ’Go you forth from your land…’ (Genesis 12:1)—in order to illumine a radiance within him. Similarly, if a person does not succeed in one place, let him go and move himself to another place, and there he will succeed. If wood is lit—yet no light rises, illumining it—let them shake it, and light will rise, flashing” [Translation by D. Matt. I’m grateful to him for sharing with me this translation from his soon to be published volume of the Pritzker Edition, Zohar Volume VIII.]. See also Zohar I177a; Wolfson, 1994, pp. 326‑97; Hellner‑Eshed, 2009, pp. 299‑367. According to Rabi Moses De Leon, this is one of the profound meaning of the term: see Liebes, 1984.

“The Impressive Caesura” and “New Beginning” in Psychoanalysis and Jewish Mystical Experience: Birth, Creation and Transformation

showed that the aggressive impulse can turn into “positive” power since primal aggression is rooted in the life instinct. Similarly, in the Talmud, the Sages interpreted the verse Gen. 1:31, “God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good,” in its opposite sense. Since the word “very” [m’eod] sounds in Hebrew like the word “death” [m’ot], they conclude that the “angel of death” and the “evil impulse” (“Yetzer ha’ra”) actually serve the good, for they are “more than” good. This subversive understanding highlighted the vitality of the negative impulse and its roots in the divine source. The Kabbalists richly developed this paradox and described the dynamic relationship between the “other side” and Eros (Liebes, 1984). Here we find creative combination of the “pleasure principle” and the “life and death instincts.” In addition, by specifying that human deeds influence divinity and can “repair” the brokenness in the Godhead, the Zohar appropriated the “other side” as the main force of healing and Tikunn (repair). By doing so, the Kabbalist achieves dual integration; inside himself and between the separated parts of divinity. Thus he fulfills his designation and achieves a feeling of “healthy potency.”

“Transformational Object” and Mystical Union Bollas links the mother‑infant dyad and the quest for the mystical‑merging and contact with the sublime. While describing the mother as a “transformational object,” he emphasizes her role in creating the aesthetic and creative infrastructure of the infant: “The mother both sustains the infant’s life and transmits to the infant, through her own particular idiom of mothering, an aesthetic of being that becomes a feature of the infant’s self” (1979, p. 96). Bollas also links this process to the religious experience, saying: “Its intensity as an object relation is not due to the fact that the object was desired, but because the object is identified with such considerable metamorphoses of being.... The search, however, for such symbolic equations of the transformational object and the experience with which it is identified continues in adult life. Man develops faith in a deity whose absence, ironically, is held to be as important a test of man’s being as his presence” (p, 98).

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Following this idea, Bracha Ettinger suggests that the mother is a “transformational object” for the fetus. In contrast to Bollas, who suggests a one‑sided relationship, Ettinger raises the possibility of “matrixial borderspace,” where “the process of meaning‑creation [is] not unidirectional but bi‑(or multi) directional.” As she claims: “The aesthetic experience described by Bollas is comparable to a passive receptivity in contact with a holy object. The viewer is passive toward the picture, just as the human being is passive toward God: s/he acts and reacts toward God, but doesn’t create and transform Him (Her)” (2006, p. 78). Ettinger emphasizes mutual transformations rooted in the pre‑natal matrixial realm: The matrix is not a symbol for an invisible, unintelligible, originary, passive receptacle onto which traces are engraved by the originary and primary processes; rather, it is a concept for a transforming borderspace of encounter of the co‑emerging I and the neither fused nor rejected uncognized non‑I. This concept has implications both on the invisible ontogenetic level and on the level of a broadened Symbolic, which includes subsymbolic processes of interconnectivity…. The mother‑to‑be’s phantasy life is also transformed by the prenatal encounter with the postmature infant with whom her/their particular matrixial subjectivity co‑emerges. (pp. 63, 81) 

I would like to develop these concepts and to present the wish to unite with divinity as a longing for the lost “wholeness” and the possibility of reassembling a fragmented interior, on the one hand, and the wish to experience “processes of interconnectivity” with the divine matrix on the other. According to the Kabbalists, our soul remembers its divine origins, and is imprinted by the feeling of fullness and light derived from the presence in the divine “Pleroma,” with continuous attachment to the upper Father and Mother in much the same way as our human parents.7

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On the five stages (Nefesh‑Ruah‑Neshama‑Haya‑Yehida) of the development of the soul in the Midrash and the Zohar, and the process of the descending of the soul into this world, see: Tishby, 1961, vol. II, pp. 16‑26. For another original reading of Ettinger’s theory and its implications regarding Kabbalistic texts, see Pedaya, 2011. I hope to expand on the idea of God as the “transformational object” in the mystical literature in the future, following Bion’s discussion of divinity through the terms “Absolute Truth,” “Act of Faith,” “At‑one‑ment,” “Godhead,” “O,” “Ultimate reality,” etc. (1965; 1970); and also Eigen, 1998; 2012.

“The Impressive Caesura” and “New Beginning” in Psychoanalysis and Jewish Mystical Experience: Birth, Creation and Transformation

In addition, although the experience of continuous mystical union with divinity and mutual co‑emerging with it, may lead to destructive narcissism and can be deceptive, it could also develop “healthy exhibitionism” and the feeling of “cosmic narcissism” (Kohut, 1966; 1977; Mitchell, 1986). As we know, without the illusion of omnipotence, creativity suffocates. We need the illusion of greatness in order to experience life with all its intensity (Eigen, 1993). Mythical and mystical thinking contains contradictions, illusions, attempts to overcome boundaries between the self and the other and life and death, and encourages dialectical views (Jung, 1961). Creation requires the experiences of formlessness and resistance to rigid divisions. For example, the wish to overcome gender difference and to feel “both sexes” (Dimen, 1991; Aron, 1995) serves an important purpose in the Jewish mystical literature, because it allows the mystic to identify and empathize with both feminine and masculine aspects of divinity: the male God and his bride, the Shekhinah (Idel, 2005; Liebes, 1984; Wolfson, 1995). As we have seen, in Gen 1:26, God Himself was perceived as simultaneously male and female: “So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them—male and female he created them.” On the one hand, the desire to merge with divinity appears in manic states and in borderline disorders, when the ego refuses to recognize its limits and insists upon merging with the “other.” At the same time, the wish to unite with the analysts/God and to restore the mother‑infant dyad can also refer to a vital healing process of psychotic patients. As Margaret Little notes, “In my experience it is not a state of symbiosis that the patient seeks to establish, but rather one of total identity with the analyst, and of undifferentiatedness from him” (1960, p. 376). She describes this “basic unity” as a “valuable unconscious delusion” which is acted out upon the body, and must be treated as such: “The importance of these body happenings lies in the fact that in those areas where the delusion is operative the patient is to all intents and purposes literally an infant, his ego a body ego. For him, in these areas, only concrete, actual, and bodily things have meaning and can carry conviction” (p. 377). In the same manner, the thirteenth‑century Spanish Kabbalist Isaac from Acre says in his mystical diary Otzar Haim that union with God is

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“like one who pours a pitcher of water into a flowing spring, such that everything becomes one.”8 He instructs other kabbalists to direct their hearts towards the “formless” source of the Ein Sof at all times, a practice that places the mystic in a direct continuum with the Infinite. R. Isaac also indicates that only through the performing of Hitbodedeut (solitude, concentration, introversion) can one dissolve oneself completely in the divine and repair himself and the Godhead. Nevertheless, it is important to emphasize the difference between the mystical ideal of total diffusion in divinity (unio‑mystica), and the regressive stage of psychotic patients. Little (1960), Winnicott (1956; 1966), Balint (1986), and others use a “unity technique” only as a first stage of treating basic faults of the soul, still seeing it as a psychotic disorder. In the same manner, Ernst Kris (1952) spoke of “regression in the service of the ego” in the creative process. The artist needs to go back into the depth of formlessness and then elaborate that experience and image into a communicable message. The art of psychotics, according to Kris, is missing that elaboration. In contrast, “depersonalization” and regression is assumed to be the ultimate stage and highest degree of mystical development. Yet we see the mystics stopping themselves short of achieving the object of their desire. For example, the aforementioned R. Isaac expresses his ambivalence toward the experience of a “mystical union” which can lead to death. In his mystical diary, he uses Moses as an example of a person who controlled himself “and did not stare nor fill his soul’s hunger and thirst.” Unlike Moses, his nephews Nadab and Abihu did not know how to abstain from temptations and desires to unite with Divinity. His reading is based on the verse in Exodus 24:11, “But God did not raise his hand against these leaders of the Israelites; they saw God, and they ate and drank,” which reflects Isaac’s own ambivalence toward the wish to unite and totally “ingest” the Godhead.9

Containment, Seduction, and Inner Space As we have seen in the opening homily of the Zohar, the Sefira of “Hokhmah” is called by many names, one of the most outstanding of

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Isaac from Acre, Otzar Haim, manuscript Moscow‑Ginsburg 775, 111a [147]. Idem, 181a‑182b.

“The Impressive Caesura” and “New Beginning” in Psychoanalysis and Jewish Mystical Experience: Birth, Creation and Transformation

which is “Reshit,” which means “first dot,” “point,” and “beginning.” The main metaphors of the first point are the symbol of the light” which spread from a “concentrated centre,” the symbol of flow and fertility, and the symbol of the “head” (in Hebrew, the word “Rosh” is echoed in the word “Reshit”). For the Kabbalists, these metaphors were combined to form a picture of divine effervescence, a journey of the “divine seed” being poured forth from the “upper head” (the “mohin”) to the “lower worlds” and back again. This dot or seed impregnates the worlds, creates and transforms them, traveling in a circular motion, which always comes back to the first point—i.e. a “new beginning.” In another zoharic homily we find the description of formation of the next Sefira, “Bina,” the upper mother, as being built by the dot. The concentrated point forms its own cocoon‑like womb, where it informs the next stage of sefirotic development. In this next stage, Bina, the cosmic womb, provides the place of being and gives birth to her divine progeny and to human reality (Zohar I, 15a‑b). What can we learn from the idea of the dot or the “concentrated point,” on the psychological‑symbolic level, as portrayed in the opening of the Zohar? I suggest that this concentration that later transforms into lights, colors, and new forms shows flexibility and creative ability to spread and shrink, to change forms, while infinitely remaining in a state of becoming. The container–contained model of Bion (1962, 1963, etc.) was based on the idea that mother‑infant relations build mature thinking ability. The capacity to transform from “zero space” images which still keep open forms, such as the zoharic “flow,” “shining aura,” and “flame,” shows an ability to transform primitive “beta elements” into meaningful and “thinkable” materials through maternal “reverie” and the “alpha function.” When the infant/human overpowers these primitive elements and the mother/God cannot contain them, a deep failure of the creative process is caused. The infant receives back his own projection with the implicit message that his state of mind is not tolerable. This causes, in Bion’s terms, a “nameless dread” (1962, p. 95), a state of mind that is not thinkable. We find the same idea implied in the Zohar in the opening of the homily. The pre‑stage of the “dot” symbolizes a position without

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movement or “will,” space or flexibility, and with the hard experience of suffocation. The next stage sees the divine will bursting through its own confines. If the creative process cannot break out of inner structure—in mystical terms, it is stuck in “auto‑erotic” position—God is isolated within His infinite and static self. In this state, there is no process of creation. God is totally separated from the sefirotic emanative process and consequently from human creatures. As the Talmud states, before this world was created, “God created worlds and destroyed them, over and over again” (Genesis Rabbah 3:7). On the mystical level, the contraction symbolized by the “first point” of Reshit which breaks through Ein Sof, is the most well‑known myth told by the Lurianic Kabbala in the sixteenth century (Rotenberg, 1990; Eigen, 2012). According to this myth, God contracts himself in order to make “free space” for the human creatures; otherwise, the human will be consumed by the infinite.10 The myth of the tzimtzum on the psychological level means making room for another beside you, within you, just like the therapist is required to “clean” the space, contract himself and let the patient “act out” his own story (or “herstory,” in the feminist sense). Containment is not an easy task, and perhaps for this reason God is the first one compelled to do so, struggling against His nature to widen, spread and “fill all the space.” As Mike Eigen notes, “The Lurianic mystical idea of ’breaking of the vessels’ is actually a problem of containment; we produce emotions we cannot contain and mentally digest, and therefore we are in an early evolutionary stage of the development of our mental digestion. It is part of our catastrophic situation and part of our inspiring challenge. We have no idea how to work with all the materials within us.”11 From another perspective, I would suggest that the symbol of the dot in the beginning of the analytic session and in the zoharic creation implies An interpretation of the first homily in the Zohar according to the myth of the tzimtzum was attributed by mistake to Isaac Luria himself, but actually was written by his pupil Josef I’ben Tabul. See: Yosef Avivi, Kabbalat ha‑Ari (Jerusalem, 2007), vol. I, pp. 168–72. 11 My interview with the author, published in “Makor Rishon,” Jerusalem 12.10.12, pp. 12‑14. See also Eigen, 2012. 10

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“The Impressive Caesura” and “New Beginning” in Psychoanalysis and Jewish Mystical Experience: Birth, Creation and Transformation

a hidden seductive energy that is part of the unfolding and revealing of the secrets of the soul. Based on the “trauma theory,” Jacques Laplanche (1976; 1999) stresses that seduction is always involved in maternal treatment and communication with the infant. The imprinting of her unconscious in the mind of the little child later is aroused and re‑expressed in mature sexuality. Sometimes this seduction is unbearable and destructive, but usually it leads to a “humanizing trauma,” enabling formative aspects of the development of the self (Stein, 1998). Laplanche (1995) understands God’s revelation as an undecipherable message from God to man, parallel to the enigmatic message the mother transmits to her child, which develops into human sexuality, desire, and the wish to connect to another. In the context of creation we can add that we are dealing with the big archetype of seduction that takes the form of the “primal scene” (Freud, 1918; and others). “What is represented in the primal scene is the origin of the individual” (Laplanche & Pontalis, 1968), and this origin appears not only when two personalities meet, but also (and especially) when the human soul unites with divinity, thus returning to its primordial source. In kabbalistic literature, the description of the union with God contains bold sexual symbolism, and embodies the idea of the “combined parent figure” (Klein, 1929; Aron, 1995). I suggest that this figure of the parents represents the inner myth of creation in Genesis 1. God, who starts creation from the united symbol of the dot, is revealed in the two archetypical bodies of a man and a woman—Adam and Eve. The individual forms are developed from the basic creative formlessness, revealed in the Biblical Myth of Creation. In addition, the Kabbalists add to this couple another “combined parental object” (Meltzer, 1998)—the upper Father and the upper Mother—Hokhmah and Bina, whose function it is to fulfill the role of the missing parents of Adam and Eve in Genesis 1‑4. In the Zohar’s understanding this myth declares that the constructed connection between God and human—their “primal scene”—includes an encounter with the void, orphanhood, pollution and deformations that are part of the creative process: The earth was tohu va‑vohu, chaos and void…. Through the potency of snow in water emerged slime. Blazing fire struck it, refuse came to be, and

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Ruth Kara-Ivanov Kaniel tohu, chaos, was produced—abode of slime, nest of refuse. Void (bohu)— sifted from refuse, settling upon it. Darkness—mystery of blazing fire. That darkness covers over the refuse, and thereby it is empowered…. So was chaos clarified and refined, from it emerging a great, mighty wind, splitting mountains and shattering rocks … Chaos—a colorless, formless realm, not embraced by the mystery of form. Now within form—as one contemplates it, no form at all … stones sunk within the shell of chaos, emerging from the shell in which they are sunk, conveying benefit to the world. Through the form of a garment they convey benefit from above to below, ascending from below to above.… Darkness, most powerful fire, empowers chaos. Darkness is fire but not dark fire until it empowers chaos…. Darkness—face of evil, for he greeted evil with a friendly face. Then it is called darkness, for it settles upon it, empowering it. This is the mystery of Darkness over the face of the abyss. (Zohar I, 16a‑b; Translation Matt, 2004, pp. 118‑20; Tishby, 1989, pp. 485‑87)

Along with manic wishes of cosmic union, the creative process returns repressed reminders of the void, faults, chaos and abyss at the heart of every creation (Matt, 1990; Liebes, 1984; Ehrenzweig, 1967). Those re‑appear in the clinic and challenge analytic treatment. In the mystical structure, sexuality is based on the void and grows from the destructive aspects of the self and the chaotic parts of the Id.12 Thus, the “otherness of sexuality” (Eigen, 2006; Stein, 2008) also deals with the dark sides of divinity, and with the “aesthetic conflict” (Meltzer, 1988) between the creator and His creations. The creative process has the potential to unravel our rigid forms, and it mitigates and softens the pathologic symptoms of the self. We return to the “first point” and spread and expand ourselves again. Therefore, the last explanation I add to the metaphor of the point in the Zohar is that of a psychotic state of mind and the feeling of an “inner prison” that comes from the difficulty occupying mental space, as Bion notes “the psychotic shows a desire to occupy a very small space” (Bion, 1992, p. 204). Such a person is locked inside himself, like God, who at the beginning of the Freud, 1900, etc. One of Freud’s definitions of the Id: “It is the dark, inaccessible part of our personality, what little we know of it we have learned from our study of the dreamwork ... and most of that is of a negative character.... We approach the id with analogies: we call it a chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations” (1933, p. 73).

12

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“The Impressive Caesura” and “New Beginning” in Psychoanalysis and Jewish Mystical Experience: Birth, Creation and Transformation

creative process is a “dot” in high ecstatic tension. Unlike the healthy person, who has a larger life space and the inner freedom to play and to experience a variety of feelings (Winnicott, 1971), the sick person feels “forced reduction” and has a small internal space. Hence, playfulness allows us to spread without reducing our existential and emotional possibilities.13 Absence of “negative capability” to contain our dark sides and the “attacks on linking” (Bion, 1959; 1970; Grotstein, 2007) leads to an impasse, which only the “Other,” or in different terms, “the Third,” can solve and rescue the person from his inner or intersubjective reality (Ogden, 1994; Gerson, 2004; Benjamin, 2004; Aron, 2006).

Caesura, Birth, and Re‑Birth Just as in psychoanalytic theory, in kabalistic literature language is birthed from formlessness and void. While interpreting the first verses in Genesis, the Zohar teaches that human language is but an extension of the divine one. Accordingly, the human process of creativity in either art or linguistic reality closely parallels this divine creative process. The “symbolic stage” of the language is based on the “semiotic” level and its dangerous and chaotic basis mentioned in Genesis 1. The first stage is connected to the maternal dyad, and only in later stages of development does the use of speech appear. The transition of humanity from the primitive phase to the dominance of the “law of the father” (Lacan, 1977) happens not only on the personal level, but also includes gender conflicts and mythical struggles (Kristeva, 1982). The use of language is considered a loss of the “amorphic” paradise—that primal place where we were understood without words. At the same time, it is a new beginning and creation, as the Zohar says at the end of our homily: God said, “Let there be light!” And there was light (Genesis 1:3). Here begins the discovery of hidden treasures: how the world was created in detail…. Till here, all was suspended in space, from the mystery of Ein Sof.

I’m grateful to James Ogilvie for emphasizing this idea during our group study in the Zohar.

13

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Ruth Kara-Ivanov Kaniel Once the force spread through the supernal palace, saying is ascribed: God said. Above, saying is not specified.... This said is susceptible to questioning and knowing. Said—a power raised silently from the mystery of Ein Sof, in the origin of thought. God said—now that palace, impregnated by the seed of holiness, gave birth, giving birth silently, while outside the newborn was heard. As the emergent one emerged, a voice was generated, heard outside: Let there be light! All that emerged, through this mystery … Let there be, alluding to mystery of Father and Mother ‫(י"ה‬yod he) … afterward turning back to the primordial point, to begin expanding into something else: light. First it burst, generating from its mystery a single concealed point, for Ein Sof burst out of its aura, revealing this point: ‫( י‬yod). Once this ‫( י‬yod) expanded, what remained was found to be: ‫( אור‬or), light…. Expanding, it emerged … by a hidden path it constantly touches that point, touching yet not touching, illumining it through the primordial point that emerged from it. So all is linked, one to another, illumining this and that…. That point of light expanded … letters of the [Hebrew] alphabet shone within, not congealing, remaining fluid…. The expanse congealed, and the letters congealed, folding into shape, forming forms. (Zohar I, 16b; Translation Matt, 2004, pp. 122‑24)

The Zohar sees in God’s first speech‑act a mystery of the union between “Father and Mother”—namely, a primal scene and the “combined parent figure.” Afterwards, the homily describes the primordial point—as the smallest letter “yod” in the Hebrew alphabet—and how it opened to other letters, thus creating the word “light.” The beginning of birth and expansion happens inside divinity, but it amazingly imitates the physical process of human birth. The fluid, divine materials transform through speech and language into the solidity of letters and words. Thus, “the birth of language,” is the birth of the form. It is a continuation of a process that began with a dot, which burst into an infinite spreading of itself. This simple point transformed and morphed into all possible structures, colors, and letters. The chaos that was concentrated within the dot appears now as language through the creation of new worlds and words of meaning. One of the most important conditions of success for a therapeutic regression is the inner belief of the analyst (and then the patient) in the possibility of “new beginning” and “new opportunity for development” (Winnicott, 1958; Balint, 1952). Michael Balint’s well‑known story of a patient who suddenly somersaulted in the middle of an analytic session

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(1968, pp. 131‑32) applies not only to the results of the “psychological growth” that followed regression, but may also apply to the mystical technique called “gilgul,” which means re‑birth, reincarnation, and “initiation.”14 Here the Freudian notion of “Caesura” can serve as a helpful tool for understanding this paradoxical process. As Freud says, “There is much more continuity between intra‑uterine life and earliest infancy than the impressive caesura of the act of birth would have us believe” (Freud, 1926, p. 138). The developments of this idea in psychoanalytical theory (Bion, 1977; Piontelli, 1992; Aharoni & Bergshtein, 2001) is revealed in the meaning of the word “Caesura” which suggests, on the one hand, a “cut,” “amputation,” or “exclusion,” and at the same time, the opposite: “a bridge,” a “link,” and continuity.15 Birth itself is both a rupture and a new start. As Winnicott writes about birth memories, “There is evidence that personal birth experience is significant and is held as memory material. When birth trauma is significant, every detail of impingement and reaction is, as it were, etched on the patient’s memory, in the way to which we have been accustomed when patients relive traumatic experiences of later life” (1958, p. 183). Here we can see two methods of dealing with the primordial chaos involved in the birth memories: repairing, transforming, and “working through” them in everyday life, and at the same time leaving them as an untouched and concentrated “dot,” while severing this reminder of the “semiotic chora” that was left behind, in the “intra‑uterine life.” In the Hassidic literature the practice of “somersault” during praying, symbolizes triumph of the values of joy and modesty, while winning the battle against melancholy and vanity (Assaf, 2009). It seems the Hasidim used this spiritual practice in order to bridge the gap between life and death, and imitating “re‑birth.” 15 On the connection between the Latin and psychoanalytic term “Caesura” and the notion on the Midrashic and Kabbalistic “Nesira” (split, cut, and sawing) I expand in my book “Human Ropes—Birth in Kabbalah and Psychoanalysis” (forthcoming). Both terms similarly attempt to understand the process of differentiation of the sexual couple of male and female from the primordial bisexual creature [Androgynous, or Du-Parzufin] and the separation of the primal mother-infant dyad, from one unified and contained body to two individuals. 14

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From the moment of our birth, there appears a double‑sided fear: the fear of “not to be born”—namely, not to realize or fulfill our essence; and at the same time, the fear “to be born”—to become fully alive—spiritually, mentally, and psychologically (Kara‑Kaniel, 2014). Birth is our deepest secret, the “first dot” and “primordial evaluation point”; it is our concealed trauma from which grows the contradictory wish, “to know and not to know” (Yaglom, 2014). The mystical implication of the “Caesura” is related to Meltzer’s notion of the “Aesthetic Conflict.” This conflict stems from the individual’s wish to unite with Mother‑God and embody her essence, in order to “Know” Oneself and Her from “inside.” At the same time, it also contains the opposite wish, “Not to Know,” and thus survives the fear of disappearing into the “pre‑beginning” state. As we have seen in the course of this chapter, in both kabbalistic views and in psychoanalytic terms, humanity imitates God, while God depends on humanity. They reflect and “mirror” each other not only in their “fullness” and “completeness,” but also in their “empty spaces,” their dark and “mad” spots and their “basic faults.” The ability to transform new forms from formlessness depends upon the use of language, which serves as a “Caesurian bridge” between the infinity of the “dot” and the beginning of new life.

REFERENCES Aharoni & Bergshtein (2001). Liro’t et ha‑Nolad (Looking at the future born). Introduction to the Hebrew Translation of A. Piontelli (pp. 12‑20). Ben Shemen: Modan Press. Aron, L. (1992). Interpretation as expression of the analyst’s subjectivity. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 2(4):475‑507. ____. (1995). The internalized primal scene. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 5:195‑237. ____. (1996). Meetings of Minds: Mutuality in Psychoanalysis. New York: Analytic Press.

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____. (2007). Black fire on white fire, resting on the knee of the holy and blessed one. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 43:89‑111. Assaf, D. (2009). The Hassid as a Homo Ludens. In: D. Assaf & Rapoport‑Albert A. (Eds.), Let the Old Make Way for the New: Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Eastern European Jewry Presented to Immanuel Etkes (pp. 120‑50). Jerusalem: The Shazar Center for Jewish History. Balint, M. (1952a). New beginning and the paranoid and the depressive syndromes. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 33(2):214‑24. ____. (1952b). Primary Love and Psychoanalytic Technique. Hogarth Press, London. ____. (1968). The Basic Fault: Therapeutic Aspects of Regression. London: Tavistock Publications. Benjamin, J. (2004). Beyond doer and done to: An intersubjective view of thirdness. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 73:5‑46. Bion, W. R. (1959). Attacks on linking. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 40:308‑15. ____. (1961). Experiences in Groups and Other Papers. London: Tavistock Publications. ____. (1962). Learning from Experience. London: Tavistock Publications. ____. (1963). Elements of Psycho‑Analysis. London: Heinemann. ____. (1965). Transformations: Change from Learning to Growth. London: Tavistock Publications. ____. (1967). Notes on memory and desire. The Psychoanalytic Forum, 2:271–80. ____. (1970). Attention and Interpretation. London: Tavistock Publications. ____. (1977). Two Papers: “The Grid” and “Caesura.” London: Karnac Books. ____. (1992). Cogitations. London: Karnac Books. Bloch D. (1979). “So the Witch Won’t Eat Me”: Fantasy and the Child’s Fear of Infanticide. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. Bollas, C. (1987). The Shadow of the Object. London: Free Assoc. Books. ____. (1979). The Transformational Object. Int. J. Psycho‑Anal., 60:97‑107. Dimen, M. (1991). Deconstructing difference: Gender, splitting, and transitional space. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 1:335‑52. Ehrenzweig, A. (1967). The Hidden Order of Art: A Study in the Psychology of Artistic Imagination. University of California Press.

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Eigen, M. (1993). The Electrified Tightrope. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson. ____. (1998). The Psychoanalytic Mystic. London: Free Association Books. ____. (2012). Kabbalah & Psychoanalysis. London: Karnac. Ettinger, B. (2006). The Matrixial Borderspace: Essays from 1994‑1999. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Evans, W. N. (1955). Primary love and psychoanalytic technique: By Michael Balint. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 24:438‑439 Fairbairn, W. D. (1952). Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality. London: Tavistock Publications. Ferenzci, S. (1933). The Clinical Diary of Sándor Ferenczi (J. Dupont, Ed.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Foucault, M. (1967). Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias. Diacritics 16:22‑27. Freud, S. (1900). The Interpretation of Dreams. Standard Edition, 4. ____. (1908). Creative Writers and Day‑Dreaming. Standard Edition, 9:141‑54. ____. (1914). The Moses of Michelangelo. Standard Edition, 13:209‑38. ____. (1915). Thoughts for the Times on War and Death. Standard Edition, 14:273‑300. ____. (1917). Leonardo da Vinci: A Psychosexual Study of an Infantile Reminiscence (A. A. Brill, Trans.). Psychoanalytic Review 4:468‑69. ____. (1918). From the History of an Infantile Neurosis. Standard Edition, 18:28‑59. ____. (1920). Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Standard Edition, 18:1‑64. ____. (1926). Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety. Standard Edition, 20:75‑176. ____. (1930. Civilization and its Discontents. Standard Edition, 21:57‑146. ____. (1933). Lecture XXXI: The Dissection of the Psychical Personality. New Introductory Lectures On Psycho‑Analysis. Standard Edition, 22:56‑79 Gamlieli, D. (2006). Psychoanalysis and Kabbalah: The Masculine and Feminine in Lurianic Kabbalah. Los Angeles: Cherub Press. Gerson, S. (2004). The relational unconscious: A core element of intersubjectivity, thirdness and clinical process. Psychoanalytical Quarterly 73:63‑98.

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Green, A. (1999). The Work of the Negative (A. Weller, Trans.). New York: Free Association Books. Grotstein, J. T. (2007). A Beam of Intense Darkness: Wilfred Bion’s Legacy to Psychoanalysis. London: Karnac. Halbertal, M. (2001). Concealment and Revelation: The Secret and its Boundaries in Medieval Jewish Thought. Jerusalem: Yeriot Press. Hellner‑Eshed M. (2009). A River Flows from Eden: The Language of Mystical Experience in the Zohar. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Idel, M. (1995). Kabbalah and Eros. New Haven: Yale University Press. Jung, C.G. (1914). The theory of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic Review, 1:260‑84. Jung, C.G., & Aniela, Jaffé (1965). Memories, Dreams, Reflections. New York: Random House. Jung, C.G., & Kerenyi, C. (1969). Essays on a Science of Mythology: The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kara‑Kaniel, R. (2014). Birth—from Metaphor to Reality in Psychoanalysis and Jewish Mysticism: Discussion of Lewis Aron’s Paper “With You I’m Born Again.” Psychoanalytic Dialogues 24:374–86. Klein. M. (1929). Infantile anxiety‑situations reflected in a work of art and in the creative impulse. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 10:436‑43. ____. (1948). A contribution to the theory of anxiety and guilt. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 29:112‑23. ____. (1975). Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works., New York: Delacorte Press. Kohut, H. (1966). Forms and transformations of narcissism. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 14:243‑72. ____. (1968). The psychoanalytic treatment of narcissistic personality disorders. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 23:86‑113. ____. (1977). The Restoration of the Self. New York: International Universities Press. Kohut, H., & Wolf, E.S. (1978). The disorders of the self and their treatment: An outline. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 59:413‑25. Kris, E. (1952). Psychoanalytic Exploration of Art. New York: International Universities Press Inc.

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Kristeva, J. (1982). Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press.  ____. (1987). In the Beginning Was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith (A. Goldhammer, Trans.). New York: Columbia University Press. Lacan, J. (1997). The function and field of speech and language in psychoanalysis. In A. Sheridan (Trans.), Écrits (A Selection) (pp. 30‑113). London: Routledge. Laplanche, J. (1976). Life and Death in Psychoanalysis (J. Mehlman, Trans.). Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. ____. (1995). Seduction, persecution, revelation. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 76:663‑82. ____. (1999). Essays on Otherness. New York: Routledge. Laplanche, J., & Pontalis, J. B. (1968). Fantasy and the origins of sexuality. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 49:1‑18. Liebes, Y. (1984). Zohar ve’Eros. Alpai’im 9:67‑119. ____. (2000). Ars Poetica in Sefer Yetzira. Jerusalem: Schocken Publishing House. Little, M. (1960). On basic unity. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 41:377‑84. Loewald, H.W. (1960). On the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis. Internation Journal of Psychoanalysis, 41:16‑33. ____. (2000). Comments on the religious experience. In: The Essential Loewald Collected Papers and Monographs (pp. 566‑79). Hagerstown, MD: University Publishing Group. Matt, D. (Trans. and commentary) (2004). The Zohar‑Pritzker Edition, vol. 1. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ____. (1990). Ayin: The concept of nothingness in Jewish Mysticism. In: R. Forman (Ed.), The Problem of Pure Consciousness: Mysticism and Philosophy (pp. 121‑59). New York: Oxford University Press. Meltzer, D. (1988). The Apprehension of Beauty: The Role of Aesthetic Conflict in Development, Violence and Art. London: Karnac Books. Milner, M. (1987). The Suppressed Madness of Sane Men: Forty‑four Years of Exploring Psychoanalysis. New Library of Psychoanalysis, vol. 3. London and New York: Tavistock Publications. ____. (1956). The communication of primary sensual experience. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 37:278‑81.

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Mitchell, S. A. (1986). The wings of Icarus, illusion and the problem of narcissism. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 22:107‑32. ____. (1988). The intrapsychic and the interpersonal: Different theories, different domains, or historical artifacts? Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 8:472‑96. Ogden, T. H. (1994). The analytic third: Working with intersubjective clinical facts. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 75:3‑19. ____. (1999). The music of what happens in poetry and psychoanalysis. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 80:979‑94. Ostow, M. (1995). Ultimate Intimacy: The Psychodynamics of Jewish Mysticism. London: Karnac Books. Pedaya, H. (2011). Merhav ve’Makom. Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuhad Press. Piontelli, A. (1992). From Fetus to Child:An Observational and Psychoanalytic Study. London, New York: Routledge. Rotenberg, M. (1983). Kiyyum besod ha‑zim‑ zum (Existence in the Secret of Limitation). Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik. Scholem, G. (1949). Zohar: Selected Translations without Commentary. New York: Schocken. Starr, K. E. (2008). Repair of the Soul: Metaphors of Transformation in Jewish Mysticism and Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge. Stein, R. (1998). The enigmatic dimension of sexual experience: The “otherness” of sexuality and primal seduction. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 67:594‑625. ____. (2008). The otherness of sexuality: Excess. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 56:43‑71. Stern, D. N. (1985). The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology. New York: Basic Books. Tishby, I. (1989). The Wisdom of the Zohar, Vol. II. The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization. Valabregue, S. (2010). Concealed and Revealed: “Eyn Sof” (Infinity) in Theosophic Kabbalah. Los Angeles: Cherub Press. Winnicott, D. W. (1949). Hate in the counter‑transference. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 30:69‑74.

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____. (1958). Birth memories, birth trauma and anxiety. In: Through Paediatrics to Psycho‑Analysis, 174‑92. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho‑Analysis, 1975. ____. (1965). The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development. London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho‑Analysis, The International Psycho‑Analytical Library, 64. ____. (1966). Psycho‑somatic illness in its positive and negative aspects. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 47:510‑16. ____. (1971). Playing and Reality. London: Tavistock Publications. Wolfson, E. R. (1995). Circle in the Square: Studies in the Use of Gender in Kabbalistic Symbolism. Albany: SUNY Press. ____. (1994). Through a Speculum That Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism, Princeton 1994. ____. (2011). A Dream Interpreted Within a Dream: Oneiropoiesis and the Prism of Imagination. New York: Zone, MIT. Yaglom, M. (2014). To Know or Not to Know. [Unpublished manuscript]

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On Abandoning Aristotle: Love in Psychoanalysis and Jewish Philosophy1 William Kolbrener

Where id was, there ego shall be. It is a work of culture— not unlike the draining of the Zuider Zee. —Sigmund Freud, 1933, p. 80

“The most fundamental principle of all,” writes Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, the “idea that Judaism introduced into the world,” is that “man must create himself” (1983, p. 134). That Freud and the rabbis share an emphasis on the importance of individual creativity makes the pairing of the twentieth‑century Jewish thinker Soloveitchik with the neo‑Freudian thinker Jonathan Lear seem less unlikely; both, through seemingly incommensurate terms—the Jewish conception of teshuva or repentance and the psychoanalytic conception of sublimation, respectively—elaborate the possibilities for the development of the individual psyche or soul. If psychoanalysis and religion since Freud’s work have been seen to occupy separate and sometimes mutually exclusive or even hostile disciplinary spaces, the works of Soloveitchik and Lear show how rabbinic and psychoanalytic discourses share a common emphasis on asserting the centrality of the individual.

1



I am grateful to Josh Weinstein for helpful conversations about Aristotle and Maimonides, and to Elie Jesner for many discussions on the relationship between philosophy and psychoanalysis.

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Unlike attempts in the past among post‑Freudians to find a space for religious discourses, my argument here does not focus on the reclamation of, as Lear himself puts it, the “infantile nature” of religious experience (2005, p. 207), or on how religion recaptures aspects of what Hans Loewald calls “archaic mind” or “primary process mentation” (2000, p. 196‑98). True, Soloveitchik and Lear both focus on the achievement of unity—not one that derives from mysticism and the celebration of the non‑discursive, but rather an epistemological unity presupposed upon difference, in the service of knowledge and the development of an autonomous self. Freud argued in Moses and Monotheism for a particular form of what he called the Jewish “phylogenetic inheritance”; in an appropriation of the Freudian gesture, psychoanalysis may be seen as a continuation, even in some sense a fulfillment, of a rabbinic emphasis on individual autonomy and transformation.2 More than that, reading Lear and Soloveitchik in dialogue enables an understanding of the unacknowledged theological stakes implicit in Lear’s articulation of the mechanism of sublimation, as well as the psychoanalytic resonances of Soloveitchik’s elaboration of teshuva, and, further, how both are presupposed upon the radical postulation of love. If the story told here is one emphasizing Jewish reference points, there is another common, perhaps even more important figure in the stories that Lear and Soloveitchik tell: that is, Aristotle. In the pages that follow, the common Aristotelian basis for Lear and Soloveitchik’s thought are elaborated, showing how the two thinkers turned to an Aristotelian conception of knowledge to undermine early modern conceptions of objectivity, and, further, to liberate their respective disciplines, psychoanalysis and Jewish philosophy, from the disciplinary constraints imposed by the truth criteria of the sciences. The dialogue enacted here between the works of Soloveitchik and Lear, in showing the centrality of individuation enabled respectively through teshuva and sublimation, provides unexpected perspectives on the common reliance upon, but, more tellingly, the eventual abandonment of Aristotle. For though both thinkers rely upon the Greek philosopher for their

2

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On the phylo‑genetic inheritance in Freud, see Lear, 2005, p. 145.

On Abandoning Aristotle: Love in Psychoanalysis and Jewish Philosophy

conceptions of knowledge, both also reject Aristotle, as they seek to elaborate the cosmic principle of love to inform their respective conceptions of personal development. Love, for both Lear and Soloveitchik, is primarily an activity, founded upon an epistemological stance that presupposes both difference and unity, not just the mystical unity assumed, from most Freudian perspectives, to be the mainstay of religious experience. Indeed, the elaboration of a self in pursuit of “individuality, autonomy, uniqueness, and freedom” in Lear and Soloveitchik depends on Aristotelian conception of knowledge, but also a conception of a universe and metaphysics informed by love for which the Greek philosopher, despite his centrality to both of their works, fails to provide an adequate precedent (Soloveitchik, 1983, p. 135). For Soloveitchik and Lear, knowledge entails the unity of knower and known, an activity based on desire, entailing an epistemological stance, the self’s active engagement with the world, or what amounts in both of their works to the knowing self’s engagement with the “given.” This given, whether psychic or worldly, only fully comes into being through the intervention of a subject who knows. As Lear writes in his 1988 book on Aristotle, the “perceptible object has the capacity to be perceived,” but the actualization of perception only takes place in the subject, and for both Soloveitchik and Lear, following Aristotle, a subject that desires (p. 103). The re‑introduction of desire—and eventually for the two contemporary thinkers, love—into the process of cognition goes against the grain of early modern scientific and philosophical conceptions of knowledge which, in giving priority to objectivity, had come to threaten the disciplinary grounds of both psychoanalysis and religion. In an Aristotelian epistemology, transformed as it will be in the works of the two contemporary thinkers, desire and love are not impediments, or even merely extrinsic to knowledge, but the means through which knowledge is enacted and attained. In this way, both thinkers, facing a world dominated by the disciplinary models of the sciences, and conceptions of objective and transparent truths, employ this epistemology of love to justify the autonomy of their disciplines, and, even more than that, to redefine the nature of truth claims across the disciplinary spectrum. In Lear’s psychoanalytic and Soloveitchik’s Jewish legal or halakhic

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epistemology, the possibility of a disciplinary pluralism—multiple and internally valid truth claims—emerges. As much as serving as a disciplinary defense, the conception of love grounded in the Aristotelian unity of knower and known—the breaking down of the subject‑object distinction as inherited from the seventeenth century—serves even more centrally in relation to Lear’s and Soloveitchik’s respective perspectives on self‑knowledge. That is, the subject’s knowledge of the “given” of the external world—and the conception of interpretation that flows from it—parallels the corresponding knowledge of the internal “given,” the knowledge of the psyche or soul. The epistemology of the unity of subject and object, adopted from Aristotle but eventually transformed in both thinkers into an epistemology of love, is expressed in Lear and Soloveitchik in relation to the development of the individual, through the processes of sublimation and teshuva. Though psychoanalytic and rabbinic registers presuppose opposing values, the psychic processes of teshuva and sublimation presume an epistemology of unity of subject and object, and indeed are the primary means through which the individual acquires autonomy, or free will, through which what Lear calls “individuation” is achieved. Further, sublimation and teshuva, as distanced as they may seem from one another, both assume, and in fact require, a world founded on love.

I. The Desire to Know Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, scion of the Brisk Talmudic dynasty, brought disparate Western and Jewish intellectual traditions together. A world‑class Talmudist with a PhD in philosophy at the University of Berlin, after his emigration to America in 1931 he became the leader of Jewish Modern Orthodoxy. During his lifetime, and even more so since his death, Soloveitchik’s reputation has been built upon his charismatic personality as a teacher as well as his prolific writings, and he has emerged as a major figure in twentieth‑century Jewish thought. My focus here, by engaging with and through Jonathan Lear’s work, is on his Soloveitchik’s three major works of the 1940s: the articulation of the epistemological assumptions in And From There Shall You Seek; how these assumptions relate to the defense of the disciplinary sphere of the

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religious philosopher in Halakhic Mind; and finally, the conception of teshuva or repentance as articulated in Halakhic Man. And From There Shall You Seek is a meditation on God’s presence, or more aptly, as expressed in the often lyrical, sometimes forlorn work, on the absence of God. For Soloveitchik, an abyss separates the Creator and his creation, and the experience of divine presence is never achieved fully on an empirical or phenomenological level, but only through languages of revelation. Yet notwithstanding what amounts to a neo‑Kantian framing of the “real”—its inaccessible distance from experience and immediate genuine knowledge—Soloveitchik represents knowledge in Aristotelian terms, a conceptual language he adopts through Maimonides, specifically in his emphasis on the relationship between subject and object, or the unity between knower and known.3 “The secret of cleaving to God,” Soloveitchik writes, citing the Maimonidean elaboration of Aristotelian knowledge, “involves the principle of the identity of the knower and the known” (2008, p. 94). Divine knowledge does not allow for the duality of subject and object; indeed, God is unified with his Creation in the act of knowing: “the world is the ’object’ of God’s knowledge, yet it is rooted in the subject,” as the “known cleaves to the knower forever, without pause” (p. 102). Human knowledge, though informed by the model of divine knowledge, nonetheless, presupposes a split not present in divine cognition: “it turns out,” Soloveitchik writes, that “self‑knowledge means splitting the personality and alienating itself from itself.” Indeed, for Soloveitchik, knowledge is born out of unity sundered, only to be reclaimed by means of the act of cognition. There are, Soloveitchik writes, “a plethora of strange figures within the soul” “half subject” and “half object”: self‑knowledge entails a confrontation between parts of the “I” which, addressed as separate entities, even agencies in the psyche, inevitably need to be overcome (p. 95). Though man lives with the never fully surmountable reality of the subject‑object distinction, both internally and externally in relation to self and world, cognition entails overcoming that separation:

3



On Soloveitchik’s neo‑Kantianism, see Ravitzky, 1986.

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“human cognition, limited and relative as it is, is rooted” in the “type of wondrous unity” associated with the instantaneous and eternal knowledge of the divine (p. 97). In the explicit borrowing of Aristotelian languages, Soloveitchik writes that “conjoined with the active intellect,” one “ascends to the level of a true knower,” and “achieves the unity of the knower and the known” (p. 98). Through a mode of cognition that partakes of the same activity and shares the same object of knowledge as the divine, “man and God are united in knowledge of the world” (p. 103). The Aristotelian/Maimonidean assertion of unity is not, however, merely a mystical attempt to elaborate a theological “cleaving”—a means to unify with the divine—but also represents the description of an epistemological stance. It should not therefore be reduced or relegated solely to the realm of a theological experience; it defines the nature of knowing itself. Indeed, in the absence of the unity that characterizes genuine knowledge, there is a fall into dualism. As Soloveitchik writes, when cognition no longer realizes its aim, and degrades into mere “potentiality,” the “dualism of subject and object emerges” (p. 98). Knowledge which is not based upon activity merely receives “impressions” and is “passive,” while the act of understanding leads to a “conjoining” with the world (p. 103). That is, for Soloveitchik, knowledge is achieved only through activity, while passivity, engendering “the dualism of man world, of I and it” may yield impressions, but not genuine knowledge (p. 101). However, what Soloveitchik calls “the epistemological innovation” and the resultant “unity of knower and known” maintains only in a “cognition imbued with love and desire” (p. 156). The introduction of love and desire as necessary components of the process of knowing, articulated for Soloveitchik explicitly by Maimonides—“one only loves God with the knowledge with which one knows Him; according to the knowledge will be the love”—may seem, according to some paradigms of knowing, like a foreign presence in what should be an exclusively cognitive activity (p. 156). However, in Soloveitchik’s Maimonidean appropriation of Aristotle, desire and the subsequent pleasure are not additions to the process of knowledge: they are fundamental, defining parts. As Lear writes in his book on Aristotle, providing a useful gloss on Soloveitchik:

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“pleasure is not an adventitious charm which accompanies thinking like a charming escort; the pleasure is internal to the thinking itself” (1988, p. 297; emphasis added). The subject who desires is also the subject who knows. From an Aristotelian perspective, when subject and object are sundered—when the object appears as discreet independent and transparent, and the subject as without desire, disengaged, neutral, and objective—knowledge is not the result. Before elaborating how desire and love function in the development of the psyche for both Soloveitchik and Lear, I turn to the nature of their respective appropriations of Aristotelian epistemology, first as it relates to knowledge of the world and then to the redefining of disciplinary hierarchies.

II. Rabbinic Pluralism and Interpretation The reciprocity of subject and object—central in the book on religious knowledge And From There Shall You Seek—also plays a significant role in Soloveitchik’s elaboration of a disciplinary pluralism, his validation of the possibility of different kinds of truth claims; the rehabilitation of interpretation; and the defense of the disciplinary autonomy of religious philosophy. Though the arguments of Halakhic Mind are unabashedly enmeshed in the languages of philosophy and the history of science, they are also founded on the Aristotelian conception of knowledge—the unity of knower and known. Soloveitchik’s argument functions on many levels; in one account, his argument traces intellectual history through the shifting fortunes of disciplines, and the changing of disciplinary hierarchies over the centuries. In the narrative that Soloveitchik tells, both the humanist and religious philosopher had been forced, after the advent of modern science, into the posture of apologist, defending religious experience in relation to the more authoritative truth claims of both science and a new empirical philosophy. Carrying the burden of objectivity as inherited from Newton, the humanist of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, as Soloveitchik defines him, had largely accepted the objectivist conclusions of the scientist. The humanist had acceded rationality, knowledge and objectivity to the scientist, embracing for himself an increasingly romantic, subjectivist, and mystical world view. If the scientist had

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claimed the realm of objectivity, then the humanist was left, sometimes reluctantly, with an increasingly impoverished sense of subjectivity. In this narrative, subject and object are sundered not only in epistemological terms, but also disciplinary terms, with the scientist inhabiting an objectivist realm of “truth,” and the humanist, left with an increasingly mystical, emotional and subjective sphere. The social scientist and religious philosopher, however, acceded to the “scientifically purified world” available to the privileged perspective of the so‑called neutral observer, accepting the epistemological assumptions bequeathed by the Newtonian scientist (1986, p. 7) As a result, “the philosophy of religion could not progress” and was left to be a mere disciplinary apologist for the Newtonian scientist (p. 39). For the new avatars of the human and social sciences, the models and priorities of Newtonian science were adopted. Such models emphasized the importance of objectivity, and a non‑situated rationality which adjudicated cultural, religious, and social phenomena from an ostensibly external perspective. In Soloveitchik’s account, the quantum physicist, in some ways the hero of Halakhic Mind, mediating between the “subjectivity” of the humanist and the “objectivity” of the classical physicist, undermines the subject‑object dichotomy instated by Newtonian science. The classical scientist maintained a belief in the so‑called objective world in its autonomy, as well as the kind of disengaged observer it implied. The modern physicist, by contrast, acknowledged that the paradigms and structures of science were themselves constructs designed to elicit the truth of the “real.” If the Newtonian philosopher had assumed a perspective of neutral objectivity, the quantum physicist acknowledged that the scientist and his experimental paradigms help to create the reality he surveys. The quantum acknowledgement of the “reciprocal relation of phenomenon and experiment” demands, Soloveitchik writes, that the relation “between subject and object must come up for reconsideration,” and that the “claim of the natural sciences to absolute objectivity must undergo a thorough revision” (p. 25). Subjectivity and objectivity were not, as both the Newtonian scientist and “modern metaphysician” had agreed, independent realms, but reciprocally determining.

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The re‑introduction, and by extension interpretation, of the subject reinstates, in quantum scientific terms, the Aristotelian emphasis on the interrelation of subject and object. Formulating what he conceives as a quantum update of Aristotelian thought, Soloveitchik writes: “contemporary epistemology has no ontological hierarchy and considers the direction between subjectivity and objectivity to be only directional” (p. 76). Pure subjectivity and pure objectivity are simply limiting abstract cases: “we do not find two different components, the subjective and the objective, but one unified phenomenon” (p. 66). Quantum physics shows that aspects of “reality”—the “given”—are only revealed depending upon the nature of the various subjective interventions.4 For Soloveitchik, the subjective component affirmed to be part of quantum observation allowed the re‑introduction of interpretation into the very discipline that had most denied its continued necessity. The world is affected by the “very act of observing,” and the so‑called “pristine object” becomes “transformed” through its “merger”—again, in Soloveitchik’s work, the quantum adaptation of Aristotle—with the subject (p. 25). For Soloveitchik, the quantum affirmation of the Aristotelian insight about the nature of knowledge allows the religious philosopher to free himself from the concepts of objectivity enshrined in classical Newtonian science. Causal or etiological explanations, borrowed from the sciences, providing certain and simplistic explanations—dependent on an external perspective of objectivity—yield, in Soloveitchik’s work, to a “thickness” of description and interpretation (p. 34). Soloveitchik’s use of the term “thickness” is felicitous, for his work, like that of the anthropologist Clifford Geertz after him, rejects the presumptive rationalizations of the traditional social sciences (from the ostensible external and neutral perspective) offering instead multiple interpretations and descriptions (p. 17). The methodology of the quantum physicist, translated for the religious philosopher, takes the latter out of the influence of the Newtonian

4



On the controversy surrounding the humanist, especially literary critical embrace of quantum science to push a post‑structuralist and ostensibly relativist agenda, especially the “Sokal Affair,” see http://www.h‑net.org/~nexa/ sokal/. See also Montag, 1997, 90–91.

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allowing for “a multidimensional religious outlook,” and the possibility of a pluralism of different approaches (p. 88). No longer “limited to causal designs” bequeathed by scientists advocating epistemologies of objectivity, the philosopher of religion engages in a process which always requires and encourages “further exploration”—indeed, this is the nature of interpretation. What Soloveitchik calls “our pluralistic cognitive approach,” and his “methodological heterogeneity,” is warranted by “ontological heterogeneity”: the complexity and multiplicity of the “given” assures that the “philosopher may gain access to reality in a manner alien to the physicist and biologist” (pp. 23, 16). Before the works of Thomas Kuhn and other revolutionary work in the history and philosophy of science, with their emphasis on changing and multiple paradigms, Soloveitchik argues for religious knowledge— among other forms—which is independent, autonomous, and internally validating. For Soloveitchik, the realm of religious experience, producing a plurality of perspectives, cannot be explained away through the causal analysis inherited from the so‑called objectivist perspective of the sciences. The “profound religious mind” is “averse to the platitudes” which claim to “circumscribe”—even render transparent—“the religious act” from an external perspective. As Soloveitchik writes, in the act of etiological explanation, “meaningful content” and “essential significance” are eschewed (p. 97). The etiological perspective provides functional explanations: for example, when Jewish dietary laws are reduced to “hygienic or sanitary considerations,” or the Sabbath reduced to a justification for priestly rest (p. 93).5 The elaboration of a singular external cause—the province of etiology—for Soloveitchik never exhausts the “given,” nor does it allow for the kind of “penetrative” acts of interpretation which constitute religious acts beyond their merely “technical discipline.” That is to say, the elaboration of religious acts from within an internal perspective—not the ostensibly disengaged and objectivist perspective that had been dominant in the social sciences, and even humanities—allows for multiple and autonomous sets of descriptions of the world of religious acts and texts.

5

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For etiological readings of the Bible, see Kugel, 2007, and my review (2010).

On Abandoning Aristotle: Love in Psychoanalysis and Jewish Philosophy

The religious personality—here again the Aristotelian resonances are clear—“finds delight in such interpretations” (p. 98). Released from the passivity and inaction—the so‑called neutral contemplation of the real— that had been bequeathed by the Newtonian, Soloveitchik elaborates the grounds for an autonomous religious philosophy cultivating the infinite and mysterious “spheres of interpretation.”

III. Psychoanalytic Pluralism Jonathan Lear, University of Chicago classicist and psychoanalyst, similarly turns to Aristotelian conceptions of knowledge, but does so to elaborate his Freudian conception of the psyche. The title of Lear’s early work on Aristotle, The Desire to Understand, suggests the Freudian turn toward “desire” his work eventually takes. Love and Its Place in Nature, published just two years after The Desire to Understand, consistently registers the presence of Aristotelian epistemology, with consequences for an understanding of knowledge as unity in regard to the self and the world. Though Lear’s Freud is, in many ways, a creation in the image of Aristotle—a philosophical Freud—the Aristotelian framework fails to be a possible precedent for Lear’s developmental conception of the psyche based on love. As we shall see, Soloveitchik embraces an Aristotle transformed by Maimonides in which not only desire but divine love plays a role; so Lear elaborates his own notion of a reciprocal love also through the transformation and eventual abandonment of Aristotle. Lear’s embrace of Aristotle, as well as his rejection of him, are equally important in what amounts to his idiosyncratic creation of Freud, a hybrid product of the appropriation and transformation of Loewald’s Freudian registers into the philosophical languages of Aristotle. As Lear describes the knowledge of the self that takes place through sublimation, mind, in the process of active contemplation is “at its highest level of activity,” which Aristotle calls “divine” (1990, p. 215). Lear writes, again alluding to Aristotle, “Humans distinguish themselves from the rest of nature by the fact that they can participate in the divine act of understanding” with the bestowing of subjective form upon the matter of the object world. In this Aristotelian rendering, the human partakes of the divine through imitation of the divine form of understanding. As Lear

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has it, love is the process that works “actively” both “in and through [the] mind” (p. 215). In Lear’s Freudian appropriation of Aristotle, however, it is the unconscious that takes the place of Aristotle’s world of the “creaturely,” and the interpretations of the subject that take the place of divine understanding. Subject and object, modified for the Freudian context, are still framed by the ideal of the unity of knower and known. The subject at once distinguishes himself from the unconscious—the drives, dreams, etc.—and unifies with them (a process detailed in the section below on sublimation) in an act of knowing. The questioning of the subject‑object distinction, central for his conception of psychic health, also serves Lear in the defense of the autonomous validity of psychoanalysis from the attacks emanating from the sensibility inherited from seventeenth‑ century science. Like Soloveitchik, Lear views the epistemological models bequeathed by early modern science and philosophy as impinging upon the “human.” From his perspective, every sphere of knowledge, even the scientific, must answer to the criteria of love. When one is “concerned with the human realm,” Lear writes, “the objective use of objectivity closes down questions,” and the “subjective use of objectivity opens them up” (2003, p. 50).6 In Lear’s innovative lexicon, “the objective use of objectivity” refers to older scientific models, the presupposition and assumption of a non‑situated view point, while the subjective use of objectivity implies a relationship between knower and known. Lear cites Loewald as an origin of the perspective in which subject and object are mutually defining, but inflects his representation of the psychoanalytic conception with the precedent Aristotelian of the unity of mind and world achieved through active thought (p. 51). Soloveitchik had questioned Newtonian assumptions about objectivity in order to find a place for the religious philosopher within a disciplinary universe dominated by the sciences. Lear, a half a century later, also questioning the “scientific image” of objectivity, more audaciously redefines the disciplinary landscape, giving priority not to science, but to an epistemology based on love (1990, p. 210). Lear’s Therapeutic Action in some sense provides a re‑working of the precedent essay by Loewald, “On the Therapeutic Action of Psychoanalysis” (2000, pp. 221‑56).

6

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Even “scientific detachment in its genuine form, far from excluding love is based on it” (Lear, 2005, p. 44). Both “scientific spirit” and “care for the object,” the former emphasizing an objective aspect, the latter a subjective one, are compatible. Lear, again echoing Loewald’s clinical writings, affirms that “in our most dispassionate and objective moments we manifest our greatest love.”7 In language confounding both that of the traditional scientist and philosopher, Lear asserts that “there is a certain kind of passion in our dispassion,” and that the object only reveals itself in its complexity—no singular perspective is exhaustive—through the right kind of subjective glance (p. 51). In the quantum terms that Soloveitchik espoused, different experimental frames reveal different aspects of an object, thus licensing interpretation in the realm that had been dominated by the sciences. Reading Soloveitchik through Lear’s lexicon, it is only the right kind of experimental frame—which in itself can be understood as an expression of “care”—which reveals the variegated nature of the object. As Lear writes, “we shape ourselves into a certain kind of subject, a scientist, when we discipline ourselves into relating objectively to objects” (p. 44). That is, the right kind of attention—whether an analytical attentiveness or a set of scientific hypothesis—allows for the object world to be known. Thus, the objectivity that is subjectively elicited is always just such, rendered present through the subjective care and “respect” with which one attends to the object. So Lear writes that love not only “permits objectivity,” but also, counter‑intuitively, “requires it” (p. 55). Acknowledging the separateness and integrity of the object is itself an act of bestowing attention, therefore an act of love, entailing in the end a unity of knowledge, but based first on differentiation. Love is not merely derivative of mystical cleaving: the respect for the object—the acknowledgement that it is “to a certain extent, self‑standing”—is not only the pre‑requisite, but itself a component, of love (p. 44). For Lear, only when one becomes the right kind of subject—one who desires to know, for him an act of love—will one see the world with “the appropriate objectivity” (p. 86). This objectivity, on the other side of the paradox, is the pre‑requisite for 7



See also Freud, 1912, pp. 111–12.

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an engaged interpretation, based in Aristotle’s conception of unity of knower and known. That is, only with the right kind of care—a striving toward unity—will objects “reveal themselves in their many facets and dimensions” (p. 44). Turning to quantum physics to undermine the priority of scientific knowledge, Soloveitchik maps out a place for religious philosophy; even more aggressively, Lear proposes re‑mapping the contours of science. For if love is, as Lear writes, “a basic force,” there ought to be absolutely “no external vantage point from which a radical evaluation could occur” (1990, p. 207). Indeed, it is not so much that psychoanalysis has to apologize for its methods, but given what Lear identifies as Freud’s “postulation of love,” science itself must re‑elaborate its methodology to incorporate love. “If science is to capture human reality, its bounds and methods must be re‑drawn”; science itself is, after all, an act of unification, “a development of higher complexity, an act of love” (pp. 220‑21). The question for Lear is not whether psychoanalysis occupies, as those wielding objectivist scientific models suggest, the lowest epistemological and disciplinary place, but whether the epistemological grounds of the sciences must themselves be redrawn to reflect their activity as one of love. The resistance to psychoanalysis thus parallels the resistance to the activity of interpretation, informed by the assumption that the real is transparent, and unambiguously available to a neutral perspective. We are driven, Lear writes, by a “need for an Archimedean point, an absolutely objective perspective,” and by the belief “that any ’internal’ validation must be non‑objective.” Lear, like Soloveitchik, locates in the seventeenth century the postulation of an “objective view of the world”—not from any particular perspective, but from “no perspective at all” (210). Because “psychoanalytic interpretation can only be validated within the context of a psychoanalytic therapy,” that is, from its own internal perspective, “the objection goes, psychoanalysis cannot be an ’objective science’” (pp. 216‑17). However, given Lear’s Aristotelian assertion of the interrelation of subject and object, neither a position of neutral observation nor the postulation of an unmediated objective reality are viable. The fantasy of an “Archimedean perspective,” as well as that

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of a transparently knowable object world, give way to the acknowledgement of the situated nature of all knowledge. For Soloveitchik, the religious philosopher, the presumption of inert religious acts to be neatly organized and correlated, assimilated into the etiological schemes of the human scientist, not only eclipses the interpretive act, but also obscures the variegated meanings implicit within them. For Lear, as well, the “the external perspective” cannot and does not “give us the way things really are” (p. 210). There are no external interpretive keys to psychic phenomenon, no lexicons of the psyche independent of the individual consciousness in which they are situated. The acknowledgement of the importance of subjectivity does not mean, Lear warns, “that anything goes, but it does mean that we need to look at the various ways we live with a concept, rather than assume that a fixed meaning is forever imposed on us” (p. 52). In therapeutic terms—and “therapeutic action” is an accommodation of the Aristotelian conception of knowledge as action into a psychoanalytic framework—“one cannot abstract from a person’s subjective experience without making mysterious what it is for him to be” (p. 220). For Lear, there is no perspective “outside of love”; as he writes, the perspective outside of love as the engaged activity of knowledge is one of “developmental failure and pathology” (p. 211). In Soloveitchik’s appropriation of Aristotle through Maimonides, the failure of knowledge as an activity of unification results in the split of subject and object. In Lear’s work, that split, characterized by the denial of relationship, is construed as psychic illness. The argument for the disciplinary autonomy of psychoanalysis, in this light, is a plea not only for the independence of a discipline, or even an affirmation of disciplinary pluralism and the validity of multiple internally validating interpretive frameworks, but also for a return through a re‑evaluation of the mechanisms of knowledge to an epistemology of love, to psychic health, both individually and culturally.

IV. Beyond Aristotle, the Necessity of Love Lear’s epistemology, with the emphasis on desire and the unity of knower and known, is Aristotelian, though like Soloveitchik he also abandons Aristotle. Lear’s interrogation of the claims of Aristotle’s Metaphysics

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and the critique of Aristotle’s highest form of human life show a path leading to Freud. In Love and Its Place in Nature, Lear first re‑makes Freud in an Aristotelian image, but eventually turns to a Freud of his own creation to provide an element of love absent in the classical antecedent. Indeed, for all the emphasis on the unity of knower and known informed by desire in Aristotle, a notion of reciprocal love, crucial, as Lear writes, for the developing individual, is absent. Love, for Lear, is the very basis for personal autonomy, “the condition for the possibility of subjectivity” (p. 173). That is, the active knowledge of the self and its developmental tendency must be nourished in a framework that encourages love. For, Lear, in pragmatic terms, love is constitutive of the individual: the presence of “loving figures” helps “constitute psychic structures sufficiently rich to enable a person to care about himself” (p. 181). Only through the internalization of these external caring relations (note the importance of the relationship between external and internal worlds) does there emerge “a creature sufficiently reflective and self‑aware to deserve the title of ’individual’” (p. 181). Lear believes that the human personality develops as a consequence of a world informed by love, not just by loving parents or family, but figuring as a sort of cosmic principle. Lear remains faithful to the mechanism of Aristotelian knowledge as a force of unity driven by desire, but he innovates a force of love, not found in Freud, as a framework for the developmental thrust of the individual.8 Lear’s excursus on love may read as verging on excess, a panegyric in praise of love: Let us count the ways of love. Love is active. It flows through humans, but it is larger than human life. It is through love that humans, and the rest of living nature, acquire form. Love tends towards higher organization and form, but humans do not acquire form passively being affected by love. What it is for love to run through a person is that he himself becomes a locus of activity. That is what it is for love to permeate our nature. (p. 219)



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Lear associates the innovation of love as a “developmental force in the world” with Freud, while conceding that Freud himself was “resistant to following the line of thought” (2005, p. 165). Thus, the ostensibly Freudian “postulation of love” reads as a creation of Lear himself.

On Abandoning Aristotle: Love in Psychoanalysis and Jewish Philosophy

Though the Aristotelian lexicon is present, with the emphasis on form, activity, and an epistemology presuming unity, Aristotle himself is not a source for a love “larger than human life,” which permeates the world and human nature. The desire for union, though the engine of Aristotelian thought is eventually, as Lear explains in his earlier work, abandoned by the Aristotle’s ideal contemplative figure, who emulating the divine, becomes a person who had once desired. For when engaged in that contemplative act of understanding, when the “understander” comprehends the world “that is meant to be understood,” he re‑enacts a divine process in its self‑sufficiency that itself transcends desire. Such “divine self‑sufficiency” is, for Aristotle, “the absolute identity of thought and object,” the “paradigm of metaphysical flourishing” (1988, p. 313). Realizing his highest nature, the contemplative figure, Lear explains, achieves a metaphysical flourishing that is “perfectly general and impersonal.” In this embrace of the contemplative life, “he leaves the nooks and crannies of his personality behind” (p. 316). Reading The Desire to Understand in hindsight, acknowledging the turn toward Freud, Lear can be seen to acknowledge that, from a Freudian perspective, neither the Aristotelian philosopher nor the universe he inhabits can provide a model for love as a developmental process. The Aristotelian divine is such that man, at his highest level, aspiring to bridge the “gap between [the] divine and natural world[s],” will satisfy his desire to understand, but in so doing will “transcend his own nature precisely at the point he finally realizes it” (p. 312). At the very moment that he most becomes human, realizing his species imperative and imitating the processes of divine knowledge, the contemplative figure abandons what had made him most human in his particularity: the desire to know. That is, when contemplative man attains this highest form of being, in doing so, he must “ultimately leave himself behind.” Aristotelian contemplative man becomes himself—most human and divine—in abandoning his particularity, in choosing himself as “importantly unmanly” (p. 312; emphasis added). Where Lear’s psychoanalytic turn emphasizes the importance of individuation and autonomy, the model of the Aristotelian philosopher of the Metaphysics, with its emphasis on the contemplative

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life, abandons the particularities of the individual life, the demands of the subject, for the universal. Such a pursuit is, in imitation of the divine, a “deeply impersonal affair,” as the contemplative philosopher comes to see “that the merely human perspective” (p. 318) is merely human, the adverb “merely” when it comes to qualify the human, unthinkable from Lear’s later Freudian perspective. The final Aristotelian embrace of a form of knowledge, devoid of the particularities of the human—stripped finally of desire and devoid of love—is presupposed on a notion of the divine as self‑sufficient and a demand to emulate this divine conception through transcendence of the personal. The extent to which Lear’s rhetoric in praise of love may be surprising corresponds to the extent to which the assertion of a source of love in the world, from the Aristotelian perspective, is itself a non‑sequitur, and must be read as something like a metaphysical—if not a cosmological even theological—innovation. The affirmation that “man is not just a donor of love,” but also ’a recipient,” from within the Aristotelian frame, betrays faith in a world of love defying rational explanation (1990, p. 186). What I am calling a theological innovation to Lear’s work as a way of moving on from Aristotelian assumptions—belief in “love as a force permeating animate nature”—emerges more clearly in relation to the parallel rejection of Aristotle in Soloveitchik’s work. In this way, Soloveitchik’s explicitly theological languages help elaborate the evolution of Lear’s thoughts. From the Maimonidean perspective that he advocates, Soloveitchik also posits individual autonomy and agency, dependent upon an active form of love in the world—in a Jewish framework, a God who loves. Soloveitchik’s conception of individual agency and responsibility require, to use Lear’s terms, a source of love in the world. For him, the Maimonidean departure from Aristotle makes that possible. Soloveitchik writes, “Judaism rejects the passive tranquility of the Aristotelian dianoetic [i.e., intellectual] life, which is quiet, focused on itself, knowing what is to be known without creative action.” The self‑sufficiency of “contemplative cognition”—without “dynamic initiative or practical action”—has “no impact” (2008, pp. 104‑5). The lack of a component of action in the figure of the Aristotelian contemplative man, Soloveitchik explains, originates in the absence of love in the world, the absence of a God who loves.

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“Love in Aristotelian philosophy,” Soloveitchik writes, “is one way: the world yearns for the Prime Mover, without experiencing reciprocal love.” Aristotle’s Prime Mover is “aloof from the world and does not long for it” (p. 153). Since there is no “directed Providence,” and the Aristotelian divine lacks “desire or intention,” knowledge and emotion are split (p. 154). As contemplation defines the divine exclusively, the contemplative man who emulates the divine will aspire toward knowledge while rejecting desire. The Aristotelian God, who as Lear writes is self‑sufficient, solicits a parallel human ideal, a contemplative figure who is self‑sufficient, not one who acknowledges desire, connection, and love. As Soloveitchik explains, the Aristotelian divine is only a “teleological and necessary cause,” a philosophical necessity (p. 153). The Maimonidean innovation, an Aristotle whom Soloveitchik both embraces and helps to construct, is a God who loves his creation such that man, in Lear’s terms, is both donor and recipient of love. In such love, knowledge and desire are not only joined, but given a divine imprimatur, and made a metaphysical force in the universe. The God who loves his creation sets a model of cognition—a unity of knower and known—where the paradigm of divine love, or love as a “cosmic metaphysical principle,” is the ground for human activity. For just as God is joined to the world through love as an active force, so man joins with the world actively through love. “The unity of the knower and the known,” Soloveitchik writes, “which is one of the main principles of Maimonides’ theory, occurs only in a cognition imbued with love.” When “affects blend with the intellect,” both their natures change, “and they become less passive.” The man who follows the paradigm of divine love “rids himself of ethical indifference”; “the concrete person” and not a figure of abstract impersonality remains committed to knowledge of the particularity of both himself and the world (1983, p. 141). Love is thus an active force, through which knowledge, emulating the divine, transforms into choice of the particular. In place of the passivity bred through the aspiration for self‑sufficiency and the experience “of involuntary impressions,” desire, choice, and intention are cultivated so that “free activity blossoms” (2008, p. 156). So central is the “metaphysical principle” of love to Soloveitchik’s understanding of autonomy and free will—to man’s ethical and psychological

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nature—that he underlines it as a fundamental principle of Jewish belief: “Anyone who says that Judaism commands the individual to love God but does not promise him reciprocal love is a heretic” (p. 154). Soloveitchik objects to those predecessors who suspected that Maimonides may have “agreed with the teaching of Aristotelian philosophy that the yearnings of the world for God are one‑way, without any reciprocal yearnings.” He rather argues that God cares “about maintaining a love relationship between Himself and His Creatures” (ibid.). Like in Lear, individual autonomy and creativity are dependent on faith in a precedent, non‑human source of love, which itself allows for the possibility of reciprocal love, as well as serving as the internal engine for transformation of the self. Focusing on Soloveitchik’s use of Maimonides, we can see the extent to which Lear’s emphasis on love emerges as a radical innovation serving his Freudian conception of individual development. Aristotle may provide the epistemological grounds for a unity of knower and known, but only the metaphysical presence of a force of love in the universe turns knowledge into a means of development, for Lear, of psychic transformation. To say that Lear’s move to introduce love in the world is in excess of his own prose, an affirmation that emerges unexpectedly, even incongruously in relation to the precedent argument, is to say that the postulation of love is in some sense an unwarranted leap. It is as if Lear, immersed in Aristotle, has suddenly fallen in love with love, and the eruption of his prose at the end of Love and Its Place in Nature signals an attempt to find the right level of being to ascribe to this “force.” In the rhetorical terms of the argument he elaborates, the sense of the creative self requires not only the abandonment of Aristotle, but also the positing of this very force of cosmic love, a move that shows Lear evidencing unacknowledged theological affiliations, in particular with Judaism. Further, reversing the terms of engagement, to the degree that Lear’s positing of love, whether of genuine Freudian provenance or not, reads as a non‑sequitur shows the extent to which the positing of a Jewish God who loves is an equally startling, radical innovation. That is, the trajectory of Lear’s work—from Aristotelian knowledge to Freudian love—has, when read in relationship to Soloveitchik’s work, the effect of foregrounding the novelty of a monotheism that posits a beneficent and loving God. Coming from the place

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of philosophy, whether the destination is psychoanalysis or Judaism, a cosmic force of love—Soloveitchik’s God of the Torah or Lear’s immanent divine force—reads as a radical innovation. The possibility of individuation depends upon the parallel set of innovations in Lear and Soloveitchik, through sublimation and teshuva respectively.

V. Sublimation Soloveitchik’s emphasis on the Maimonidean transformation of Aristotelian epistemology permitted an understanding of the stakes invested in Lear’s metaphysics of love, and how the philosophical trajectory of his own work models a shift in sensibility from the perspective of Athens to Jerusalem. Foregrounding Lear’s conception of sublimation allows for insights into Soloveitchik’s Jewish notion of repentance, or teshuva. More than that, articulating the languages of sublimation and employing them to elaborate teshuva shows the extent to which psychoanalytic discourses provide an explication of the Jewish concept, and, in a sense, fulfill it. Turning towards psychoanalytic languages to understand teshuva is not then an example of what Emanuel Levinas calls translating the Hebrew into the language of the Greek (1994, p. 52). In this reading, the psychoanalytic discourses articulated by Lear emerge as a privileged lens for allowing the complexities and nuances of teshuva to emerge. Lear’s conception of sublimation, what he describes as “a task of love,” the “love manifest in psychological activity,” has its origins in Loewald’s precedent understanding of the Freudian concept. For Lear, as for Loewald, the process takes centrality: the latter asserts that “the transformation of ’unconscious modes’” is the “original and enduring quest of psychoanalysis” (2000, p. 545).9 For both figures, sublimation entails first the acknowledgement of psychic differentiation, and only then unification (Lear, 1990, pp. 174, 181). The drives are first acknowledged as a part of the self, though constituted by forces of past psychic history outside of an individual’s control. Because of the forces of repression, the

9

See Loewald, Sublimation: Inquiries in the Theoretical Psychoanalysis (2000, pp. 435‑517); as well as Psychoanalysis and the History of the Individual (2000, pp. 529‑79).

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drives are alienated, and therefore remain unacknowledged. Lear writes, “Repression is the archaic activity by which I deny that certain drives are part of me” (p. 173). The process of individuation, or the activity of love, first acknowledges the existence of those drives and psychic forces, desires that may appear at first as “aliens pounding at the gates,” and then integrates them into the self (p. 174). The unity of subject and object, here the knowing self and the drives, is achieved through a knowledge based upon love allowing, as Lear writes, for “a transformation of the relation … instinctual life” (p. 165). The psychoanalytic love that Lear advocates first acknowledges the fundamental difference of the drives, and only then assimilates them into the self. Thus the acknowledgment of difference precedes the psychic gesture of unification. Freud’s principle “where it was, there I shall become” is one in which the given of the past and the ideal self of the future transform into the self of the present. In other words, the loving acknowledgment that the strangers at the gates are indeed part of the self in fact provides the only means through which, to continue the metaphor, the future destiny of the city can be determined (p. 173). That is, the integrative movement that allows the becoming self of ego and super‑ego, or the ideal self, to find its origins in the givens of psychic life. What began as an act of differentiation—and cognizing the “aliens” is itself, as an act of recognition, an act of love—transforms into an act of identification, the acknowledgement of what had been construed as the merely “given” as part of one’s own “active mind.” In Loewald’s terms, “unconscious forms of experiencing” are integrated into the “more lucid life of the adult mind” (2000, p. 545). For Lear, this is the paradigm activity of interpretation, understood as internally validating. For the “drives,” taking the place of the world of living creatures in the Aristotelian world, are “striving towards being understood” (1990, p. 215). In another transformation of Aristotelian language, the striving of the created world toward intelligibility, for matter to acquire form, the particular human capacity to understand transforms into a psychic act of unification through interpretation. With the Aristotelian cosmos internalized, the unconscious standing in for God’s creation, the subject’s “good interpretation … both relieves the pressure of an instinctual wish and informs its content.” Here subject and

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object merge internally: the good interpretation, through the right kind of attention, allows the drives to speak, but it is precisely because the subject—or the interpretation—is oriented toward the drives in the right way that they can speak. Indeed, for Lear, “the act of understanding of the wish is also an expression of the wish at its highest form of development” (p. 213). Sublimation in this sense is not the “defensive” translation of the drives or wishes into some kind of foreign register, as is sometimes conventionally assumed, but what Loewald calls “genuine appropriation,” the means by which the interpretive act, informed by care or attention, brings unity to the psyche, or re‑elaborates a unity which, even in its denial, was always present (2000, p. 578). The human soul, as Lear writes, “is a psychological achievement,” and thus the “fundamental issue cannot be merely internal harmony, but whether one has made one’s soul one’s own” (1990, p. 188). Harmony, for Lear, presupposes disparate psychic entities in a relationship, while the appropriation of the soul as one’s own, the choosing of the self, also entails an act of unification. What had at first seemed foreign is now “through the validation of a good interpretation” shown to have paradoxically both been given voice to by the interpretation and provided the impetus for it. This paradigm act of interpretation is also the paradigm activity of responsibility: “There is the relief in taking another step from passivity to activity, from a position in which one’s life is lived by meanings over which one has little understanding or control to a position in which one actively lives according to meanings one has helped to shape” (p. 216). Indeed, as Lear writes, it is the very act of taking responsibility that defines the interpretive act: “accepting responsibility is an active love” (p. 172). For Lear, this activity as interpretive engagement is rendered most powerfully in his figuration of Oedipus. From a conventional psychoanalytical point of view, Lear writes, Oedipus is viewed as determined by his fate: the “given,” past history, is always present in a way that makes one think that one’s fate is already determined—Oedipus is the paradigm figure of this concept. However, in Lear’s reading, whatever the gods ordained, Oedipus nonetheless says, “the fact is that I did it.” In the claim at the end of Oedipus Rex—“I am Oedipus”—echoing the unconscious utterance of that

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same claim in the beginning of the play, he becomes, through the act of responsibility, a “locus of activity,” and as a consequence “demands to be distinguished from the rest of nature” (pp. 170‑71). The failure of taking such responsibility means a person defined only, again the Aristotelian language, “as a potentiality, as something” (Lear does not even accord this potentiality human agency): he is only something that might come into being (pp. 188). One who takes responsibility for the “given,” whether personal history, the drives, or dreams, engages in the active knowledge by which the self is transformed. Lear’s Oedipus thus declares: “I am not just a passive sufferer of divine or cosmic forces, I am not just sunk in nature, I act” (p. 171). For Lear, a creative relationship to the “given,” a responsibility—this is the nature of love—to the drives is the origin of genuine freedom and individuation. Only love, taking responsibility for the self, allows for the transcendence of potentiality and the possibility of free activity.

VI. Teshuva “From Plato and Aristotle,” Soloveitchik writes, to “the psychoanalytic school of Freud and his followers, who sought to probe the depth of man’s subconscious, the problem of dualism keeps reappearing and demanding its resolution” (1983, p. 109).10 In Soloveitchik’s writing, the problem of dualism is addressed and resolved through the human imitation of divine activity, the act of creation. But the creation to which Soloveitchik refers is teshuva, translated as repentance, but meaning more literally “return,” with a set of resonances, made clearer in relation to Lear’s psychoanalytic register. Soloveitchik’s conception of teshuva is one of creative self‑fashioning, which gives full recognition to the powers of a recondite, even apparently recalcitrant past. In contrast to the normative religious figure— that of Soloveitchik’s generic homo religiosus—who sees repentance as a Soloveitchik’s perspective on Freud, whether based on firsthand knowledge or not, is often hostile. In Out of the Whirlwind (2003), Soloveitchik very forcefully distinguishes his conception of internal life—“emotional experience”—with that of Freud, which he claims (a very different understanding of Freud from that of Lear) does not belong to the realm of “the interpretive” (pp. 188‑89).

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function of atonement, of divine agency alone; in Soloveitchik’s understanding, repentance is a creative act incumbent upon man. The homo religiosus “mourns for the yesterdays that are irretrievably past, the times that have long since sunk into the abyss of oblivion, the deeds that have vanished like shadows, facts that he will never be able to change” (p. 113). Psychic history, from this perspective, fully part of the past, can only elicit regret. The repentance achieved by means of atonement “is a wholly miraculous phenomenon made possible by the endless grace of God.” The man Soloveitchik calls “halakhic man” does not “fight the shadows of a dead past, nor does he grapple with deeds that have fallen into the distance” (p. 113). For him, the past is not “irretrievably lost,” but rather an intrinsic part of his psychic identity. Indeed, the very idea of teshuva presupposes a past that is still in some sense “alive,” for “it is impossible to regret a past that is already dead, lost in the abyss of oblivion” (p. 114). Here the dualism presupposed in conventional conceptions of repentance is transformed as the parts of the psyche, associated with aspects of time, merge together. Freud saw the id as corresponding to the past, the ego as an agent of the present, and the super ego as a possible image of an ideal future (1940, pp. 23, 206). As Loewald expresses it, psychic unity is presupposed upon the “interpenetration and mutual determination of the three temporal modes,” as well as the psychic agencies with which they are associated (2000, p. 546).11 For Soloveitchik, past, present, and future are separate as well, and also mutually intertwining: “a person may … abide in the shadow of a simultaneous past, present and future” (1983, p. 114). In the conventional model of the relationship between past and future, as Soloveitchik explains it, the past tyrannizes over the future, and determines the shape that the future will take. In this reading, the “given determines”—through a “causal lawfulness”—what the future will be The Freudian concept of nachtraglich may be a precursor to the “interpenetration” of temporal modes described by Loewald. The term, which, according to Laplanche and Pontalis (1973), Freud used “repeatedly and constantly,” challenges the “linear determinism” of the past’s influence on the present. Nachtraglich suggests “a conception of temporality” in which “consciousness constitutes its own past, constantly subjecting its meaning to revision in conformity with its ’project’” (pp. 111‑12).

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(p. 116). But where past and future remain “living,” the possibility of the relationship between them creates the dynamic from which teshuva and self‑creation emerge. For Soloveitchik, the model of a narrative about the self is borrowed from Jewish history, where past, present, and future are inter‑related, part of a divinely ordained plan. Just as there is an “eschaton”—an ideal toward which history tends on the national level, a collective redemption—so the individual elaborates his own eschaton, his ideal of a future to which to aspire (p. 118). Through the forward‑looking glance in sacred history for the “covenantal community,” the moment is transformed: “the fleeting evanescent moment is transformed into eternity” (p. 119). So also for the individual telling his own story, it is through the image of an ideal future that the past comes to life, undoing conventional causal relationship in which the past determines the future. Soloveitchik writes that the “cause is located in the past, but the direction of its development is determined by the future.” Past and future relate one to another as interacting psychic agencies. Both cause and effect appear in what he calls “active‑passive ’garb,’” and each influences and is influenced by the other. Indeed, past and future, the given of one’s personal life and the ideal future image, are attributed agency. The given of the past, as Lear would call it, takes its shape from the future: “the future imprints its stamp on the past and determines its image” (Soloveitchik, 1983, p. 115). But more than that, the past itself determines the future self that will come through the gesture of repentance to shape it. The unifying act of teshuva does not simply obliterate the past—which would be in psychoanalytic terms an “empty hysterical gesture”—but cultivates the resources inherent in the past through which the future and in turn a new past are created (Lear, 1990, p. 179). Where for Lear, the right kind of interpretation simultaneously allows the drives to be understood and emerges as a consequence of those drives, for Soloveitchik, the past self contributes to producing the future ideal self through which a new past and self, as it were, come into being. Past and future are no longer opposed, but there is “a true symbiotic, synergistic relationship” (1983, p. 115). The past is not held at a distant or renounced, as in the more conventional dualist notions of atonement, but cultivated rather for

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the possibilities it has within it. To be sure, as Soloveitchik argues in From There Shall You Seek, there are different “agencies,” parts of the soul that are split one from the other. The pre‑requisite for psychic unity—another appropriation and transformation of Aristotelian epistemology—is the recognition of that precedent dualism. In Lear’s terms, the “strangers at the gate” cannot be re‑integrated into the city without the precedent recognition of their separateness. Unity, in Aristotelian thinking, is always presupposed first upon difference, on granting, in this instance, the given its autonomous integrity, before the act of unification. This psychic synergy of past and future selves—Loewald’s interpenetration of temporal modes—for Soloveitchik has origins in the saying of the Talmudic sage Reish Lakish: “Great is repentance for deliberate sins are accounted to him as meritorious deeds” (p. 116). The repentance, through which the valence of past activities are reversed and changed from transgression to merit, the Talmud goes on to explain, is performed out of love, allowing the past to be transformed under the interpretive gaze of an ideal future (Yoma, 86b). A repentance performed out of fear may have the effect of neutralizing past transgressions, transforming them into actions that are considered retrospectively to be mere accidents to the soul, not integral to it. This model of repentance is closer to Soloveitchik’s conception of “atonement,” where the past ceases to have any living force, and is simply rendered null. Repentance out of “love,” however, in the Talmud’s conception, takes the given—in Soloveitchik’s lexicon, “transgression”—and transforms it into something new. The force of the interpretation tending toward development—the ideal image of the self that is projected by the repenting self—allows for a form of unification, and a change in status of the person: “Man, through repentance, creates himself, his own ’I’” (1983, p. 125). In the strange causality of teshuva, past actions do not bring about future events; rather the ideal of an unrealized future helps to recreate the past, according to a trajectory which is already implicit within it. As Soloveitchik writes, instead of “event a leading to event b, event b leads to a” so that a life narrative is not always already determined, but subject to change (p. 115). “Man cancels the law of identity” with teshuva; in repentance, the self becomes non‑identical to the self it once was; or put

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differently, teshuva activates an aspect of the self, even a self, that had once been dormant, “as much as to say, I am another person and am not the same man who committed these deeds” (p. 113). This activity is not just a hysterical assertion, the forced taking on of a new persona independent of recognition of the forces implicit in the self, but rather an achievement of psychic unity, based on not only divine love but also the internal mechanism of love that mirrors it. Indeed, the force of love in the world, so crucial to Lear, present for Soloveitchik simply in the God who loves and chooses his creation, makes it possible for man to manifest a loving relationship with himself. In this sense, man chooses to choose himself. The cause under direction of the future can take many paths. The creation of a new “I” comes through eliciting and choosing the causes in the past, already present which the right notion of futurity elicits. In this instance, one hears an echo of Freud’s “where id was, ego shall be.” For when man, as Soloveitchik writes, “molds the image of the past by infusing it with the future, the ’was’ is subordinated to ’the will be’” (p. 117). This becomes, to use Lear’s psychoanalytic terms once more, a “re‑drawing of the boundaries of the mental” (1990, p. 192): what had appeared to be forces conspiring against the integration of the soul and the creation of a new identity are in fact the agents of that internal harmony. The past, as Loewald writes, is “acquired” through the “creative development of the future” (2000, p. 547). Soloveitchik describes this self as cultivating continuity, both psychic and temporal. The integration between past, present, and future in the psyche is made possible by “the never‑ending process of self‑creation” (1983, p. 122). Without that continuity and the resulting bifurcation between an unredeemable past and an idealized future, there is only the determination by the causality that leads to passivity. “When today and tomorrow are dominated and controlled by yesterday, … [the] spiritual constancy and continuity … [whose] content is a never‑ending process of self‑creation simply disappears” (p. 122). In Soloveitchik, what amounts, in Lear’s terms, to a loving accommodation of that past—integration with an ideal future—is the beginning of an individuation based on creativity, but also engendering responsibility. “The primary mode of man’s existence,” Soloveitchik writes, “is the particular existence of the individual,

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who is both liable and responsible for his acts” (p. 125). For Lear, individuation, “determining the shape of the soul” (1990, p. 173), is achieved through overcoming the forces that encourage the individual to abdicate “his conscience to the external world,” to attribute agency to forces beyond him (p. 200). For Soloveitchik, “the man who has a ’particular existence of his own is not merely a passive, receptive creature’ but one who ’acts and creates’” (1983, p. 125). He is not, as Soloveitchik calls him, a passive “man of fate,” subject to forces over which he has no control, but the active “man of destiny” (1992, p. 151). The interpretive powers of the subject are engaged to transform the “given,” in both a universe and self informed by divine love. Finally, Soloveitchik’s conception of teshuva depends, as in Lear’s account of sublimation, on distancing from the Aristotelian antecedent, even while embracing it. “The process of development from possibility to entelechy [or actuality] is the fundamental principle of reality” (1983, p. 133). For the Aristotelian, the fruition of the contemplative life, and the celebration of the “theoretical life,” entails not the realization of “one’s own individuality, the potentiality that is latent in matter,” but rather “in the abstracting of form from matter” (ibid.; emphasis added). In Aristotle—Lear’s account also attests to this—there is a movement out of the particular, to abstract form. By contrast, creative action, for Soloveitchik and Lear, entails the embracing of the material given—in its very particularity, an action presupposed upon love—rather than its abandonment. Thus Soloveitchik employs an Aristotelian lexicon, inflected by love, to describe the relation of future ideal to the givens of past life. Though the soul, Soloveitchik writes, is grounded, citing a verse in Deuteronomy in “days past” (4:32), the individual “looks behind him and sees a hylic matter that awaits the reception of its form from the creative future” (1983, p. 122). The individual self was shaped by the past, but that self—in its hylic materiality—awaits further direction, a psychic transformation allowed, in Soloveitchik’s reading, through the divine precedent of love. In this way, for Soloveitchik, the Aristotelian giving of form is not one‑directional: one does not ignore the psychic reality and pull of “days past.” The creaturely, in its potentiality a mere Aristotelian

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factum, something to be acted upon, becomes active. “The hyle in this process of creation, must,” Soloveitchik writes, “ultimately be able to act, drawing upon its own resources” (p. 131; emphasis added). The self, even as it is transformed, maintains its integrity and particularity—it is not to be assimilated by the universal—and through the image of the future projected back, it finds, as it were, within itself its own resources. As Lear writes, “The individual develops not by abolishing the drives, but by taking them up and incorporating them into the life of the emerging person” (1990, p. 203). In Soloveitchik’s conception of teshuva, the imagined future is generated by the very desires—in Soloveitchik’s register, the transgressions—that may have caused a failure of development or the distancing from God. Those transgressions are not pushed away, but acknowledged to be—they are “taken up” as—the very energies that bring the repentant close to the divine. Like in the case of Lear, for Soloveitchik Aristotle remains a primary reference point even as his worldview is abandoned. “The dream of the Attic sage is the obliteration of particularity which is rooted in matter” (1983, p. 133). The ideal Aristotelian life—the contemplative one—abandons the particular, and the creativity that attends to it for the contemplation of the universal. Soloveitchik claims, “The pure, first form does not create, therefore, man is not obliged to create” (p. 133). For Soloveitchik, as Lear writes in different terms, “man is a response to love,” both a recipient and donor (1990, p. 219). Emulating the divine who loves is the beginning of an individuation based upon embracing the human, the creative self in all his particularity. In a reversal of Aristotelian conceptions of human fulfillment, it is through particularity that man most realizes himself: “With reference to all other creatures, only the universal has a true continual existence … but with respect to man, individual existence attains the height of true eternal being.” Indeed, the universal man, in the continued inversion of the Aristotelian model, is “passive to the extreme” and “creates nothing” (1983, p. 125). The divine love shown to the prophet, the apotheosis of the creative man, is for Soloveitchik not just an ontological privilege, a divine gift, but is “dependent on man himself” (p. 134). The prophet, defined as the man who most loves God, employing the cognitive resources of love to unify the soul, becomes,

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because of these efforts, most loved by God. In this sense, individuation, as in Lear, is not only a response to love, but also elicits divine love. The creature becomes a creator, the “object who is acted upon [by] a subject who acts” (p. 131). Before what Lear calls Freud’s innovation of love and the possibility of the developmental psyche enabled through sublimation is, for Soloveitchik and the Talmudic rabbis his work distills, teshuva and a life not only of “cognition and profound understanding,” but creation and renewal (p. 131).

VII. Man, Untranscended At the end of his book on Aristotle, Lear observes that in the abandonment of particularity, Aristotle’s notion of the contemplative life seems “unlovely” because it is by nature “unethical” (1988, pp. 313, 315). As Lear explains, the Aristotelian justification for the unethical is the possibility of embracing a life that participates in the divine. That is, in the Aristotelian framework, certain men “may have overwhelming reasons to lead an unethical life” in aspiring to “transcend the human and become divine” (p. 319). To the extent that the last pages of The Desire to Understand betray a tone of apologetic disappointment, they anticipate Lear’s embrace of a desire that does not lead to its ultimate abandonment, a place where desire and love retain their human form. For Aristotle, man’s fate as an always “enmattered” being testifies to the extent to which the contemplative ideal will always in some sense be a failure (p. 318). Lear’s Freudian commitments, read in retrospect, ultimately betray a disillusion with the Aristotelian account, and the embrace of an ethical and developmental imperative in the world that is not “merely,” but emphatically human. For Lear, Freud becomes the means through which the life—in the abstract— that is best to live becomes identical with the “life that is best for man”— as an individual—“to live” (p. 318). Soloveitchik, however, elaborates this identity in the figure of the halakhic man who emulates the divine not only through cognition but also love, and for whom emulation of the divine permits the expression of the human—in all of its material particularity and creative activity. Lear’s work, even in its explicitly non‑theological registers, reveals, though unintentionally, the power of the innovation of a Jewish

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worldview of a creator who both chooses and loves. Lear’s Aristotelian assumptions, and what reads as an incongruous and unexpected celebration of the cosmic principle of love, foregrounds not only his own conceptual innovation, but also, in parallel, the radical innovation of Judaism in relation to the worldview of the Greek. The innovation of love comes, in relation to the philosophical work of Aristotle, as a non‑sequitur in Lear’s work; the innovation of a divine God who loves and chooses might be seen as the radical non‑sequitur in world history, rather than the domesticated appearance it so often assumes in communities of believers. Further, Lear’s work, when read through Soloveitchik and the explicit critique of Aristotle, demonstrates that psychic health and individuation may depend not only upon parental and social, but also cosmological and what might be called theological frameworks. For Lear, it is only the presence of love in the world— “larger than human life”—that demands a developmental response from man (1990, p. 219). The parallel corollary insight: reading Soloveitchik through Lear’s psychoanalytic perspective, allows not only for a psychoanalytic explanation of a theological mechanism, but also serves as an interpretation, using Lear’s own hermeneutic model, allowing Soloveitchik’s sense of teshuva to better speak. That is, Lear’s psychic model in Love and Its Place in Nature—with the emphasis on a cosmic principle of love— becomes the means through which Soloveitchik’s own languages are to be understood. The transformative individualism at the center of Lear’s psychoanalytic worldview, and, for lack of a better phrase, the faith in love which informs it, reveals the complexity and nuance of what may be an antiquated religious concept. More than that, I am suggesting that Lear’s psychoanalytic sensibility based upon love can be read as a continuation, even a fulfillment—(Freud’s phylogenetic inheritance as a metaphor may not be out of place) of the antecedent rabbinic sensibility that Soloveitchik elaborates. Reading Lear and Soloveitchik in dialogue may have the effect that those committed to the rabbinic tradition may see psychoanalytic models as a means to better understand Jewish discourses, while those within psychoanalytic communities may have more reason to abandon the

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hostility toward religion, especially Judaism, initiated in Freud’s work.12 Soloveitchik may help those of us committed to psychoanalysis understand that theology—assumptions about the cosmos—may not only not be hostile to models of the developing psyche, but, in some ways, may be essential to them. Lear’s work may help those of us committed to Judaism understand that psychoanalytic models elaborate not only the psyche, but the neshama or soul. Further, Lear’s work may help us see that if Judaism, as Soloveitchik argues, introduced creativity into the world, then psychoanalysis may be the privileged inheritor and current expositor of that distinctly Jewish imperative of creative selfhood. Finally, for us, psychoanalysis and Judaism should no longer be conceived as antagonists, but partners (unlikely as they may seem), cultivating the autonomous psyche and the cultures that not only accommodate those souls, but nurture them.

REFERENCES Commentary on the Sokal Affair. (1996). http://www.h‑net.org/~nexa/ sokal/. Freud, S. (1912). Recommendations on Analytic Technique. Standard Edition 12:111‑20. ____. (1914). The Moses of Michelangelo. Standard Edition, 13:211‑38. ____. (1939). Moses and Monotheism. Standard Edition, 23:3‑137. ____. (1933). New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. Standard Edition, 22:3‑193. ____. (1940). An Outline of Psychoanalysis. Standard Edition, 23:141‑207. Geertz, C. (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Kolbrener, W. (2010). The real thing: How to read How to Read the Bible. Jewish Quarterly Review, 100(1):183‑89. Kugel, J. (2007). How to Read the Bible. New York: Free Press. On Freudian ambivalence about, even admiration for Judaism, see Moses and Monotheism’ (1939, p. 115) and The Moses of Michelangelo (1940, p. 233).

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Laplanche, J., & Pontalis, J. B. (1973). The Language of Psychoanalysis. London: Karnac Press. Lear, J. (1988). Aristotle: The Desire to Understand. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ____. (1990). Love and Its Place in Nature. New Haven: Yale University Press. ____Lear, J. (2005). Freud. New York: Routledge. ____. (2003). Therapeutic Action. New Haven: Yale University Press. Levinas, E. (1994). In the Time of the Nations. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Loewald, H. (2000). The Essential Loewald (N. Quist, Ed.). Hagerstown, MD: University Publishing Group. Montag, A. (1997) Communications. Tradition, 31(4):90‑91. Ravitzky, A. (1986). Rabbi J. B. Soloveitchik on human knowledge: Between Maimonidean and neo‑Kantian philosophy. Modern Judaism, 6(2):157‑88. Soloveitchik, J. (1984). Halakhic Man. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society. ____. (1986). Halakhic Mind. New York: Free Press. ____. (1992). Kol Dodi Dofek: It is the voice of my beloved that knocketh. In: B. H. Rosenberg (Ed.), Theological and Halakhic Reflections on the Holocaust (pp. 51‑117). Hoboken, NJ: Ktav Publishing House. ____. (2003). Out of the Whirlwind. New York: Ktav Publishing House. ____. (2008). From There Shall You Seek. New York: Ktav Publishing House.

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Bewilderments: The Story of the Spies Avivah Zornberg

The Change of Heart The narrative of the Spies, with its tragic aftermaths, lies at the very heart of Sefer Bamidbar—at the very heart, we might say, of the midbar, the wilderness, itself. This is the critical point, the great failure, which radically changes the future history of the people. As a result of this moment, the whole adult generation is condemned to sink into the sands; a new generation will fulfill the prophecies of redemption. Thus, in a sense, not only the future but the past too is re‑configured: the promises of the Exodus must be re‑interpreted. A delegation of princes is sent to spy out the Land. The spies bring back a report that reduces the people to terror and tears and the cry, “Is it not better for us to return to Egypt?… Let us appoint a leader and return to Egypt!” (14:3‑4) Beginning as a wish, the idea of returning to Egypt becomes for the first time a concrete proposition. Rashi connects this moment with the very beginning of the Exodus from Egypt: And it was when Pharaoh let the people go, God did not lead them by way of the land of the Philistines, although it was nearer; for God said, “The people may have a change of heart when they see war and return to Egypt.” (Exod. 13:17) Rashi: If they had travelled by the direct route they would have returned [immediately]. Even so, in spite of the fact that God took them by

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In an unusual narrative move, the Torah informs us of what God said to Himself. He communicates His thoughts to no one, it seems; except perhaps to Moses, when He dictates the Torah to him. God’s words articulate a reality in which the desire to return to Egypt is bound, at some point, to erupt. Returning to Egypt is, in effect, a core fantasy of the people; from the outset of the Exodus narrative, it secretly organizes their inner world. Sooner or later, in reaction to the fear of war, it will inevitably disrupt the project of the Exodus. When, little over a year later, the people cry “Let us appoint a leader and return to Egypt!” they give a newly political expression to an old desire, which until that point was never so fully articulated.1 Something had been waiting to crystallize. Even God’s strategy, the roundabout route out of Egypt, has been able only to delay an inevitable crisis. The change of heart that God foresaw is realized in the Spies story. The roots of the narrative therefore reach back into the past, and its impact is felt far into the future. According to a classic mishna,2 this narrative is dated the ninth of Av, which is to become a fatal date in Jewish history. Time after time, catastrophes will fall on this day, and it will be institutionalized as a national fast‑day, accumulating its own complex history of cataclysmic loss.3 Far from being an isolated incident, then, this story gives expression to profound movements in the Israelite soul. It becomes the root‑stock of many future national sorrows.

Enigmatic Passions On the face of it, this is a story about fear. The people recoil from the prospect of defeat in war. The Spies bring them an ambiguous report, acknowledging the fertility of the Land, even carrying a sample branch of 3 1 2

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See e.g. Exodus 14:11; 16:3; 17:3; Numbers 11:20. Taanit 4:6. For instance: the destruction of the First and Second Temples, the crushing of the Bar Kochba rebellion, the declaration of the First Crusade, the Expulsion of the Jews from the Iberian peninsula, and the beginning of the deportations from the Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka.

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its bounteous fruit: “We came to the Land you sent us to; it does indeed flow with milk and honey; and this is its fruit” (Num. 13:27). “’However (Efes),’ they continue, ’the people who inhabit the country are powerful, and cities are fortified and very large; moreover, we saw the Anakites (giants) there. Amalekites dwell in the Negev region; Hittites, Jebusites, and Amorites inhabit the hill country; and Canaanites dwell by the Sea and along the Jordan” (13:28‑9). As Ramban points out, the pivot of their speech is the unusual word Efes—literally, nothing, zero4—here translated as “however.” They undercut their own beatific report, in which they have essentially confirmed God’s original description of the Land at the Burning Bush.5 The Spies seem to be saying, “That may be true, but we can’t…. The inhabitants are too strong, too terrifying….” Efes carries the sense of the “delete” key on a computer keyboard. “All the goodness of the Land is ultimately irrelevant: we are powerless.…” Responding to their fear, Caleb protests: “We can indeed go up and possess it, for indeed we can prevail over it.” Their fellow‑spies insist: “But we cannot go up against them….” Fear in a situation of war is a rational emotion. Indeed, as we have seen, it was precisely foreseen by God from the outset. However, the reaction that the Spies arouse in the people is not entirely rational. The people weep all night, and they wish they had died in Egypt, “or else in this wilderness” (14:2). Apparently, they would prefer to be dead than to face the danger of death. They both fear death and wish for it, deciding to return to Egypt, the very site of death. The theme of the giants, too, plays a remarkable role in the Spies’ report, creating an unexpected frisson in a sober account of military challenges. At first, indeed, the Spies tell of a fearsome population and well‑fortified cities. Immediately, they modulate to a different key: “Moreover, we saw the Anakites there—the offspring of the giants.” “Moreover” (ve‑gam) sounds like an afterthought; or is it perhaps an 4



5



Efes is used to refer to the end, extremity, non‑existence. As a verb, it means to cease, fail, come to an end. Its use as a conjunction is quite rare. As here, it means save that, howbeit—qualifying a preceding statement. See Exodus 3:8, 17.

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intensification, intimating a secret terror? What intimidates them is not the strategic difficulty of this war, but the sheer size of these giants, their mythic stock. This is what they really saw. They return to this theme twice more: first, in their description of the Land as “eating its inhabitants— and all the people we saw in it were immense” (13:32). What began as a narrative of a terrifying race of giants has become a general description of the population—“all the people.” Then, again, it reverts to the gigantesque: “And there we saw the Nephilim (giants6), the Anakites are part of the Nephilim—and we looked like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and so we looked in theirs” (13:33). We saw becomes a motif referring to an uncanny vision of the giants, in whose shadow the Spies see themselves as grasshoppers and assume that the giants also see them as such. Far from registering an empirical view of the Land, seeing and seeing oneself precipitate the narrative into a dynamic of madness, images, fantasies, and projections. In Midrash Tanchuma, God frames a critique of the Spies’ inner world: They said, “We looked like grasshoppers in our own eyes.” God said, “This I can overlook. But, ’And so we looked in their eyes’—here I am angry! Did you know how I made you look in their eyes? Who told you that you didn’t look like angels in their eyes?”7

God analyzes the Spies’ words: apparently, it is legitimate to imagine oneself as a grasshopper in the presence of a giant. This is how human beings begin life, small and powerless in the presence of immense powers. In fantasy, this is how, perhaps, we always remain. To see a world of giants is to remind oneself of a primal sense of things; to project one’s fantasy onto the giant, to determine his fantasy world, limits the possibilities of fantasy and of otherness.8 Thus God says, “Who told you that you didn’t look like angels in their eyes?” The midrash seems to allow for the power of fantasy, of imaginative ways of seeing reality, even for the terrified fantasy of the helpless self. Limiting the equivalent freedom of imagination of the other, however, is 8 6 7

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See Genesis 6:4. Tanchuma Shlach 7. See Beit Yaacov, Vayera 21.

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to presume too far. God insists on preserving the sense of difference and therefore the “possibility of possibility.”9 What the Spies see, therefore, convulses them not simply with fear, but with a sense of intimate Efes: they are annihilated. The word Aliyah— going up to the Land—is suffused with the sense of looking upward at the contemptuous eyes of the gigantic inhabitants of that Land. To see, for them, is to allow the world to mirror their deepest life. The Spies then evoke in the people that same sense of Efes, of annihilation. They fear to die, because they are, in imagination, already dead: “If only we had died in the land of Egypt, or in this wilderness if only we had died!” (14:2). The perfect chiasmus (a‑b‑b‑a) expresses a closed and fatal condition, elegantly encased in mirroring words. The wish to return to Egypt is the wish to be in the death place, at the end of imagination. Such fantasies of self and other seek confirmation from the outside world. Here, in the Tanchuma passage, God is angered at their fatal constriction of imaginative possibility. Perhaps it is this that makes Moses and Aaron “fall on their faces before the assembled congregation of the Israelites” (14:5). In the face of a mass panic that admits no dissenting vision, Moses and Aaron find themselves struck with despair. In the words of Seforno,10 they saw the “crooked that cannot be straightened” (Eccl. 1:15); they resembled the sages who “pressed their faces into the ground,” too intimidated by King Yannai’s power to deliver their judgment.11 Moses and Aaron are dumbfounded by the people’s nihilism; a core fantasy has them in its grip, as God had predicted at the moment of the Exodus. So powerful is this state that Moses and Aaron can offer no resistance. It remains for Joshua and Caleb to attempt a different rhetoric. They try to reassure the people, to no avail. Their exhortations range from affirming the goodness of the Land to urging them not to fear.12 In response, the people attempt (lit., they said) to stone them, but their intention is thwarted by the sudden appearance of God’s glory. See e.g. Jonathan Lear, 2000, 118. Seforno to 14:5. 11 Sanhedrin 19b. 12 Exodus 14:7‑10. 9



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In this passage fraught with mystery, Joshua and Caleb affirm and re‑affirm the goodness of the Land, which, after all, has never really been in question.13 Their exhortations about fear, too, are strangely framed: The phrase, “They are our bread…” evokes the Spies’ fantasy of being eaten by the natives (“a land that eats its inhabitants” [14:32]). As though the only way to allay the infant fantasy of being eaten by the giants is to eat the eaters, as though the only alternative to impotence is omnipotence, its other face. In the same way, “Their shadow has left them” (14:9), and the protective Shadow that endows the other with his giant force can only be countered by the equivalent totality of “…And God is with us.” This is not the language of strategic security concerns; the imagery of bread and shadows intimates the nightmare life of the people. Indeed, it in turn provokes a violent reaction from the people—an attempted lynch. At this point, a vision of God’s glory halts the popular frenzy. What the people see is left undescribed; no words help us understand what it is that prevents them from acting out their destructive passion. That passion, too, is enigmatic, as is the counter‑passion of Joshua and Caleb. God’s glory will in fact appear several times in the Book of Numbers— always ineffable, a wordless event that blocks the people from going beyond words in their rebellions.14 Strikingly, this rebellion is all words: the Spies see, show, and tell. The people cry, rebel—all in words. The one action they contemplate—stoning Caleb and Joshua—is described in terms of a speech act: “they said to stone them” (14:10). It is this narrative of sounds (“And they gave forth their voice and they wept…”) and words that precipitates God’s decree—the disappearance of a generation. To the vociferations of the people, Moses and Aaron apparently have nothing to say. Their faces to the ground, they enact a wordless despair; the counterpart, perhaps, of Caleb and Joshua tearing their garments (14:6). This despairing gesture is repeated four times in the course of the Book of Numbers.15 Like the epiphany of God’s glory—and almost always in conjunction with it—it becomes a leitmotif in the wilderness saga. An

See 13:27. Cf. Deuteronomy 1:25. See Numbers 16:19; 17:7; 20:6. 15 Numbers 16:4; 16:22; 17:10; 20:6. 13 14

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inarticulate collapse and an uncanny revelation of God’s glory silently and repeatedly punctuate the cries and whispers of the wilderness. A remarkable midrash subversively connects the two sentences in the verse: “They intended to stone them with stones. And the glory of God appeared to all the Israelites in the Tent of Assembly”—“They took stones and hurled them upwards.”16 As the Maharsha comments, if we read this as one run‑on sentence, the stoning has two objects, Caleb/Joshua and the glory of God. Normally, the verb, “appeared,” would precede the subject, God’s Glory—va‑yera kevod Hashem—marking the second sentence off from the first.17 Perhaps because there is no break between the two sentences, it becomes possible to suggest a secretive intention behind the stoning. Caleb and Joshua have become the screen‑target of the people’s hatred, which is essentially directed against God. The would‑be lynch represents a radical human animus that generates a radical divine response.

Good or Evil? How can we understand the people’s animus in this critical narrative? We have suggested that fear—of the rigors of war, of defeat—does not sufficiently account for the emotional depth‑charges that erupt from the people’s words. Could the core issue be, after all, a doubt about the basic goodness of the Land? The Spies’ mission was framed by Moses, who asked not only about the strength and strategic force of the population but—more insistently—“What is the Land in which they live?—Is it good or bad?… Is it fertile or infertile?” (13:19‑20). The question of good and evil seems so fundamental that the reader assumes that the Spies’ failure must be a failure in answering this. And yet, as we have seen, the Spies report faithfully, “It is a land flowing with milk and honey.” They not only acknowledge the Land as fertile but they speak faith‑full words that acknowledge God’s promise at the Burning Bush (Exod. 3:8). They even bear back with them the laden branches of fruit to confirm that faith. Strikingly, when Moses B.Sotah 35a. See Torah Temimah on 14:10. The sentence structure with the subject first is usually read in the pluperfect.

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narrates the story to the people forty years later, he remembers the Spies as reporting simply, “The Land is good” (Deut. 1:25). So, on the face of it, goodness is not the point at issue. Why, then, do Caleb and Joshua revert so fervently to this issue of goodness, when they respond to the people’s death‑wish? Tovah ha‑aretz me’od me’od, they say—“The Land is a very, very good one!” (14:7). Perhaps, in some sense, the question of goodness is, after all, at the heart of the narrative? We remember how the question of good and evil haunted previous narratives: Yitro resisting Moses’s persuasions, with all their repetitions of the word tov (good)—five times in a brief narrative; the people complaining about “Ra (evil) in the ears of God” (11:1); the people “desiring desire,” which is “evil in Moses’ eyes” (11:10); Moses complaining to God, “Why have you done evil to Your servant?” (11:11) Tov and ra hold a distinctly subjective meaning in this text; that they represent a personal experience—tov li and ra li, good for me and bad for me—that could be called love and hate. As though a central subject of this book were the emotional and imaginative perspectives of its protagonists rather than the teaching of an absolute ethical system.

Difficult Freedom In the Spies’ narrative, this subject is ruthlessly exposed. From the first words of the narrative, the emphasis is on the subjective lives of Moses, the Spies, and the people. Shlach lecha—“Send for yourself people to spy out the Land,” says God to Moses. The whole notion of a spy‑ mission comes from God, with the force of a command. What, then, is the meaning of lecha—for yourself? In his commentary, Rashi strikingly integrates this story with the later story Moses will tell about the Spies, at the end of the forty‑year desert trek:

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Send for yourself (13:2): On your own judgment; I do not command you; if you wish, send them. God said this because the Israelites came to Moses and said, “Let us send men before us….” As it is said (Deut. 1:22): “And you approached me, all of you, saying, ’Let us send men….’” And Moses took counsel with God, who said, “I told them that it is a good land, as it is said, (Exod. 3:17), ’I will bring them up out of the affliction of Egypt … into a land flowing with milk and honey, a good and spacious land….’

Bewilderments: The Story of the Spies As they live, I swear that I will give them now an opportunity to fall into error through the words of the Spies, so that they should not come into possession of it.”

In Rashi’s account, the word lecha intimates God’s reservations about the Spies’ mission, as if to say, “I command but I do not command”; as if to defer—ironically?—to Moses’s judgment. Here, God emerges as offended by the people’s doubts as to the goodness of the Land: “I told them that it is a good land!” For Rashi, the goodness of the Land is the central issue that the people are driven, essentially, to resolve. To this end, they demand the Spy mission. God reacts with subtle displeasure at their skepticism; but at the same time, He allows space for human desire, human judgment, human choice—and human error: “I will give them room for error.” Like a parent of an adolescent child who is set on a course of action his father deplores, God uses a language of free choice— if you wish, on your judgment, I do not tell you to do this—in order to convey a complex message. Ultimately, the child must make a free choice that includes knowledge of the parent’s disapproval. Rashi’s synonyms for lecha basically register the complex tone in which God speaks. God gives Moses the “difficult freedom”18 of an adult decision. He opens for Moses a transitional space, in which to navigate between God’s desire and the people’s. In the Deuteronomy narrative, Rashi elaborates on the unconscious dimensions of the moment: And the matter was good in my eyes: In my eyes but not in God’s eyes. But if it was good in Moses’ eyes, why did he mention it in rebuking them? A parable: A man says to his friend, Sell me your donkey! He replies, Yes. The buyer asks, Will you give it to me on trial? He answers, Yes. May I try it on hills and mountains?—Yes. When the buyer sees that the seller puts no obstacles in his path, the buyer thinks, This man is quite confident that I shall not find any defect in it—So he immediately tells him, Take your money, I don’t need to try it! I too consented to your words, thinking that you would perhaps think better of the Spy idea when you saw that I put no obstacles in your path. But you did not think better of it….19

This is the title of Emmanuel Levinas’s volume of essays on Jewish topics. Rashi on Deuteronomy 1:23.

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In place of a direct command, we have the psychology of a situation of desire—in this case, a commercial transaction.20 The buyer who asks for a nissayon, a trial run, is reassured when the seller accedes to all his demands. Unspoken, the issues of desire and doubt—the wish for assurance about the quality of the object of desire—make eminent sense, as does the seller’s genial manifestation of confidence. This is a story of justified anxiety and the tactics that facilitate the transaction. However, in the logic of the commercial parable, the buyer ought to back off from his anxious wish for a test run. In Rashi’s parable, this is Moses’ view of the situation: the rational anxiety of the people about the Land ought to be allayed by Moses’ willingness to send the Spy mission. But the poker game goes strangely wrong. The people do not, after all, back off from their desire to send the mission. Moses is faced with the unexpected depth and complexity of the people’s anxiety. Perhaps, after all, the donkey analogy is not as satisfactory a metaphor for this situation as Moses imagines? In Rashi’s midrashic source,21 the commercial model for the anxiety of desire is itself tested and found wanting. Moses comes to realize that his earlier understanding of the situation was not adequate. An ironic note enters Moses’ narrative: “The matter was good in my eyes….” Vision is subjective and subject to error. Maharal subtly elaborates on this midrash.22 God’s use of the word lecha (it’s up to you) suggests to Moses that God is not in favor of the Spy mission, that the issues here are more radical than may appear: Is it a good land or a bad one? He therefore explicitly raises this question in his instructions to the Spies. By articulating the people’s deepest anxiety, he hopes to allay it. Once again, Moses’ idea does not work. Both Rashi and Maharal imply that the people are driven by inexplicable anxiety about the goodness of the Land. All Moses’ pragmatic tactics, his very willingness to engage with their repressed doubt—all prove inadequate. See Ramban on 13:2 (Ve‑ya‑touru). The expression la‑tour, to “spy out the Land,” is given a commercial turn: “like someone who comes to buy something.” 21 Sifrei 21. 22 Gur Arye to Numbers 13:2. 20

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Under cover of a reconnaissance mission, the people are tormented by inexpressible doubts. This confrontation, then, stages the uncanny nature of the core question: Is it a good land or a bad one? Moses underestimates the complexity of the question for them, and so brings their bad faith to light. The language of social transaction cannot engage with their terror. Only by finding their own expressive language can their secret life unfold. It is interesting to compare this reading with that of Ramban. In his reading, Moses is quite happy to send the Spies, not only because this constitutes legitimate preparation for war, but also because it will establish beyond doubt how good the Land is. He himself has no doubts on this score, since God praised it at the Burning Bush: “…a good and spacious land.” However, he wants to engage the full desire and willing cooperation of the people. He therefore instructs the Spies to notice the land’s goodness “so that they will know it and convey it to the people, who will rejoice and be filled with new strength to go up there.”23 For Ramban, goodness is a concrete matter of soil and fruit and economic prosperity, easily determined by empirical testimony. For Rashi, on the other hand, the anxiety about goodness and badness is not so easily resolved. In the end, it proves to be a subjective matter, and it engages the indirections of unconscious life. The issue of ratzon— wish, desire, motivation—is staged here. Moses attempts to meet the people’s anxieties by manipulating the field of social desires and fears. He fails, since he cannot recognize the depth of the goodness question in its intensely subjective reach. Here, the question becomes one of love and hate—tov li and ra li—What is good or bad to/for me? The desirable is no longer an objective matter; the personal perspective of the people lies at the heart of the story. On this level, there may be more than one right answer. In a sense, all the questions that Moses lists for the Spies are, in the end, about goodness and badness. Perhaps even the questions about the strength of the people and of the fortifications are not simply Ramban on 13:2.

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about the difficulty of conquest, but also act as indications of the goodness of the Land.24 The Spies, however, interpret these indications as deterrents. Ultimately, interpretation is subjective; one man’s love is another man’s fear and hatred. Does this mean, as Sefat Emet claims, that the Spies sinned by interpreting, when they were asked simply to report?

The Skeptical Bridegroom The core idea of the Spy mission is refracted through a different parable in the following midrash: R. Joshua says: To what might they be compared? To the case of a king who secured for his son a wife who was beautiful, of good parentage, and rich. The king said to him, “I have secured for you a wife who is beautiful, of good parentage, and rich.” The son answered, “Let me go and see her!” For he did not believe his father. His father was sorely vexed and said to himself, “What shall I do? If I tell him, ’I will not show her to you,’ he will think, ’She is ugly; that is why he does not want to show her to me.’” At last, he said to him, “See her and you will know whether I have lied to you! But because you did not have faith in me, I swear that you will never see her in your own home, and that I will give her to your son!” Similarly, God assured Israel, “The land is good,” but they had no faith, and said, “Let us send men before us that they may spy out the land for us.” Said God, “If I prevent them they will say, ’He does not show it to us because it is not good.’ Better let them see it. But I swear that not one of them will enter the land”; as it says, “Surely they shall not see the land which I swore to their fathers, nor shall any of them that despised Me see it!” (14:23)25

The prince wants to see his bride for himself—on the face of it a legitimate desire. However, the midrash explains his motivation: “because he did not believe his father.” The king is faced with the same problem as the seller in the buying‑a‑donkey midrash: if he is not to lose his son’s trust altogether, he cannot simply forbid him to see her. What the prince needs to ascertain is the bride’s beauty; for her other qualifications his See Sefat Emet Likkutim Shlach on 13:28. Bamidbar Rabbah 16:6.

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father’s word, apparently, suffices. But the king is indeed insulted by his son’s lack of faith in him (lo he’emanta bi). Subtly, the midrash changes its wording from its original description, “he did not believe his father” (lo haya ma’amin le‑aviv). The father is aggrieved by a failure of relationship. It is not simply the bride’s beauty that is at issue, but more radically, the son’s trust in his father. For this reason, the father lets him see the bride but defers the full seeing of marriage to the next generation—“I will give her to your son!” The skeptical bridegroom in the parable subtly deflects the meaning of the Spy narrative. If the bride’s beauty represents the goodness of the Land, this is conveyed at first as an objective matter—she either is or is not beautiful—and the prince’s insistence on seeing her indeed constitutes doubt of his father’s word: it insinuates that his father is lying. In the case of a marriage, it would seem, at least to the modern reader, quite legitimate for the bridegroom to see the bride, since beauty is, in this context, a subjective matter. (In fact, Jewish law forbids marriage to take place unless bride and groom have met, unless the groom has seen his bride.) What the bridegroom wants to ascertain is whether he loves his bride. The father seems to understand this and speaks of trust in me—as though his son’s doubt violates the depth of their relationship, the son’s trust that his father knows his heart. When the king assigns the bride to the prince’s son, he creates an uneasily oedipal solution, which casts a troubling light on the narrative of the Spies. Seen through the prism of this midrash, the project of sending spies is tainted from the outset; and the outcome has a grotesque dimension. God’s perspective is set in an uncanny relation to the human world of love. Ideally, perhaps, what God declares to be loveable should indeed be loved. This narrative deals with the axis of human vision, which cannot always be totally aligned with God’s axis. The marriage parable is thus more fraught with meanings than the donkey‑sale parable. In this context, beauty is inevitably subjective: Is the bride beautiful to him? Might trust in his father cover this question? The parable is charged with the wishes and demands of both sides. Perhaps indeed God the Father wants to be trusted to understand the personal desires of His people? Or perhaps the son’s desire to know

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not only the bride but his own desire is a sign of a kind of maturity, a necessary basis for marriage? On the other hand, perhaps the demand to see, to ascertain, itself compromises the possibility of trust? The canny “consumer” glance possibly erodes, by its very nature, the growth of relationship, the full seeing of marriage. The marriage model thus stages the Spies’ mission as ambiguous, requiring interpretation. To question the goodness of the Land may represent a legitimate human need to experience one’s own desire, as Ramban suggests. Or it may suggest that one is deficient in that basic trust that is the very liquor of life. This trust, or faith, is the ability to see the other in one’s home—to see the possibilities of connection. This becomes a narrative about the deeper losses entailed in skeptical rejections.

The Skeptic as Nihilist In this crisis of trust, there is a bleakness, an experience of “world‑ consuming doubt,” as the philosopher Stanley Cavell characterizes the condition of skepticism. This condition, Cavell writes, is a “standing threat to … human existence” (Cavell, 1994). At its root, the people’s doubt is not about the Land, or even about God’s goodness, but about what Cavell calls “natality.” Hamlet’s question, “To be or not to be,” emphasizes not “whether to die but … whether to be born … whether to affirm or deny the fact of natality, as a way of enacting, or not, one’s existence.” Hamlet’s condition, says Cavell, is that of the adolescent who, in preparation for becoming an adult, faces decisions about accepting or rejecting rebirth into the world. Suffering from the “incurable malady” of skepticism, one may choose to accept “that the existence of the world and others in it is not a matter to be known, but one to be acknowledged…. The world must be regained every day” (p. 172; emphasis added) This is the “condition of the possibility of accepting the world’s beauty.” The mission of the Spies, I suggest, raises similarly radical issues. The skeptical question—How can you tell what exists, whether language applies to anything?—represents not simply a failure of knowledge, but a failure of acknowledgement; its result, as Cavell forcefully puts it, “is not an ignorance, but an ignoring … an unappeasable denial, a willful uncertainty that constitutes an annihilation” (p. 88). Cavell discusses

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Shakespeare’s portrait of Leontes in A Winter’s Tale as a portrait of the “skeptic as fanatic.” Leontes repudiates his own son, for lack of certain knowledge. The people who insist on sending eyewitnesses to validate the good land, like the prince who questions the beauty of his bride, are apparently engaged in a legitimate concern for personal desire. The more radical truth, however, is that both, in some sense, wish for there to be nothing. Doubt of this kind wishes not to love; not to participate in being born; not to marry; not to acknowledge one’s son—a portrait, in Cavell’s words, of “the skeptic as nihilist” (p. 89). We remember the Spies’ report: it is a good land, it flows with milk and honey; here is a sample of its bounty. Then the bleak nihilism breaks through: Efes. Usually translated “however,” Efes acts, at the least, to qualify the positive report just uttered. The root of the word denotes “the end,” the extremity, non‑existence. Afsei aretz—the edges of the earth— focuses on a vanishing point of meaning, a horizon beyond one’s visual grasp.26 Used as a conjunction, as it is here, it signifies not simply “on the other hand,” but an almost total negation of the Spies’ own praise of the Land. Efes annihilates: “All that goodness is meaningless….” The Spies thus both affirm and deny the goodness of the Land. They bring back empirical knowledge of a goodness they have no ability to acknowledge. They can take no account of it. They can neither enter into it nor see themselves as part of it. Efes annihilates personal meaning. The Spies, and through them, the people, attack not only their own potency, or God’s power, but their own minds, their ability to make meaning. This is not simply a matter of a conflict between desire and fear. Efes erodes the idyll of fertility they themselves have evoked. Desire is shot through with the horror of giants. The land flowing with milk and honey—the mother flowing with sweet milk to feed her children—becomes a “land that consumes its inhabitants”—a monstrous mother who eats her young. See R. Hutner’s interesting reading of Psalm 98:3: “All the ends of the earth shall see God’s salvation.” The Psalmist sings of the “edges,” the end of time, the perspectives of the future which will read back now‑absent meaning into the events of history. Efes describes a reality whose immediate relevance is obscure (Pachad Yitzchak, Purim, 10).

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This catastrophic land is an object of both fascination and revulsion. Even its fruit is gigantic—a cluster of grapes requires two bearers. The visual impact of this land is both wondrous and horrifying; ungraspable; in a sense, unseeable. The biblical account of the Spies’ first response to the Land is revisited in the letters and journals of early European explorers in the New World. These writings are the subject of Stephen Greenblatt’s study, Marvelous Possessions, which documents the prevailing sense of the “marvelous” in these testimonies; the prodigious, the literally amazing. The explorers experienced neither pleasure nor pain but a bewildering loss of identity. Longing and horror both characterize their response to the inhuman scale and beauty of the place. The reports of these early explorers shine an oblique spotlight on the uncanny dimension of the original encounter of the Spies with the Promised Land. The biblical text and its midrashic elaborations play on the Spies’ anguished wonder. Will the Land eat us, or will they be our bread? Are we grasshoppers or angels? In an equivalent of the infant’s “startle reflex”—eyes widened, arms thrust up—the Spies are flooded by an excess that annihilates them (Greenblatt, 1991, p. 14). The impeccable first account of the Land immediately erupts in riotous fantasies beyond human measure. Projections and introjections break through, a fear of the radical difference of this Land. “Who told you that I did not make you seem as angels in their eyes?” God is aggrieved at the Spies’ knowingness, at the way they foreclose possibilities in their rush to understand. The midrash sees this as a kind of skepticism: a denial of the imaginative existence of the other.

The Transparent Eyeball Efes obliterates the personal value of objective goodness: fertility, prodigious increase. Efes declares that this Land is not good for us; it cannot be loved by us. As Freud put it, “In the world of the neuroses it is psychical reality which is the decisive kind.” (Freud, 1916‑17, p. 368) For the Spies, external reality—the goodness of the Land—becomes a representation of their inner reality. In this narrative particularly, the Spies set aside the metaphysical meaning of words—good now means I love it,

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I want it. In place of the philosophical and the ethical good and evil, there now arise the passionate, idiosyncratic associations that constitute their psychic reality. Is this, then, the “sin”27 of the Spies, as it is colloquially known? We have seen that Sefat Emet takes this position: they were not asked to express their personal perspective on the goodness of the Land. In allowing themselves to be drawn into their private obsessions, they distort the objective reality they are to report. I suggest that the problem here is rather different. An impersonal report is not, in fact, possible; it may not even be desirable. All language is shot through with the hues of fantasy, of love and hatred, wonder and fear. Rather than reporting facts, language creates worlds. It would have been impossible for the Spies to strip their vision of its personal, idiosyncratic elements. Perhaps, on the contrary, we could say that the Spies and in their wake the people are not sufficiently conscious of the power of unconscious fantasy in themselves and in others. Their account of the giants emphasizes subjective vision: “We saw the giants, we seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers….” They report this in a tone of clinical objectivity, as though Efes had not created a rift between public and private reality—as though Efes had not already negated the publicly shared reality in favor of a private symbolic world. Perhaps, then, the disruptions of imagination are inevitable. The world cannot be seen without “interference.” According to a classic Talmudic description, Moses alone of human beings “saw b’aspaklaria meira—through a clear lens.” All others, including prophets and seers, saw through an unclear glass, a distorted lens of subjectivity.28 The problem arises when one is not aware of one’s own deflections of vision. Imagining oneself clear‑eyed, one may become the greatest fantasist of all. “Les non‑dupes errent (The un‑deceived err),” claimed the French analyst,

The expression is a rabbinic construction. The word “sin” is never used in the biblical narrative. 28 See B.Yevamot 49b. Also see Rashi on Numbers 12:6. 27

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Jacques Lacan, playing on his concept of Le nom du pere: the greatest illusion may be the pretension of total lucidity.29 The “clear lens” of undistorted vision is re‑evoked by Emerson in his essay “Nature”: Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods is perpetual youth…. In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life—no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground— my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye‑ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. (Emerson, 1982, pp. 38‑39)

Emerson’s ecstatic experience in the woods transports him beyond the accidents of life to a purity of vision that strips him (or sloughs him— perhaps evoking the serpent in paradise) of egotism and of the densities of a self accreted through the years. Dropping all the accoutrements of ego, he becomes a transparent eye‑ball: almost a translation of the aspaklaria meira, the clear lens of the Talmud. He is nothing but a walking I/Eye— pure perception, subject of revelation. Paradoxically, even as he proclaims his American visionary dislocation from the English traditions of vision and poetry—he finds in the New World a “perpetual youth”—his language is deeply informed by Romantic lyrical traditions. Mark Edmundson (1990, p. 131) points out that the “perfect exhilaration” of the self become transparent eye‑ball is an “appealingly grotesque modification” of Wordsworth’s vision: “While with an eye made quiet by the power/ Of harmony…./ We see into the life of things” (Wordsworth, 1955, p. 153). In Edmundson’s view, however, Emerson retreats from the encounter with the “opposition,” or the “antagonist,” with whom his metaphysical See Rashi to the “unclear lens” passage in Yevamot : “Other prophets saw through an unclear lens and thought they saw, though they did not see. Moses saw through a clear lens and knew he did not see His face.”

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vision contends. Genuine transformation is believable only if the “possibility of irreparable harm” is confronted. The grief of the world, the experiences of loss and mourning, and the passing of time are eluded here in a willful movement of ecstasy by the eyeball that renders all things transparent: “I am part or particle of God.” This form of transcendence is achieved by negation: “All mean egotism vanishes…. I am nothing; I see all….” All and nothing: but fear of the losses that the world may yet inflict still haunts the passage. Emerson’s grotesque image of the transparent eyeball with its ecstatic lucidity brings us back to the drama of the Spies. The Spies return with a mythically framed “good” report of the good Land. This represents both the physical reality of nature and the metaphysical promise of God’s love. Instantly their worst fears flood back, the possibilities of “irreparable harm.” The visionary mode proves precarious; the objective goodness of the Land cracks under the force of the lava that erupts in their words. Efes signals an imagination enthralled by the menacing figures of catastrophe. The good report can be achieved only by neutralizing these terrors; but then is easily neutralized in turn. Here is the skepticism that Cavell describes as a kind of fanaticism. In a sense, the skeptic “wants the annihilation that he is punished by … [he] wants for there to be … nothing … nothing but plenitude.”30 The human condition of partial knowledge enrages him. All or nothing; better not to have been born, to be neither natal nor mortal. The possibility of acknowledging his (limited, not fully understood) part in the world would involve the repeated grief of mourning for the losses intrinsic to such a world.

The Core Fantasy The people resort to a night‑long paroxysm of weeping, wishing to be dead. This moment of apocalyptic despair is, at heart, a wish never to have been born. “If only we had died” leads them to only one thought— the wish to return to Egypt, to the place of primal non‑being. To be a no‑thing (Bion, 1995, p. 16) is in effect to annihilate one’s beginning, one’s

Cavell, 1994, pp. 88‑89.

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birth. This is the extremity of the Efes state. Here, thought itself becomes intolerable. What breaks through in the Spies’ words is what Jonathan Lear calls a core fantasy. Such fantasies have great imaginative power to organize the self; they represent an identity quite at odds with the conscious sense of practical identity. “It is a mark of the human,” Lear writes, “that we do not quite fit into our own skins.” Moreover, the “remainders,” the “flotsam and jetsam” of what does not fit into one’s social identity constitute “organized attempts to form an identity around the solution to a primordial human problem…. The fantasy thus serves as a source of unity of the self” (Lear, 2011, pp. 50‑51). The Spies express their ambivalence about being and non‑being—“To be or not to be.” The people respond in tumult and hysteria (“And Caleb hushed the people….” [13:30]). They seek to avoid death in war by returning to the place where they may cease before being born. A core fantasy emerges that annihilates goodness and the possibility of love. The world is intolerable; but even that fact cannot be acknowledged. The distorting lens carries the illusion of clarity. Moses, on the other hand, is radically unlike other human beings in that he “sees through a clear lens”; he lives as close to the “transparent eye‑ball” condition as is humanly possible. His perception may lay claim to an objectivity which, the Talmud says, is beyond the reach of all other human beings. In other words, the Talmud in effect defines the human as the bearer of an excess of fantasy that colors and shapes reality. Not quite fitting into their skins, human beings create their own realities. “Is the Land a good land or a bad one?” Unconsciously, this translates for the Spies and for the people as “Do I love it or hate it?”—or, more starkly, “Do I love or hate?” Asking the question, the self is suddenly aware of its own mystery. All the workable illusions become questionable. “I come to know that I do not know” (Lear, 2011, p. 102). Paralyzed, the people “give forth their voices and they weep on that night” (14:1). All that is heard in the darkness is the voice of the people, the wordless weeping of an enigmatic sorrow. Only in the next verse does their keening resolve into words of complaint.

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The Game of Loss The lament constitutes a moment of “self‑disruption” (Lear, 2000, p. 93), in Jonathan Lear’s terms. He uses the expression to analyze Freud’s description of a “disturbing habit” that his infant grandson developed whenever his mother left him for a few hours. He would throw a wooden reel with a piece of string attached into his cot so that it disappeared. At the same time, he would utter a loud “o‑o‑o‑o” sound, which all agreed represented the German word fort (gone). He would then pull the reel out of the cot again by the string with a joyful da (there). Freud comments that this represented the child’s “compensation to himself for his mother’s absence, by himself staging the disappearance and return of objects within his reach” (Lear, 2000, p. 90 n. 91). As Lear puts it, “This is a moment of self‑disruption in an already disrupted life.…” He adds: “What the disruption is for really depends on what happens next.” He then speculates about what would happen if the child could never get to da: He would then get stuck repeating “o‑o‑o‑o” over and over again. We would then see something that looked like a traumatic neurosis. Indeed, the child might begin to use these outbursts to attack his own mind. For the child would never be able to get a thought together if each attempt to do so was interrupted by an outburst of “o‑o‑o‑o.” Rather than face the loss, the child might opt to attack his own ability to understand what has happened to him. This would be the beginning of a massively self‑destructive, self‑annihilating character. (Lear, 2000, p. 93)

The fort‑da game “brings the child’s experience together rather than blows it apart. The invention of the game converts this rip in the fabric of experience into an experience of loss” (p. 94). The mother’s absence becomes something the child can play with, think through and around. The mother becomes someone “who can be present, go away, and come back again, all the while maintaining … her distinct identity.” Lear strikingly calls this game “courage‑in‑the‑making … the development of protocourage” (ibid.). The child is impelled to develop the capacity to tolerate absence; for only in the absence of the object does thinking begin. Giving a name to his pain seems to transform the pain.

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But “the name of loss requires the game of loss.” In playing his game, the child develops ways of living with his loss. At the same time, Lear acknowledges, the “disruption in the fabric of life” to which the game is a response has been to some degree covered over. Life has been creatively re‑invented—but something has been left out; there is a “remainder,” which is precisely the disruption that generated the process in the first place. This is “Freud’s deepest insight … that … life can never be lived without remainder” (p. 96). During their night of weeping, I suggest, the people are crying “o‑o‑o‑o,” mourning a nameless loss. The core fantasy of Efes has made it impossible to think; they inhabit the “rip in the fabric of life.” The question Lear raises is, “What is this disruption for?” If it fails to generate the game of loss, a name for loss, it remains a wail of “gone.” The world is gone away and cannot be recalled.

Angel of Death This is what the Talmud calls bechiya shel chinam—literally, crying for nothing. It is the meaningless weeping, a failure in that courage that Freud and Lear describe. This crisis raises bewildering questions about the nature of courage, of faith, of goodness and badness in the wilderness. Joshua and Caleb, the “courageous” Spies, respond to the disruption by enacting a mourning scene—“They tore their garments.” They declare: “The Land that we passed through to explore it is a very, very good land!” (14:6‑7). What is the force of this response to the weeping nation? After all, on the level of public reality, the Spies had freely acknowledged the goodness of the Land. What, then, are Joshua and Caleb adding by intensifying their description of its goodness? If anything, the intensifiers only weaken the force of the original description—“a land flowing with milk and honey”—which Joshua and Caleb also reiterate in the next verse. In a remarkable reading, He‑amek Davar connects “very, very good” with God’s final vision of His created world: “And God saw all that He had made, and behold it was very good” (Gen. 1:31). On each previous day, God has seen the world as simply good. Is it the sheer fact of completing His work that intensifies God’s sense of tov? Or is it, perhaps,

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the final object of creation, the human being, that is tov me’od—very good? One midrash points out that adam, the human being, is an anagram for me’od—very.31 It is the human presence in the world that is tov me’od. However, He’amek Davar cites another, more challenging midrash: “Me’od—zeh malach ha‑mavet—Very good refers to the Angel of Death!”32 Human mortality sharpens and intensifies the goodness of life. Unalloyed pleasure becomes cloying; the experience of limits, of loss, allows one to experience delight more acutely. In the same way, Joshua and Caleb are not describing the objective fertility of the Land, but the subjective human experience of pleasure and satisfaction. They acknowledge life and death as inextricably interwoven. They speak with a keen understanding of what Mark Edmundson calls the “antagonist”—the Angel of Death, their own worst fears, the possibility of irreparable harm. They affirm the paradox of the game of loss through which courage can be developed. “Very, very good” signals a human mourning process that salvages the possibility of desire.

“Because God Hates Us” For the people, Joshua and Caleb’s acknowledgement of the paradoxical beauty of the world is enraging; their impulse is to hurl stones “upwards,” at God’s Glory.33 What they are attacking is the notion of what Gerald Manley Hopkins calls “Pied Beauty”: Glory be to God for dappled things All things counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers‑forth whose beauty is past change: Praise him. (The Penguin Book of English Verse, ed. John Hayward [Penguin Books, 1958], p. 388)

Yalkut Shimeoni, 16 (on Gen. 1:31). Bereshit Rabbah, 9:12. The midrash includes a play on mavet and me’od. 33 B.Sotah 35a. 31 32

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Constantly losing the world, Joshua and Caleb acknowledge that it must be regained every day; moving between absence and presence becomes the essential game. But the people live in the place of loss, in a malady of skepticism to which, apparently, there is no alternative. They inhabit a world in which love and hate, good and bad, are radically split. It is only their children, says God, who “will know the Land which you have reviled” (14:31). The Hebrew word for “reviled”—m’astem— suggests a visceral rejection, physically, the vomiting reflex. The same expression occurs in Psalms 106:24: “And they reviled the desirable land; they did not believe His word.” The key terms are concentrated, as though welded together: hatred, desire, belief. The Land is desirable, but not to them; they have no ability to regain the world that has gone from them. And again, “Because you have reviled God who is in your midst” (Num. 11:20). Their hatred is directed against God, who is in a sense within them. In this sense, it is self‑hatred that marks their experience of God Himself. The most explicit expression of this split is in Moses’ narrative, forty years later, of the night of weeping: “You sulked in your tents and said, It is because God hates us that He brought us out of the land of Egypt, to hand us over to the Amorites to wipe us out” (Deut. 1:27). By this time, the core fantasy is fully recognized: the people experience God’s hatred as informing the epic narrative of the Exodus. It is as though the people cannot figure themselves as lovable to God. Rashi strikingly catches the projection implicit in their fantasy: “Really, He loved you, but you hated Him—as the proverb has it, What you have in your heart about your friend you imagine he has in his heart about you!” This shocking diagnosis has taken forty years for Moses to articulate. Perhaps this is the time it has taken for the people to be capable of hearing such truths about themselves. What erupted during the night of weeping annihilated the very possibility of love, whether God’s love for them, or, more disturbingly, their own love for God. It is only after the forty‑year wilderness trek and the death of a generation that Moses can confront them with their own destructiveness.

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“With All Your Heart” The English psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott writes powerfully about the difficulty of acknowledging the “destructiveness that is personal, and that inherently belongs to a relationship to an object that is felt to be good—in other words, that is related to loving” (Winnicott, 1990, p. 82). The primitive aspects of emotional development are often experienced as intolerable. The destructive aims of early life, in which the infant in effect consumes the mother without compunction, are felt in later development to be too ruthless even to acknowledge. The notion of health, Winnicott suggests, requires the capacity to take “full responsibility for all feelings and ideas that belong to being alive.” The patient in analysis, therefore, needs to understand the destruction in himself before he can meaningfully experience constructive and creative work. Conversely, a “platform of generosity can be reached and used so that from it a glimpse might be gained of … that which underlies the generosity, and which belongs to primitive loving…. Toleration of one’s destructive impulses results in a new thing: the capacity to enjoy ideas, even with destruction in them…. This development gives elbow room for the experience of concern, which is the basis for everything constructive” (pp. 86‑87). The clinical cases that Winnicott cites illustrate this slow movement toward toleration of destructiveness; otherwise, the result is “either depression or else a search for relief by the discovery of destructiveness elsewhere—that is to say, by the mechanism of projection” (p. 88). The people in the wilderness manifest some of the dilemmas of love and hatred. They live through the destructive urges that accompany the experience of loving. To love God, the Land, or themselves is a project that becomes possible only when they can begin to tolerate the full extent of their hatred. The God who performed many miracles for them, who freed them from slavery and promised them a good and fertile land, elicits from them both love and hate. For He is also uncanny, both familiar and strange, making inscrutable demands of them, massacring them by the thousand. His land is inhabited by giants who consume those who live in it. Their revulsion against God and Land is, in Winnicott’s model, an

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aspect of their love that they must come to acknowledge and, to some extent, to integrate. They need, in some way, to live all parts of themselves, if faith is to gain ground within them; for the catastrophe of otherness, of a world gone away, is part of the process of becoming a self. As Michael Eigen puts it, “[a] capacity as deep or deeper than the sense of catastrophe must be called forth if healing or profound maturation is to take place” (Eigen, 2004, p. 219) Eigen discusses what he calls “the area of faith” in the work of the great British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion: If, for example, one’s emotional reality or truth is despair, what is most important is not that one may be in despair, but one’s attitudes toward one’s despair. Through one’s basic attentiveness one’s despair can declare itself and tell its story. One enters profound dialogue with it. (p. 133)

In a similar way, acknowledging the otherness of God, or of other people, means entering into profound dialogue with it, and ultimately with one’s own otherness. One’s destructiveness plays a role in the vitality of love. Perhaps this is what the Talmud intimates when it comments on the biblical command, “You shall love God, your God, with all your heart” (Deut. 6:5). Since the Hebrew for “your heart” is spelled here with a double letter beit (levav, where lev is generally used), the Talmud comments that one should love God with both one’s hearts, “with both one’s inclinations, good and evil.”34 Tov and ra, good and evil, are expressed in love and hate, closeness and distance, continuity and rupture, constructive and destructive impulses. Both must be acknowledged if the fullness of love is to be experienced. Only after Moses, at the beginning of Deuteronomy, has confronted the people with the full extent of their hatred can he begin to explore a new vocabulary of emotional connection between his people and God. Loving, yearning, desiring (ahavah, chefetz, cheshek) appear for the first time in the palette of relationship—a movement of feeling flowing both ways. For instance, God asks for their love, because “it was only your fathers that God desired in His love for them, so that He chose you, their seed, from among all peoples this very day” (Deut. 10:15). Rashi

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comments: “[He chose you:] As you see yourselves desired from among all the idolaters this very day.” God’s desire becomes an existential reality for the Israelites; they become capable of seeing themselves as desirable and desired. On this basis, they can be asked to love God le‑tov lach—for your [their] good (10:13). I suggest that it is only after the people have acknowledged the full extent of their hatred that they can register love flowing from them and to them. Their original acceptance of the Torah and its commandments gave them what Winnicott calls a platform of generosity, from which a glimpse might be gained of their own destructiveness. Perhaps only after the sin of the Golden Calf can they begin to mourn for the losses they have incurred.35 With mourning comes concern, and the playfulness that allows one every day to regain the lost world. This process of acknowledgment, mourning, and play reaches a new pitch when Moses can speak to them, at the end of the forty years in the desert, of their own hatred.

Drawn in Desire To love God with “both one’s hearts” involves the violence intrinsic to hatching processes (Eigen, 2004, p. 114); it is part of the human developmental struggle. It involves disruptions and deeper forms of integration; and the discovery of what Lear calls uncanny longing (Lear, 2011, p. 20). As though longing strangely arises at moments when given reality suddenly becomes questionable. Joshua and Caleb say to the people in the moment of their greatest crisis, “If God desires us, He will bring us to this Land and give it to us, the land flowing with milk and honey” (14:8). It is all a matter of desire; God’s for them, theirs for God. But the people are enraged; they are in a state of hatred, as Moses will remind them forty years later—God’s for them, theirs for God. The root of their trouble, Moses will tell them quite matter‑of‑factly, was that “you did not want to go up…” (Deut. 1:26). Moses records this as a failure in faith, in trust: “In this matter, you did not believe in God, your God” (Deut. 1:32). “In this matter:” says Rashi, “He promises to bring you into the Land and you do not trust See Exodus 33:4.

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him.” In real time, God expresses the failure to Moses: “How long will this people not trust Me, despite all the signs I have performed in their midst” (Num. 14:11). This also points to the paradox of an inscription in their very being—which they cannot trust. The kind of faith God waits for is not a dogmatic belief in His power, but rather faith in His love for them. A people who think themselves hated by God cannot trust the signs of His benevolence, however deeply experienced. To trust means to acknowledge the enigmatic messages of the other who is truly unknowable, who is absent in His very presence. God’s enigmatic “signs” ask to be translated by human desire. In the final analysis, to trust is, as Sefat Emet puts it, to be “drawn in desire” after the other.36 Human desire arouses divine desire that overwhelms all the limitations of time and space. In this way, Sefat Emet repeatedly translates Joshua and Caleb’s words, “If God desires us…” as “All depends on Israel’s desire.” On the realistic view, the people in fact have not yet developed that true self that is capable of such a desire and such a trust. In this sense, the moment is indeed not yet ripe for going up into the Land. From a different perspective, as Sefat Emet suggests, if the people had been really impassioned—drawn after God—the surge of miracles that redeemed them from Egypt would have borne them into the Land. In this sense, the people make an unconscious choice. They choose to live within the natural human world of love and hate, trust and distrust, connection and separation. It will then take them forty years, and the concentrated tidal rhythm of death and birth, to begin to integrate their “two hearts” and find the love that will only then become utterable.

In Transit The time in the wilderness is a journey toward a fuller experience of the possibilities of love and trust. It is a time of movement, spent in transit towards a way of living with all that, in Winnicott’s terms, is experienced as not‑me. This is the meaning of wilderness—the space and time of an otherness that is experienced as not‑human. See e.g. Sefat Emet, Bamidbar, 105.

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The developing child learns to “play” with the experience of absence, of the mother who has gone away. This is a journey through time, from a sometimes obliterating sense of Efes, in which “All I have got is what I have not got” (Winnicott, 1971, p. 24). The people travel back and forth between here and there, between subjective and objective reality. The great dread is of being pulled apart by their own aggression; of being lost in some wilderness. For coming to know this fear, there is nothing like actually being in a wilderness. In transit, viable symbolic objects, representing loss and recovery, can be created. Time and again, these objects will fall apart and be recreated. God, the Land, their very selves, will tend to disappear, like the grasshoppers of their fantasy. Their journey can already be glimpsed within the frame of the narrative of the Spies itself. For even in the maelstrom of weeping on that fateful night, an utterance emerges, an act of dibur (language) about the people’s reality. Sheer voice (“They gave forth their voice…”) settles into an expression of the nothing that they inhabit: “If only we had died in the land of Egypt, or in this wilderness if only we had died…” (14:2). The wish never to have been born modulates gradually into the full fantasy of return: “…Let us appoint a leader and return to Egypt” (14:4). In this speech, the people become for a moment consciously expressive of their unconscious condition. Something has broken through into speech which is suffused by the fantasy it describes. This is a moment of “uncanny disruption,” in Lear’s words; an official self gapes open and another identity becomes visible. The unity that is genuinely available to us is, I think, marked by disruption and division…. Whatever unity is genuinely available partially consists in certain forms of disruption. The aim of unity should not be to overcome these disruptions, but to find ways to live well with them. Ironically, the unity that is available to us is a peculiar form of disunity. (Lear, 2011, p. 43)

Even a concept like Efes—nothingness, negation—marks a stage on a journey, a moment when a guiding fantasy comes into view. Putting their imaginative life into words, so that the fantasy “suffuses the words” (p. 125), does not—surprisingly—destroy the world: the world survives,

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as does God, and their own selves. More than that, through such moments of rupture, something new is hatched.37 Reading the wilderness narrative in this “therapeutic” way depends on a radical assumption: that the people can, in a sense, hear themselves as they speak. Their angriest outbursts act not least on themselves. A truth has been uttered that they themselves may find bewildering. Such eruptions of fantasy life may constitute a journey through a “great and terrible wilderness” (Deut. 1:19). In transit, possibilities of love and desire and faith may become visible. In this wilderness journey, the question of goodness will unfold its complexity. For Moses, there never was a question about the goodness of God’s guidance. Seeing through a clear lens, Moses speaks, to the end, of the good land that he yearns for. When, in the last months of his life, he cries to God, “Please let me cross over and see the good land…” (Deut. 3:25), Abarbanel suggests that he wishes to demonstrate the truth of its goodness to his people. His dearest wish is to confront his people with this manifest goodness; after this, he is willing to die. But God interrupts his plea: “Enough! Do not speak to Me any more of this thing!” Moses is not to go on harping on this question of the land’s goodness. Perhaps the reason that God interrupts Moses is that just here, in “this thing,” the rift between Moses and his people opens wide. Moses’ state approximates to the “transparent eye‑ball” evoked by Emerson. For him, goodness is an objective matter; he and all reality are “part or particle of God.” In contrast, the people are driven by fantasies and anxieties that make goodness an issue of love and hate; the Land represents other questions about themselves, the world, and God. No demonstration of lush fruit can ever lay to rest the Efes coiled within them. Moses’ dream of vindication cannot address their need. For them, a journey will have proved necessary if they are to find a way of speaking of the good Land with all their heart.

Cf. Rashi on the parable of the stations of illness in the journey of the king’s son: on Numbers 33:1.

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REFERENCES Bion, W. (1995). Attention and Interpretation. North Vale, NJ: Jason Aronson, Inc. Cavell, S. (1994). In Quest of the Ordinary. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Edmundson, M. (1990). Towards Reading Freud. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Eigen, M. (2004). The Electrified Tightrope. London: H. Karnac Ltd. Emerson, R. W. (1982). Selected Essays. Penguin Books. Freud, S. (1916‑7). Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. Standard Edition, 15‑16. Greenblatt, S. (1991). Marvelous Possessions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lear, J. (2011). A Case for Irony. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ____. (2000). Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Winnicott, D. W. (1990). Home Is Where We Start From. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. ____. (1971). Playing and Reality. London: Routledge. Wordsworth, W. (1955). Poetry & Prose. London: Rupert Hart‑Davis.

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The “Hearing Heart” and the “Voice” of Breakdown Ofra Eshel

A “Hearing Heart”—“‫”לב שומע‬ We should read the bible one more time. To interpret it, of course, but also to let it carve out a space for our own fantasies and interpretive delirium. —Kristeva, 1993, p. 126

The peculiar combination of a “hearing heart” (“‫ )”לב שומע‬has captured my imagination and thinking, and has carved out a space in my clinical understanding over many years. As a child in primary school, I studied the biblical story of King Solomon asking God to give him a “hearing heart” to be able to judge the people (I Kings 3:9), and I was perplexed by this peculiar combination—how can a heart hear? The marvel of a “hearing heart” followed me into my first paper on storytelling and listening in the analytic situation (1996). Later, in my paper on containing (2002 in Hebrew; 2004a), I emphasized the importance, even necessity, of the analyst’s “hearing heart”—hearing, listening, and understanding with one’s heart—in the containing process. Recently (2012a), once more, the analyst’s “hearing heart” formed a fundamental aspect of my thinking when facing the “voice” of trauma or breakdown. Hazan (2008) also related to the “hearing heart” in a lecture on analytic listening.

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When translating my paper on containing (2002) from Hebrew to English (2004a), I was surprised to discover that the standard translations of the Bible into English diminish the peculiarity of this combination by changing the “hearing heart” to “an understanding heart” (King James Bible; American King James Version; The Jewish Publication Society; New American Standard Bible; Darby Bible Translation; Webster’s Bible Translation), “a discerning heart” (The New International Version Study Bible), “an understanding mind” (New Living), or “a thoughtful mind” (James Moffat Translation). Only the Oxford Study Bible comes closer to the original Hebrew—“a heart with skill to listen.” These translations thus miss the subtle yet crucial next step in the Hebrew biblical narrative. Although King Solomon asks God for a “hearing heart” (“‫)”לב שומע‬, he is given “a wise and an understanding heart” (“‫)”לב חכם ונבון‬, and also “both riches and honor”: Behold, I have done according to thy words: lo, I have given thee a wise and an understanding heart, so that there was none like thee before thee, neither after thee shall any arise like unto thee. And I have also given thee that which thou hast not asked, both riches and honor. (I Kings 3:12‑13)

“The wisdom of God was in him” (3:28), yet not a “hearing heart.” What does this mean? Hazan offers a compelling explanation: It seems to me that buried in this ancient text is a unique insight into the essence of analytic listening, and even if it is not found there, a contemporary listening to the text allows us to derive this insight from it. What I am saying is that it is referring to a wish that will always remain only partially fulfilled, and at best, we must be satisfied with a wise and understanding heart, which is no small feat. But even if we do not receive a hearing heart, it exists there as a poetic ideal which constitutes part of who we are, and serves as a landmark which determines the azimuth according to which we listen. (Hazan, 2008, p. 7; emphasis in original)

I understand this differently. I think that in the biblical text a “hearing heart” thus becomes a great human longing which cannot be obtained from without, not even through Divine giving; nor does it pertain to the realm of wisdom, even Divine wisdom. All of these may confer “a wise and an understanding heart.” The “hearing heart,” however, can be attained only through a willingness to dare to open one’s heart and soul to

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another human being. It is thus at the core of the analyst’s difficult, sometimes even exceedingly difficult, struggle to give himself/herself over— with all one’s heart, soul, and might (Eigen, 1981, based on Deuteronomy 6)—to being there within the troubled emotional experience of the patient’s world; staying open, attuned, sensing, hearing, and feeling the “voice” of the patient’s trauma or breakdown that cries out. Freud wrote that the analyst “must turn his unconscious like a receptive organ toward the transmitting unconscious of the patient. He must adjust himself to the patient as a telephone receiver is adjusted to the transmitting microphone” (1912, pp. 115‑16). I wish to add here the “hearing heart” as an essential part of the analyst’s increased receptive capacity, especially when the patient’s transmission is unthinkably traumatic and “beyond the pleasure principle.”

The “Voice” of Trauma or Breakdown Freud confronts and grapples with the notion of trauma in his seminal and complex essay “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920), which is often regarded as one of his most intriguing and provoking essays. Although he begins with the dominance of the pleasure principle in psychoanalytic theory, he goes beyond the pleasure principle to the compulsion to repeat traumatic experiences and traumatic dreams that “disregard the pleasure principle in every way” (p. 36). This leads him, throughout the essay, to a radical reformulation of his metapsychological theory founded on the primacy of the pleasure principle. Freud first relates to the change in the aims of psychoanalytic technique after twenty‑five years of intense work. At first, the focus was on discover[ing] the unconscious material … psychoanalysis was then first and foremost an art of interpreting. Since this did not solve the therapeutic problem … the chief emphasis lay upon the patient’s resistances…. But it became ever clearer that the aim which had been set up—the aim that what was unconscious should become conscious—is not completely attainable by that method. The patient cannot remember the whole of what is repressed in him, and what he cannot remember may be precisely the essential part of it…. He is obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of, as the physician would prefer to see, remembering it as something belonging to the past. (p. 18; emphasis in original)

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Freud then elaborates the concept of trauma, which necessarily implies “a breach in an otherwise efficacious barrier against stimuli” (p. 29), provoking the compulsion to repeat which is “more primitive, more elementary, more instinctual than the pleasure principle which it over‑rides” (p. 23). It is the vital task of the compulsion to repeat in order to master or bind the excessive stream of excitations. Only after this task has been accomplished is it possible for the dominance of the pleasure principle (and its modification, the reality principle) to proceed unhindered. Freud notes that in some people these repetitions are particularly striking. “They give the impression of being pursued by a malignant fate or possessed by some ’daemonic’ power” (p. 21). He illustrates this with a strange, dramatic story: The most moving poetic picture of a fate such as this is given by Tasso in his romantic epic Gerusalemme Liberata. Its hero, Tancred, unwittingly kills his beloved Clorinda in a duel while she is disguised in the armour of an enemy knight. After her burial he makes his way into a strange magic forest which strikes the Crusaders’ army with terror. He slashes with his sword at a tall tree; but blood streams from the cut and the voice of Clorinda, whose soul is imprisoned in the tree, is heard complaining that he has wounded his beloved once again. (p. 22)

The disastrous actions of Tancred, mortally wounding his disguised beloved in a battle and then, unknowingly, seemingly by chance, wounding her again, powerfully represent for Freud the way that the experience of a trauma repeats itself, unwittingly and unremittingly, through a person’s unknowing acts. This repetition, at the heart of the trauma, which overrides any principle of pleasure and reality, thus also created “an extensive breach” (Freud, 1920, p. 31) in Freud’s theoretical and clinical thinking. “An analyst should leave room for the growth of ideas that are being germinated in the analytic experience, even though the germ of an idea is going to displace him and his theories,” said Bion (2005, p. 49) in a Tavistock seminar, at age eighty‑one, a year before his death. In my opinion, Freud’s extraordinary thinking here germinates this sort of innovative idea of unknown future developments relating to trauma and memory in psychoanalytic theory and practice.

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Cathy Caruth, a professor of comparative literature and English who deals extensively with trauma, bases her intriguing book Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (1996) on this particular point in Freud’s article, elaborating the notion of “the wound and the voice.” She evocatively suggests that the resonance of Freud’s example goes beyond this dramatic illustration of repetition compulsion and exceeds, perhaps, the limits of Freud’s conceptual or conscious theory of trauma. For what seems to me particularly striking in the example of Tasso is not just the unconscious act of the infliction of the injury and its inadvertent and unwished‑for repetition, but the moving and sorrowful voice that cries out, a voice that is paradoxically released through the wound. Tancred does not only repeat his act but, in repeating it, he for the first time hears a voice that cries out to him to see what he has done … bears witness to the past he has unwittingly repeated. Tancred’s story thus represents traumatic experience not only as the enigma of a human agent’s repeated and unknowing acts, but also as the enigma of the otherness of a human voice that cries out from the wound, a voice that witnesses a truth that Tancred himself cannot fully know (pp. 2‑3; emphasis in original).

For Caruth, the moving quality of this story is its striking juxtaposition of the unknowing, injurious repetition and the witness of the crying voice. This is a “double wound” because the wound‑trauma of the psyche, unlike the wound of the body, is an event that is originally experienced too unexpectedly and overwhelmingly to be fully known, and is therefore not available to consciousness until it imposes itself again, in the repetitive actions and nightmares of the survivor. It is this very unassimilated nature—the way it was precisely not known in the first instance—that returns to haunt the survivor. Therefore, according to Caruth, what the parable of the wound and the voice thus tells us, and what is at the heart of Freud’s writing on trauma, both in what it says and in the stories it unwittingly tells, is that trauma seems to be much more than a pathology, or the simple illness of a wounded psyche: it is always the story of a wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available. (p. 4; my emphasis)

This “voice,” in its delayed emergence and its belated address that stubbornly insists on bearing witness to a disconnected, silenced, hidden

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wound, returns us to the need for a hearing ear and mind, and as I have suggested, a “hearing heart” to open up further and fuller possibilities of hearing. But what is the necessary, correct, or even feasible way of hearing trauma when faced with its enigmatic, tantalizing appearance of muteness and a strange cry, of a pleading demand to know along with inaccessibility, of a disguised, mortally wounded woman and a tree that streams blood—especially in a situation of massive dissociation? What is the meaning of this repeated “double wound” in the clinical situation? Caruth begins her book with a citation from Tasso: Though chilled with horror, with a second blow He struck it, and decided then to look. (Tasso, Jerusalem Liberated, quoted in Caruth, 1996, p. 1)

What then is the meaning, to the patient, to the analyst/therapist, of being “chilled with horror” when the traumatic experience threatens to emerge, and how is this horror to be faced in treatment? Since Freud, the study of trauma has evolved significantly within psychoanalytic thought and practice, mainly in the last few decades, and in terms of dissociation rather than repression. However, it can be said that the psychoanalytic investigation of trauma itself followed a traumatic course and therefore also needed a double, belated emergence to find a “voice.” This had its inception in the early period of psychoanalysis. The work of the Hungarian psychoanalyst Sandor Ferenczi, especially in the last years of his life, brought to the fore the importance of childhood trauma and its impact on personality. This led to a tragic rift between him and Freud, particularly with regard to the presentation of Ferenczi’s last paper “Confusion of Tongues” (1933), and his subsequent ostracism from the psychoanalytic community (Aron and Harris, 1993). Whereas Freud abandoned the seduction theory as early as 1897 and replaced it with the intrapsychic drive model, infantile fantasies and repression, Ferenczi emphasized the realities of childhood traumas of sexual and physical abuse and the subsequent fragmentation and

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dissociation. Dissociation, unlike repression, defends against overwhelming memories of traumatic experiences. These claims were a daring contradiction of Freud’s view that memories of sexual abuse are based on instinct‑driven fantasies. Furthermore, Ferenczi investigated daring therapeutic methods for coping with the reliving of traumatic overstimulation, terror and dissociation in treatment, with the analyst serving as an important reparative force. After Ferenczi’s death, the injunction against further consideration of these ideas and conceptions within the psychoanalytic world was so powerful that it was many years before the issues of childhood trauma, dissociation, and the possibility of accessing memories of childhood abuse were again addressed in psychoanalytic theoretical and clinical thinking. In the British psychoanalytic literature, these ideas were developed mainly by psychoanalysts of the Independent (Middle) group with regard to object relations theories, traumatic early relationships and therapeutic regression. These psychoanalysts include Balint, Ferenczi’s analysand and disciple, who attempted a conciliatory gesture toward Freudian “classical” theory and technique (1968); Winnicott (1945; 1963; 1965a; 1965b); Khan (1963; 1964; 1971); and Fairbairn (1952) in Edinburgh. In the American literature this area was addressed by Sullivan (1953); Shengold (1989); Modell, who wrote extensively about the effect of trauma on memory (1990; 2005; 2006; 2009); and Herman (1997). From the end of the 1980s and the early 1990s this subject was frequently discussed by relational psychoanalysts: Davies and Frawly, who focused on the treatment of adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse (1991; 1992; 1994; Davies, 1996); Bromberg (1998; 2006; 2011); Donnel Stern (1997; 2003; 2004; 2009; 2010; 2012); and Howell, who defined trauma as the “event(s) that cause dissociation” (2005, p. ix). The exploration of trauma in the clinical situation revolves around the profoundly complex relation between the silenced, dissociated wound and the voice that cries out; the knowing—not knowing of the unbearable traumatic experience, at once demanding and inaccessible. It is a kind of unbearable double telling—the story of the unbearable nature of the traumatic experience and the story of the ongoing unbearable nature of its survival (Caruth, 1996). “Traumatic experiences do not produce

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memories but actualities” (Hernandez, 1998), and the horror of reaching to the original trauma, which both defies and demands going there. For me, the most important psychoanalytic writings in this regard are Winnicott’s posthumous papers: “Fear of Breakdown,” written around 1963 but published three years after his death, in 1974, and its continuation “Psychology of Madness” (1965a). Winnicott relates to the disastrous impact of being broken down in infancy, at the time when the ego organization is threatened, since “the ego cannot organize against environmental failure in so far as dependence is a living fact” (Winnicott, 1963, p. 174). It is that extreme primitive agony of early breakdown which Winnicott also calls madness X (and Eigen, following him, refers to as agony X; 1999; 2004). This early breakdown is so unthinkable and “indescribably painful” that it cannot be experienced, and a new massive defense organization, which the patient displays as an illness syndrome, is organized against it. Consequently, the individual becomes imprisoned in a dissociated, ever‑present “unthinkable state of affairs that underlies the defence organization” (Winnicott, 1963, p. 174), which has already happened, but since it has not yet been experienced, it cannot get into the past tense, and is feared and compulsively sought after in the future. It is thus an ongoing catastrophe, then, now, about to happen—forever; an endless impact on one’s being. In Winnicott’s unique words: The breakdown has already happened, near the beginning of the individual’s life … but … this thing of the past has not happened yet because the patient was not there for it to happen to. The only way to “remember” in this case is for the patient to experience this past thing for the first time in the present, that is to say, in the transference. This past and future thing then becomes a matter of the here and now, and becomes experienced by the patient for the first time. (1963, p. 179; emphasis added)

Winnicott is describing a profound inner struggle. In those depths of unthinkable agony of early breakdown or madness are buried both the traumatic experience and a “basic urge” to experience it and thus “to be recovered in experience … remembered in the reliving of it” (1965, p. 126; emphasis in original) in treatment. This evokes the dread of breakdown or of the return of the original madness; but also the patient’s great need to reach to this original, unthinkable state of breakdown, to risk

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re‑experiencing and reliving the early agony—this time in treatment, with the analyst and his or her different holding and “auxiliary ego‑ supporting function,” which will make recovery possible. Thus, using Caruth’s words, it is the treatment that will be the venue of the “double wounding”—through the belated emergence of the trauma, and the possibility of hearing the voice that cries out from the wound. With the addition of Winnicott’s thinking the treatment will actualize both the cry of the belated traumatic reactivation and a new opportunity for reliving, experiencing, and correcting it. Winnicott’s vision opens new possibilities of understanding and working analytically with the more deeply disturbed aspects of patients’ personalities and experiences. Max Hernandez, an eminent Peruvian psychoanalyst, writes in this regard: Winnicott’s notion, in a way, could be considered a radical reworking of one of Freud’s last clinical comments—a reworking of vast consequences. Freud (1937) wrote, “Often enough, when a neurotic is led by an anxiety‑state to expect the occurrence of some terrible event, he is in fact merely under the influence of a repressed memory (which is seeking to enter consciousness but cannot become conscious) that something which was at that time terrifying did really happen. I believe that we should gain a great deal of valuable knowledge from work of this kind upon psychotics even if it led to no therapeutic success” (p. 268). But for Winnicott (1963) [regarding the more psychotic phenomena], “the original experience of primitive agony cannot get into the past tense unless the ego can first gather it into its own present time experience and into omnipotent control now (assuming the auxiliary ego‑supporting function of the mother [analyst])” (p. 177). In the analytic process, the patient may stop looking for or to the past event not yet experienced only if s/he gathers the original environmental failure into the area of her/his omnipotence within the transferential experience (Hernandez, 1998, p. 137).

The emphasis thus lies in allowing the unbearable agony to be gradually experienced and lived out with the analyst in treatment. “All this is very difficult, time‑consuming and painful,” writes Winnicott, “but alas, there is no end unless the bottom of the trough has been reached, unless the thing feared has been experienced” (1963, p. 178; emphasis in original).

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Thus, the critical question here, and in my opinion one of the most difficult questions at the heart of psychoanalytic work, is how willing are we—analysts and therapists—to reach to the unbearable realness of the patient’s most traumatic experience, breakdown, and madness; to face the chilling horror and pain in hearing the voice that cries out from the bleeding wound. When the patient in treatment repeatedly points to the ongoing wounding, without the ability to go through it, how do we stay within and go through these devastated‑devastating states—in statu nascendi—until patient‑and‑analyst “t(w)ogether” (Eshel, 2004b, 2012a) become able to experience, tolerate and cope with the anxieties that were unthinkable in their original setting. “Someone must feel it in order for us to embrace it as reality” (Eigen, 2004, p. 65). I believe that in order to be within the patient’s deepest feeling states and their emotional meaning, within the gripping pull toward breakdown and recovery until “the thing feared has been experienced,” the analyst needs the capacity of mind and heart—a “hearing heart.” I will now illustrate this with a clinical example.

Clinical Illustration This clinical example is taken from André Green’s last book, Illusions and Disillusions of Psychoanalytic Work (2011), published several months before his death. The book explores theoretically and clinically disappointing and sometimes tragic processes in psychoanalytic treatments. The clinical section presents a dozen disappointing or failed cases drawn from Green’s analytic work and from the clinical experience of his colleagues, followed by a short commentary by Green on the difficult essential points or characteristics of the case. This is interesting because Green rarely presented clinical examples in his writings. It can be said that here Green goes beyond himself, “goes beyond a comfortable position concerning clinical practice and introduces a deep approach to failures in the psychoanalytic treatment” (Fiorini, 2011, p. ix). I wish to address the case reported by analyst Litza Guttieres‑Green, Green’s wife, entitled “Ariane: An Unresoluble Transference.” This is a difficult analysis of a forty‑year‑old woman, Ariane, which took place over twenty years ago. Ariane was referred to treatment because of severe

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anxiety attacks, accompanied by a feeling that she did not exist, alcohol abuse, disappointing love affairs and suicide attempts. She spoke of a void, a black hole that both terrified her and drew her to it. Ariane’s mother was ill from her birth and died when Ariane was six. The child suffered very early in life from feelings of terror and hostility. She remembered nothing of her childhood. Her only recollection related to her mother’s burial: she had been left at home, and, from the window, saw a crowd of people and her family dressed “in black.” She had been afraid and had hidden under the table. In spite of her difficult childhood, she had successfully completed a university degree, was highly regarded, married a fellow student, and had two children. But she saw all this as a “frantic headlong flight,” during which she did her best to “fill holes,” without managing to avoid depressive episodes. Due to political events, Ariane and her husband were forced to go into exile with their two very young children, and Ariane became severely depressed. She went through failed psychotherapies, and risked her marriage by leaving her husband and returning to him several times. She lost her job. She underwent short‑term psychiatric hospitalizations because of suicide threats, panic attacks, and alcohol abuse, and was treated with psychotropic medications, all to little avail. When first consulting Guttieres‑Green, Ariane maintained that she had no more hope and that “death would be a liberation.” In spite of this difficult clinical picture, Guttieres‑Green accepted her for treatment, and the relationship between them became at once difficult and fragile. A constant sense of emergency prevailed, with treatment occasionally interrupted by hospitalizations. Guttieres‑Green experienced feelings of helplessness and thought she was going through something akin to what her patient was describing. It was difficult to follow the flow of associations, to memorize, understand, think about, and interpret the confused material. Sometimes Guttieres‑Green was overcome by extreme sleepiness during the sessions, barely managing to keep her eyes open. She told herself that she had to maintain a setting that was capable of containing and protecting the patient—and protecting herself—against the patient’s destructiveness. She read Freud, Ferenczi, Winnicott, Tustin, and Green in search of answers to problems the patient

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was confronting her with, and thus accumulated much theoretical‑clinical knowledge. She came to believe that Ariane’s mother had been unable to establish ties with her daughter that could survive her own death and give her a sufficiently secure basis. Ariane had not acquired confidence in a lasting and reliable relationship; she withdrew behind a mask of narcissistic indifference, while the grudge and hatred against her deceased mother were being relived in the transference. Gradually, however, Ariane’s acting out decreased, more elaborate material appeared, and real analytic work began. Ariane came regularly and no longer spoke of discontinuing treatment. She acknowledged her dependence and attachment, and also looked after her children. She now brought many dreams to treatment. Although she was not free of anxiety, her capacity for insight led her analyst to hope that matters would develop favorably. The hole, the void, which Guttieres‑Green and Ariane’s previous therapists interpreted as representing Ariane’s mother’s tomb in which she had taken refuge, were now linked by Ariane to a lack at the origin of her life. “I would like to find a sense of continuity again to fill this void,” she said. She had always connected it with her mother’s death because her therapists, Guttieres‑Green included, had always made this link for her, and because she did not know how to interpret it. “I think that it was before [mother’s death], something that did not happen left a hole. I’ve never been able—or known how—to speak about it. I began to understand when I told you that I did not know my mother” (p. 125). Here Guttieres‑Green said to herself that the loss of memory hid a breakdown that had already happened (according to Winnicott, “Fear of breakdown”). Buried memories and unconscious fantasies gradually became accessible, although they retained particular characteristics. While Ariane was able to render her fantasies into images and communicate them to her analysts, she pointed out that in all her dreams the characters [“spoke”] in French, the language of the analysis, and not in her mother tongue. It was in the course of the analytic work that she learnt to look at them directly, in her analyst’s presence; even if they remained frightening, she was able to find the words to represent them. She said, “I

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have learnt to speak with you” (p. 127). However, these representations had a massive, repetitive character, as if there was a link that she could not make, and she was unable to get beyond them. Something remained unrepresentable. Was it not the “voice” of the core catastrophe that happened long ego and still goes on, unmet, not‑yet‑experienced? According to Guttieres‑Green, different interpretations of the void, the black hole, the deadly tomb, did not succeed in creating hope in a more stable way. For Ariane, what was empty and missing was always more important than what was full; hate triumphed over love. She said: “I am desperate because in spite of the changes, I continue to feel alone and empty. My life has no meaning even though I cannot say why. What we have understood and reconstituted together surrounds a hole. What is in this hole, I will never know; it did not take place, quite simply, and that is what is lacking. So I cannot know what I am lacking, nor can I have any hope of filling this void” (p. 127). Guttieres‑Green consoled herself with the symptomatic improvements: Ariane seemed calmer, and less self‑centered; she spoke about those around her, and not just about her own terrors. The following summer, the patient decided to end the treatment and return to her country of origin with her children and husband. The treatment ended after the summer vacation. Ariane would telephone from time to time; gradually, the telephone calls became less regular— Guttieres‑Green thought that Ariane only wanted to make sure that she was alive—and then they stopped altogether. I quote here the final paragraph, verbatim: She came back; several years had gone by, and I was horrified by her appearance: she had grown older, of course, but she seemed degraded; her husband had left her and remarried; her children had gone away to study, and had started to work. They were doing well, but she did not see them much. They had their own lives. “Everyone has abandoned me, I am alone,” she said with a little smile. She was not looking after herself, and had no money; she showed me her ruined teeth: “I’ve aged, you can see!” I asked her if she was in therapy. “No, I would like to come back to you.” I refused. She understood, but she had hoped it might be possible, she said, with her little resigned smile. Staring into space, she seemed to be dreaming … about what? I will never know. She left again, leaving me

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I think that this is a tragic and disastrous ending.1 In what I am about to say I am not being critical or condescending towards Guttieres‑Green. I appreciate her frankness and courage in presenting this case. All of us, analysts and therapists, have been faced with moments, places, individuals in treatment—hopefully not many—rendering us unable, or unwilling, to go on treating. A severely disturbed patient, who arrives without any money, without a husband, all alone, wretched and degraded, with rotting teeth, does not create a willingness to take her back into treatment. But let me reconsider this case in the light of Caruth’s and Winnicott’s ideas in regard to hearing the crying “voice” of unbearable early trauma and breakdown. It seems to me, given my understanding of Winnicott’s radical notions of “fear of breakdown” and “psychology of madness,” that this was not an untreatable patient with “obstinate and insurmountable resistance to recovery,” as André Green concludes in his commentary on this case (p. 131); nor was it, in Green’s words, “a gaping hole that psychic work cannot fill, the content of which even she is unable to imagine,” that “continues to be like an open wound” (p. 130). Rather, her return was a fateful moment in which a real breakdown was being conveyed. The patient was confronting her analyst with the essence of her core disaster, her being lonely, lost, empty, her collapsing to the very

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I wonder whether the name which Guttieres‑Green chose for her patient does not reveal her own complex feelings over abandoning her patient. Ariane is a French translation of the Greek name Ariadne, a name mostly associated with a woman in love ruthlessly abandoned. Ariadne, in Greek mythology, was the daughter of Minos, King of Crete, who fell in love with Theseus, the son of King Aegeus of Athens, who came to Crete to be sacrificed to the Minotaur in the labyrinth, but instead intended to kill it. Ariadne helped him by giving him a sword and a ball of thread, so that he could slay the Minotaur and find his way out of the labyrinth. She eloped with Theseus after he succeeded in killing the Minotaur, but Theseus abandoned her, sleeping, on the island of Naxos. Ariadne was desolate and wanted to die, but she was discovered by Dionysus who married her, and they had two children. In the end, Ariadne dies a tragic death (she was either killed or committed suicide).

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lowest level. In this concrete and terrifying way she was handing over to her analyst the relentless imprint of the trauma on her ruined psyche and life, the true, actual meaning of the unbearable, of devastation, desolation, and nothingness. Indeed, “the last scream just before hope was abandoned” (Winnicott, 1969, p. 117; emphasis in original) cried out from the depths of her inconsolable “open wound.” Moreover, in keeping with Winnicott’s ideas of “fear of breakdown,” I would add that the previous “so‑called advances [in the analysis] ended in destruction” (Winnicott, 1963, p. 178) because there was no reconnecting to the full, painful intensity of the patient’s breakdown and the unbearable nature of her survival, which were actualized in her return. This could have become the place‑time in the treatment in which “the bottom has been reached” and “the thing feared” could be met and experienced (Winnicott, 1963, p. 178). It invoked the possibility of facing the overwhelming nature and extent of the inaccessible underlying traumatic state, which was waiting to be heard; a possibility not‑yet‑experienced because from the very beginning of her life, this patient had had an unavailable, seriously ill mother, with whom the matrix experience of “mother and child live an experience together” (Winnicott, 1945, p. 152; emphasis in original) could not take place. Therefore, there was a “void,” a “gaping hole,” which the patient became able to grasp and convey in treatment, saying “I think that it was before [mother’s death], something that did not happen left a hole” (Green, 2011, p. 125). It was now possible, for the first time, in a “past‑present actuality” (Eshel, 2004b) for the analyst to be with her within the realness of the breakdown, and go through it, patient‑and‑analyst “t(w)ogether”; the analyst thus bearing and experiencing with the patient and for the patient the relived breakdown that had already happened but was not yet experienced (Eshel, 1998a; 1998b; 2001; 2004a; 2004b; 2005; 2006; 2009; 2010; 2012a; 2012b; 2013a; 2013b). The catastrophic change (Bion, 1965) thus becomes a catastrophic chance. Going back to and paraphrasing the biblical verses in which this paper was conceived, I would say that the “wisdom” of psychoanalysis was in this analysis—the work of “a wise and an understanding heart,” yet not a “hearing heart” that hears the crying voice of breakdown. André Green concludes his book by stating: “It is meaning

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that provides real holding, and not the object” (2011, p. 190). In my opinion, the emergence of meaning that provides real holding also has to involve a “hearing heart”—which the powerful ideas of Caruth (1996) and Winnicott (1963, 1965a) have helped me to ponder, unfold, and convey in psychoanalytic work. I would like to end with a final quote from Bion (2005), also from his July 3, 1973 Tavistock seminar, which I feel is most relevant and important in this regard. Bion, at the age of eighty‑one, a year before his death, and also, like André Green, an eminent psychoanalytic author after fifty years of psychoanalytic practice, states: To sum up: we are presented with the debris, the vestiges of what was once a patient and what still could be analogous to blowing on the dying embers of a fire so that some spark communicates itself to others; the fire is built up again, although it appeared to be nothing but dead ash. Can we look at all this debris and detect in it some little spark of life?

And afterward: I don’t want to appear to be criticizing or running down my colleagues, but I have recently become more and more convinced that psychiatrists and psychoanalysts don’t believe in mental suffering, and they don’t believe in any treatment of it… Fundamentally, they never get to the point of feeling that the person who comes to the consulting‑room is actually suffering and that there is an approach to it that is on the right lines. Even psychoanalysis may be close enough to be on the right track, to be worth pursuing further. But not, “yes, I know”.… a technical facility, very easily acquired, tends to produce a barrier against the real thing. (Bion, 2005, pp. 44‑45, 48; my emphasis).

For me, this is a powerful Bionian rendering of a “hearing heart.”

REFERENCES Aron, L., & Harris, A. (1993). Sandor Ferenczi: Discovery and rediscovery. In: L. Aron & A. Harris (Eds.), The Legacy of Sandor Ferenczi (pp. 1‑35). Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press.

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Balint, M. (1968). Basic Fault. London: Routledge.

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Bion, W. R. (1965). Transformation. London: Maresfield Library/Karnac, 1965. ____. (2005). The Tavistock Seminars. London: Karnac. Bromberg, P. M. (1998). Standing in the Spaces: Essays on Clinical Process, Trauma, and Dissociation. Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press. ____. (2006). Awakening the Dreamer: Clinical Journeys. Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press. ____. (2011). The Shadow of the Tsunami and the Growth of the Relational Mind. New York: Routledge. Caruth, C. (1996). Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Davies, J. M. (1996). Linking the pre‑analytic with the postclassical: Integration, dissociation, and the multiplicity of unconscious processes. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 32:553‑76. Davies, J. M., & Frawley, M. G. (1991). Dissociative processes and transference‑countertransference paradigms in the psychoanalytically oriented treatment of adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 2:5‑36. ____. (1992). Reply to Gabbard, Shengold, and Grotstein. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 2:77‑96. ____. (1994). Treating the Adult Survivor of Childhood Sexual Abuse. New York: Basic Books. Eigen, M. (1981). The area of faith in Winnicott, Lacan, and Bion. International Journal of Psychoanaysis, 62:413‑33. ____. (1999). Toxic Nourishment. London: Karnac. ____. (2004). The Sensitive Self. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Eshel, O. (1996). Story‑telling in the analytic situation. Sihot/Dialogue, Israel Journal of Psychotherapy, 10:182‑193. ____. (1998). Meeting acting out, acting in and enactment in psychoanalytic treatment, or: Going into the eye of the storm. Sihot/Dialogue, Israel Journal of Psychotherapy, 13, 4‑16. ____. (2001). Whose sleep is it, anyway? Or “Night Moves.” International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 82:545‑62. ____. (2002, in Hebrew). Let it be and become me: Notes on containing, identification, and the possibility of being. Sihot/Dialogue, Israel Journal of Psychotherapy, 16:137‑47.

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____. (2004a). Let it be and become me: Notes on containing, identification, and the possibility of being. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 40:323‑51. ____. (2004b). From the “Green Woman” to “Scheherazade”: The becoming of a fundamentally new experience in psychoanalytic treatment. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 40:527‑56. ____. (2005). Pentheus rather than Oedipus: On perversion, survival and analytic “presencing.” International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 86:1071‑97. ____. (2006). Where are you, my beloved? On absence, loss, and the enigma of telepathic dreams. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 87:1603‑27. ____. (2009). To be “included” in the silence: On the silent patient and the analyst’s “presencing.” Sihot/Dialogue, Israel Journal of Psychotherapy, 23:221‑35. ____. (2010). Patient‑analyst interconnectedness: Personal notes on close encounters of a new dimension. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 30:146‑54. ____. (2012a). In the darkness “beyond the pleasure principle”: On facing the unbearable traumatic experience in psychoanalytic work. Sihot/ Dialogue, Israel Journal of Psychotherapy, 27:5‑15. ____. (2012b). A beam of “chimeric” darkness: Presence, interconnectedness and transformation in the psychoanalytic treatment of a patient convicted of sex offences. Psychoanalytic Review, 99:149‑78. ____. (2013a). Tustin’s “diabolon” and “metabolon” revisited: Further clinical explorations. The Frances Tustin Memorial Prize, the 18th Annual Frances Tustin Memorial Lectureship in Los Angeles, California. ____. (2013b). Patient‑analyst “withness”: On analytic “presencing,” passion, and compassion in states of breakdown, despair, and deadness. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 82:925‑63. Ferenczi, S. (1933). Confusion of tongues between adults and the child. In: M. Balint (Ed.), Final Contributions to the Problems and Methods of Psycho‑Analysis (pp. 280‑290). London: Hogarth Press, 1955 [Reprint, London: Karnac, 1994]. Fiorini, L. G. (2011). Psychoanalytic ideas and applications series. In: A. Green, Illusions and Disillusions of Psychoanalytic Work (pp. ix‑x). London: Karnac.

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Freud, S. (1912). Recommendations to Physicians Practising Psycho‑ analysis. Standard Edition, 12:109‑20. ____. (1920). Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Standard Edition, 18:1‑64. ____. (1937). Constructions in Analysis. Standard Edition, 23:255‑69. Fairbairn, W. R. D. (1952). Psycho‑analytic Studies of the Personality. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Green, A. (2011). Illusions and Disillusions of Psychoanalytic Work. London: Karnac. Grotstein, J. S. (2010). “Orphans of O”: The negative therapeutic reaction and the longing for the childhood that never was. In: J. V. Buren & S. Alhanati (Eds.), Primitive Mental States (pp. 8‑30). London: Routledge. Hazan, Y. (2008). Thoughts on listening. Lecture, Israel Psychoanalytic Society, October 2008. Herman, J. L. (1992). Trauma and Recovery. New York: Basic Books. Hernandez, M. (1998). Winnicott’s “Fear of breakdown”: On and beyond trauma. Diacritics, 28:134‑43. Howell, F. (2006). The Dissociative Mind. New York: Routledge. Khan, M. M. R. (1963). The concept of cumulative trauma. In: The Privacy of the Self (pp. 42‑58). London: The Hogarth Press, 1986. ____. (1964). Ego‑distortion, cumulative trauma and the role of reconstruction in the analytic situation. In: The Privacy of the Self (pp. 59‑68). London: Hogarth Press, 1986. ____. (1971). To hear with eyes: Clinical notes on body as subject and object. In: The Privacy of the Self (pp. 234‑250). London: Hogarth Press, 1986. Modell, A. (1990). Other Times, Other Realities. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press. ____. (2005). Emotional memory, metaphor and meaning. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 25:555‑68. ____. (2006). Imagination and the Meaningful Brain. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ____. (2009). Metaphor: The bridge between feelings and knowledge. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 29:6‑17. Shengold, L. (1989). Soul Murder: The Effects of Child Abuse and Deprivation. New Haven: Yale University Press.

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Stern, D. B. (1997). Unformulated Experience: From Dissociation to Imagination in Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge. ____. (2003). The fusion of horizons: Dissociation, enactment, and understanding. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 13:843‑75. ____. (2004). The eye sees itself: Dissociation, enactment, and the achievement of conflict. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 40:197‑237. ____. (2009). Shall the Twain Meet? Dissociation, metaphor, and co‑ occurrence. Pychoanalytic Inquiry, 29:79‑90. ____. (2010). Partners in Thought: Working with Unformulated Experience, Dissociation, and Enactment. New York: Routledge ____. (2012). Witnessing across time: Accessing the present from the past and the past from the present. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 81:53‑81. Sullivan, H. S. (1954). The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry. H. S. Perry & M. L. Gawel (Eds.). New York: Norton. Winnicott, D. W. (1945). Primitive Emotional Development. In: Through Paediatrics to Psycho‑Analysis Collected Papers (pp. 145‑56). London: Karnack Books and the Institute of Psycho‑Analysis, 1992. ____. (1963). Fear of breakdown. In: G. Kohon (Ed.), The British School of Psychoanalysis. The Independent Tradition (pp. 173‑82). London: Free Association Books, 1986. Also in C. Winnicott, R. Shepherd, & M. Davis (Eds.), Psycho‑analytic Explorations (pp. 87‑95). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. ____. (1965a). The Psychology of Madness: A contribution from psychoanalysis. In: C. Winnicott, R. Shepherd, & M. Davis (Eds.), Psycho‑analytic Explorations (pp. 119‑29). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. ____. (1965b). The concept of trauma in relation to the development of the individual within the family. In: C. Winnicott, R. Shepherd, & M. Davis (Eds.), Psycho‑analytic Explorations (pp. 130‑48). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. ____. (1969). Additional note on psycho‑somatic disorder. In: C. Winnicott, R. Shepherd, & M. Davis (Eds.), Psycho‑analytic Explorations (pp. 115‑18). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.

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“Have You Seen My Servant Job?” A Psychological Approach to Suffering Richard Kradin

The Book of Job (‫ )איוב‬is widely recognized as an ancient inquiry into the problem of theodicy (Gordis, 1978). Even in antiquity, Job was recognized to be parable, not a historical recounting (Eisenmann, 2012). Although the book’s provenance is uncertain, most modern scholars agree that it was likely authored by either an exilic or post‑exilic author circa the sixth century B.C.E. and locate it within the textual genre of Wisdom that was common in the ancient Near East (Perdue, 2007). Structurally, the work includes prose narratives that bracket a series of verse dialogues between Job, his “comforters,” and YHWH.1 Form criticism suggests that the text originally was a simple folk‑tale that included the prose prologue and epilogue, and that the central verses were inserted to create the complex work as we have received it (Perdue, 2007). Whereas the problem of theodicy is the central theme of the text, the psychologist Daniel Merkur in a recent review of the various psychoanalytical interpretations of Job has emphasized the relevance of its storyline rather than theological concerns (Merkur, 2004). As Merkur notes: Looking not for theology but for narrative, I find a coherent story about a man who was deeply upset with God but who came to inner peace through a transformative mystical experience. His theological views underwent change in keeping with his mystical transformation. (p. 120) 1



YHWH is the tetragammaton that represents the ineffable name of God in the Hebrew bible.

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Some ancient commentators displayed substantial insight into the psychology of Job’s personal plight. However, few psychoanalytical commentators have addressed the critical nexus between religious and psychological thought that can also be gleaned from a close reading of Job. Carl Jung, in his controversial Answer to Job, explored the psychological underpinnings of theodicy, but he focused on the psychological evolution of the God‑image rather than its human protagonist (Jung, 1958). Jung’s treatment of Job is of interest for a variety reasons. Jung anthropomorphicizes YHWH to an extent that suggests a failure to appreciate the sophistication of ancient monotheistic religious sensibilities. He also adopts a commonly held view of YHWH as a persecutory figure in the text, a position that runs counter to traditional Judaism, and that in fact fails to consider adequately the complexity of the dynamic between these protagonists: One would have to choose positively grotesque examples to illustrate the disproportion between the two antagonists.…Yahweh projects on to Job a skeptic’s face which is hateful to him because it is his own, and which gazes at him with an uncanny and critical eye. (Jung, para. 591)2

Yet Jung’s overall appreciation that the religious impulse within the psyche cannot be reduced to childhood fantasy is critically important to the present thesis. No psychological consideration of Job can avoid the theme of object loss. The text is constructed around Job’s mourning a series of profound losses, including his wealth, societal standing, and children. Sigmund Freud’s treatise on Mourning and Melancholia has important theoretical implications for a psychological approach to Job, as it concerns what constitutes cathartic mourning versus neurotic “melancholia (depression).” As Freud notes:



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While this is not the place to consider Jung’s prejudices with respect to Judaism, he is clear on the point that he is examining the text from the perspective of a modern Christian who adopts the perspective that God has in fact “evolved” within the collective psyche of Western civilization from YHWH to Christ, a position that would certainly not be accepted by most Jewish religionists.

“Have You Seen My Servant Job?” A Psychological Approach to Suffering The distinguishing mental features of melancholia are a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self‑ regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterances in self‑reproaches and self‑revilings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment. This picture becomes a little more intelligible when we consider that with one exception the same traits are met with in mourning. The disturbance of self‑regard is absent in mourning; but otherwise the features are the same. (Freud, 1916, p. 244; emphasis in original)

In response to his losses, Job enters a period of ritualized “mourning”; however, his subsequent monologues may be interpreted as more consistent with “melancholia.” Like modern depressed patients, Job exhibits substantial obsessionality and narcissism, and this has previously been observed (Merkur, 2004). The elements that account for the radical transformation in Job that occurs following his encounter with YHWH have not yet been sufficiently addressed. Job experiences an epiphany, i.e., his experience is reframed via a radically different construct of meaning, through which earlier righteous indignation gives way to an acceptance of his losses. The present paper explores the role of mystical experience in the transformation of suffering, and aims at providing a comfortable and pragmatic nexus between psychoanalysis and traditional Judaism. Job begins with a description of his societal standing: Job is endowed with riches and he enjoys the respect of his community. He is described as “pure, upright, God‑fearing, one who turns away from evil” (Job 1:1). He is clearly scrupulous, punctilious in his religious observance, as the text suggests with respect to the regularity with which he brings sacrifices to atone for the possibility of his children’s sins. Job is an obsessionally driven creature of habit: “This is what Job always did” (Job 1:6). At the beginning of the text, Job is described in terms that suggest he is “self‑sacrificing,” but by its end, he has learned to sacrifice genuinely on behalf of others. The earthly setting of the prologue shifts suddenly to events in the heavens, where YHWH inquires of ha Satan, a pre‑diabolic prosecuting angel, whether he has taken note of Job, “A man of unquestioning integrity, a probing mind, who fears God and avoids evil” (Job 1:8). This shift to the supernal realm may be imagined symbolically as what is transpiring

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in the unconscious of the protagonist. Job’s subliminal doubt is symbolized by Ha Satan, traditionally regarded in Judaism as the source of man’s evil inclination (‫)יצר הרע‬. Ha Satan is dubious of Job and suggests that his piety would cease were he to be deprived of his possessions. From this perspective, one may surmise that Job’s conscientious behavior is in fact driven by unconscious guilt, as the psychoanalyst O. Renik suggested in his treatment of the text (Renik, 1991). YHWH grants the dubious angel the right to afflict Job with a series of catastrophic losses, but insists that his life be spared—a psychological compromise position,3 in which the ego suffers but is also spared total annihilation. Indeed, the anhedonia that is invariably seen in obsessional and depressive patients can be viewed as a compromise that safeguards the ego from being flooded by disorganizing affect. Job’s immediate response to hearing about the sudden loss of his wealth due to marauding tribes, and the death of his children in a sudden natural disaster, is one of reflexive acceptance: “YHWH giveth and taketh away” (Job 1:21). The psychologist David Bakan has argued that Job’s failure to question the loss of his children reflects an infanticidal impulse on the part of the father, projected by an ancient mind as negative transference onto a “murderous God” (Bakan, 1968). Indeed, the reader is told at the outset that Job is sufficiently troubled by the behavior of his children—who appear to spend much of their life in rounds of festivity—to make sin offerings repeatedly on their behalf. From this perspective, Job is related to the Akedah story of Abraham’s aborted sacrifice of Isaac, and evokes the larger question of the psychology of child sacrifice in ancient religious cults. In a nearly isomorphic reproduction of the initial part of the conversation between YHWH and Ha Satan, and at the latter’s suggestion, Job

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The lack of autonomy of Satan is shared with other angelic messengers in the ancient Israelite religion. The idea of autonomous evil has never been an unquestioned theological part of Judaic monotheism. This is indicated in Isaiah 45:7, in which YHWH states, “I create the good and the bad.” Scholars have suggested that the style of Job and the exilic prophet Isaiah may have been writing in the same period and in response to the question of theodicy raised by the traumatic destruction of the First Temple in 586 B.C.E. and the subsequent exile into Babylonia of the intelligentsia of Judah.

“Have You Seen My Servant Job?” A Psychological Approach to Suffering

is next afflicted with a skin disorder that plagues him without any relief, as he sits silently in the traditional seven days (‫ )שיבע‬of mourning. This curious textual duplication symbolizes the emphatic stirring of contents within Job’s unconscious that have not been sufficiently heeded. Like the plagues in Exodus, Job’s affliction began at a distance but now touches him directly in the flesh. The psychoanalyst Jack Kahn has theorized that Job’s skin disorder is a psychosomatic ailment, an expression of conflated unconscious guilt and anger (Kahn, 1975). Somatization also suggests alexithymia, i.e., Job’s inability to read his internal affect and a defect in symbol formation (Kradin, 2012). Job’s affliction is also a source of shame, as he is unable to hide his disfigurement, and it necessarily exposes him to the perusal and critical judgment of others.4 They all revile him, and must, according to Job, infer the gravity of his culpability to have been so severely afflicted, based on the prevailing theodicy espoused by his comforters. Rabbi H. Kushner in his text The Book of Job raises the interesting point that before the widespread availability of mirrors, one’s self‑image was largely dependent on how others reacted to one’s appearance (Kushner, 2012). Indeed, the relatively late date of their widespread introduction in the sixteenth century may in part explain why so many people are hypersensitive to the reactions of others. Job is also clearly distressed and angered by his loss of status within the community; he experiences shunning as a severe narcissistic wound. Once revered, Job is now repugnant to women, children and even his own servants. According to W. S. Taylor, as a consequence, Job is unable to maintain a stable self‑image in the absence of the public affirmation that he had enjoyed (Taylor, 1956). The question addressed by the biblical narrator is whether disaster can ever befall a blameless man. The traditional theodicy espoused by Job’s “comforters” is that punishment is the just reward for sin, although it may be difficult to discern its cause. Yet Job steadfastly refuses to admit that he is at fault; he insists that no convincing argument can be brought against him to justify his suffering. As a consequence, he asks for—and

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eventually receives—a personal hearing of his case before YHWH. Indeed, the text has many of the characteristics of a legal proceeding and adopts a variety of terms, such as “law,” “contend,” and “condemn,” that are generally viewed as references to Judaic legal proceedings. The speeches in the text are rhetorical and argumentative, and in general distinct from the tone adopted by other ancient Israelite Wisdom texts, such as the Proverbs or Ecclesiastes.5 The legalism of the dialogues is consistent with Job’s obsessive worldview that both demands rational explanation and calls for witness as well as recourse for his perception of having been treated unjustly. The biblical narrator captures the psychological nuances of Job’s personality, including his rigidity, oppositional stances, conflicts with authority, and isolation of affect. Job’s failure to admit to the possibility of doubt betrays the paranoid tinged reaction formation that unconsciously defends against disorder and blame. When Job eventually rises from his period of mourning to speak, he barely acknowledges the presence of his “comforters,” nor does he refer to the death of his children. Instead, he curses the day of his birth, insisting that it would be better never to have lived than to endure the sufferings heaped him by God. Job is unrelenting in his self‑deprecations, a feature that Freud viewed as the sine qua non of depression as opposed to mourning. Supporting this idea are repeated references to darkness (‫)חשכ‬, such as “murkiness,” “shadows,” and the “dimming of the stars.” As the biblical historian Kathryn Schifferdecker suggests, Job’s monologue appears to be aimed at undoing Creation. In declaring “May that day be darkness!” he opposes the divine injunction, “Let there be light!”— an imperative that metaphorically prefigures the development of human consciousness (Schifferdecker, 2008). Indeed, Job’s plaints with respect to birth prefigure YHWH’s response in which Creation figures prominently. Job’s desire to escape from his misery and his inability to identify a path out of it also characterize the narratives of depressed patients.



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The legalistic tone of Job does not include specific halachic references, but the ideas of a prosecuting angel and Job’s insistence on justice are in keeping with a legal framework for the text.

“Have You Seen My Servant Job?” A Psychological Approach to Suffering

Like Job, their thoughts are morbid and preoccupied with death; like Job, they yearn for even transient repose from the continuous agitation that racks their afflicted psyche‑soma. The depressed patient suffers from recriminations; and while Job insists that he has not transgressed, he does concede the price he has paid for his over‑scrupulousness: For I was greatly frightened—and it has overtaken me, that which I dreaded has come to me. Never did I feel secure, never quiet, never at peace. Now torment has arrived. (Job 3:24)

With this confession of the persistent anxiety that has plagued his efforts at warding off the ever‑present fear of divine retribution, Job concludes his first monologue. From a psychoanalytical perspective, Job has been suffering chronically from unconscious guilt, and his behavior belies his perceived blamelessness. It also suggests that while in this situation, he has lived with constant fear of YHWH, that he has experienced little love of Him. Whereas Proverbs 1:7 suggests that “fear of God” is the “beginning of wisdom,” in its absence, piety is empty and neurotic ritual. The rigid order of Job’s psychological position is the stimulus that evokes the destructive chaos of his unconscious. As Freud noted in his essay, “Wrecked by the Unconscious,” it is not uncommon to observe patients whose unconscious wishes undo them when they are fulfilled (Freud, 1916). Job’s wealth and standing in society may have contributed to his fall from grace. Indeed, his words suggest that he is ambivalent concerning his success, on one hand feeling entitled to it, while anxiously expecting its loss. The much‑dreaded chaos has overcome him. The self‑defeating behaviors that are often seen in depression belie not simply a fear of success but also an underlying grudge of having been unjustly treated by an unsympathetic and powerful authority, often a morally culpable parent or divine imago. The psychoanalyst R. L. Katz has suggested based on Job 3:24 that Job suffers from moral masochism (Katz, 1958). This is evident in the acridity of Job’s complaints about YHWH, which border on what was viewed as blasphemy by some commentators in antiquity. However, Job projects his own unconscious contents onto YHWH:

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Richard Kradin But if I am innocent should I not be able to raise my head? Surfeited with shame, confronted by my misery! It became too much that You set traps for me as for a lion, so that you returned again and again to render punctilious judgment against me. (Job 10:15‑16; emphasis added)

Job’s moral masochism and his projections serve as defenses against productive mourning and are a common cause of the resistances encountered in therapy, including negative therapeutic reactions (Kradin, 2008). Although the provenance of Job is uncertain, at the time of its final redaction, the idea of an afterlife had not yet become entrenched in Judaism. Consequently, Job sees no hope for a life cut short by disease and misfortune. He muses, “As a cloud disintegrates and is gone, so he that goes down to the grave shall never come back” (Job 7:9). Unaccustomed to introspection, he questions why YHWH in his omnipotence should be concerned with meting out severe punishment to a lowly man: “What is man that you exalt him, that You turn Your heart towards him.... Can you not let me be awhile so that I can swallow my spittle?” (Job 7‑20). Job bemoans the fact that YHWH has been merciless in inflicting pain upon him. As L. Goitein suggests in his treatment of the text, ancient “theology could not foresee that Guilt is its own reward and that it is against Conscience that placatory rites are directed” (Goitein, 1954). Psychologically speaking, Job is not the victim of persecution; instead he suffers from his own harsh persecutory super‑ego that he perceives as Other. However, in the ancient Israelite religion, there was no meaningful attribution of disease except as the divine consequence of sin.6 Rigidly defended and ambivalent concerning his own dependency, Job persists in crying out for comfort while stubbornly refusing the efforts of others to help him, so much so that his own wife suggests that he “blaspheme YHWH and die,” in an effort finally to achieve relief! Job experiences his vulnerability as shame, convinced that those around him view him as pathetic and deserving of YHWH’s wrath. YHWH is accused of being relentless in his lack of compassion and his “comforters as pitiless”:

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Although divine healing is biblical, the first reference to a positive role for a physician is found in Ben Sirach 38:2: “The skill of the physician lifts up his head, and in the presence of great men he is admired.”

“Have You Seen My Servant Job?” A Psychological Approach to Suffering Know that God has wronged me… Pity me! Pity me! You are my friends, For the hand of God has struck me. Why do you punish me as God does? (Job 19:6, 21‑22)

Blind to his role in what has transpired, and unable either to bear or escape his misery, Job questions, “Why should light be granted to the weary, life to the embittered”? The despair expressed by Job mimics that seen in patients who suffer from depression, who at times may describe an actual decrease in the vibrancy of light due to a physiological decrease in the activation of optical pathways (Bubla, Kerna, Eberta, Bacha, & van Elsta, 2010). How is Job to come to grips with the cause of his suffering? His “comforters,” in fact, suggest a time‑honored psychoanalytic approach: Job must search his soul for the causes of his affliction. Is he so proud to believe that he is indeed blameless? In the apocryphal Enochian literature and in Milton’s Paradise Lost, Satan is described as a prideful angel that fell from heaven (Kushner, 2012), and his central role in the plot suggests that Job’s “comforters” may have indeed been correct in accusing him of overweening pride. After all, they argue, if he is indeed pure of heart, then surely his suffering will be transient. But if his piety has been mere pretense, then woe to Job! The rounds of monologues between Job and his “comforters” display increasing agitation and mutual impatience. Job’s comforters insist that someone other than YHWH must be at fault for Job’s current state, and that he is flirting with blasphemy in continuing to insist on his innocence, especially now that he has been shown prima facie evidence to the contrary. As the “comforter” Bildad the Shuhite suggests: How long will you speak such things? Your utterances are a mighty wind. Would God pervert justice, would Shaddai pervert righteousness? If your sons sinned against Him, He sent them away due to their iniquity. (Job 8: 1‑6)

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Job’s response is dismissive and bristling, betraying his rigid hypersensitivity. He barely acknowledges the presence of the “comforters,” who have shared his entire period of mourning, and he is disdainful of their counsel, chiding them for their lack of empathy and for what he interprets as their errant claim to wisdom superior to his own. In his response to Tzophar the Naamathite’s counsel, Job counters, “I, too, as you do, possess understanding; in no way does mine fall short of yours” (Job: 12:3). Job denies the traditional theodicy offered by his comforters. He will not accept that he has offended God and denies accusations that he is prideful and haughty: A careful perusal of the verse dialogues reveals the fact that they fall well short of true dialectics. Job and his “comforters” appear to speak at each other, rather than with each other. Job is singularly uninterested in their ideas and instead addresses his thoughts to YHWH directly: I would speak to the Almighty, I insist on arguing with God. You invent lies; you are all quacks. If you would only keep quiet, it would be considered wisdom on your part. (Job 13:3‑5)

This failure of relatedness depicts Job’s narcissism and can also be seen in depressed and obsessional patients. The psychoanalyst Daniel Merkur suggests that the comforters’ well intentioned admonitions developed into accusations and abusive hostility. It is not immediately clear why tempers became short. Job’s successful parrying of his friends thrusts could presumably have been received by them good naturedly. (2004, p. 129)

However, this opinion fails to consider Job’s influence on the behavior of those around him. True, as Merkur notes, the “comforters” are primarily motivated by theological concerns rather than consolation, but it is evident that the combination of Job’s narcissism, depression, and anger, via projective identification, in part accounts for the angry stances adopted by the “comforters” in response to Job.

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However, a variety of critical psychotherapeutic corrective lessons can be gleaned from the approach of Job’s comforters. By adopting an interpretive stance as opposed to an empathic one, they were unlikely to persuade Job of his culpability. As many psychotherapists have learned through direct uncomfortable experience, arguing with the obsessional patient rarely leads to success. Interpretations in such cases, even when correct with respect to content and well intentioned, will not generally yield therapeutic insight. In this regard, they have neither comforted nor enlightened Job. The repeated failures of the “comforters” leads to the intervention of Elihu (He is my God), who is self‑described as younger and therefore less entitled to speak in the place of his elders, but who nonetheless insists that he has an important message to deliver. Textual critics have offered a number of explanations for the intervention of Elihu, including the dominant opinion that his discourse is a later interpolation into the text. However, it is evident that he plays a critical role in Job’s psychological transformation. Elihu shares features with other angelic figures that are seen elsewhere in the Hebrew bible. The content of his statement prefigures what YHWH will later express to Job directly. Psychologically speaking, he augurs the numinous experience that is beginning to emerge into Job’s psyche. As in the story of an angel’s appearance to the parents of Sampson in Judges 13, it is not clear whether Elihu is a divine or human figure. His sudden appearance and disappearance from text, prior to YHWH’s theophany, may favor the latter. Elihu has succeeded in softening Job’s resistance, and provides Job with a psychological container capable of receiving the numinous appearance of YHWH; he is the symbolic embodiment of a well‑timed interpretation. Skillfully balancing empathy and interpretation, Elihu begins to deconstruct Job’s resistance. As Merkur notes, Elihu’s insight that “punishment is not punitive but rather educational prepares the way for Job’s breakthrough” (Merkur, 2004, p 129). Job does not have a chance to respond, and Elihu mysteriously disappears entirely from the text. Before addressing the ultimate transformative mystical event that leads to Job’s healing, I would like to examine how commentators within

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the Judaic tradition have approached Job. As might be expected, the text has evoked a spectrum of reactions by traditional commentators over the ages, with some—but certainly not all—exhibiting an exquisite psychological sensitivity toward the subject of human suffering. The ancient Talmudic commentators were, in general, critical of Job’s position, accusing him of coming dangerously close to blaspheming YHWH, if not doing so overtly. They tended to distance themselves from Job in claiming that he was not an Israelite but a righteous pagan who lacked the wisdom and clarity of an ancient Jewish prophet. The Talmudic tractate Baba Bathra 15b goes as far as to state: There was once, among the gentile people, a chassid (pious man) whose name was Job. He was placed into the world with only the purpose that he might earn his reward. God exposed him to suffering and [rather than submitting quietly] he began to curse and blaspheme. Because of this God doubled his reward in this World so that he might be driven out of the World to Come.

The midrashic and Talmudic sources were also sympathetic toward Job’s comforters. Baba Bathra 16b lists them among the seven prophets sent to the gentile world, and Rabbi Shlomo ben Yitzhak (Rashi) specifically refers to Eliphaz the Temanite as a tzaddik, a righteous man. Some Talmudic commentators adopt a forgiving attitude towards Job, seeing him as a man who has sustained substantial and unexpected trauma. The Amoraic commentator Rava suggests in Baba Bathra 16b that, “Job is not to be blamed for what he said. Because of his pain, it is to be viewed as though he said it unwittingly. His words came out without the benefit of considered thought.” Rava is aware that acute psychological trauma can lead to a loss of reason, and that temporary insanity precludes normative culpability, an important reminder for those called upon to comfort the victims of acute trauma. Rav Saadia Gaon interprets Job as a text meant to help its reader cope with the vicissitudes of life. Rashi suggests that “Job is a parable from which we learn appropriate responses to those who condemn (or grumble about) the manifestations of God’s stern justice (which might overtake them) and (further top teach us) that no man is blamed for words that he utters because of his agony,” restating the opinion of Rava.

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Rashi is famous for his straightforward exegesis of text (p’shat). While recognizing Job’s shortcomings, he is also critical of the three “comforters.” He suggests that their responses to Job were not merely incorrect, as later confirmed by YHWH, but also insensitive and at times cruel. Elihu, on the other hand, is commended by Rashi, not for his superior wisdom but for his compassion. A modern rabbinic commentator, M. Eisenmann, suggests that Job is “about friendship and its limitations, about sensitivity and insensitivity, about empathy and love, about disappointment and reconciliation.” Eisenmann emphasizes that, “More than we learn what to answer, we learn how to answer—and most importantly how not to answer” (Eisenmann, 2012, p. lxiii). The final chapters of Job are devoted to YHWH’s response to Job’s challenge. They are considered to be amongst the most perplexing verses of scripture. Scholars have rarely agreed upon their interpretation. At a superficial level, they represent a show of might in response to Job’s challenge, what some, like Jung, have taken as a imbalanced tour de force by an unconcerned Creator. However, it is highly doubtful that those who admitted the text into the canon of the Hebrew bible would have interpreted YHWH’s response to Job this way, and none of the ancient commentators held such an opinion. YHWH appears suddenly out of a whirlwind immediately after Elihu’s final monologue. He wonders who Job is and challenges him to arm himself like a warrior for what is to transpire. What is the imaginal correlate of Job’s encounter with YHWH? It is noteworthy that the text describes YWHW’s response in verbal rather than visual terms. Job hears the voice of YHWH, but unlike the hekhalot vision of Isaiah 6 or the merkavah of Ezekiel 1, his subsequent reaction suggests that he has primarily experienced a visual rather than an auditory phenomenon: “I have heard of You through the hearing of the ears but now my eyes have seen You!” (Job 42:5). It is recognized that sensory synesthesias can accompany mystical experiences, and this may account for the logical disparity in Job’s response (Hunt, 2004). What is the role of Job’s mystical experience in his healing and how can it be viewed within the boundaries of psychoanalytical thought?

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In their confrontation, YHWH poses a series of challenging questions to Job concerning Creation: Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Pray tell me if you are so wise. Who determined its dimension—do you know? Who measured it with a line? Wherein are its sockets set or who set its cornerstone? When all the morning stars sang in unison, when all the angels shouted? Damming in the sea behind doors as its flow issues forth from the womb? When I clothed it in clouds, swaddled it in mists. I hemmed it in by moats, providing bolts and gates. (Job 38:4‑11)

This is not simply YHWH intimidating Job, as some, including Jung, have suggested. Job’s response does not suggest any further wounding. Rather, YHWH is educating him. As Maimonides concludes in his treatment of Job: So there is a difference between works of nature and the productions of human handicraft; so there is a difference between God’s rule, providence, and the intention in reference to all natural forces…. This lesson is the principle object of the whole Book of Job, it lays down the principle of faith and recommends us to derive proof from nature, that we should not fall into the error of imagining his knowledge to be similar to ours all or his intention providence and rule similar to ours. (2004, p. 507)

Merkur suggests that one should view Job’s encounter with YHWH as an intrapsychic experience reflecting the projection of negative affect unmediated by the presence of an “analyst.” According to him, what Job encounters in the whirlwind is his own idea of God. For Merkur, Job’s vision is simply a projection of “what Yahweh would have to say were Yahweh to answer him” (Merkur, 2004, p. 136). Certainly, this is one explanation; but it fails to consider the “varieties of religious experience,” as described by William James and others (James, 2002). Job’s experience of YHWH is that of the Other; it is in keeping with most descriptions of mystical experiences, which are virtually always sensed as coming from outside oneself. In psychological terms, Job can be said to have experienced an encounter with his unconscious, or what Jungian psychologists refer to as the Self or the imago Dei. Job’s reaction to YHWH is a mysterium tremendum, as described by Rudolf Otto (1923), and reducing this to preverbal recollections of

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infantile experience is overly simplistic and pales in comparison to the numinosity captured by the poetic imagination of the ancient biblical wordsmith. The experience leaves Job dumbstruck. When YHWH insists on a response, what is forthcoming is Job’s admission of a dramatic diminution of his ego. Job’s concerns seem puny—even to himself—when he exclaims, “What can I answer you? I have put my hand over my mouth” (Job 40:4). Indeed, this is a recognized psychological reaction to profound mystical experience; it is humbling and includes a profound sense of Other (S. T. Katz, 1983). Mystical experiences may occur along a spectrum of altered states of mind, as Maimonides suggested in antiquity (Maimonides, 2004) and has been demonstrated by modern researchers, ranging from altered states of mind to frank psychosis (Clarke, 2001). When they appear in an otherwise normally functioning individual, they are best viewed as liminal states, and as Donald Winnicott suggested with respect to transitional objects of infancy, they should not be definitively located either within or outside of the psychological container (Winnicott, 1971). When confronted with patients who report mystical experiences, psychoanalysts are well‑advised to approach them empathically rather than dubiously, while ascertaining whether they are a feature of generalized psychosis or borderline structuring. For Job, YHWH’s revelation was also reassuring. Job is no longer alone; he now has a partner, as evidenced by the fact that YHWH begins to speak to Job in the third person after His first discourse. This supernatural leveling of the asymmetric power between the protagonists may be seen as a therapeutic factor in Job’s ultimate recovery, as it often is in the treatment of narcissistically vulnerable patients. Job need not gird his loins in order to do battle with YHWH, as they are now struggling together. Job is not outside of Creation; he is part of it and he now knows with certainty, “My Redeemer lives” (Job 19:25). YHWH’s revelation to Job concerns Creation. YHWH explains that He is not simply the One who creates ex nihilo; rather, as Genesis 1:1 implies, his task includes the continual structuring of the boundaries of chaos. He speaks of “damming in” the sea, “hemming it in with moats,” “and swaddling it in mists.” YHWH is as much divine Container as

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Creator. All of nature is subject to His control, and maintaining it is a task that far exceeds the capacities of any His creatures. Indeed, one gets the sense that YHWH is actually appealing to Job for understanding, as being the Master of Creation is challenging and burdensome. Rather than being condescending to Job, as many have seen in their confrontation, there is a sense of mutual need. However, YHWH does rid Job of the misconception that man is the focus of the Universe. Man is simply one of YHWH’s creatures; he is not its singular achievement or ultimate aim. YHWH delights in the wondrous capacities and the specific demands of all his creatures, from the lowly insect to the fearless warhorse and the soaring eagle. All of their needs must be met. The great mythic creatures of Creation, Behemoth and Leviathan, may be considered symbols of the chthonic depths of the unconscious. They defy man’s efforts at destroying them and challenge YHWH’s capacities to control them. Job is indoctrinated not simply into the wonder of Creation but into the potentially healing aspects of the creative process. Creator and creation are mutually invested in each other. In referring to the monstrous Behemoth and the dragon‑like sea creature Leviathan, YHWH adopts the Hebrew verb ‫שחק‬, which means “laughter” or “sport,” so that play is also seen to be a part of the plenitude of nature. Creation is a dangerous place in which lurk danger, losses, illness, and death but it is also full of wonder. Job now recognizes that he has no control over the traditional “evils.” He no longer views himself as an object of unjust persecution; instead, he listens with awe as YHWH describes the freedom granted to all creatures. As a consequence, Job learns that in order to participate fully in Creation, one must do so not only out of obligation, but also with a sense of wonder, creativity, and playfulness. Individuals comparable to Job are encountered daily in the practice of psychoanalysis, although reports of full‑blown mystical experience are rare. Nevertheless, as the Talmudic sages suggest, dreams are one‑ sixtieth of prophecy, and so one often can identify numinous derivatives within them. A short anecdote exemplifies the point. R. is a 52‑year‑old academic philosopher who came to analysis in the midst of a “mid‑life

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adjustment” and lingering low‑level depression. Born into a working class family of Italian immigrants, he grew up in what he experienced as a stifling intellectual climate. Despite substantial childhood trauma and deep and unresolved Oedipal issues, he had managed to marry, raise several children, and achieve prominence in his career. However, R. was, like Job, and by his own admission, obsessional, overly scrupulous, with a considerable propensity to ruminate concerning his psychological problems, which he blamed on parental impingement and neglect. He had always done “the right thing,” and feared the negative consequences of taking risks. He had by his own account made considerable progress during a previous fifteen‑year classical psychoanalysis, but still was unable to break out of the self‑imposed boundaries that he now experienced as stifling. Soft spoken, well mannered, and exceedingly modest, it was evidently extremely difficult for him to acknowledge the unconscious grandiosity and entitlement that he rigidly defended against. He specifically came to see me because of my Jungian training and expressed an interest in exploring the symbolic realm of his dreams, convinced that this was what he needed at this point in life. He reported the following dream several months into analysis: I am looking out from a medieval tower. I leave the tower and turn to my right, when suddenly a large snow‑capped mountain appears before me that I cannot pass. I feel trapped. However, when I turn to my left I see a small knee high fence that I can easily climb over. It leads to me down a path to an apartment building that I recognize from my youth. People are swarming out of the building to greet me, including my deceased father who appears genuinely happy to see me. I look to his left and there a black woman with a long neck greets me and leads me to an old black woman who gives me a gift. It is a check for $721.08. I am moved to tears and we embrace.

There are obviously many ways to interpret such a dream. Its Oedipal implications are apparent with respect to the phallic and obstructing mountain “father” and the gift‑giving “mother,” but I would like to share aspects of what might be termed “a Jungian interpretation” here. This patient had spent his life in the “ivory tower” of academics and was preoccupied with doing the “right” thing. Unfortunately, his many years in psychoanalysis had not substantially reduced what he recognized

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as his harsh super‑ego and Oedipal guilt, derived from early fantasies and real interactions with a narcissistic and psychologically incestuous mother and a distant and disapproving father. His own experience of the dream images once he turned “left” and passed over “the wall” were profoundly emotionally cathartic for him. We explored the significance of turning “left” as opposed to his usual tendency to go “right,” as corrective for his super‑ego driven activities. The initial impulse to turn “right” brought him to an immovable mountain, the site of the giving of the Mosaic Law, and what he, like Job, perceived as the source of an internalized harsh paternal/divine ego. The young black woman was interpreted as a “shadow anima” figure, Jung’s symbolic representation of a repressed inner “feminine,” as evidenced by his isolation of affect and unconscious instincts. The “old woman,” a figure often encountered in folk tales appeared to represent the archetype of the “wise old woman,” i.e., an avatar of a feminized God‑image in Jungian parlance. What was most uncanny was the amount of the check given to him as a gift. He was very specific about the amount but unable to associate productively to it. I noted that the gematria of the numbers when added together was 18, the value for life (‫ )יח‬in Hebrew, and that 1+8=9, the number of the Goddess in many pagan mythologies (Campbell, 2002).7 In this interpretation of the dream, the patient was offered a gift of life via entry into the matrix of the feminine, no small token. This life‑affirming interpretation supplied an entry into elements of the dream that appeared to refer to his guised narcissism, reflected by the overwhelmingly positive greeting accorded him by the crowd and the need for mirroring in the transference. Returning to Job, the climax of the text is his confrontation with YHWH, but the epilogue further explores the elements of his transformation. YHWH now admonishes Job’s “comforters,” beginning with Eliphaz the Temanite, “My anger is seething against you and against

7

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The number 9 appears in association with the Great Mother Goddess in a variety of ancient pagan religions and as a measure of time; e.g., 432,000 years is the cycle of the Kali Yuga, in the Hindu Purãna, and 4,320,000 years is the Hindu mahayuga, or great cycle.

“Have You Seen My Servant Job?” A Psychological Approach to Suffering

your two friends, because in your defense of Me you did not speak as appropriately as had my servant Job” (Job 42:7). The “comforters” had failed Job, not merely empathically, but in suggesting that YHWH’s behavior was within the bounds of their comprehension. Job can be faulted for his anger with YHWH, but not for recognizing that the simple laws of theodicy do not apply a priori to nature. The “comforters” can be viewed as the super‑ego constructs that had fostered Job’s old belief system, prior to his losses, and which compelled Job to act with ritualistic precision and anxiety in the past. Job’s insight, although flawed, was correct, in appreciating that his previous efforts at controlling an orderly world had been misguided and futile. For this reason, the “comforters” are instructed to admit their error and to seek Job’s forgiveness. Job acts as a mediating priest who now brings prayers and sin offerings on their behalf. Although Job has already repented, he must still be purged of the old elements in his psyche that caused the ego to cling to erroneous beliefs. Only then would wholeness be fully achieved. Job has traveled from a fragile state of narcissistic “false self” perfectionism to an integrated “true self,” which can now live comfortably in the world despite its finitude. With this final ritual act of repentance, Job’s health is restored and his possessions are “doubled”—ironically, the traditional halachic penalty paid by a thief—suggesting that YHWH also assumes responsibility for what he allowed Ha Satan “to steal” from Job. The biblical author takes pains to point out that Job’s attitude towards his new children has undergone a profound change. It is noteworthy that in the midst of his grief, Job had made hardly a reference to the loss of his children. Admittedly, it may be anachronistic to expect the idealized parental child bonds of modernity to apply to the ancient Near Eastern societies, where wives, children and livestock were accounted as possessions; however, examples of love between parent and child are easily found in the Hebrew bible. Job’s apparent lack of concern for his children, except as potential sources of anxiety with respect to his own culpability, characterized his previous narcissistic position with respect to them. At the end of the text, Job’s transformation includes a loving relationship, specifically to his daughters, who are all named in the text,

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described as beautiful, and included in his inheritance that traditionally would have been limited to his new sons. This reveals Job’s increased love of family, as well as a new appreciation for the feminine matrix of creation, as opposed to his earlier ritualized relationship with YHWH, the distant spiritual archetypal father. Job’s transformation is not simply intrapsychic. Like most aspects of Judaism, his growth is linked to action in the world. Job’s health, family, wealth, and position are restored, and he lives to a ripe old age (even by biblical standards). As the medieval commentator Rabbi Moses ben Nachman (Ramban) concludes: But when he came to know God correctly, he realized that true bliss— which is the knowledge of God—is available to whoever knows Him. No suffering can ever dim its luster. (Eisenmann, 2012, p. xlvii)

The lessons to be learned from Job apply equally well today to those who hold religious beliefs, as well as those who do not, as all men must at some point, come to grips with suffering and mortality. Perhaps the most enlightening treatment of Job from both a religious and psychological perspective was offered in modern times by the late Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, a philosopher and guiding light of Modern Jewish Orthodoxy. In Out of the Whirlwind, he examines the importance of Job in Jewish theology and suggests its importance with respect to existential psychology. With respect to Job’s numinous encounter with YHWH, Soloveitchik suggests that it reflects an ambivalent psychological position: “On the one hand there is shock and violence…. On the other hand there is a feeling of endless grace that remakes man in the image of God, who is enveloped by mystery and transcendence.” Soloveitchik emphatically rejects any psychological approach that avoids suffering as a necessary part of human experience. Through scrupulous piety and rituals, Job attempted to avoid the pain of loss and suffering. As he notes, “Job did not grasp the meaningfulness of the cosmic drama to man; he did not encounter God in creation…. He failed at the level of ontic experience. Hence God addressed Himself to him through the cataclysm” (Soloveitchik, 2003, p. 140).

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Soloveitchik concludes: Judaism found God in the violent outbursts of a negating energy in the universe. The anxiety of the lonely, the sorrow of the man facing nihility and the dark night of an exhausted and despairing man are media of the great revelation. In short pain is always kerygmatic; it bears a message. (p. 129)

Man’s mastery of his fate is limited and ultimately must yield to the greater laws of nature. Job addresses the fact that life that can be neither predicted nor explained. Life offers many rewards, but it does not provide a safety net. As Soloveitchik suggests: When he meets God, he [man] begins to retrace his steps. Hard won positions are evacuated, points of vantage are deserted, and man who has traveled long distances piling up on his journey victory after victory, conquest upon conquest, swings back to the point of departure and is defeated—defeated by nobody but himself. To encounter God means victory and defeat, self‑affirmation and self‑negation. (p. 107)

Whether one adopts a religious viewpoint or a humanist secular perspective, the reality of man’s finitude is unassailable. It is Soloveitchik’s opinion that the goal of a well‑lived life is not a psychological state of equanimity; instead it is the ability to bear suffering with dignity. This is a critical difference between the Eastern traditions and the monotheistic ones of the West. Whereas “suffering” is the First Noble Truth of Buddhism, the path out of it calls for increasing states of equanimity and detachment from the everyday struggles of life. Soloveitchik roundly rejects this approach, and instead sees redemptive power in continuing to bear suffering in this world with dignity. Psychoanalytical treatments that fail to address this existential question may be judged as incomplete, as Freud’s opinion was early on that a primary goal of psychoanalysis was to convert neurotic “misery” into ordinary “unhappiness.” In responding to Job, YHWH inquires, “Who is this who has such murky ideas, speaking without due consideration?” (Job 38:1). In this regard, Job is Everyman, for who among us has not erred, like Job, in denying life’s painful realities and ultimate end? Freud sought to rid man

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of his illusions of control; Jung strove for a conscious recognition of the archetypal forces of nature that work through the human psyche. The continued popularity of Job is that it still serves effectively as a guide along these pathways.

REFERENCES Bakan, D. (1968). Disease, Pain, and Sacrifice Toward a Psychology of Suffering. Boston: Beacon Press. Bubla, E., Kerna, E., Eberta, D., Bacha, M., & van Elsta, T. (2010). Seeing gray when feeling blue? Depression can be measured in the eye of the diseased. Biological Psychiatry, 68:205‑8. Campbell, J. (2002). Inner Reaches of Outer Space. New York: New World. Clarke, I. (Ed.). (2001). Psychosis and Spirituality. London: Whurr Publishing. Eisenmann, M. (2012). Job: A New Translation with a Commentary Anthologized from Talmudic, Midrashic, and Rabbinic Sources. New York: Art Scroll. Freud, S. (Ed.). (1916). Those Wrecked by Success. London: Hogarth Press. Goitein, L. (1954). The importance of the Book of Job for analytic thought. American Imago, 11:407‑15. Gordis, R. (1978). The Book of Job: New Translation and Special Studies. New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America. Hunt, J. (2004). Emotionally Neuropsychology, 21:761‑72.

mediated

synesthesia.

Cognitive

James, W. (2002). The Varieties of Religious Experience. Mineola: Dover. Jung, C. G. (Ed.). (1958). Answer to Job (Vol. 11). Princeton: Bollingen Press. Kahn, J. (1975). Job’s Illness: Loss, Grief and Integration. New York: Pergamon Press. Katz, R. L. (1958). A Psychoanalytical Coment on Job 3:25. Hebrew Union College Annual, 29:377‑83. Katz, S. T. (1983). Mysticism and Religious Traditions. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Kradin, R. (2008). The Placebo Response and the Power of Unconscious Healing. London: Routledge. ____. (2012). Pathologies of the Mind Body Interface: The Curious Domain of the Psychosomatic Symptom. London: Routledge. Kushner, H. (2012). The Book of Job. New York: Schocken. Maimonides. (2004). Guide for the Perplexed. New York: Barnes & Noble. Merkur, D. (2004). Psychotherapeutic change in the Book of Job. In: J. H. Ellens & W. G. Rollins (Eds.), Psychology and the Bible (pp. 119‑139). Westport: Greenwood Publishing. Otto, R. (1923). Idea of the Holy. Oxford: Oxford. Perdue, L. (2007). Wisdom Literature. Louisville: Wesminster John Knox Press. Renik, O. (1991). The biblical book of Job: Advice to clinicians. Psychoanalytical Quarterly, 60:596‑606. Schifferdecker, K. (2008). Out of the Whirlwind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Soloveitchik, J. (2003). Out of the Whirlwind: Essays on Mourning, Suffering and the Human Condition. New York: Ktav Publishing House. Taylor, W. S. (1956). Theology and therapy in Job. Theology Today, 12:451‑62. Winnicott, D. (1971). Playing and Reality. London: Tavistock.

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On the Use of Selected Lead Words in Tracing the Trajectory of the Transmission of Transgenerational Trauma in the Genesis Ancestral Saga Menorah Lafayette Rotenberg

Introduction There is no dearth of plots and themes in Genesis or of ways to understand and interpret them. I suggest that one of the main storylines in the Saga of the Matriarchs and Patriarchs is the record of their struggle to figure out what was required by a new and unseen God. As Robert Alter notes, “It was no easy thing to make sense of human reality in the radically new light of the monotheistic revelation” (1981, p. 176). Nonetheless, in reading the Genesis Saga as a single continuous story about “begettings” that will lead to the creation of an Israelite nation that is “Blessed,” “Elected,” and “Chosen” by God, I am astonished by how much the text is saturated with violence, rupture, deception, loss, and betrayal. In effect, it is a narrative of a transgenerational transmission of trauma. In the quest for the holy grail of “The Blessing” (B’RaKhah), the rights of the eldest (B’KHor) are undermined as the Birthright (B’Khorah) gets shifted around for no clear reason. Through the metathesis of these root letters, we are initiated into a fungible world of unreasoned preferential love. This love initiates a reign of terror: who will be chosen and who will be cast out? It leads to separations that are premature, precipitous, and

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forcible—leading to rupture, hinting at exile. It leads us to question the reliability of God’s love for and election of Israel. In a text that is about the begetting of generations to found a nation, life is always precariously hanging in the balance. No generation in our Ancestral Saga escapes these desperate dynamics. Thus our Saga reflects both the expectation of traumatic injury and the intergenerational repetition of it. We can trace the trajectory of this trauma through repetitive leitmotifs that we find in the text and the lead words (leit worts) that carry these motifs forward. In doing so, I bring my professional self as a feminist psychotherapist and family therapist to illuminate the latent mythologies that cascade down through the four generations of our ancestral family. I employ the therapist’s construction of a Genogram with its focus on the repetitive intergenerational organizing myths (McGoldrick, 1985; Marlin, 1980). This dovetails with what I call the “long arm of history,” which we know as God’s “visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children and upon the children’s children unto the third and fourth generation” (Exod. 34:7). It is my aim to revisit these repetitive dynamics not only to uncover the latent preoccupying issues, but as Thomas Ogden (1990, p. 244) puts it so felicitously, to “disentangle the inevitability of meaning” (emphasis added). It is hoped that when long‑standing patterns of self‑destructiveness are brought to consciousness we will have the power to choose a more benign mythos. This decoding is one of the central tasks of the therapist. It is also one of the central tasks of the reader of literature to heighten our awareness that our story could have been written differently. In pursuit of “The Blessing” or “to answer God’s call,” almost every ancestor made portentous choices that continued the trajectory of ruthless visionary sacrifice and trauma. As we will observe, it could have been otherwise. The passing on of the trauma was not inevitable. Yet to many it would appear that one of Judaism’s foundational and epochal myths, the story of the Akedah, the Binding of Isaac, has indeed been inevitable. The valorization of sacrifice has haunted us throughout Jewish History. Contemporary Israeli writers in particular have focused on their current trauma of war after war by this “near” sacrifice of Isaac as not only inevitable, but indelible. In the poem “Heritage,” Haim Gouri writes:

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Menorah Lafayette Rotenberg Isaac as the story goes was not sacrificed. He lived for many years [and] saw what pleasure had to offer…. But he bequeathed that hour to his offspring. They are born with a knife in their hearts. (Carmi, 1981, p. 565)

Thus the many calamities that befell the Jews, especially the Holocaust (with its indelible tattooed numbers), have often been viewed through the lens of the Akedah. Interestingly, the Greek tales of the Argonauts had a similar sacrificial story (Freeman, 2012, p. 175). For the Greeks this story was one of many—it did not become their signature mythos. Thus it is important to ask: Why has such a sacrificial mythos become the Jewish signature story? With this in mind how may we attempt to discern a more benign Biblical mythos?

Lead Words In this attempt, my primary aim is to show the way each lead word carries the freight of mistrust and how in turn these words appear to insinuate themselves harmlessly as they interpenetrate our text. The words I have chosen to follow are not words that should alarm us but words of daily discourse: Seeing (and the Unseen God), Hearing, Love, Trust (and Mistrust). These words are also the basic building blocks that the infant (Israel) uses to attach itself in a trustful relationship with its caregiver (God). I am proposing, however, that the paradigm offered in Genesis highlights a failure of trust in Israel’s encounters with its new monotheistic unseen God. In trying to understand some of the causes for this profound mistrust, I suggest that God is ambivalently and ambiguously portrayed in the Hebrew Bible in a way that destabilizes the possibilities for developing trust. These words, and other lead words not considered here, reflect a critical dialectic regarding the way God is perceived in Genesis and in the Hebrew Bible in general. On the one hand, God is the God of righteousness and justice. Over and over, we are told that God is the Biblical referent in whom to place our trust because God is just. Psalm 146:3‑9 instructs us, …Put not your trust [betaḥ] in the great, in mortal man who cannot save… Who secures justice [mishpat] for those who are wronged?

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The Lord loves the righteous… [tsaddikim].

On the Use of Selected Lead Words in Tracing the Trajectory of the Transmission of Transgenerational Trauma in the Genesis Ancestral Saga

However, as David McCracken writes, God is also perceived as a God who “celebrates the normal world turned upside down.” Thus, …any conception of character as a fixed or stable entity is inadequate in a text where the kingdom of God is offered as a disruption of worldly fixity and stability and where the crucial issue about character is its relation to the disruptive kingdom…. Individual characters are insignificant and the dominant voice [of God] becomes the only one worthy of attention. (Weems, 1992, p. 27; emphasis added)

This disruptive outlook has been conceptualized as “carnivalesque,” as used by Mikhail Bahktin to describe literary genre that flouts authority, inverts social hierarchies, and dismantles the status quo as is permitted in a season of carnival (Abrams, 1999, pp. 62‑63). This notion is well expressed in Hannah’s song: The bows of the mighty are broken, And the faltering are girded with strength. Men once sated must hire out for bread; Men once hungry hunger no more. While the barren woman bears seven, the mother of many is forlorn. (I Sam. 2:1‑10) We find it again in a verse made famous by Handel in his exquisite Oratorio, “Messiah”:

Let every valley be raised, Every hill and mount made low Let the rugged ground become level And the ridges become a plain. (Is. 40:4) While this carnivalesque dynamic offers comfort to the marginalized, poor, and powerless, it is a destabilizing dynamic. One day I am sated and suddenly the next day I am scavenging for food. How can this be? Why should I build anything when in a moment, on God’s whim, it may be torn down? This prompts us to ask, what is the role of human agency in the hidden design of God’s plan? Thus Joseph excuses his brother’s attempted fratricide, saying, “It was not you who sent me here but God to preserve life” (Gen. 45:5‑8). Would Joseph have forgiven his brothers if he had not sacralized his pain? In this double system of accounting, should anyone be held accountable?

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Seeing and the Unseen God Having highlighted the indelible imprint of the Binding of Isaac, I would like to turn to an even earlier foundational myth of the Israelite nation. This is the critical command of Lekh Lekha that is generally not questioned nor thought of in terms of moral equivalence to the command of the Akedah. It is a kind of “stealth” command, sneaking into the first encounter that the fledgling nation has with God and its attendant new monotheistic reality. If we look closely, it presages the Binding of Isaac, as it valorizes the notion of sacrifice for the ideal. And the Lord said to Abram, “Go forth (lekh lekha) from your land and your birthplace and your father’s house to the land that I shall show you (erekhah). And I will make you a great nation … and you shall be a blessing.” And Abram went forth as the Lord had spoken to him. (Gen. 12:1‑4)

Thus at the heart of our earliest encounter with God is the experience of a primal ethos of rupture. Abram just goes forth as if in a trance— no questions asked. Could he not have asked, “why can’t I remain at least until my elderly father Terah dies (11:32) so that I can bury him and mourn him as is our custom”? This radical tearing away at one’s roots also makes our new relationship with God co‑eval with “the Land.” That is to say, a full complete relationship with God can only be had: 1) in this new Land, the Land of Israel that God promises to show him; and 2) it only is obtained by complete obedience to God. However, both relationships which have the presaging implications of lethal love have been overshadowed by the Akedah. It is important to note that despite Abram’s leaving as if in a dissociated trance, if we look closely, we will note a “return of the repressed” in two texts that are not especially highlighted in classical rabbinic literature. The first occurs in Abraham’s words to Avimelech, “...when God caused me to wander [hitu, from the root hitah] from my father’s house” (Gen. 20:13), and the second in his command to his servant to find Isaac a wife, “The Lord of Heaven, who took me from my father’s house and from my native land” (Gen. 24:7). Naomi Graetz (2012, p. 45) writes, “There is a poignancy here, for Abraham recognizes that in retrospect he was unable

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to feel mourning at the time…. This is the trauma from which Abraham almost never recovers … and possibly at the root of his tortuous love affair with God.” Indeed she wonders if we can read the text as when God “misled me” (hitu, same root hitah can also mean mislead) rather than “caused me to wander.” In this reading, I would strongly suggest the hermeneutics of suspicion is at work here. However, there is a midrash that chastises both God and Abraham for this precipitous and callous leave‑taking and notes that the reason for the emphatic doubling of leykh lekha, is that God exempted only Abraham (lekha, for you) from the commandment of honoring his parents (Gen. Rabbah 39:7). Why was Abraham commanded to desert his father? We have always assumed it was to impress us with the urgency of following a “higher” calling. Let us compare God’s demand for exclusive allegiance with Camus’ famous statement, “If I had to choose between this justice and my mother, I would still choose my mother” (Aronson, 2004, p. 211). By contrast, here we see how our ancestors were inducted to an all‑embracing, ruthless mythology that is apiece with the new monotheistic reality. How can the two ever be disentangled? As noted earlier, in Genesis, we follow a family embarking on a relationship with God much as an infant starting out with its parent. Erik Erikson considers the establishment of trust as the basic task of infancy. In this stage “the basic sense of trust and the basic sense of mistrust … remain the autogenic source of both primal hope and primal doom throughout life” (1950, p. 75). Trauma literature repeatedly stresses the need for trust as the prerequisite for any work of recovery to reconstruct a coherent self. Threaded through the Genesis stories, the lead verb to see is woven in and out, causing the reader to double back to pick up the various trails strewn around this verb. What does the infant see? It is a major achievement and act of trust for the child to conjure up the mental representation of its mother. This achievement of object permanence is what allows the young child to contain itself when its mother leaves. At this point we have advanced beyond the concrete stage of “out of sight, out of mind.” Without this advance, which comes only with repeated constancy, we could not expect Abraham and his descendants to trust (emunah, Gen. 15:6) in an unseen God. It is the

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internalizing of this constancy that allows for faith, even when it is felt that God has hidden His face (hestare panim; see Is. 54:7‑8). Another major aspect in considering seeing from a developmental perspective grows out of D. W. Winnicott’s concept of “mirroring,” regarding how we learn to see ourselves. Winnicott suggests that when the baby looks at the mother’s face, what the baby sees is itself. “In other words, the mother is looking at the baby and what she looks at is related to what she sees there” (1989, p. 112). Thus we are all born into a mythology that shapes the “gaze”; how we are seen and how we are known. In the Hagar and Ishmael cycle (Gen. 16, 21) God’s gaze as a caring gaze is highlighted. It is framed by “a God that Sees” (ata el ROi, Gen. 16:14). In both stories we find Hagar in the desert near a well with life sustaining water. In the first episode (Gen. 16) a messenger of God tells her to return to her Sarah. She sees and names the well The Well of the Living‑One‑Who‑Sees‑Me (Beer‑laḥai‑ROi). On the strength of having been seen by God, she is fortified by God’s promise and the knowledge that she is cared for by God. However, in the second episode (Gen. 21), Hagar’s fortitude deserts her. On the strength of Sarah’s demand and God’s acquiescence to it, Abraham expels Hagar and Ishmael. They wind up right near another life‑giving well. This time, however, she does not see the well, but God tenderly tells her to hold Ishmael fast by her hand. “At that moment God, opened her eyes, and she saw a well of water, and gave the boy to drink” (Gen. 21:19‑20). In the Hagar‑Ishmael cycle above, we noted that God is not blind. However, in Deuteronomy 31:17 and the prophetic literature, God can explode in a blind rage and shows it by hiding His face (hestare panim) a concept which has played a large role in Jewish theology. Since we cannot see God’s rage, let us just listen to the splenetic splutter of fury that is expressed in the Hebrew “B’shetsef ketsef histarti pani regah mi’mekh…. In overflowing wrath I hid my face from you for a moment….” (Is. 54:8). One can almost hear God struggling to articulate his onomatopoeic choleric rage? There are many who regard these words as so devastating that they believe the Holocaust took place precisely in a moment when God’s face was hidden. To understand how one could infer such an unimaginable

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catastrophe from the averting of God’s face, we return to the psychology of the infant. To the infant, its mother’s gaze is all she has to tell her she exists. Thus God’s hiddeness, hestare panim, exploits the terror of not being seen and not being attended to. It is the cruelest threat of abandonment which petrifies us with the terror of being annihilated. It surpasses the notion of a destabilizing God. Rather it is a declaration by God of all‑out warfare on our notion of being alive in the world. So we stop to ask: can such a God be trusted?

Voice, Hearing, Listening, Cry As the text moves from the Abraham Cycle to the Rebecca‑Isaac Cycle, the lead words shift to a word‑cluster having to do with hearing: KoL (Voice) and SH’MA (Listen). This can be viewed as a literary device; Isaac has been made blind (Gen. 27:1) for the very purpose of allowing Rebecca’s plot to succeed as she presses Jacob to pretend he is Esau. It can also be viewed as the Divine Hand of God, writ large in this text which highlights Isaac’s blindness. Now when Isaac was old and his eyes had become too dim for seeing, he called Esau, his elder son, and said to him…. I have grown old; I know not how soon I shall die…. Hunt me some game that I may eat, so that I may … bless you before I die. And Rebecca was listening (SHoMA‑at) as Isaac spoke to Esau his son. Rebecca said to Jacob her son…. Listen to my voice (SH’MA b’KoLi) … fetch me two choice goat kids that I may make them into a dish…. And you shall bring it to your father and he shall eat, so that he may bless you before he dies. (27:1‑10)

When Rebecca listens to Isaac’s instructions to Esau (Gen. 27:5), we note she has been eavesdropping. This tells us something about hearing that differs from seeing. As Elise Hancock writes, hearing is “our far sense” (1992, p. 29; emphasis added). It notifies us of things that we cannot see but that are crucial to our survival. While the infant’s gaze connects him to his caregivers, it is the infant’s cries that connect the caregiver to the infant. The infant needs to connect to that “far sense.” Getting his providers—“to heed his cry”—is the infant’s essential survival mechanism. Thus God is said to “Hear the voice

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of the child wherever he may be (ki SHaMA Elokim et KoL ha‑naar ba‑asher hu sham)” (my translation, Gen. 21:17). Two generations later, when the Israelites were enslaved by the Egyptians, “they cried, and their cry came up to God…. And God heard their groaning (va‑yiSHMA Elokim et na‑akatom)” (Exod. 2:23‑25). Perhaps nothing is as central to the healing process of psychotherapy as empathic listening. Therapists listen in a distinctive way that allows people to overhear themselves, reflect thoughtfully about themselves, and thus to construct a self that has meaning and authenticity. They try not to anticipate or superimpose their own stories on the stories they are hearing. At times that allows them to hear things in the narration that have not been heard before. They may pluck a detail previously overlooked and assign it a different weight. What they reflect back is a rendering reconfigured by the therapist’s ability to be attentive and attuned in a richer, deeper way to the presentation. This allows a person to move from a fixed latent susceptibility to a more manifest awareness. Thus it restores agency, which allows them to make changes as they become aware that change is needed. The Genesis text betrays an anxiety by our ancestors to ensure that amidst the proliferation of voices clamoring to be heard, his or her voice will be the one that will be listened to. An example is in the conversations between Sarah and Abraham. After years of childlessness, Sarah asks Abraham to take her maid, Hagar, as a concubine and through her to sire a child. We learn that “Abraham listened to Sarah’s voice (vayiSH’MA Avram l’KoL Sarai)” (Gen. 16:2), and a child, Ishmael (YiSHMA‑el, God hears) is born to Hagar and Abraham. Later, God intercedes and Sarah bears her own son, Isaac. At the weaning party for Isaac, Sarah sees Ishmael “playing” or perhaps laughing, “m’tsaḥek,” and decides to banish Ishmael lest he be a co‑inheritor with Isaac (Gen. 21:1‑12). Abraham is duly troubled by this and confers with God, who counsels—commands?—him, “in all that Sarah tells you, listen to her voice (SH’MA b’KoLah)” (21:12). In this finely calibrated symphony, I wonder who is listening to whom? Is God trying so hard to listen to the many voices that soon we will note that God does not hear Esau’s cry? Let us now follow closely the lunge for the pivotal fungible B’Rakhah (The Blessing).

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On the Use of Selected Lead Words in Tracing the Trajectory of the Transmission of Transgenerational Trauma in the Genesis Ancestral Saga And Isaac said to Jacob, “Come close … that I may feel you, my son, whether you are my son Esau or not.” And Jacob came close to Isaac his father and he felt him and he said; “THE VOICE IS THE VOICE OF JACOB BUT THE HANDS ARE ESAU’S HANDS (haKoL KoL Ya’akov, v’hayadayim y’day Eysav)” But he [Isaac] did not recognize him (Jacob, V’lo he‑kiro [Jacob]) for his hands were, like Esau’s hands, hairy, and he blessed him…. (Gen. 27:21‑23)

Now the scenario hangs on Isaac’s famous musing question, although not quite questioning enough, “the voice is the voice of Jacob but the hands are the hands of Esau.” We will continue to observe the importance of this seemingly minor letter “vav” (“but”). While we may speculate as to whether Isaac preferred to turn a deaf ear to Jacob’s voice, the text is very clear; Isaac was duped and did not recognize him. And so we will hear one of the most wrenching cries to be heard in the Hebrew Bible: “Have you not reserved a blessing for me (27:36)? Have you but one Blessing, my father? Bless me too, father.” And Esau raised his voice and he wept (vayisa Eysav KoLo va’yevkh) (27:38).

It is Esau’s bitter cry of loss that must be pitted against Rebecca’s ruthless vision of what was required of her. And it must be pitted against Jewish tradition that has largely sided with her fraught sacrificial vision.1 This haunting lament of despair has reverberated through the millennia. It is the cry of the uncared‑for child, the one who has been cast out and cannot fathom why? That cry will follow Jacob, so that when he meets Rachel at the well, it will be his turn to weep (“vayisa KoLo va’yevkh” [Gen. 29:11]). Years later, when Joseph brings Jacob to meet Pharaoh, we 1



An example of a midrash that does feel an injustice was done is in Midrash Rabbah, 68:4, commenting on the verse, “When Esau heard the words of his father, He cried with an exceeding great and bitter cry, etc. (27:34). R. Hanina said: “Whoever maintains that the Holy One, blessed be He, is lax [in dispensing justice], may his bowels become lax! He is merely long‑suffering, but [ultimately] collects His due. Jacob made Esau break out into a cry but once, and where was he punished for it? In Shushan, the castle, as it says, ’And he cried with a loud and bitter cry, etc.’” (Esther 4:1; trans. H. Freedman, 1983).

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hear echoes if not of bitter tears, then of bitterness, as he evaluates his life. He tells Pharaoh, who has asked him his age; The days and years of my sojourn are one hundred and thirty years; few and ill‑fated have been the days of the years of my life (Gen. 47:9).

Love We understand, however, that despite God’s failure to listen to Esau’s cry, God is in firm control when ordering Abraham to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac as a burnt offering. “Take, pray, your son, your‑only one, whom you love, Isaac, and go forth to the land of Moriyah/seeing and offer him up there as a burnt offering”…. And Abraham rose early in the morning … took Isaac and went to the place of which God had told him. (Gen. 22:3)

As I noted at the beginning of the chapter, the Akedah (The Binding of Isaac) or the Trial of Abraham, is one of Judaism’s foundational myths (Gen. 22:1). In the end, Isaac is not sacrificed and God rewards Abraham with a blessing. The blessing is conferred because Abraham obeyed God’s command “because you have listened to my voice (ekev asher SHaMAta b’KoLi)” (Gen. 22:17) and “did not withhold your son, your only son” (Gen. 22:16). Many have asked why did Abraham not protest, or bargain with God as he did over the annihilation of Sodom and Gomorrah (18:17‑33). He had the whole agonizing night to think about it. The narrator prefers not to tell us. So once again, Abraham seems to dissociate and walks with Isaac early in the morning as if in a trance. This is part of the essential mystery that has perplexed scholars, philosophers, literary critics, believers, and non‑believers alike since this command was given. I would speculate that the shattering command to sacrifice his son reinforced Abraham’s dissociative state, which he adopted as a defense when he heard God’s earlier catastrophic command to “Go Forth,” Lekh Lekha (12:2). It was déjà vu with such a forceful ferocity that it literally left Abraham speechless, as if he had been suddenly thrown into an aphasic state. Earlier, Abraham did protest following God’s announcement that he would have a son with Sarah, his wife (Gen. 17:15, 16). Then

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he dared to question God. “And Abraham said to God, ’If only Ishmael might [continue] to live in your presence.’” In Hebrew it is even a more succinct and piteous plea: “Lu Yishmael ḥai l’phanekha” (17:18). However, God just goes on as if he has not heard a word Abraham says, and reiterates, “No, Sarah your wife will bear you a son and you shall call his name Isaac” (Gen. 17:19). How could God fail to respond to such a heart‑breaking plea? Abraham is begging God to let his son Ishmael live and be well. Abraham would be happy to have Ishmael carry on his line; that is all he asks for. To quote David McCraken again: “Individual characters are insignificant and the dominant voice [of God] becomes the only voice worthy of attention” (in Weems, 1992, p. 27). Now that only Isaac is left, he has indeed become Abraham’s only beloved son—for did Abraham even know where Ishmael was? We might say that that the consequences of Abraham’s preferential love for Isaac—the first time love is mentioned in our text—inaugurates a most mystifying and “fateful” understanding of this unique feeling. In turn we might wonder after we hear the command to Abraham to slaughter his son,2 what could God possibly know of love? But we note that God does know something about love, as it is as a preeminent requisite of God’s relationship with Israel: And now, O Israel, what does the Lord your God demand of you? Only this: … to love Him … with all your heart and soul, keeping the Lord’s commandments and laws…. It was to your fathers that the Lord was drawn in His love for them, so that He chose you, their lineal descendants, from among all peoples…. (Deut. 10:12‑15)

If the paradigm of love is that of sacrifice, perhaps many of us would choose a less romantic path. Certainly we would wonder what God has in store for the people he has chosen. Indeed, the Genesis text warns us that love is capricious and blind, it can be murderous, and that love will not protect us. 2



God’s command to Abraham to “offer” his son as a burnt offering (Gen. 22:2) to God may not quite convey the depth of the horror that is invoked on hearing this. But to force us to face this terror, we learn that Abraham takes the [slaughtering] knife (ma’akhlet) in his hand to slaughter his son as one would an animal.

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Phyllis Rose writes that there is a “human tendency to invoke love at moments when we want to disguise transactions of power.” Further on she asks, “Who can resist the thought that love is the ideological bone thrown to women to distract their attention from the powerlessness of their lives? And [there are] those who might see it as the bone thrown to men to distract them from the bondage of their lives” (198, p. 8). Nevertheless, for many romantics, it might please them to learn that the capstone of Rebecca’s journey to become Isaac’s wife culminates in love.3 And Isaac brought her into his mother Sarah’s tent, and took Rebecca, and she became his wife; and he loved her. And Isaac was comforted for his mother. (24:57)

Isaac’s instant love for Rebecca, who will “comfort him for the loss of his mother” (Gen. 24:66), however, seems to prove the adage that “love is blind”—or at least, oediply blind. In this story about blundering blind love, we will wonder about the nature of Isaac’s blindness and his refusal to see that which may cause us to surrender our illusions. Has Isaac been so infatuated with his mother, Sarah, that he turned a blind eye to her role in banishing Ishmael? Did Isaac not wonder about Sarah’s inability—or unwillingness—to protect him from his father’s attempt to kill him? Isaac seems to have loved his mother unequivocally, as he will love Esau, for it is Isaac who first states his preferential love. And when her time was come to give birth … there were twins in her womb…. And Isaac loved Esau for the game that he brought him, BUT, Rebecca (V’Rivkah) loved Jacob. (Gen. 25:24–28)

Thus Isaac states his preferential love and gives a reason for it, as if to belie the capricious nature of love. Rebecca does not justify her love for Jacob, and we may surmise that she has already internalized God’s prophecy “the elder shall serve the younger” (Gen. 25:23). Her unreasoned love, which is perhaps in line with a more romantic notion of love, sets

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For a wonderful elaboration of the role of love in the Bible, see In the Beginning Love: Dialogues on the Bible (Samuel, 1973).

On the Use of Selected Lead Words in Tracing the Trajectory of the Transmission of Transgenerational Trauma in the Genesis Ancestral Saga

the scene for Jacob’s infatuation with Rachel later in the Genesis Saga. It inaugurates the same chiastic cycle of preference for the younger child over the eldest. In Jacob’s case it is his preference for the younger sister, rather than the youngest child. We note how harmlessly it seems to insinuate itself. It is inaugurated with that same quiet insistent “but” that introduces Rebecca’s preferential love for Jacob. Now Laban had two daughters: the name of the elder was Leah, and the name of the younger was Rachel. Leah’s eyes were tender, BUT Rachel (V’Raḥel) was comely in form and comely to look at. And Jacob fell in love with Rachel…. (Gen. 29:16‑18)

Nor should we be surprised that later, when Joseph is reunited with his brothers, we hear again that quiet, insistent, preferential “but” as he gives Benjamin, the youngest, his only full brother, the son of their mother Rachel, special treatment; To all of them [his brothers] he gave each man a change of clothing, BUT to Benjamin (U’‑l, Binyamin) he gave three hundred shekels of silver and five changes of clothing. (Gen. 45:22)

Both Jacob and Joseph enact their feelings to make them known to others, oblivious to the consequences. Such passionate preferences within families are apiece with the seemingly unfair “reversal of fortune.” In the Hebrew Bible, in particular in Genesis, they have been linked to the displacement of the eldest in favor of the youngest, who will get the coveted “Blessing.” Earlier, Jacob’s passionate preference for Joseph was made known to all his family; “Now Israel (Jacob) loved Joseph more than all his children, because he was the son of his old age and he made him a coat of many colors” (Gen. 37:3). Did it concern Jacob that his extravagant love caused his other children to hate his beloved son Joseph (Gen. 37:4)? Perhaps, having been the recipient of Rebecca’s fulsome love, Jacob was blithely unaware of its consequences. Or perhaps he is aware of its damning consequences, but has been primed to be held in its thrall and cannot lay it aside. Such is the power of the repetitive pull of inter‑generational patterns. In Rebecca’s portentous—but not inevitable—decision to deceitfully transfer the blessing to her beloved son Jacob, we see the inexorable power that personal, family, and godly myths possess when they mesh.

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Therapists who work with families have felt the immense and powerful pull that family myths exert. The therapist tries to stand outside the family and its myth‑making, but its compelling emotional logic sucks her into its vortex until she too almost views the family’s need to behave as they do as inevitable. And while the therapist may formulate the reasons why a particular myth has been constructed, the family’s tenacious grip on it will make it feel as if pre‑ordained. Recalling the language of the gods and mythology, it almost feels as if it were fated. And so we see how a mythos cascades down the generations when left unexamined and no longer moored in its origins—in this case, God’s voice.

Trust and Mistrust As I noted at the beginning, the entire Genesis text is permeated by a heightened sense of mistrust. Nowhere is it as clear as in Chapter 42 (9‑35), when Joseph accuses his brothers of being spies when they come to Egypt during a famine to buy food. Over and over they protest that they are honest men and hence, trustworthy (keynim anaḥnu) (Gen. 42:31). Words for trust and truth telling (keynim, eymun, emet) occur seven times as the brothers attempt to counter Joseph’s accusations. The seeds of distrust that Rebecca has sown by having Jacob disguise himself in his brother Esau’s fine garments (27:15‑16)4 have spilled over into her grandson’s generation, where deceit regarding Joseph’s garment—now robed in Egyptian garb—surfaces again with great clarity (41:42). Let us consider why trust is such an important matter? Trust is like the air we breathe. We do not notice it but we cannot live without it. It is the basic coin of the realm. While we must all learn that nothing in life is subject to our full control, nevertheless there must be some sense of certitude in our lives. The alternative is a costly constricted siege mentality. Abraham can trust in God (v’he‑emin) (Gen. 15:6) because God tells him, “Fear not, I will be your shield” (Gen. 15:1). One of the primary roles the parent plays in infancy is to shield the baby and act as a buffer regarding both its inner and outer environment. God’s caring allows Abraham to

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See my article (M. Rotenberg, 2002, p. 56) “Portrait of Rebecca” where I wonder what Esau’s “fine garments” were doing in Rebecca’s tent.

On the Use of Selected Lead Words in Tracing the Trajectory of the Transmission of Transgenerational Trauma in the Genesis Ancestral Saga

trust in God’s promise to make him a great nation even though as yet he is childless (Gen. 15:2, 6). Interestingly, when Jacob flees to Haran he asks for this basic, elemental care from God at Bethel. He vows, “If the Lord God be with me and guard me … and give me bread to eat and clothing to wear, and I return safely (b’shalom) to my father’s house, then the Lord will be my God” (Gen. 28:20). Jacob has just come from his mother’s house where he has participated in an act that repudiated and betrayed all the basic familial conventions of filial and fraternal solidarity. Does Jacob wish to turn the clock back and begin again as the fortunate infant who can trust and be trusted? At Bethel, he is no longer chasing after “The Blessing.” Now it appears that he just wants safety and peace (shalom). Is this vow a recognition of the struggle he will have ahead just to survive? Who will give him back a basic optimism and a feeling that life is good? His mother is not trustworthy, nor is he. In whom can he put his trust? Once again, we need to remember that our Ancestors have been asked to trust in an unseen God. Ironically, the God of Genesis does make His presence known in ways that abet our difficulties: for God plays favorites. By arbitrarily choosing the youngest sibling to inherit, the status quo of primogeniture is unexpectedly reversed. If we are chosen for no apparent reason we feel uneasy. Today we are fortune’s favorite, but tomorrow the privilege may be withdrawn. Once again, this highlights the genre of the carnivalesque. A lack of consistency places a severe strain on the child’s ability to feel cared for. It does not feel fair to suddenly be passed over. The lead words “to see” and “to hear” punctuate the way the senses are bombarded and subverted in one deceitful ploy after another. In each generation, the wish to be seen and heard goes further astray, adding to the sense of alienation and rupture. However, side by side with the trickery and duplicity in our text, we see an almost commensurate concern with the issues of trust and justice leaving us wondering which is the text and which is the subtext. The two are so entangled that it becomes succeedingly difficult to discern which layer is meant to be primary. On the one hand, the overwhelming amount of deception in our Saga engages almost all of our attention. On the other hand, the stirring injunction, “Justice, justice shall you pursue”

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(tsedek, tsedek, tirdof) (Deut.16:20), echoes through the millenia. It almost convinces us that to act justly is indeed the pre‑eminent text. However, as we shall continue to see, ambiguity and ambivalence keep tripping us up. Let us now return to the coveted “Blessing” that is about to be conferred one final time in our Saga. Near the end of his life, Jacob “could not see” (Gen. 48:10). Before dying, he wants to bless Joseph’s children.5 He reaches out with his right hand to bless Ephraim, Joseph’s younger son, once again upending the customary norm. Joseph tries to pull Jacob’s hand away to put it on his eldest son Manasseh, because at this point in Joseph’s life he recognized that “it was wrong in his eyes” (to switch the recipient of the Blessing) (Gen. 48:17). But Jacob refuses (Va‑yimaeyn) (Gen. 48:17‑20). Once again our insistent “but” has asserted itself. Jacob stubbornly holds on to the prophecy Rebecca, his mother, received from God, “And the older shall serve the younger” (Gen. 25:23). This has now become Jacob’s received wisdom (albeit from his mother, and no longer moored in God’s prophecy). It is easy to understand Jacob’s need to be loyal to his mother. But what allows us to understand Joseph’s effort to challenge his father’s morality? This is truly astounding! Because we know the story so well, we often miss the enormity of this stunning volte‑face. I wish I could end with this text and leave us with the Joseph who becomes conscious of his family’s mistrustful dynamics and is able to step outside of his constricting mythos and credit him with the inauguration of the benign myth of hope. As Erikson noted,” The autogenic source of primal hope” is the outcome of basic trust that has overcome basic mistrust (1950, p. 80).



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In naming his children, Manasseh, “God has made me completely forget my hardship and my parental home” (Gen. 41:51), and Ephraim, “God has made me fertile in the land of my affliction” (Gen. 41:52), Joseph is attempting to forget his childhood woes. However, the names have the quality of a conversion symptom, in that it both conceals and reveals at the same time. Every time Joseph refers to one of his children he will be reminded of that which he wishes to suppress: his brothers’ hatred, and his mother Rachel’s initial infertility and her death in giving birth to his brother Benjamin.

On the Use of Selected Lead Words in Tracing the Trajectory of the Transmission of Transgenerational Trauma in the Genesis Ancestral Saga

However, our story does not end here, and what follows makes us doubtful that Joseph has internalized his new insight “it was wrong.” After Jacob dies, the brothers come to speak to Joseph: “Before his death, your father left this instruction: ’So shall you say to Joseph, forgive I urge you the offense and guilt of your brothers who treated you so harshly.’” And Joseph was in tears (Va’yevkh) as they spoke to him. “We are prepared to be your slaves.” But Joseph said to them, “Have no fear! Am I a substitute for God? Besides, although you intended me harm, God intended it for good, so as to bring about the present result—the survival of many people.” (Gen. 50:20)

While this text continues to surprise me, it really should not, as we have heard this before (Gen. 45:4‑8) when Joseph revealed himself to his brothers after Judah’s eloquent but wrenching plea to Joseph to release Benjamin and hold Judah captive in his stead (23:9).6 Then Joseph weeps and tells his brothers for the first time that that they should not be distressed, “it was to save life that God sent me ahead of you … God sent me here to ensure your survival on earth…. So it was not you who sent me here but God….” (Gen. 45:4‑8). If we have heard this before, why should it surprise me now? It does so for two reasons: 1) because of its placement after what one would hope was a transformative moral insight that his inherited code “was wrong” and 2) because of Joseph’s emphatic repetition and insistence that it was God who sent him “for the good.” Earlier, I speculated that Joseph was able to forgive his brothers because he had sacralized his pain and thus he had not really suffered his suffering. Both times we are left with the notion that by not holding his brothers accountable he could in truth forgive them. We understand the highly emotional psychic underpinnings as to why Joseph weeps as he reveals himself to his brothers; but why then does Joseph cry again as they beg him for forgiveness after his brothers confess to their harsh treatment of him? I would suggest it is an editorial recognition that in fact Joseph never forgave his brothers. I would strongly propose that this time his weeping was a crack in his longstanding use of the defense of denial. As this

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For a fuller discussion of Judah’s—not Joseph’s—transformation, see Rotenberg (1984), “Vayigash Portrays Judah’s Moral Development.”

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defense was breached through the sophisticated and eerie psychological defense of projective identification, he was forced to realize that his brothers could sense his fury toward them; Joseph still felt the shame and strong sting of humiliation as he was violently striped of his ornamented tunic, and his panic as they threw him into an empty pit—and then perhaps the most unpardonable of all—the brothers sat down to eat! (Gen. 37:23‑25). Is it any wonder that they realized that now that their father was dead Joseph would want to exact revenge? No one who has not felt the highly charged defense of projective identification can imagine the intensity of its power and its immense capacity to astonish—if not overwhelm—the therapist. So a therapist might suddenly feel sad as she listens to a narration that is devoid of any emotion. The therapist mentions her feeling of this sudden sadness and the patient breaks out with despairing sobs. The narrative then takes a sudden twist as years of repressed feeling emerges. Thus as long as Joseph could repress his anger he could continue to be shielded by the notion that his brothers meant him no harm—for it was God who was The Actor, and they all were but the instruments of God’s dominant sacrificial vision. By holding onto this idealization of God, Joseph could be spared the deep painful feelings of shame, loss, rupture, and betrayal. He also was spared many questions that others might have had in his place. He did not have to ask himself why “his brothers hated him so much that they would not even speak peaceably [civilly] to him (vayisnu oto v’lo yakhlu dabro l’shalom)” (Gen. 37:4). He did not have to look at why, when his father Jacob knew his brothers hated him so much (37:3), he nevertheless sent him out alone to face them—letting him wear the hated “multi‑colored coat” so that the brothers “would see him from afar” (37:18)—to “seek [see to] their welfare (reah shalom aḥikha)” (Gen. 37:14). He did not have to ask himself why he played so many cruel tricks on his brothers and especially on his elderly father (Gen. 42:6‑34, 44:1‑17), nor why he had not let his father know that his beloved son was alive. This is not the place to ask the many more questions that inhere in the multi‑ faceted Joseph Cycle.7 But even these few questions give us



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For a very succinct overview of the Joseph Cycle where I suggest it is the “The Akedah Revisited,” see Rotenberg (2003), “A Hidden Master Plot.”

On the Use of Selected Lead Words in Tracing the Trajectory of the Transmission of Transgenerational Trauma in the Genesis Ancestral Saga

a sense of the depth of Joseph’s unremitting rage. It is no wonder that Joseph weeps. And we weep with him as well because we too have been entangled—ensnared?—by our received mistrustful mythos.

Conclusion In writing this essay I had several aims in mind. The first was to show how lead words carry the transmission of transgenerational trauma in the Genesis Saga. In doing so I wanted to portray how each ancestor had grave decisions to make and that they invariably chose to continue in a sacrificial vein rather than try to change their ingrained beliefs. My second aim was to make us aware of the role that God played in co‑creating this deceptive Saga. In Genesis—the story of the beginning of the infant Israelite nation—God is portrayed ambiguously and thus is a destabilizing influence threatening a tenuous relationship. The ambiguity makes it most difficult to separate text from subtext: God as a pursuer of justice, a God of caring and a God whom one can trust. But God confuses us as One who plays favorites, undermines the accepted mores of who should be the inheritor of the Blessing and at times turns away from us with great wrath. This undercuts any sense of trust that may have built up, as we do not know which of these strands is meant to be the primary text. My last aim was that once these strands were brought into consciousness, we could break the repetitive cycle and find a more benevolent mythology. This is what therapists hope to do all the time. It is the underpinning of our work. We are not truly “neutral.” We are always hoping to modulate the pain our patients carry due to conflicts long forgotten or repressed. Sadly, we do not always succeed, and as I pointed out I do not think Joseph did either. In a parallel process, I concluded that in turn I had failed to discern the more benign myth. However, upon further reflection, I realized that transformation does not come with one giant leap forward (just as one “interpretation” or “insight” does not suddenly heal the patient), but is rather the product of a long and difficult process. What was then needed was to look beyond the Genesis Saga to the other books of the Torah where our Foundational Codes of Law are to be found. There we see that the transformative process is reflected in the commandments that over and over enjoin the new

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Israelite nation “to remember [v’zakharta] that you were a slave in Egypt” (Deut. 5:15). Here the text is crystal clear, and what we find is not a mythos but a singular benign ethos that has been encoded in Law. These laws encode an ethos of remembrance of abuse but completely reverse the abusive pattern. The accepted understanding of the transmission of transgenerational trauma might have predicted that after being freed from their enslavement in Egypt, the Israelites would become the abusers. What we see instead is an astonishing set of laws whose constant command to the Israelites is “…not to wrong a stranger or oppress him, as you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Exod. 22:20). And as if this were not enough, God adds “for you know the feelings [v’atem y’datem et nefesh hager]) of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt” (Exod. 23:9). These empathic laws of remembrance, of having been slaves and then freed, undergird many biblical commands. It informs the biblical requirement not only that the stranger should not be wronged (Lev. 19:32), but that the community must take responsibility for the stranger together with the poor, the widow and the orphan. Thus we are commanded to leave some produce from the harvest of the field (leket k'tzirkha) and the fruit of the vineyard (peret karmekha) especially for them (Lev. 19:9‑10). These codes of laws are in and of themselves a precious gift to humankind. On a meta level, however, it reminds us again that the resistance to the repetition compulsion comes not only from a conscious awareness of it but from an empathy of remembrance. It comes not from the denial of our pain but from fully metabolizing it. This allows us to be open to the demands of justice. In a postscript to his book Zakhor, the Jewish historian Yosef Yerushalmi wonders “Perhaps the antonym of ’forgetting’ is not ’remembering’ but justice” (1989, p. 117). As I write now, the Israelites have returned the The Land that Abraham was summoned to (Lekh Lekha). That “Land” is now the State of Israel. With this return (v’shavu banim l’gvulom) (Jer. 31:17), justice demands that we embrace the empathy of remembrance in the benign ethos we find encoded in the commandments that were written to be fulfilled in “The Promised Land.”

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REFERENCES Abrams, M. H. (1999). A Glossary of Literary Terms: Seventh Edition. New York: Harcourt Brace College Publishers. Alter, R. (1981). The Art of Biblical Narrative. New York: Basic Books. Aronson, R. (2004). Camusartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel that Ended It. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Carmi, T. (Ed. and trans.). (1981). The Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse. New York: Penguin Books. Erikson, E. (1950). Childhood and Society. New York: W. W. Norton. Freedman, H. (Ed. and trans.). (1983). Midrash Rabbah (3rd ed.). New York: Soncino Press. Freeman, P. (2012). Oh My Gods: A Modern Retelling of Greek and Roman Myths. New York: Simon & Schuster. Graetz, N. (2012). Trauma and recovery: Abraham’s journey to the Akeidah. CCAR Journal: The Reform Jewish Quarterly, Spring 2012:29‑50. Hancock, E. (1996, September). A primer on vision. Johns Hopkins Magazine, pp. 43‑45. Marlin, Emily. (1989). Genograms. New York: Contemporary Books. McGoldrick, M., & Gerson, R. (1985). Genograms in Family Assessment. New York: W. W. Norton. Ogden, T. (1990). The Matrix of the Mind. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson. Rose, P. (1983). Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages. New York: Vintage Books. Rotenberg, M. (2003). A hidden masterplot. Forward, December 19. ____. (2002). Portrait of Rebecca: On the devolution of a matriarch into a patriarch. Conservative Judaism, 54(2):46‑62 (December 28, 1984). ____. (1984). Devar Torah: Vayigash Portrays Judah’s Moral Development”, December 28, Schenectady, NY Jewish World. Samuel, E., Samuel, M., & Van Doren, M. (Eds.). (1973). In The Beginning, Love: Dialogues on the Bible. New York: The John Day Company. Weems, R. (1992). The Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women: The ideology of race, gender, and sexual reproduction in Exodus 1. Semeia, 59:25‑34.

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Winnicott, D. W. (1989, originally published 1967). Mirror‑role of mother and family in child development. In Playing and Reality, 111‑118. New York: Routledge. Yerushalmi, Y. H. (1989). Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory. New York: Schocken Books.

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The “Coat of Many Colors” as Linking Object: A Nodal Moment in the Narrative of Jacob’s Bereavement for Joseph Moshe Halevi Spero

What attracts me in undertaking Joseph, and what I should like to express, is the transformation of Tradition into Present as a timeless mystery, the experience of the self as myth. —Thomas Mann, Dec. 28, 1926 (1970).

The poet Goethe confides in the reader of his autobiography Dichtung und Wahrheit that during his early teens he attempted an extensive prose‑poem about the biblical story of Joseph. This early project gradually yielded a manuscript of disproportionate length, and although the actual work was abandoned along with other early experiments, the young writer continued to be preoccupied with the biblical epic and its hero. Reflecting upon the challenge that made this project so compelling yet ultimately daunting, Goethe writes: It had long seemed to me desirable to work out the history of Joseph, but I could not get on with the form, particularly as I was conversant with no kind of versification which could have been adapted to such a work. I now endeavored to discriminate and picture the characters, and by the interpolations of incidents and episodes, to make the old simple history a new and independent work. I did not consider—as, indeed, youth are apt to forget—that subject‑matter was necessary for such a design, and

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It remains unclear just what “perceptions of experience” Goethe had in mind in order to acquire usable “subject‑matter.” One senses that he was referring to some sort of empathic resonance that would have enabled him to interpolate—a psychoanalyst might say “reconstruct”— crucial psychological dimensions of the laconic, “simple old story” in order to render the episode more meaningful to us.2 Indeed, many writers before Goethe and since have experienced a similar compulsion to clarify the hidden “subject‑matter” of this biblical story, a task taken to its most notable extreme, if not to excess, by Thomas Mann’s copious epic Joseph und Seine Brüder (1940),3 to which we will refer below. And yet despite all of the post‑biblical, midrashic‑interpretive, and contemporary literary refinement of the Joseph story, unsettling lacunae remain, evoking unanswered questions. At some point, a confluence of personal circumstances led me to an insight about a particular detail in

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The original German for the last sentence is: “Ich bedachte nicht, was freilich die Jugend nicht bedenken kann, daß hierzu ein Gehalt nötig sei, und daß dieser uns nur durch das Gewahrwerden der Erfahrung selbst entspringen könne” (Hamburg edition, 1948, p. 144). This approach, of course, renders the writer vulnerable to the sharp debate concerning the methodological feasibility of transgenerational empathic pathways. This is a complex topic which cannot occupy us here (see Anderson, 1981; Rollins, 2008), but I obviously subscribe to the view that such retroactive work can be undertaken within a certain kind of psychoanalytic framework, including the meta‑framework of psychoanalytic analysis of texts. Throughout this essay we will be working primarily with one section of the German (1940) and English versions (1933‑1943 [1956]) of Thomas Mann’s famous book. Interestingly, Mann’s own autobiographical recollection of Goethe’s disclosure comes across more succinctly: “The natural story of Joseph is extremely graceful, but it seems too short, and one feels oneself called upon to paint out all of its details” (1930, p. 66). Mann was later to quote Goethe in the identical manner in his address to the United States Library of Congress (1942), adding “How strange! Immediately these words from Dichtung und Warheit came to my mind, in the midst of my reveries—they were in my memory; I did not have to reread them” (p. 4). In fact, however, while Mann’s pithy version of Goethe’s wish places great emphasis upon a kind of “pull” from within the seductive lacunae of the text itself, Goethe’s actual comment in his autobiography is more complex.

The “Coat of Many Colors” as Linking Object: A Nodal Moment in the Narrative of Jacob’s Bereavement for Joseph

the Joseph story that has gnawed at me over the years. I struggled with these circumstances and with my new idea in order to fashion just the right question that might enable me to articulate the extrapolative process through which I got to that insight.4 The methodological question I shall propose focuses upon a crucial detail in the biblical story of Joseph: the famous ketonet passim, translated into English—somewhat inaccurately, as we shall see—as the “coat of many colors.”5 I ask: What happened in the end to the ketonet passim? Previous writers have attempted to define the ketonet passim from anthropological, sociological, theological, and literary points of view, each contributing a bit to our overall understanding of this famously provocative gift from Jacob to Joseph. Frye (1981, p. 176), for example, represents the broad genre of writers who interpret the many‑colored coat as a fertility‑god symbol, whereas Matthews (1995) argues that the gift of the special tunic, and the role of clothing in general throughout Joseph’s later trials in Egypt, indicate steps in the development of the need for privacy and even deception, and the reclaiming of self

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These circumstances included two main elements. The first was my personal struggle concerning a particular object, a piece of cloth, whose importance, for me and for others, evolved in the context of two very sudden and traumatic losses of life. The second element was the mental exercise evoked by a professional writing assignment bearing upon the topics of death, mourning, and the definition of nostalgia (see Impert & Rubin, 2011; Slochower, 2011; Spero, 2011). Ketonet certainly means “coat,” “shirt,” or “tunic,” but the adjectival phrase “of many colors” as the translation for the Hebrew plural term passim is technically inaccurate, as we shall see, and yet it appears rather traditionally throughout many of the standard translations of the Bible. In this essay, I will use both the Hebrew phrase ketonet passim (pronounced: ke’TOE’net pa’SEAM) and the popular English translation interchangeably, though I prefer to use the Hebrew ketonet passim. As we shall see, Thomas Mann also preferred to use the transliterated term ketônet passîm (Mann’s accent markings) throughout his monumental work, Joseph and his Brothers (1933‑1943 [1956]). My own preference for the Hebrew phrase is based on the inadequacy of the translation “many colors” for the Hebrew term passim, to be discussed shortly. Note that when the single Hebrew term for “coat” appears without any accompanying adjective it is pronounced kutonet (koo’TOE’net) and not ketonet.

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(cf. Nwaoru [2009]). However, none of the pertinent studies addresses the kinds of questions that a psychoanalyst might put to the text. A psychoanalytic inquiry into the “coat of many colors,” uniquely, would not to be limited to concrete, observable sartorial characteristics or cultural mores regarding the coat itself, nor would it be content to offer yet another metonymic interpretation per se.6 Rather, we want to learn about the psychological fate of the uncanny garment after the events reported in the biblical text: what is the ultimate intrapsychic destination of this ill‑fated piece of clothing? If we then ponder the complementary question—where did this cloak or robe come from in the first place?— we, again, are not concerned with the literal sense (e.g., “Jacob gave it to Joseph!”), but in the sense of psychological origin or unconscious provenance. That is to say, what psychic need or fantasy would require the generation of such an object and eventually militate toward its loss or destruction? A better understanding of this need or wish would help us to imagine what ultimately happens, or is likely to have happened, to the object. It should be obvious by now that I do not expect us to find the ketonet passim hidden in a clay pot. The psychoanalyst is prepared to invest himself in the psychic dimensions of space and time occupied by an object in order to better comprehend the kinds of fantasies, or fantasy‑sustained structures, that correspond to that object, or to which the object responds. Such mental operations are attempts to define “objects” of a mental‑representational kind that have been internalized in the mind at one level or another.7 In this approach, it is insufficient simply to refer to an object as a symbol; one must explain how something came to be

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The kinds of lofty, mystical, metaphoric, or existential explanations that tend to be the stuff of most biblical writing and explanation, while inherently valuable, represent a step away from the “rock bottom” psychoanalytic type of explanation, which seeks to explain the “higher motives” (without thereby implying that they have no other value). I do not reject these. However, I have put aside the theological or historical‑moral interpretations in favor of what strikes me as the most fundamental psychological dimension of the coat and its fate. The concept of “object” should be taken to connote an “object representation,” which refers to a larger composite of memories, with their attendant intra‑ and intersubjective psychic configurations that have been internalized at a variety of increasingly abstract levels of symbolization (Schafer, 1968).

The “Coat of Many Colors” as Linking Object: A Nodal Moment in the Narrative of Jacob’s Bereavement for Joseph

symbolic, what level of symbolism has the object attained, and how does it function qua symbol within the mind of the individual. This approach, in the biblical case at hand, would have us explore the “taking inward,” mentally, of a psychological representation of a certain kind of relationship with, or use for, a specific kind of garment. The degree to which an “object” has been internalized (i.e., highly, partially, or barely at all)—and the degree to which the original “perceptual servitude” to the physical entity can be loosened, enabling the space resulting from that loss or absence to be filled with wholly symbolic meaning—tells us what we need to know about the psychodynamic importance of the object. This approach, I dare say, provides the kinds of “perceptions of experience” that young Goethe wished to grasp as he contemplated the details of the Joseph story. The few psychoanalytically‑informed commentators who have studied Joseph’s personality mention the ketonet passim tangentially amid their larger discussions of his narcissistic dreams, the role of maternal and paternal absence, rites of passage, oedipal envy, transgenerational trauma, and fratricide.8 These investigators have focused on the coat as a morally and politically problematic token of power granted by Jacob to Joseph, symbolic of the transition to adulthood and emblematic of conflicting vectors of narcissistic mirroring, oedipal love, and sibling rivalry. However, while such views advance our understanding considerably, these writers have not fitted their views into the deep structure and complexities of the text. My contribution will do so. Since the biblical story has the “deep structure” of a psychological myth,9 we can view the textual frame— 8 9



Such as G. Katz (1991); J. Katz (1963); Zeligs (1974); Zornberg (1995; 2009). The idea that certain stories depicted in the Torah can be viewed as psychological myth does not imply the reduction of the status of biblical text to that of mere myth, or that the biblical corpus ought to be viewed primarily as a collection of mythological legends (see S. Spero, 1999). The psychoanalyst who emphasizes psychological myth does not, in the main, intend to contest the historical or ethical probity of the content of the myth—its historicity, so to speak. Rather, the psychoanalyst focuses upon the profoundly deep mental structure captured by the myth, expressed in symbolic story form, and studies the way in which the languaged mind forms itself around otherwise incomprehensible events or experiences. Myth‑making, like the

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the words regarding the tunic and what happens to it—as an ideogram about a disturbance in the natural evolution of psychological, representational “objects” during bereavement and complicated mourning. In this view, the words “ketonet passim” and “kutonet” in this biblical chapter represent a mental terrain; they highlight the presence of a nodal moment (to be defined below) in the internal fluctuations of Joseph’s envelopment within his father’s unsettled needs and, eventually, Jacob’s complicated, even pathological bereavement over the absence of his son. These primitive forces alone determine the true fate of the ketonet passim as a mental object, while the textual anomalies contain and convey them.

Nodal Moments in a Textual Narrative Freud, from his earliest works (1896, pp. 198‑99; 1900, pp. 340‑1n, 410; 1909), pointed to the importance of what he called the knotenpunkt (knot‑point) in a text, be the text laboriously edited, freely associated, or dreamed. Knot‑points draw attention to the existence of a dynamic vortex or juncture where the norms of everyday language and conscious cognition have begun to slip and are pulled, despite themselves, toward



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psychoanalytic process itself, identifies and lends form to psychic wishes or perceptions that could not be admitted to consciousness if not for the narrative frame of the myth, including its mise‑en‑scene and variegated temporal dimensions (Arlow, 1982; Hartocollis & Davidson Graham, 1991). Two key principles or dimensions are brought to light when working with this approach: First, with every major advance in mentalization and subjective awareness, new interpretations of myth become possible, and these interpretations themselves gradually become absorbed into the myth, adding to its complexity and applicability. At the same time, these interpretations might not actually modify the basic structure of the myth until exceptionally great transformations take place in human nature (Lévi‑Strauss, 1955, pp. 216‑17). Second, as explicated by Wilfred R. Bion (1963; 1965), the integrated structure of the myth does not just express a symbolic meaning. More significantly, the myth contains (in the fundamental sense of containment) violently paranoid, self‑destructive forces which might otherwise destroy the mind. Paradoxically, myths evoke turbulence, and tend to oppose stagnant, one‑ dimensional knowledge. As such, myths are active; they depict how the nascent mind learns to contend with its fear of its own thoughts and its tendency to split and evacuate them. For this same reason, the dynamic core of a myth is also always on the verge of violent cataclysm even as it is generally held together by the text’s internal logic and the other narrative or representational dimensions that characterize it.

The “Coat of Many Colors” as Linking Object: A Nodal Moment in the Narrative of Jacob’s Bereavement for Joseph

some “deeper” unconscious emotional force. These knot‑points, which Freud also referred to as “switch [Wechsel] words,” act as an umbilicus, navel (1900, pp. 317‑18), gate, or bridge whereby multiple conflicting motivations or feelings converge and express over‑determined meanings while maintaining the appearance, owing to the norms of language, of a collective unity or identity.10 Contemporary researchers Freedman and Russell (2003; Freedman et al., 2011, pp. 245‑47), assign the term nodal moment to those areas of a text that reveal major internal transformations in the quality and level of symbolization, presumably experienced by the individual, though not always consciously. Moments such as these are characterized by conspicuous textual density or sparseness, sudden confluence or repetition of words, ellipses, changes of grammatical structure, and the abrupt emergence or suppression of emotion. For the Freedman group (2011), nodal moments are pockets within a narrative that have been preceded by material that was intensely regressive, relatively desymbolized, or blatantly concrete, where meaning had been dense and unformulated, that gradually become increasingly symbolized, better formulated, and open to reflection. Optimally, in the transformation from the unformulated to the formulated, from the desymbolized to the symbolized, significant emotional paradoxes are discovered and processed, and their intersubjective significance can be confronted. Typically, nodal moments get set in motion when an individual enters a new object relationship, or reaches a new level of object relationship—such as birth, death, or even a creative shift in understanding the transference—that initially evokes regression and desymbolization but is eventually followed by more creative movement toward enhanced symbolization, mature relationship, and more abstract understanding. Occasionally, a nodal moment remains suspended or stranded at a specific point for quite some time, its final resolution becoming evident Jacques Lacan (1955‑1956, pp. 267‑68), in his expositions of Freud, referred to these knot‑points as points de capiton or quilting points, akin to the buttons on an upholstered object that hold many layers of cloth together. These points seem to fix or stabilize meaning, and yet complex meanings are distributed and disseminated from them (see Evans, 1996).

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only at a subsequent point. In our story, the final biblical references to the ketonet passim mark one such stranded knot‑point.

Why the Kutonet Could Not Simply Have “Disappeared” Now let us recall my methodological question: what happened in the end to the “coat of many colors?” The reader who has even passing familiarity with Chapter 37 of Genesis will be puzzled by the apparent naiveté of my question, or chide me for ignoring the obvious. After all, the biblical text depicts quite clearly how the brothers stripped the ketonet passim from Joseph’s body, shred and bloodied it, and sent it to be displayed before their father. Compelled to confront the tortured garment, Jacob immediately identifies it (Gen. 37:33), and, bereft, withdraws into an abyss of inconsolable aloneness. After this point, one does not hear of the coat of many colors again.11 This portrait of things, however, is not quite the fullest picture warranted by the biblical text. It is a “standard” portrait that tracks a concrete object that at some point ceases to be referred to. But that is not the same thing as ceases to be. The text, it is true, tells us what befell “the coat,” but is that coat the “coat of many colors” or was it a separate coat? The Writ does not actually clarify this ambiguity. The ambiguity is not just a narrator’s stylistic preference. In principle, the deeply perceptive, unconsciously‑linked human mind could not truly expect this to be the end of the story, for in the unconscious nothing ever ceases to be.12 The conscious part of the mind, predicated upon That is, there is no reference in the Pentateuch to any kind of ketonet passim. However, the two words ketonet passim do appear one additional time in the wider Bible, in the tragic episode of the rape and usurpation of Tamar by her half‑brother Amnon (2 Sam. 13:1‑19). Though not critical to the thesis of the chapter, it is pertinent and supportive, and I will return to it below in Footnote 30. 12 This way of thinking is in accord with the contemporary view of the unconscious as a wise agent, an internal and active “knower” characterized by deep, universal, and ancient wisdom, though much of this agency is preconceptual and paralinguistic, such that only small amounts of this “unconscious” wisdom gain expression in easily expressible form (Grotstein, 1997a; Langs, 1997; 1998). This is not a childish personification: while it is obvious that there is no unconscious as such without minds to sustain it, within the mind the unconscious operates on an individual and group level, and across time (via 11

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asymmetrical logic, and the older, unconscious part of the mind, which operates in a symmetrical mode (Matte‑Blanco, 1975)13—where, importantly, negation and differentiation cannot be conceptualized—coexist in a complex, uneasy detente that sustains a background ontology in continuous foment. This unique ontology maintains a tension between seemingly paradoxical realities alongside that otherwise comfortable and familiar range of perceptions we refer to as “objective reality.” This same tension subtends the realm of fantasy, and drives a subversive hypertext that is latent to all nominative texts, acting as a permanent archive of all negated, elided, and discarded texts that preceded the nominative one. Unlike an inert refuse bin where “deleted” files stagnate, hypertexts are active, prompted by psychological and linguistic rules that govern the relationship between people, objects, or events. Oftentimes, people, objects, or events of interest seem to not appear in a specific narrative text, but their influence can be “felt” in the psychic space suspended between text and mind. Possibilities that are latent in the hypertext deconstruct, reconstruct, and enrich the manifest text. During psychoanalysis, the analysand alludes to his or her own hypertext through associative speaking, fantasies, reverie, and dreams. In biblical textual reality, we might then state, a hypertext is announced by nodal moments. These nodal moments attract the mind of the midrashic and contemporary

projective dynamics, such as when artists project mental “states” through their work). 13 The symmetrical mode that characterizes the unconscious implies, as Freud insisted, that the law of mutual exclusivity (which states that a thing cannot be identical to its opposite) and the mechanism of negation cannot have any meaning (see Matte‑Blanco, 1975): perfect symmetry rules. Asymmetrical logic rests upon the adoption of the law of mutual exclusivity (e.g., to accept that a bachelor cannot be a married male is to accept an asymmetry), and requires negation in order to create the aboriginal yes/no upon which all mentality is based. Symmetrical logic, which is already a form of thinking of some type, characterizes the secondary unconscious and is a combination of both modes, though heavily weighted in the direction of symmetry. Of course, in dilute form, symmetrical logic permeates creative conscious thought, such as in metaphors, literary tropes, figures of speech, word‑play, etc. (“Oh, Susan’s husband has always been a bachelor!”), and that is how color gets brought into the asymmetrical domain.

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mythologist (whether or not s/he is fully conscious of why s/he might be so attracted). Thus, the coat of many colors could not disappear except in a superficial sense. Psychological economy is conservative, and mental representations as such—no matter what else befalls that which has been represented—are immortal (Rizzuto, 1979; 1992). While it is true that the manifest text enables us to presume that Joseph’s coat was destroyed or discarded, we will see that it does not quite state as much. Rather, the quality of the psychological trauma taking place at the time compels us to consider that the coat is present but has been masked, displaced, or transformed.

Toward a Definition of Ketonet Passim The chief source of confusion surrounding the role of the ketonet passim is evidently the Hebrew term passim, plural for pas, which led to the standardization of inaccurate non‑Hebrew translations that obscured the deeper sense of the term. Strictly speaking, the Hebrew term ‫( פסים‬passim) has nothing to do with color. Passim is the plural of the Hebrew word ‫( פס‬pas), a strip or stripe; a noun form derived from the Assyrian infinitive pes’sas, “to end” or “to spread, pass over, vanish” (Brown, Driver, & Briggs, 1906, p. 821). The various rabbinic interpretations of passim that cling to this essential definition, to summarize, mainly emphasize that the tunic reached the midpoint or pas of Joseph’s hand; others say, the midpoint of his foot; others say that the strips of cloth were thin and extremely light, such that the fabric could be hidden in Joseph’s hand, gathered into a ball the shape of a nut. The rabbis of the Talmud and Midrash were quick to lend additional, richer character to the coat, whose central trends I paraphrase here:14 Passim [plural; i.e., many images]—Upon these stripes were images [extracted from the original kot’note ’or God made for man]: pictures of all of the birds and animals of the world [cf. Talmud B., Pesahim, 54b]. Rashi, Ramban, Ibn Janah, Radak, Ralbag, ad loc, summarized by Kaplan (1981) to Gen. 37:3; see also Ginzberg, 1909[1956], vol. 1, chap. 7; Kasher, 1950, Book 2, pp.1397‑99.

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The “Coat of Many Colors” as Linking Object: A Nodal Moment in the Narrative of Jacob’s Bereavement for Joseph Pas [in the sense of] pa’yis, a lottery—heyphi’su a’lav, the brothers cast lots to see [who would kill him; who would carry the news of his death] to their father; the lot fell upon Judah. Pas is [derived from the meaning] kli meylat, a linen tunic. And the Midrash states that the word passim is an acronym for the [identity] of the crises [tzaro’tav] he was to face: [thus] p‑s‑i‑m—[an abbreviation for the first Hebrew letter of the following terms] he was sold to Potiphar and to the soharem [merchants], to the Ishmaelites, and to the Mideanites. Passim, in the plural [in order to indicate:] count s‑i‑m [i.e., sum the numerical value of the Hebrew letters: samakh=60, yud=10, mem=40: 110]. [To teach that] Joshuah who was destined to learn Torah at the foot of Moshe, descended from Joseph, and Joshuah lived 110 years, as did Joseph, in the value of s‑i‑m.

These views deemphasize the role of color in and of itself; the element of color was at best secondary, or only an assumption of the interpreters.15 To be precise, any translation that emphasizes “stripes”—a striped robe, perhaps variously‑colored—or a luxurious, royal coat whose sleeves run to the pas or mid‑line of the hands and feet, would be faithful to the Hebrew. More importantly, the expanded view emphasizes the role of passim as a signifier of the quality of dynamic relationships that it evoked or caused to evolve. These qualities inhere in: (a) the coat’s history, (b) the conscious and unconscious intention of giving the coat to Joseph, and, ultimately, (c) the effect of the coat on the further developments in the relationship between Jacob, Joseph, and his brothers. It is impressive, therefore, if not startling, to note the degree to which the earliest non‑Hebrew translations of the term ketonet passim adhered to the presumption that passim defines a multi‑colored robe. The error or misinterpretation seems to have begun with Martin Luther, who translated the words “ei tunicam polymitam,” found in the Latin Biblia Sacra Vulgata (1546/1969), into the German “einen bunten Rock” (Die Bibel [1545]), “a colorful coat.”16 This definition endured throughout many This same assumption is made elsewhere: Hur kar’pas u‑tehey’let (Esther, 1:6)—“ka’rim shel passim, stripped pillows,” explains the Talmud (B., Meg., 12a), which Rashi interprets as colorful stripes (mi’ney bega’dim tze’vone’im). 16 The original Latin reads: “Israël autem diligebat Joseph super omnes filios 15

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translations of the Bible.17 Luther’s German translation, while reasonable, is inaccurate, since the term “polymitum” simply means “many finely woven threads” (Hastings, 1898, p. 244n). Gradually, non‑rabbinic scholars, whether or not they were aware of (or cited) the rabbinic corrective, noticed that the true meaning of the Hebrew term pas has little relation to the notion of color. Brown, Driver, and Briggs insisted upon “tunic reaching to palms and soles” (1906, p. 821). Later, drawing on Nahum Sarna’s (1989, p. 225) analysis of the Greek, Latin, Syrian, and Arabic cognates, and Theodore Gaster’s (1969, p. 237) review of Mesopotamian art and artifacts, James Swanson (1997, to Gen. 37:3) portrays the ketonet passim as “[either] a very long‑sleeved robe extending to the feet, or a richly‑ornamented tunic either of special color design or gold threading, ornamental and not suitable for working … [uniquely designed] for showing special favor or relationship.”18 With time, more accurate translations superseded the Lutheran one. While the authoritative Catholic Douay‑Rheims Bible (since 1609) continues the tradition of a “varicolored coat,” as do the contemporary versions of some of the sources cited above, Luther’s bunten Rock was not adopted uncritically by most subsequent German Bibles, such as

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suos, eo quod in senectute genuisset eum: fecitque ei tunicam polymitam.” Consistently, Luther provides the very same translation for the words ketonet passim that appear at 2 Samuel 13:18. Engelfried (1990) offers an exhaustive analysis of the possible sources of Luther’s bunten Rock mistranslation. 17 Here are several examples: “una túnica [var: una ropa] de diversos colores” (La Biblia de Casiodora de Reina [1959]); “une tunique de plusieurs couleurs” (La Biblia de Casiodora de Reina [1959]); “una veste di vari colori” (Nuova Riveduta Sui Testi, Giovanni Diodatina [1532/1930]); “veelkleurige mantel” [var: veelvervigen rok] (Dutch Het Boek [1988]); “en mantel i granna färger” [gaudy color] (Swedish Levande Bibeln [2000]); “uma túnica de varias cores” (Portuguese Biblia Sagrada, João Ferreira de Almeida Revista e Atulaizada [1893]). 18 In 1964, E. A. Speiser ended his review of the matter with an odd rhetorical question: “The traditional ’coat of many colors,’ and the variant ’coat with sleeves,’ are sheer guesses from the context; is there anything remarkable about either colors or sleeves?” (p. 289). His approach, typical of Higher Criticism, and later adopted by many other commentators, linked the ketonet passim to the robes that appear on the statues of goddesses from a relatively later period in history, which he assumed to have been the true time of writing of the biblical story. However, he offered no additional interpretation of the significance of the coat.

The “Coat of Many Colors” as Linking Object: A Nodal Moment in the Narrative of Jacob’s Bereavement for Joseph

the Elberfelden Bible (1871), which translates it as “einen langen Leibrock.” Nor was it accepted by English translations such as The Tyndale and later King James’ New English Bible, both of which prefer “a long sleeved coat” (tunica talaris) or a “coat reaching to the extremities.”19 Now is the point to welcome Thomas Mann’s work into the discussion. In his epic historical‑fiction, Joseph and his Brothers (1933‑1943 [1956]), Joseph’s tunic plays a central role. Throughout 88 pages devoted to the happenings surrounding the coat (as opposed to the some 250 words in the biblical version!), Mann tends to refer to the coat simply by the transliterated words ketônet passîm instead of “bunten Rock” as defined by the Lutheran translation upon which Mann heavily leaned. Though Mann occasionally uses the phrase “coat of colors,” he seems to have been favorably influenced by post‑Lutheran Bible translations that emphasized the coat’s length, lightness, or uniqueness rather than its color. In his extensive descriptions, Mann incorporates almost all of the midrashic traditions that portray the coat as a long garment, large enough to wrap oneself within (e.g., “bunt … groß und weitläufig … mit weiten Ärmeln” [p. 297]), and as bearing richly embroidered cosmological scenes and aphorisms or sayings (Koelb, 1976; 1978).20 Overall, Much later, this restricted sense came to be reflected in conservative English translations such as “richly ornamented robe” (New International Version of the English Bible [1973]) and “special robe with long sleeves” (New American Standard Bible [1995]). 20 Mann studied the midrashic sources as carefully as he was able. Among the eight Jewish sources he acknowledged, his main wellsprings were secondary and tertiary sources, specifically Micha Josef (Berdyczewski) Bin‑Gorion’s collection of Jewish aphorisms and aggadic lore (1913) and Bin‑Gorion’s little‑known redaction of stories devoted to Joseph, extracted from the semi‑apocryphal Se’fer ha‑Ya’shar (Noah, 1840 [1977]). Interestingly, Bin‑Gorion titled his own book Joseph und Seine Brüder: Ein altjüdischer Roman (1917). Aside from the title, Mann also borrowed pages upon pages of details and dialogues from these secondary collections in writing his Joseph. To what degree Mann consulted directly or indirectly from Hebrew‑language sources or German translations, is a matter of unresolved scholarly discussion (Koelb, 1976; 1978; Koelb & Spicehandler, 1976; Levenson, 1999; Rosenwald, 1978; Wright, 2007), though we know from his letters that he consulted, at least a few times, with Rabbi Jakob Horovitz (d. 1939) of Frankfurt‑am‑Main. I have drawn from the most consistently supported view that Mann did not read or speak Hebrew (though he mastered a bit of Hebrew orthography), but took great pains to amass a wealth of midrashic data of one kind or another, primarily taken from 19

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Mann seems to have adopted the midrashic view, which he studied, that the physical qualities of the coat, no matter how superlative, screened deeper, transgenerational qualities. We shall return to this dimension below.

Ketonet Passim as Coat of Thresholds A fuller meaning of the special passim‑tunic as a psychological object requires that we turn again to the Hebrew roots of the phrase. I mentioned above that pas connotes a boundary, an extremity, and— to introduce an important term—a threshold. This connotation emerges by taking into account that the word ‫( פס‬pas), formed by the two letters pey and samekh, is etymologically linked to the term ‫( סף‬saf), formed by samekh and pey. Immediately, we find ourselves in reach of words like pe’sach and sippim, which are redolent of the concepts of passage, doorways, thresholds, and subtle, threshold‑like phenomena such as fence straddling or ambivalence (see Rashi to Exod. 12:13 [u‑pa’sah’ti aley’khem] and to 1 Kings 18:21 [ad matei a’tem pos’him al sh’nei se’p’im]). A brief condensation of some sources will more than suffice to establish my point:21 The verb ‫( ָפ ַסס‬pas’sas), to catalogue (or ‫[ לְ ַמייֵ ן‬le‑ma’yen] in modern Hebrew); to untie and separate (Talmud, Sha’bbat, 24b, 155a) or to tear into stripes or shreds, and to scatter (Mishneh, Naz’er, 6:3); ‫( פספס‬pas’pes) may also be a transposition of ‫( ספסף‬seaf’sef), to cut the edges of hair or to trim the ends by singeing (see Tosefta Pe’sa’him, 5:10). Saf and pas are unquestionably related to the root ‫( אפס‬e’fess), to disappear, vanish, become naught, “no more,” zero sum (Gen. 47:15; Is. 5:8, 41:12; Zeph. 2:12; Prov. 14:28, 26:20); e.g., “For the faithful men have disappeared, vanished…” (Ps. 12:2).

German language secondary and tertiary sources. This question touches upon the related issue of whether Joseph is best deemed a midrash or merely a novel; I concur with Levenson (1999), who argues convincingly that it must be considered both. 21 These examples have been derived from Ben‑Shushan (1976, p. 2114); Ben‑Yehudah (1959, vol. 4, pp. 5038‑39); Brown, Driver & Briggs (1906); Sivan & Fruchtman (2007, p. 853).

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The “Coat of Many Colors” as Linking Object: A Nodal Moment in the Narrative of Jacob’s Bereavement for Joseph In classical or illustrative writing, the term pas or e’fes can also be used to denote “although” or “yet,” in the sense that implies the nullification or serious qualification of a preceding assertion (e.g., Deborah’s rebuke of Barak [Judg. 4:9]). In David’s song (“I chose to dwell in the tent of the Lord” [Ps. 84:11]), we find the rather unique word ‫( הסתופף‬hes’to’fef), which actually means “to sit on the threshold” or ‫מפתן‬. This term is a rare (hitpa’el) ‫ התפעל‬construction of the verb ‫ספף‬, derived from the word ‫ סף‬for threshold, indicating the psalmist’s comfort straddling a state of contiguity ( ‫ ספּון‬as in Deut. 33:19), hidden (Deut. 33:21) or a border, limnal state, when ensconced in faith. ‫( פספוס‬fis’fus), to disappoint, or miss out, also bears the sense of ‫להחמץ‬ (le‑ha’hmitz) which originally refers to the radical fermentation of leavened bread (Exod. 12:39), or a volatile (Is. 1:17), ruthless state (Ps. 71:4). This construction is utilized in contemporary Hebrew to indicate a missed opportunity, a situation that somehow does not achieve its full proportions or come to fruition, a state that is flat or limp like unleavened bread that fails to rise. ‫ אסופי‬or ‫( אסופית‬a’su’fe or a’su’feet), refers to a foundling (Talmud, Kiddushin, 69a; Baba Metzia, 87a), an abandoned child, a child whose identity is not defined by boundaries, or is taken up from the street. ‫( האספסוף‬the mob), which refers to an unbounded, miscellaneous or “mixed multitude” or appendage (turba collecta) that respects no boundary; that lives at the periphery of a more cohesive group [this term is a hapex legomenon that appears only in Num. 11:4].

A broad range of fresh associations now begins to swirl around the term passim. One gets the sense of an ephemeral boundary, perhaps the first boundaries of the human mind, where the limits of time and space are just beginning to be demarcated in a stable way; a realm where transition can be either enhanced or impeded by the qualities of these boundaries; the range between intentional acts versus happenstance and randomness; the tantalizing possibilities of an encounter or opportunity met or failed; the difficulty of surrendering the dichotomous splitting of the paranoid‑schizoid position in favor of the blended ideas and emotions of the depressive position; and the exquisitely uncanny sensitivities, doubts, and anxieties that lurk around edges and borders of all forms of geographic domains.

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Freud anticipated the powerful psychological vortices that characterize threshold phenomena, ranging from the internal borders between self‑ and object‑representations to our commonplace psychological anxieties and fears surrounding ineluctable biological events such as birth and death and mundane artifacts such as doorways, embankments, cusps, or any point where two entities touch. He noticed this symbolism in dreams, which are in and of themselves a threshold phenomena (1900, pp. 504, 559). His general view was expressed as follows: The dangers which the anxious man believes to be threatening him never appear more vivid in his expectation than on the threshold of a dangerous situation, and then, too, is the only time when protecting himself against them is of any use. (Freud, 1918 [1817], p. 197)

The clinical thinking behind this view is based on an earlier conceptualization which Freud never abandoned: Repression does not take place solely by the construction of an excessively strong antithetic idea, but by the intensification of a boundary idea, which thereafter represents the repressed memory in the passage of thought. It may be called a boundary idea because on the one hand it belongs to the ego and on the other hand [it] forms an undistorted portion of the traumatic memory. (Freud, 1894, p. 229)

In Freud’s view, repression (and related defense mechanisms) does not operate simply by replacing traumatic subject matter, but rather by modifying the amount of attention we pay to an idea, along a route of temporal relations among events, based on a variety of traumatic considerations. In a strange way, the “boundary” of the memory of a trauma becomes a symbol for that danger, enabling the psychic apparatus to anticipate danger efficiently. As the psyche develops, boundaries always harbor an implicit, or latent, uncanny sense of danger or apprehension, which the individual may or may not master. Freud’s sensitivity to the significance of boundaries and thresholds (Schwellen) drew his attention to a wide spectrum of additional psychic structures that pertain to threshold functioning—such as the stimulus barrier (Reizschutz) and the primordial psychic envelope, the earliest meeting point between mind and brain and between word‑representation and thing‑representation.

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In summary to this point, though the Bible and Midrash do not communicate in psychoanalytic idiom, the dimensions delineated by pas and saf clearly characterize threshold phenomena. It follows that ketonet passim might well be taken to represent a cloak or envelope of threshold‑like quality, a Schwellen‑tunic, if not a threshold in and of itself.

Elaboration of the Kutonet in Rabbinic Midrash The talmudic, midrashic, and other rabbinic exegetical sources, typically keen to link biblical heroes, themes, and objects from disparate contexts based on the slightest morphological similarity or acoustical echo, are uncharacteristically silent regarding the fate of the ketonet passim. However, if the fate of the coat is mysterious, the rabbis did propose that the special coat had a history.22 The precursor of the ketonet passim was believed to be the aboriginal garment, the kot’note ’or (“clothes of skin”) that God fashioned for Adam and Eve upon their exile from Eden (Gen. 3:21). Psychoanalytically construed, this legend handily links the ketonet passim, whatever else it may come to mean, with the concept of a skin garment, or the skin envelope, the earliest psychic “organ.” Following Freud, contemporary psychoanalysts understand this skin envelope as a budding mental representation that provides a primordial wrapping or container for the ego organism as it is gradually internalized.23 For ease of bibliographic referencing, all of the midrashic sources from which I draw in this section are found in Kasher’s encyclopedic compendium (1950, p. 1399 n. 50). 23 The clinical concept of the skin ego, and the related research on various forms of psychic envelopes, began with the work of Didier Anzieu in 1974 (Anzieu, 1985; 1990), predicated on several early explorations by Freud, and of Esther Bick (1968, 1986) in England, and was further developed by Anzieu’s students in France, by Frances Tustin (1990) in England, and by Judith and Theodore Mitrani in the United States (1997). According to Anzieu, the ego encloses the psychic apparatus much as the skin encloses the body. The chief functions of the skin are transposed onto the level of the skin‑ego, and from there onto the level of the thinking ego. The functions of the skin‑ego are to maintain thoughts, contain ideas and affects, and provide a protective shield (among others), thus serving as the first interface between inside and outside, and is the foundation of the container/contained relationship. 22

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Within months, this preverbal representational envelope transforms into the inner sense of ego organization, self‑enclosure, and a firm sense of self‑other boundaries. Following this midrashic identification, we might combine the psychological weights of the early “coat of skin” and the later “coat of passim.” In the structure of the myth, the transmission of this relic represents the primordial genesis of the mind as it moves from being covered by a concrete bit of skin‑like clothing or kutonet ’or, imposed from without, initially bearing only an inchoate sense of saf, pas, or threshold, to a more mature psychological representation of a protective ego skin wrapping, the ketonet passim. Now, the kutonet is no longer merely a concrete garment, although its fuller internalization would still require conscious intention, deconstruction, and symbolization. I am unaware of any midrash that outlines subsequent phases in this developmental process. However, there is a midrash that augments the current picture, claiming that the coat passed from Adam to the hands of Noah, Nimrod, Esau, Jacob, and finally Joseph. Along the way, according to yet another rabbinic elaboration, the coat or cloak was adorned with icons of all of the animals, mythological scenes, and embroidered aphorisms with mystical meanings. Thus the coat was perceived as a hunter’s and a king’s fetish—capable of stunning animals and enemies so they could be easily conquered. Yet as long as the coat remains a magical object, the user has not recognized that these “powers” do not reside in the object itself but are in fact basic ego functions of the mind. With the handing of the coat to Joseph, a transition of sorts had begun. The psychological transition from the coat that had been initially handed down to Esau and then refashioned by Jacob can be sensed from hints in the biblical text. In order to receive the Abrahamic blessing from Isaac, who harbors a pathetic, blind love for Esau, Jacob’s mother Rebecca insists upon disguising him in his brother’s cloak (Gen. 27:15‑16): And Rebecca took the precious clothes [big’dai ha‑hamu’dot] of Esau, her eldest son, which were with her in the house, and she dressed Jacob, her youngest son, with them.

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Commenting upon this text, the midrash (Gen. Rabbah 97:6; Num. Rabbah 4:8) reveals a hidden myth: the clothes of Esau were “precious” or “coveted” (ha’mad) because they were originally Adam’s ketonet ’or, noted above, the first clothing created by God. A developmental process is implied as the garment moves through the generations toward its relatively more advanced priestly role. This midrash also exposes a highly complex conflict of honor, filial piety—possibly ambivalent—and envy, portraying a confident Esau who taunts Jacob by saying, “I spend my days in the field and at war, unlike you, and yet I would never serve our father without wearing the precious garments!” Though Esau may have dimly sensed the pull toward a higher cultural achievement, using the coat solely as priestly symbol, he favored the coat primarily for its mantic powers. By the time the coat rests in the hands of Isaac and Jacob, its manifest identity is that of a symbolic vestment, and yet the seething impulses of early, incompletely sublimated aggressiveness were still palpable. The immature concept of the coat could not yet settle these cataclysmic forces; in the attempt to contain these forces, or mask them, the physical coat was still very much needed as a real object (i.e., not fully symbolized). In contemporary terms, then, the coat of passim was richly endowed with a range of incompletely organized oral (skin) and even phallic dynamics, but could not quite absorb the more complex, triangular or oedipal tensions that were explicit in this new phase of biblical family development. Ideally, the intense dependency upon any specific concrete coat or wrapping can be relinquished once the individual has achieved a clear and full symbolized sense of sippim (plural of saf), or psychic boundedness, durable enough to maintain the capacity for separation and individuation across a broad gamut of emotional crises. However, at the stage when Joseph first receives the kutonet, it enwraps him before he is yet able to express a completed mental achievement. He obviously begins to be moved by the enhanced capacity to dream—as a true, budding “dream envelope” should thus enable24—but he is no less overwhelmed See Missenard (1990), a student of Didier Anzieu (1990), and note especially his rich formulation of a wide array of psychic envelopes that operate from earliest infancy onward.

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by the meaning of his dreams than are his father and brothers, as he rushes to share the dreams, uncontained, unworked. Tragically, nothing more could be done with the coat—its wearer was unable to perform more mature psychological transformations, and the coat itself could not yet be internalized as a symbolic mental object representation.

 homas Mann’s Neo‑Midrashic Contribution to the Meaning T of Kutonet Thomas Mann’s breath‑taking tetralogy Joseph and his Brothers (1933‑1943 [1956]) offers an extensive amount of interpolated dialogue between Jacob, Joseph, and the brothers, stippled with fictional but very plausible private musings regarding the “special coat” (pp. 450‑538). Mann’s rendition abounds in what we must refer to as neo‑midrashic insights that are very much in accord with the restive psychological properties of the ketonet passim.25 It is fair to say that Mann is just short of obsessed with the coat of many colors, elaborating upon its appearance and sensual properties in a manner that surpasses all ancient midrashic accounts. Indeed, many contend that the coat serves as the organizing leitmotif of the book. As the chapters unfold, Mann invents several metamorphoses of the kutonet Mann stated expressly (1940, p. 12) that his enormous work was intended as form of “Torah exegesis and amplification … a rabbinic midrash” in which “meaning and being, myth and reality, are constantly passing into each other” (1889‑1955 [1970], p. 140). To that end, Mann maintains his narrative’s overall temporal “consciousness” by constant linkage to the framework of the Jewish calendar, by using conspicuously biblical forms of speech, and through the creation of innumerable word‑plays, lexical exegeses, etymological divagations, and pan‑scriptural citations that would typify a sacred text. This preservation of proportionality characterizes “good” midrash as well as “good” exposition of myth (Fisch, 1998, pp. 18‑19; Fishbane, 1989, p. ix). On the other hand, Mann often “forces” certain motives, reveries, and prophetic anticipations into his heroes’ conscious awareness—as if they were mere screens—in a manner that risks depriving the biblical actor of the crucial naiveté that characterizes authentic moral challenge (see Hartwich, 2001; Josipovici, 1988). I do not intend here to claim that our biblical heroes were conscious of the kinds of dimensions we shall highlight. To the contrary, much of what attracts our attention in the text are aporia and absences that require us to point out dimensions that were in all probability unconscious or beyond fully symbolized representational experience of the actors.

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symbol, such as the reappearance of the coat theme in his lavish portraits of Tamar’s tze’if (or Schleiergewand), the prostitute’s veil (Gen. 38:14), and the beg’ged (the festive Feierkleid) or royal tunic that Joseph, still enslaved in Egypt, lets fall while fleeing Potiphar’s seductive wife (Gen. 39:12‑13). Indeed, though Mann sometimes seems to have rather uncritically gathered all of the data that could be drawn from any biblical context featuring tunics and robes (Koelb, 1976; Tumanov, 2000), ultimately the weave he creates elicits a profound effect: the kutonet itself becomes a metaphor, a myth within the myth. With Mann, the metaphoric impact of the coat remains eternally active long after it is no longer physically present. The second crucial element that Mann imposes upon the ketonet passim is this: it is central to Mann’s line of thought that Laban initially gave Rachel a veil (ein Schleier [1933‑1943 (1956), p. 294]) as a gift, which Jacob then used as her bridal veil and later, following her tragic death, transformed into the ketonet passim. There is no hint to this fascinating idea in any Judaic source that I have been able to locate; it seems to have been wholly Mann’s own inspiration.26 From Laban’s point of view, this veil is no more than a magical token, invested with the erotic properties of the goddess Ishtar and the protective, fertility‑related powers of Maya, and so forth. The veil enables Laban to deceive Jacob, offering Rachel’s sister Leah to him as a wife, thereby setting the backdrop for the theme of the ketonet passim as a “veil of deception” as well as revelation. For Jacob, however, the veil is redolent with longing, containing threads of conflict across many generations. The idea that the coat was made of remnants of Rachel’s bridal gown is recently repeated by Cohen (1996, p. 153), who references two sources: Mann’s book and another midrash that he does not identify. In addition, Cohen states that the pseudonymous, mediaeval Sefer ha‑Yashar (he cites chap. 36, no. 15) teaches that Jacob had originally used this coat as a bridal veil when marrying Rachel, who turned out to be Leah. It was intended for Ruben as first born son, but then held back owing to his reprehensible behavior in the mysterious, half‑screened episode of Genesis 35:22. However, I have not been able to locate such a story in any copy of the original Sefer ha‑Yashar (e.g., Noah, 1840) available to me. Katz (1991, p. 508), in an otherwise important essay on birth‑order, rivalry, and envy in development, also takes the bridal veil‑ ketonet passim identity as fact, yet cites no source for this, not even Mann. See also Frosh (2005) and Rosenwald (1978). The source of this idea remains a mystery.

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Following his beloved Rachel’s untimely demise, overcome by guilt, Jacob locks the veil away. As Mann’s version of the story proceeds, young Joseph clamors repeatedly—one might say neurotically—to obtain “Mami’s veiled garment” (p. 388). Jacob himself is uncertain that Joseph is mature enough to wear it but eventually relents, with misgivings, and bestows it upon his son: It covered his whole body. It made him so handsome and beautiful that is was almost eerie, indeed bordered on divine. The fact is that his resemblance to his mother, the eyes—had never been so patently evident before as it now was thanks to this attire—and it was so evident to Jacob’s eyes that they welled with tears, for he could believe only that he beheld Rachel before him. (p. 392)

In the same manner by which the big’dai hamu’dot (“precious clothes”) had bound Jacob to Esau in guilt and shame, the tunic now envelops Jacob and Joseph in rapturous love as well as lingering guilt and shame surrounding the prematurely terminated life, improvised burial, and unfulfilled dreams of Rachel. As Joseph in Mann’s tale will later taunt one of his brothers, wearing his mother’s tunic essentially identifies him as one and the same as her. It is the regressive pull of that dyadic, pre‑oedipal fixation that is so unbearable to Jacob and his other sons. Thus, with the destruction or loss of Joseph and the coat, the complexity of Jacob’s task of mourning is doubled. A second neo‑midrashic addition to our understanding of the coat comes from the Islamic tradition. The story of Joseph in the Holy Qu’ran diverges in significant ways from that of the Old Testament or any known Jewish text. First and foremost, in the Surah Al Yusuf, there is no description, by any name, of a special tunic. As the Qu’ran’s abbreviated version of the biblical tale unfolds, the brothers soon accost Joseph and throw him into the pit with no mention of tearing his shirt (Al Yusuf, 12:10). However, a post‑Qu’ranic “midrashic” tradition explains that the brothers removed Joseph’s inner shirt (qamis) and placed him in the pit naked.27 Returning to the text of the Qu’ran (12:17‑18), the brothers Quite similar to the rabbinic midrash, Islam maintains that Jacob had given Joseph “the shirt of Paradise” somehow compressed into an amulet (ta’weezh), which Joseph wore and never removed. In the pit, Joseph is visited by the

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soon present a bloodied shirt (qameesihi) to Jacob—Jacob, according to the Qu’ran, is explicitly not fooled by their scheme. Nothing more is said about that shirt. The Qu’ran then offers a fascinating twist. After Joseph is reunited with his brothers (12:94, 97), the young viceroy senses that he ought to send some token back with them that might identify him to Jacob: he takes his “inner shirt” (qameesi) and bids his brothers to “cast it before [Jacob’s] face.” The text does not specify that this was the original inner shirt given to him by Jacob, yet Jacob feels the shirt, pungent with the smell of Joseph, and as he wipes his tearful eyes with the cloth his prophetic vision is miraculously restored. We could entertain the possibility that the two “inner shirts” were one and the same.28 There is an Islamic tradition, reported by ’Allamah Tibrisi, according to which Joseph proclaims, “Only he who took my shirt to him the first time should take it now to Jacob.” Judah then says, “I am the one who took it to him and it was me who smeared it with blood. Then I informed him that a wolf had eaten him.” Joseph then orders Judah to take the shirt and inform Jacob that he is alive.29 In this variant, the very same qamis, or kutonet, that had been the cause of angel Jibräeel (Gabriel) who now removes the special shirt from the amulet and wraps Joseph within it. 28 I happened upon this possibility in the work of Hugh Nibley (1988), who found an extrapolation of the relatively brief account in the Qu’ran, cited above, in the Qisas al‑anbiya (Stories of the Prophets) written by al‑Tha’labi, a tenth century compiler of ancient legends concerning biblical and non‑ biblical pre‑Islamic prophets. Nibley’s translation of the pertinent passage by al‑Tha’labi read as follows (pp. 219‑20): And when Joseph had made himself known unto them [his brethren] he asked them about his father, saying, “What did my father after [I left]?” They answered, “He lost his eyesight [from weeping].” Then he gave them his garment [qamis, long outer shirt]. According to ad’Dahak that garment was of the weave [pattern, design] of Paradise, and the breath [spirit, odor] of Paradise was in it, so that it never decayed nor in any way deteriorated [and that was] a sign [omen]. And Joseph gave them that garment, and it was the very one that had belonged to Abraham, having already had a long history. He said to them, “Go, take this garment of mine and place it upon the face of my father so he may have sight again,” and when he brought the garment he laid it upon his face, so that his sight returned to him. 29 Sources compiled by ’Ali ’Abdur‑Rasheed (2009), Commentary on Surah Yusef [at www.al‑islam.org/hawza/ tafsir/Yusuf.pdf ]; see esp. n. 70.

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psychological arrest, moral dimness, and historical opacity, now restores prophetic vision, brings an end to mourning, and kindles the possibility of symbolic growth. Despite the differences between the Judaic and Islamic traditions, the basic intuition seems the same: the ketonet passim could not simply disappear as if it were a decommissioned bit of stage property. An object of this importance has to undergo some sort of transformation. For Mann as for Islam, the “inner shirt” evolves, bloodied, torn by the wife of Potiphar, yet miraculously sustained throughout the gradual moral and psychological divagations in the unfolding plot, ultimately returning to its source. Where the torn kutonet had once arrested the dreaming process, it now restores it. I believe that the biblical version is even subtler. In the story, the coat, the individuals who wore the coat, and the relationships it signified, are all equated in Jacob’s mind and poorly differentiated from his own ego. Among Jacob’s core psychological conflicts might have been the life‑long struggle to balance his masculine self‑image, fighting the anxiety caused by the amorphous role model of his saintly father, Isaac, strong‑willed mother, and powerfully aggressive and impulsive twin brother, Esau. If it is true, as Beebe (1984), Lefkovitz (1988), Zeligs (1974), and others argue, that Jacob’s marriage to sisters helped to recuperate or bolster his masculine self‑image, it is conceivable that the beautiful, effeminate, and intellectually oriented Joseph, born to the wife Jacob desired most but lost, may have jostled that tenuous balance. The enchanting ketonet passim, remnant of the first skin envelope and recently an ephemeral reminder of the loss and abandonment of Jacob’s beloved wife, would have wrapped father and son in an incendiary bond. The kutonet also incorporated the as yet unworked struggle to impose priestly restraint over violent envy and impulsiveness, and was intended to symbolize the conquest of the mind via dream interpretation, the capacity to displace the peremptoriness of the impetuous present by concentrating upon the hidden past or the future. However, a coat, or investiture within it, as a magical dream apparatus does not quite work (neither does the couch accomplish much without the analytic framework!). The art of dreaming requires a psychic

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process more creative than that of collecting the assorted words that come to us upon waking, or even the willingness to be a conduit for prophetic messages. Jacob intended for Joseph to be able to take the father’s own dreaming aspirations further, but the heavily‑burdened kutonet only enslaved the son. Joseph would need to explore other conditions that could enable him to risk dreaming his own as yet undreamed experience (Ogden, 2004) before further growth could take place, such as learning to experience the dreams of others, under risky circumstances, without the artificial aid of a magical coat.30

Complicated Bereavement and Linking Objects The effort to “think” the reality of death and to conceptualize the idea of the absolute termination of consciousness is a paramount example of the mind at work, struggling with paradox at every turn. On one hand, the primary unconscious, the motive force of the mind, does not register limitation and finality at all (Matte‑Blanco, 1975) and is incapable of sustaining mental life. On the other hand, the survival‑oriented system of consciousness that gradually emerges, provoked by loss and absence, is dependent upon a linguistically primed apparatus (also inaugurated by loss!) that is unable, despite appearances, to truly capture absolute limitation and finality! I mentioned in Footnote 11 that the term ketonet passim does appear one additional time in the Old Testament at the center of the story of the rape of Tamar by her half‑brother Amnon (2 Sam. 13:1‑19), both children of King David. Following the shameful rape, Tamar pleads with Amnon to legitimize their relationship, at which point the text reveals that she is wearing a ketonet passim, the habitus of royalty (13:18‑19). When Amnon cruelly rebuffs her, Tamar tears that tunic, puts ash on her head, and enters into lonely, lifelong mourning. It is remarkable that the rabbinic midrash is totally silent regarding the second appearance of the term ketonet passim. Recently, Bledstein (2000, p. 77) focuses on the parallel between the two references and proposes that the special tunic bestowed upon Tamar the status of “master of dreams” (ba’al ha‑ halo’mot), with the capacity to minister to the tortured soul. It is also a burden foisted upon her. By tearing her kutonet, according to Bledstein (p. 82), Tamar experiences a cathartic crisis, freeing herself of her father’s illusions that she should heal her brother. In accord with my view here, as a still‑too‑concrete “symbol” imposed prematurely upon an incestuous, poorly differentiated situation, the coat might need to be literally torn away from the wounded body‑mind of the hero in order to prevent total psychological inundation.

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The impact of the ego “accepting” the death of the other (as inferred from human locutions that declare such “acceptance”) exposes us to the deeper, unconsciously driven mirror impression that the ego itself, to whom the mental representation of the loved one is bonded, has also died. The ego must therefore learn to execute a variety of manipulations during the course of development in order to maintain a sense of wholeness in the face of death. These range from psychotic denial, concretization, or dissociation to healthy‑minded decathexis, symbolization, identification, and memorialization. These mechanisms are also used by mature personalities during the regression induced by mourning, temporarily or longer, yet even when such regression has ceased, pockets of disavowal and regressed symbolization may linger. To whatever degree the conscious mind approximates an understanding of death, it cannot totally escape the nagging intuition, stemming from the ego’s back‑to‑back relationship with the unconscious, that such understandings are inherently incomplete. Perforce, we struggle to creatively recast and re‑narrate our anxious grappling with death, bereavement, and remembrance through various media, including myth, with the understanding that all representations of death and terminality remain incomplete and provoke anxiety on some level. Normative degrees of “incomplete” acceptance of death are expressed through symbolized mementos, the bittersweet feelings of moderate nostalgia, and a sense of movement beyond loss. The more serious degrees of incomplete acceptance are expressed through complicated rituals and magical mementos, obsessive nostalgia, and a sense of being stranded in time with the lost object.31 In his psychoanalytic assessment of complicated bereavement, Volkan succinctly defines the emergence or “election” of a linking object, and clarifies how this kind of object becomes enmeshed in unproductive, obsessively repetitious, brooding nostalgia that defeats the natural advance towards more mature symbolization: The concept of the “stranded object” belongs to Santner (1990). The chief essays of related interest on this topic are Akhtar, 1996; Boym, 2001; Emery, 2006; and Slochower, 2010; see also the recent discussion between Impert & Rubin, 2011; Slochower, 2011; and Spero, 2011.

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The “Coat of Many Colors” as Linking Object: A Nodal Moment in the Narrative of Jacob’s Bereavement for Joseph I have found that patients with established pathological grief typically select an inanimate object—a symbolic bridge (or link) to the representation of the dead person—to use objects in a magical way. I have called these objects “linking objects.” Such objects mainly provide a locus for externalized contact between aspects of the representation of the deceased. The mourner sees them as containing elements of himself and of the one he has lost. By using this linking object, the mourner can keep alive the illusion that he has the power to either return the dead person to life or to “kill” him. That is, he has the illusion of absolute control over a psychological meeting ground that is afforded by the linking object. Linking objects absorb, as it were, some of the conflicts pertaining to the work of mourning. In other words, aspects of the work of mourning are externalized onto the linking object, and the pain or other sensory perception is not felt. (1981, pp. 99)

Thus, the linking “object” occupies a psychic domain between the more well‑known transitional object—characterized by its capacity to endow a high quality of internal “space”—and the perverse, fetishistic object—characterized by its tendency to severely truncate the quality of internal “space.”32 The transitional object (Winnicott, 1951), for example, is typically a soft, comforting entity selected from the child’s surroundings, invested with libido more than with aggression, guiding the child away from symbiosis toward enhanced symbolization. While the transitional object arises initially when the child is still quite dependent upon the primary caretaker, it is designed to gradually become free of all sense of urgency, weaning the mind from the peremptory need‑object orientation that characterized earlier stages of development. Though the transitional object itself initially requires a certain degree of “sameness,” its effectiveness very rapidly depends upon an increasingly varied spectrum of meanings, When I write “linking object” I am referring to some object or physical thing in the world that serves as an index or token for a certain kind of internal object representation of a linking quality. As well, I am using the term space as we are accustomed to in psychoanalytic research, drawing from the relationship between symbolization and internal spatialization, and between desymbolization and internal defenestration or emptying‑out, as discussed by Freedman et al. (2011) and his colleagues (Friedman, 2002; Lasky, 2002). At the same time, the concept of mental space is an abstraction, and its overuse can dispose one to thinking in terms of concrete spaces, which is the opposite of what is intended by the concept.

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feelings, and behavior. The transitional object is thus a healthy, developmentally anticipated phenomenon that is eclipsed, after a point, as transitionality replaces dependence upon any specific transitional object. At that juncture, the physical object itself (e.g., the comforter) is put aside, abandoned, hidden, or “lost,” while the intra‑ and intersubjective relationships that it had primitively signified are now fully internalized (Hong, 1978; Tolpin, 1972).33 The fetish, in sharp contrast, is an object of magical control or denial, selected under conditions of great anxiety and dread, and linked concretely or metonymically to a frustrating and frightening genital. The fetish deals with anxiety in a manner that is highly ritualized, militates against the surrender of the physical fetish token, and promotes arrested symbolization, or desymbolization, within its domain. As such, the fetish object blocks psychological development. Whereas transitional play leads toward an increase in potential space, spontaneity, the creative sharpening of self‑other differentiation, and ultimately an acceptance of oedipal resolution, fetishistic ritualization leads towards rigid, perverse space, enactment, the pathological clouding of self‑other differentiation, and, ultimately, the suspension of oedipal resolution (Erikson, 1977). The linking object, in form, function, and fate, lies somewhere in between the transitional and fetish objects. This kind of object, which can be seen in children and adults, arises in the presence of three conditions: (1) sudden, radical loss, (2) complicated bereavement or established pathological mourning, and (3) the prior existence of unresolved flaws in the transition from the pre‑oedipal world to the oedipal one. It tends to express, symptomatically, a basic inability to fully accept loss or the absence created by loss or severe damage to the integrity of the self. The linking object can be any entity that is selected in order to represent some aspect of the sundered relationship between the self and Transitional representations, in other words, enable the ego to retain its relative autonomy in the world of objects. It is only when the natural growth of inner transitionality is hampered or blocked—for example, under the kinds of traumatic conditions we find in the biblical episode of Joseph’s abduction—that the actual object in the physical world continues to be required, to demand the absolute attention of the individual, masking the ego almost concretely rather than becoming an abstract dimension of a shared experience.

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a deceased loved object (an actual property or attribute of the dead, or something similar to it, or some other concrete element [e.g., a photo] that the mourner then holds or attaches to their own body [e.g., a moustache, a piece of clothing]). Linking objects sustain an unconscious fantasy that the dead and the living are reunited “within” the linking object, a fantasy generally augmented by ritualistic or magical mannerisms surrounding its use. The linking object is thus an ambivalent token that enables the self to maintain the illusion of psychologically “killing” the object—the representation of which, maintained at a distance from oneself, one has not yet fully “taken in” or identified with (Volkan, 1981, p. 368)—while triumphing over loss, since the not‑taking‑in suggests that the object still exists. The psychological dilemma is that, while the linking object “absorbs” some of the anger arising from the narcissistic hurt that results from unbearable loss, the true work of mourning cannot be accomplished because painful emotional perceptions have been externalized onto the linking object (p. 371). The struggle for the mourner is between the wish to live with the living and the wish to be at one with the dead; a pathological bonding to the immortal version of the object, sometimes perceived as living, sometimes perceived as dead (see Freud, 1916‑17[1915], pp. 246, 256; Ogden, 2002). In summary, the linking objects of pathological bereavement straddle the self‑other representational boundary in order to repair a breach in the ordinary level of transitionality that had prevailed until the moment of loss. Because the thing‑like dimension of the linking object is held onto so tenaciously, the healthy processes of resignation, negativization, and internalization cannot take place, and true symbolization becomes nearly impossible.34 As such, linking objects do not encourage creative nostalgia, and are associated instead with relentless sorrow and ruminative “reminiscence.” “Negativization,” as opposed to pathological forms of negation, is used here in the Hegelian sense of sublation, or the erasure of the concrete and the condensation of sensually perceptual experience into a purely mental symbol. The relationship between symbolization and “the work of the negative” (not brute “negation” or denial) has been defined in psychoanalytic terms by Wilfred R. Bion (1963, 1965), André Green (1993), and Friedman (2002).

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The Torn Coat and the Inability to Mourn Now that we have considered the multifaceted dimensions of ketonet passim—in particular, as representative of a tenuous, threshold‑like quality of early, or regressive, psychological relationship—we will be better able to fathom its alleged destruction or disappearance and potential retransformation. We rejoin the biblical text as the hostile brothers strip Joseph of his clothes (Gen. 37:23, 31‑35): And it came to pass that Joseph came to his brothers, and they stripped Joseph of his kutonet, of the ketonet ha‑passim, that was upon him.

The brothers then conspire to fool their father (Gen. 37:31): And they took Joseph’s kutonet and they slaughtered a he‑goat [se’ir ’eyzim], and they dipped the kutonet in blood.

A dispatch is then made: And they sent the coat of many colors [va‑ye’shal’lehu et ketonet ha‑passim], and they brought it before their father, and they said: “This have we found [zot ma’tza’nu]. Recognize now whether it is your son’s coat or not” [ha’ker na ha‑ketonet benkha hi, im lo]. And he recognized, and said [va‑ya’ki’rah va‑yo’mer] “It is my son’s coat!” [ketonet be’ni] “An evil beast has devoured him.” [ha’yah ra’ah akhala’tho] “Joseph is surely torn to pieces.” [ta’rof to’raf yo’sef]

Jacob’s bereavement strikes him to his core (Gen. 37:34): And Jacob rent his garments [va‑yik’ra yaakov sim’lotav] and put sackcloth upon his loins [va‑ya’sem sak be‑mat’nav] and mourned for his son many days.

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This bereavement quickly becomes chronic (Gen. 37:35): And all of his sons and all his daughters rose up to console him [le‑na’hamo], but he refused to be consoled [va‑ye’ma’en le‑hitna’hem], and he said: “No, but I shall descend to the grave, to my son, mourning” [e’reyd el be’ni a’vel she’olah]; And his father wept for him.

The rabbinic commentaries did not fail to notice an array of textual disturbances, aporia, and redundancies, all hallmarks of the contemporary clinical description of a nodal moment. Reexamining Genesis 37:23: And it came to pass that Joseph came to his brothers, and they stripped Joseph of his kutonet, of the ketonet ha‑passim, that was upon him.

The rabbis asked why Joseph’s kutonet is referred to twice. Rashi suggests that Joseph was wearing more than one coat: “His kutonet”—this refers to his cloak [ha’luk]; “The ketonet passim”—this refers to the extra cloak his father added beyond what he had given the brothers.

An earlier midrashic commentary adds even more detail (Gen. Rabbah, 84): “And they stripped Joseph”—this refers to the pi’nas [his cape or a’de’ret]; “His kutonet”—this refers to his cloak [ha’luk]; “The ketonet ha‑passim”—this refers to the pargod, the illustrated coat [me’il ha‑me’tzuyar]; “that was upon him”—this refers to the pamlaniya, the pants.

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This midrash creates a flurry of garments, almost as if to obscure our view and mask the actual garment that was bloodied and sent to Jacob. In fact, R. Naftali Zvi Yehudah Berlin (d. 1893) (Peirush ha‑Emek Da’var) adopts Rashi’s hint and boldly insists that the text intentionally differentiates the kutonet and ketonet passim—the reference to the kutonet that is dipped in blood in Genesis 37:31 is, in fact, not the famed ketonet passim! Berlin opines that the brothers had in fact not planned to send the special coat to Jacob, sensing that this would only spotlight their envy and anger and implicate them in Joseph’s demise. Berlin then revises entirely our understanding of the subsequent scene: And they sent the coat of many colors [va‑ye’shal’lehu et ketonet ha‑passim], and they brought it before their father, and they said: “This have we found [zot ma’tzanu]. Recognize now whether it is your son’s coat or not” [ha’ker na ha‑ketonet ben’kha hi im lo].

The extra words “and they … and they” implies distinct actions applied to different objects, in Berlin’s view. That is to say, the brothers sent or secreted away the ketonet passim beyond anyone’s sight. He is supported in this view by others who, sensing a similar dilemma, maintain that the term va‑ye’shal’lehu, “they sent away,” in fact connotes “they tore it up; that is, they shredded it with a she’lah or sharp knife.35 Having destroyed or hidden the ketonet passim, the brothers then bloodied “it,” “it” now referring to another simple, nondescript coat of Joseph, and it is this coat that they sent to Jacob. For example, some of the commentaries render the term va‑ye’shal’lehu, “and they sent,” not in the sense of agency but in the sense of the wild lashing out of a she’lah, a sharp spear or knife (e.g., Joel 2:8; Job 36:12; 2 Chron. 23:10) (Epstein, 1949, p. 302; Ki‑Tov, 1967, p. 205), such that the verb more correctly denotes a thoroughly violent slashing of the coat of colors, and not the intent to send this coat to Jacob.

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Let us now reexamine Jacob’s reaction to what he is shown. The brothers (or their agents) merely present the bloodied simple coat and bid Jacob to recognize it. Shocked, Jacob acknowledges that it is Joseph’s and then exclaims (Gen. 37:33): And he recognized it; and he said, “It is my son’s coat, an evil beast has devoured him; Joseph is surely torn to pieces!”

The brothers remain utterly silent, neither confirming nor challenging Jacob’s presumption. The classical commentary of S. D. Luzzato (d. 1865) senses something quite remarkable in this paragraph (1871, p. 156) and isolates three stages in Jacob’s reaction. The first two sentences yield fairly cognitive, objective, or realistic inferences (though, as the reader knows, they are inaccurate, since Joseph is alive): first, the identification of the garment, and, second, the inference as to how it might have come to be in its current state—“an evil beast has devoured him.” But the third statement, “Joseph is surely torn to pieces!,” provides the full emotional reaction. In his expletive—ta’rof to’raf yo’sef—we are immediately confronted with a powerful double verb and Joseph’s personal name. By this point, Jacob has abandoned dry reasoning and describes a scene that he imagines in his reverie, giving life to the terrifying aggressive lust of the predator. At the same time, Jacob’s emphatic description conveys a powerful quality of conclusiveness that the evidence before him, and the equivocal acquiescence of the messengers, neither supports nor confirms. Thus the rabbis were wise to make room for the possibility that Jacob’s conviction was not directed at what the brothers wished for him to believe. Rather, the patriarch was much more certain that the brothers themselves, specifically Judah, were deeply implicated in whatever it was that in fact occurred to Joseph.

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Anticipating the equally troubling fact, offered by the subsequent text, that Jacob “refuses” to be consoled, the midrash preferred to see Jacob as simply uttering the words he sensed the brothers wished to hear. In the rabbinic interpretation, Jacob’s response was two‑fold: he identified the coat, absorbing immediately the idea that Joseph was in grave danger, but he did not accept the illusion the brothers sought to create.36 His exclamation expressed his conviction that only his son Judah— symbolized as the to’ref—was capable of besting Joseph, and the fear that Joseph was yet to be “torn,” or seduced in some life‑threatening way, in a strange land.37 Consider now the aftermath of Jacob’s painful outburst (Gen. 37:35): And Jacob tore his clothes, and he wore sackcloth on his loins; and he mourned for his son [va‑yit’a’bel al be’no] many days. And all of his sons and all of his daughters rose to console him, but he refused to be consoled, and he said: “for I shall descend to my son, to She’ol, mourning”; And his father lamented over him.

The rabbis were perturbed by Jacob’s refusal or inability to mourn. In a somewhat concrete way of understanding this, midrashic sources proposed that Jacob clung to various historical promises and peripheral intuitions that enabled him to sustain the belief that Joseph was not dead.38 The midrashic accounts maintain that Jacob did not believe the brothers, hence refused to be comforted, and conducted extensive magical tests to ascertain if Joseph was indeed dead (Talmud, Sof ’rim, 21:9). According to the midrash, Jacob hints to this at a later point. In the episode where Jacob poises to bless Joseph’s two sons, Joseph corrects his father’s seemingly mistaken placement of his right hand on the younger son, at which point Jacob replies, “I know, my son, I know” (Gen. 48:19): the midrash (Pesikta Rabba’ti, 3) maintains that Jacob was hinting that he had always known that Joseph had not been killed by wild beasts. 37 Described in detail in Ginzberg (1909: Vol. 1, chap. 7), and Kasher (1950), to Gen. 37:33, nos. 185 and 190 and to Gen. 37:35, no. 205. 38 For example, according to one tradition (Gen. Rabbah, 84), Jacob noticed that Isaac was not as bereft as everyone else in the family; see also Kasher (1950) to Gen. 37:35, nos. 202, 206. 36

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Another view held that Jacob’s refusal, or inability, to mourn was not due to simple denial; rather, it resulted from a s’varah, an inference that Joseph was still alive. Rashi (Gen. 37:35) works out this inference in a cryptic explanation: [s.v.] “And he refused to be comforted”—[the Talmud teaches:] One does not accept comfort for someone who is still alive, even though one thinks [ve‑sa’vur] he is dead; for it is in reference to the dead that a decree has been issued [gezeyrah hei] that the dead be forgotten from the heart, and not in reference to the living!

That is to say, Jacob reasoned that if, as time went on, he remained inconsolable, then this peculiar state ran contrary to the halakhic norm that establishes that the dead are ultimately forgotten after a certain point in the mourning process. If so, presuming a halakhically‑calibrated world, Jacob inferred that it must be the case that Joseph was not dead! This kind of reasoning might strike the contemporary ear as woefully artificial, yet within the context of the mythic structure it portrays quite accurately the rationalization of intense psychic torment, the kind of feverish cognizing by which the mind struggles to realize a deeply ambivalent wish. The key term in Rashi’s commentary is the word sa’var, “a living person who is thought to be dead.” How dead could such an individual be to the deep unconscious? I think that Rashi’s interpretation attempts to tell us that Jacob’s main sense of Joseph’s death was merely the result of a logical supposition, a flimsy hypothesis that informs Jacob that it is reasonable that Joseph is dead. Yet the stained, not‑quite‑identified coat, illuminated by the brothers’ nervous, darting eyes created the powerful alternative impression that perhaps Joseph is anything but dead. Jacob is again stretched across a pas, a threshold that can barely sustain him. He is torn between what consciousness reveals to him as plausible and his deeper intuition—Rashi (Gen. 37:33) refers to it as a “spark” of Holy Spirit [netz’ne’tzah bo ru’ah ko’desh]—that Joseph is lost but not in fact dead. Zornberg sharply senses that this conflict plays a large role in Jacob’s inability to mourn: There is, indeed, an active force to the verb, va‑yima’en, “he refused” [to mourn]. Something in Jacob stubbornly bars him from oblivion: he

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Moshe Halevi Spero will remember Joseph, keep him alive‑in‑absence in his mind. Jacob is conscious of his limited perspective, as a human being. He is aware that he has a “blind spot,” and allows for it: Joseph has disappeared, but Jacob knows that the plausible interpretation of the bloody coat is just that—an interpretation—a sevara, in the language of talmudic logic. The totality of the blank—not even a corpse to fill it—and the totality of the conspiracy of silence around him evoke glimmerings of intuition. If Joseph “is not” here, in Jacob’s field of perception, perhaps he is elsewhere? If he is lost, perhaps he is to be sought, to be imagined as continuing, not ended? (1995, pp. 300‑301)

Thomas Mann’s elaboration of the scene of initial grief and bereavement fleshes out her point: His voice was toneless, still a mere whisper, when, as if it were a confession, he finally responded to those who, though now long vanished, had brought him this token. “Yes it is my son’s coat!” Then he screamed in a terrible voice that rose to a shriek of despair: “A wild animal has devoured him, a ravenous beast has mutilated Joseph and torn him to pieces!” And as if the words “torn to pieces” had provided him the clue to what he must do, Jacob began to tear his own clothes. (1933‑1943 [1956], p. 513)

Mann accurately senses that the violent tearing of “all of his clothes” (Gen. 37:34) is an unconventional regression to nakedness, “moving from symbol to crude reality and terrible fact” (p. 514). That is, in his anguish, Jacob has moved precipitously close to the edge or threshold beyond which lies only das Ding, the unsymbolized, brute Real, omnivorous and destructive of things mental. He has lost his son, true, and this has evoked the memory of earlier losses; but if he abandons all symbols, he will lose his mind. Following this, a state of protracted mourning sets in, lasting for years. What accounts for this? Is Jacob’s mourning unceasing and “pathologically established” simply because the practical evidence, on grounds of “reason,” permitted no closure, as the Talmud felt? I think that we cannot accept this. I believe that the Talmud’s pseudo‑halakhic solution provides only the schematic structure, whereas it is Mann’s imagination that more accurately fleshes out the inner representational failure:

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As if taking counsel from Freud’s earlier outlines of the oedipal configuration, as it might look under conditions of the untimely disappearance of the mother, Mann offers all of the elements of pre‑oedipal fixation that complicate the task of more mature oedipal identification and renunciation. Together with the factors I noted above, Mann provides the truer portrait of multi‑tiered mourning, augmented by the principle of retroactive and deferred action, what Freud termed Nachträglichkeit,39 and of the struggle with the in‑between state of introjected representations of his beloved lost objects. Enmeshed within the merged internal representations between father, mother, and son (abetted by certain physical identities as elaborated by the midrash),40 now concretized by the confusion For psychoanalysis, the most critically significant psychic meaning is conferred after the fact as current events awaken repressed memories, unarticulated dimensions of perception, or unimagined possibilities. This is a radically different and unique direction of causality than one is used to, though it is more and more clearly understood to be true of the physical universe as well as the psychic domain (Eickhoff, 2006; Laplanche and Pontalis, 1967, pp. 112). 40 For example, the Midrash and Talmud state in several references that the “splendorous image” (ziv ikunin), or “likeness” (de’yukon)—the second term is a portmanteaux comprised of the Hebrew word de’mut and the Greek word icon—of Jacob and Joseph was identical (Gen. Rabbah, 84:8). “And Israel loved Joseph more than all of his sons for he was the child of his old age and he made for him a coat of many colors” (Gen. 37:3). Highlighting the words “the child of his old age” (ben‑zeku’nin who lo), the Talmud interprets, “Rabbi Judah taught: ben‑zeku’nin—the splendor of his image [ziv iku’nin] was identical to [Joseph’s]” (Kasher, 1950, 1396 n. 41). The use of the term ikunin or icon emphasizes that we are referring to a relatively inferior, introject‑level quality of internalization, characteristic of narcissistic mirroring (see Spero, 1993). 39

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of tunics, Jacob can find no port of call among his insufficiently mourned objects, including parts of his own sense of self.

The Transformation of the Ketonet Passim Perhaps the greatest expression of Jacob’s inability to mourn is the fact that the whereabouts of the ketonet passim cannot be readily accounted for. Until now, I have accepted that this unaccountability is the result of confusion about the actual identity of the coat presented to him. No doubt, this is part of the dilemma. Whether for a dead son or a son perceived as all but dead, Jacob is frozen or stranded in a state of suspended mourning, but has he abandoned all symbols while in this state? Thomas Mann, for instance, portrays Jacob sitting amidst dust, ashes, and shards, weeping, clutching the tattered veil in his hands, and torturing himself with his anger, recriminations, and self‑doubt (p. 527). Yet the biblical text nowhere states that Jacob clutched a tattered veil in his hands. However, on a deeper level, every grammatical nuance and imaginative textual elaboration that we have reviewed here suggests that the ketonet passim had always been a threshold object, an overburdened envelope for representational tasks only partly achieved, a token of unresolved sexual conflicts, insufficiently differentiated dream states, and unmourned losses. The kutonet—and the ego apparatus of the individual who wore it, and the self‑object relationship whose structure was dependent upon such an incompletely internalized part‑representation—was simply not ready to be accounted for. My feeling is that the elusive ketonet passim, capricious and fluctuating even when physically present, has reappeared right before our eyes in disguised form. As it had been transformed so many times before, the tunic has now been transformed into the sackcloth within which Jacob contorts his mind and body. The Hebrew term sâk (sackcloth) does not appear elsewhere in the Pentateuch, and only occurs four other times in the entire Old Testament. In the mythic reconstruction I am proposing, Jacob first apprehends the torn kutonet, then tears his own clothes and, finally, exchanges these in his mind for the fibers of the ketonet passim. The sâk, the clothes of mourning, is a linking object that represents the loss that he is unable to mourn,

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the skin of a new tenuous threshold, in which he sits, nearly immobilized, for twenty‑two years.41 Paradoxically, this new “kutonet” is both a regression and a progression in the odd journey this cloth had traveled since the birth of the mind at the boundary of Eden. On one hand, the sâk signifies a movement away from the magical ketonet passim; on the other hand, this new form of kutonet, the sackcloth‑linking object, cannot itself negotiate transitions. The Bible does not clearly portray Jacob as cloaked within the original tattered ketonet passim, but within a transformed cloth, sâk, a non‑kutonet, the shadow of the ketonet passim now modified into an arrested, linking‑representational version of its former identity. At best, the rent sâk sustained a stalemate between the wish to live with the living and the wish to be at one with the dead; a pathological bonding to the immortal version of the object, sometimes perceived as living, sometimes perceived as dead. This conjecture is bolstered by anamnesis. By returning to examine a central organizing episode of Jacob’s own youth, we find the source of his intuitive, agonized grasping out at rough‑sewn clothing as a linking object, a source which enables us to view Jacob’s novel invention of sackcloth as an instance of repetition of the repressed. I referred above to the episode in which Jacob’s mother compelled him to disguise himself, wearing animal skins, in order to mime the role of his brother Esau (Gen. 27:19, 23). The ruse works. As Jacob hurries out, Esau himself returns (Gen. 27:32‑33): The paradoxical impression created by this linking object is retained from that point onward. The expression “and he sat [in] sackcloth … and mourned” inspired the rabbis—“Rav Eybo taught: Because Jacob took to sackcloth, the power of the sackcloth [to effectively beseech God in times of crisis] does not leave his children and his grandchildren unto the end of all generations” (Gen. Rabbah 37:34). In the Midrash Esther Rabbah, this view is somewhat modified: “Rav Eybo taught: Because Jacob took to sackcloth, so too only the great men [of each generation] may use sackcloth,” referring to the incidents of David, Ahab, Yoram, and Mordekhai (1 Chron. 21:16; 1 Kings 21:27; 2 Kings 6:30; Esther 4:1). In a final variant, the sackcloth is referred to as somehow “guaranteed by covenant”—the pleas uttered when wearing it shall never return unanswered (see Kasher [1950] to Gen. 37:34, no. 198). The words of prayer, the psychological accomplishments, are what move the soul, and not simply the “magical” wearing of the object itself.

41

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Moshe Halevi Spero And Isaac his father said to him, Who are you? And he said, “I am your son, your firstborn, Esau!” And Isaac trembled a great trembling, exceedingly so. [va‑ye’he’rad yiz’hak hara’dah gedo’lah ad‑me’od] And [Esau] shouted a great, bitter shout, exceedingly so. [va‑yiz’ak ze’a’kah gedo’kah u‑ma’ra ad‑me’od]

Owing to confounding clothes, Isaac is confused, and cannot accurately recognize (ve‑lo hi’kiro [Gen. 27:23]) which of his sons stands before him, or cannot identify which set of personality traits best suits the sacred “blessings of Abraham” that he was to bestow upon the deserving individual. Father and son are both blind‑sided and their shock and pain merge at the threshold of a garment—a double guilt now wraps itself around Jacob’s shoulders. Tragically, owing to a failure in mourning and forgiveness, the “exceeding” trauma of misidentification is transmitted from generation to generation. Jacob’s collusion in Isaac’s inability to differentiate and identify returns in a parallel moment of crisis as Jacob’s sons now “blind” him with a stunning object and a single question: “This we found, recognize it; is it your son’s cloak or not?” That is: Is this the same kind of garment that you yourself used years back in order to escape the envious rage of your own elder brother, to cloak or mask your aggression, in the concrete belief that your own internal conflicts in identity could be resolved by introjecting someone else’s characteristics? When you handed it on to Joseph, were necessary adjustments made? And is this merely a cloak, or is it a psychic envelope of some kind—and as such, is it Joseph’s, is it your own, does it enclose both of you in some complex psychological state?

Jacob’s reply is actually frighteningly accurate: And he recognized, and said [va‑ya’ki’rah va‑yo’mer] “It is my son’s coat!” [ketonet be’ni]

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The big’dei ha’mudot (precious garments) worn by Jacob, which had earlier lead to Isaac’s lack of haka’rah (recognition) now jar Jacob himself into an all too acute haka’rah. At the same time, there is a collapse of differentiation in Jacob’s recognition: “It is my son’s coat!” We note that the proprietary phrase “It is,” while implied by the Hebrew, is not stated, such that the laconic phrase ketonet be’ni, taken literally, conveys the sense that “my son” and “coat” are a single entity. In retrospect, and given the circumstances that had come to pass, Jacob’s conflicts and fears were no better transmuted by passing along the heavily “burdened” cloak of Esau to Joseph. Full psychological differentiation had failed; coat, son, and self are shredded and lost. Jacob’s idealization of his son and his repressed ambivalence toward him were predicated upon, and no doubt reactivated, deeper guilt and unresolved conflicts in his relationship with his own brother, Esau, and his father, Isaac. This complexity must have prevented Jacob from fully appreciating the danger to which he had exposed his son. Even if one adopts the rabbinic fantasy that Jacob was unconsciously (divinely?) guided to send Joseph headlong into harm’s way in order to trigger the ineluctable unfolding of the destiny foretold by Joseph’s dreams, this kind of “higher motive” did not adequately mitigate the pathological burden of envy, hate, and narcissistic twinship and mirroring within the minds of the various protagonists. Giving the ketonet passim to Joseph only maintained rather than resolved the idealized mirroring relationship between father and son and also passed along all of the previous, incompletely mastered episodes of loss and bereavement. Gazing upon the tattered physical object before him, and contemplating the representational ruin it caused, Jacob can neither surrender nor mourn. In his mind’s eye, the warp and woof of experience unfurls and regresses to sâk—the most raw, unprocessed type of clothing, the barest threshold between human skin and animal skin, carapace rather than raiment, the garb of ruin and self‑abasement, a symbolic non‑cloth. Like all regressions, sâk can provide some stability. Yet wrapped within this pathological linking object, Jacob languishes, for years, with no awareness of the passage of time, unable to either spatialize time or temporalize space, morbidly anticipating the descent into oblivion with his “undead” son.

Q

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The question of whether the ketonet passim ceased to exist at the point where the text seems to suggest that it did must be translated: did conditions allow for the coat to have been psychologically absented or negativized, maturely, thereby completing the process of symbolization? This dimension of symbolic absenting, negativization, and abstraction is crucially important, for it stands in contrast to instances when the image of objects and persons who have ceased to exist continue to “persist” psychically in a quasi‑concrete, not‑fully‑symbolic manner due to the fact that their absence has not been fully accepted mentally. The quality of the sense of persistence in these two circumstances will be different. The nodal peculiarities of the text suggest that the ketonet passim has not been definitively eliminated. The concrete object is hidden, lost in word play, and disappears from the manifest text, never to reappear as such, yet returns in the subtext, transformed into the sackcloth linking object. The beloved object now sequestered, Jacob essentially freezes the process of loss in an intermediary representational state, a process that only resumes when father and son are reunited.

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Dedication This chapter is dedicated, first, to Debbie z’tl. I cherish every moment you gave me. You sang unto God, you danced with Miriam and the women, and you helped the old to dream dreams and the youth to see visions. . . . and you shall be a blessing. . . . To Mom, Barb, and Werner. You are my dearest friends. You never waiver in your support and love for me. You believe in me. You encouraged me as I worked on this project. You comforted me when the remembering became too painful. I also dedicate this chapter to Rabbi Heidi Cohen. You were there to sing the Mi Shebeirach, as Debbie’s life slipped away. Tis very true, my grief lies all within; And these external manners of laments Are merely shadows to the unseen grief That swells with silence in the tortured soul; There lies the substance: and I thank thee, king, For thy bounty, that not only givest Me cause to wail but teachest me the way How to lament the cause. –Richard II, IV.i.305‑313

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My sister’s death has forever changed my life. There will be an ever‑present void. This is the most profound and painful challenge I have ever faced. At times, I am still inconsolable. I find myself numb, walking, shaking my head in disbelief. I see my sister lying in the hospital bed—all of the monitors are flat‑lining in rapid succession. That is the image I will carry with me until it is my time to die. That image has a useful function. As excruciatingly painful as the image is, it is all that keeps me from watching and waiting for her to pop in through the door in shorts, a T‑shirt, and baseball cap, holding her dog in her arms. Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Elie Wiesel (1982) has written, “The survivor’s problem is not Hamlet’s problem of ’To be, or not to be?’ The survivor’s problem is ’To be and not to be,’ Loss is a permanent state in the life of a survivor. From now on, life will be and not be” (as cited in Alford, 2009, p. 59; emphasis added). I have questions but lack the answers to fill my emptiness. How to say my inexpressible feelings? How to meet my unmet longings? What does her body look like after all these days? Why my sister? Why now? Does she know how much I love her? Does she know how desperately I miss her? The clinical material in this chapter is based on my experience in dealing with the death of my sister, Debbie. I present aspects of psychoanalytic theories and their clinical application as they interface with mourning practices reflected in Jewish scholarly texts and underline the striking similarities between traditional Jewish mourning rituals and psychoanalytic theory and practice. As a Jew, a psychoanalyst, and a mourner, I live and experience the interrelatedness of the three. My sister’s death occurred six weeks prior to my beginning to write this chapter. I completed my first draft one month after the first Yahrzeit, the Jewish observance of the anniversary of a loved one’s death. At times the newness of her death seemed to be a handicap. Even so, writing has forced me to reflect on death—my sister’s and generally— with rawness and honesty that might not have been possible had I written as a reporter of distant experience.

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As is always the case when discussing Jewish observance of Law and tradition, there are myriad interpretations regarding the way to observe, the degree to which one adheres to the letter of the Law, and the motivation for doing so. Readers of all faiths may find areas of disagreement with the integration of the material. Thus, I offer a notion introduced by Brawarsky and Mark (1998): We’re two Jews, and between us we seem to have even more than three opinions. We’re typical of many people—both Jews and non‑Jews—who can’t look at a statement without turning it inside out and flipping it around. With this approach to life, questions lead to questions as readily as to answers.... [This] notion goes back at least as far as the Talmud, the compilation of Jewish law that records discussions by generations of scholars. (p. xi)

I will briefly discuss the historical foundation of the striking commonality between Jewish mourning obligations and rituals, and the psychoanalytic process of working with patients who have experienced loss. Both processes require a tolerance for the unknown and unanswerable, the uncertainty and mystery of life and death. In both Judaism and psychoanalysis, the method of arriving at a resolution is valued as no less important than the resolution itself. Death, like no other life experience, evokes contradictions, paradoxical thinking, unknowns, unanswerable questions, mysteries, and hopes—a cauldron mixture that often yields magical thinking. Both Judaism and psychoanalysis employ the brilliant insight that there is value in knowing that we cannot know, answering a question with a question, holding a paradox. The good scholar/rabbi and the good analyst demonstrate wisdom in the choice of the material, as well as the interpretation of the material (Spence, 1982, as cited in Levenson, 1988, 5). Jews are storytellers, as evidenced by our collection of ancient and modern texts that we employ for a variety of purposes. As Wolfson (1992) has observed: In the Talmudic method of text study, the starting point is the principle that … every term and expression is significant…. Demonstrating Talmudic hypothetico‑deductive method of text interpretation … the Talmudic student will proceed to raise a series of questions before he

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Shadows of the Unseen Grief satisfies himself of having understood its full meaning. If the statement is not clear enough, he will ask, “What does the author intend to say here?” If it is too obvious, he will again ask, “Why expressly say this?” If it is a statement of fact or of a concrete instance, he will ask, “What underlying principle does it involve?” If it is an exception to a general rule, he will want to know how much it is to exclude. He will furthermore want to know all the circumstances under which a certain statement is true, and what qualifications are permissible. (p. 1)

The hallmark of Sigmund Freud’s work, and the core of psychoanalytic theory, is his Interpretation of Dreams (1965/1998). As Radnitzky (1968) stated, “What Freud de facto did was to produce a shift in the tradition of psychology by introducing a new way of studying the phenomena which is primarily hermeneutic” (cited in Handelman, 1982, p. 146). Handelman has maintained that: Freud’s innovative hermeneutic was a particularly Judaic one…. For Aristotle, interpretation had to do with declarative, logical discourse, not with rhetorical and poetics. Interpretation was concerned with truth and falsity of logical propositions, not with the multiple meanings of semantics. The univocity of meaning, and the concept of hermeneutics as ascertaining the truth or falsehood of a logic of oppositions, were connected to the Christian logos. [T]he Jewish concept of interpretation … is multivocal, indeterminate, rhetorical and poetic, as well as logical (as is Freud’s), concerned with the affirmation of truth or falsehood in terms of uncovering deeper meanings. (p. 146)

Accordingly, the Talmud promotes opposing opinions. Handelman went on to provide an apt description of this method for analyzing a text: [C]onnections between arguments, citations, and traditions may take the discussion seemingly far from its original subject and expand into explanations of other statements, which in turn invoke aggadic interpolations, stories, proverbs, etc. before the original halachic question is returned to. (ibid.)

Juxtapose this with Freud’s (1965/1998) description of dreams: Each train of thought is almost invariably accompanied by its contradictory counterpart, linked to it by antithetical association. The different portions of this complicated structure stand, of course, in the most manifold logical relations to one another. They can represent foreground and background, digression and illustrations, conditions, chains of evidence

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Handelman has also observed that the rabbinic tradition juxtaposed the written and oral Torah, just as Freud did with dream text and interpretation: “And like the Rabbis, Freud insisted that he was not creating new meanings, only uncovering, like an archaeologist, what lay buried beneath” (p. 148). Stern (2003) described in psychoanalytic terms what Brawarsky and Mark presented in their discussion relating to the Jewish method of questioning: [T]he curiosity or freedom of thought I am proposing as the guiding value for psychoanalysis—the kind that expects obstructions at every step of the way and is commodious enough to encompass even the things we do not want to know—is an ideal. (p. 81).

The approaches of Judaism and psychoanalysis continue to evolve. The objective of each is to facilitate the individual’s ability to find meaning and wholeness in life, partly by encouraging curiosity as foundational for learning about one’s world and inner life. Freedom to be curious is understood as a given in a meaningful and successful analytic experience. The question to be answered is: About what should we be curious? Stern (2010) has offered “Meno’s Paradox,” a dialogue between Socrates and Meno, as a consideration of the question: MENO: But how will you look for something when you don’t in the least know what it is? How on earth are you going to set up something you don’t know as the object of your search? To put it another way, even if you come right up against it, how will you know what you have found is the thing you didn’t know? SOCRATES: I know what you mean. Do you realize that what you are bringing up is the trick argument that a man cannot try to discover either what he knows or what he does not know? He would not seek what he knows, for since he knows it there is no need of the inquiry, nor what he does not know, for in that case he does not even know what he is to look for. (p. 162)

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Stern (2003) labeled curiosity as the imagination and discipline that lead to seeing what was questionable. To be curious is to be sensitive to the possibility of a question. Curiosity is the constant suspicion that one’s own capacity for thought is woefully inadequate in ways that will eventually become painfully clear. Curiosity is a respect for particularity, a respect that for some attains the dimensions of love, or even reverence. Carry Stern one step further, and we find tolerance for the unanswered inherent in the ability to be curious. As Keats wrote, “Negative Capability is, the ability … of being in uncertainties, mysteries, [and] doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” (as cited in Bion, 1970, p. 124). Both psychoanalysis and Judaism believe in and promote the strength, uniqueness, and inherent value of the individual. In the Jewish tradition, mourning rituals and obligations are integral to working through the loss of a loved one, trusting the mourner to have the strength to confront—and be strengthened by confronting—the ruthless nature of the truth of death. Psychoanalysis resonates with the wisdom of Jewish teachings and practices, as each addresses issues related to loss and grief. As Handelman (1982) wrote, “Psychoanalysis, it might be said, owes its hybrid character in the history of Western thought to its continuation of the Jewish exegetic tradition in contrast to late nineteenth‑century German Protestant hermeneutics” (p. 131). In my own practice I use a broad spectrum of psychoanalytic theoretical models. My choice of the most effective theoretical orientation depends not just on the given patient on a given day, but on my psychic location at the time. Freud wrote: My self‑analysis is in fact the most essential thing I have at present and promises to become of the greatest value to me if it reaches its end. In the middle of it, it suddenly ceased for three days, during which I had the feeling of being tied up inside (which patients complain of so much), and I was really disconsolate…. (cited in Masson, 1985, p. 270)

Freud wrote articles and clinical notes about experiences with patients, as well as his own personal struggles. His writing served as his

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analysis. Much like Freud, in my struggle to understand and articulate my feelings and thoughts as they relate to my sister’s death, I feel tied up inside and disconsolate. Aberbach (1989a) alluded to the fact that the creative process is a method of self‑analysis that can be used by Holocaust survivors as a tool for searching and linking up with a loved one who has died. The role of creativity among survivors may be compared with that of the bereaved in more usual circumstances…. The inhibition or blockage of fantasy as a result of incomplete mourning may find its compensation or antidote in creative self‑expression. Through creativity, the artist may confront and attempt to master the trauma on his own terms and, in so doing, complete the work of mourning. The unresolved elements of grief may thus themselves be both motive and substance in creativity: this holds true of all forms of loss and creativity…. (p. 275)

Aberbach (1989b) also asserted: Through creativity, the survivor may attempt not merely to comprehend what he has gone through, but also to invest his life with meaning. For the act of creation, which is also an act of testimony, may be perceived as the purpose for which he has been granted life…. In the act of creation, of testimony, survivor artists may show how strongly they feel that life is awaiting something from them. It may be that, in general, creativity deriving from loss . . . has for its underlying purpose the investment of life with meaning through the salvaging of truth and beauty from the pain and the waste [of] time. (pp. 21–22)

“The creativity involved in the art of mourning need not be the highly developed creativity of the talented artist,” wrote Ogden (2000). He continued: The notion of creativity, as I am conceiving of it here, applies equally to the creativity of the artist and to “ordinary creativity”—that is, to the creativity of everyday life. What one “makes” in the process of mourning—whether it be a thought, a feeling, a gesture, a perception, a poem, a response to a poem, a conversation—is far less important than the experience of making it. (p. 66)

Although I am neither painter nor poet, my hope is that creativity will emerge from “de‑scribing” my experience as a clinical narrative, a processing of my loss that will bring a renewal of spirit. This follows Wilner (2006):

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Judaism’s customs and obligations provide opportunities and permission for mourners to acknowledge feelings that are beyond words—a provision made in the psychoanalytic process as well. According to Bollas (1993): The analyst does not ask the patient to explain his state of mind: the lack of such accountability further adds to the patient’s movement into this frame of mind. . . . The patient may be silent for long periods of time, deeply involved in private inner experiencings [sic] that elaborate notions of the self, the other, and existence. The analyst will remain present but not intrude on such silences, and in so doing both participants recreate something of the nature of what I term “constitutive object relations.” It is akin to the beginnings of any person’s existence, . . . which is not based on intersubjectivity or the effort of speech. (p. 418)

Ogden (2008) expounded on the same point: [T]he goal of the psychoanalytic process is not that of helping the patient resolve unconscious intrapsychic conflict (or any other emotional problem); rather, the aim of psychoanalysis is to help the patient develop his own capacity for thinking and feeling his experience. Once that process is underway, the patient is in a position to begin to confront and come to terms with his own emotional problems. (pp. 23–24)

Just as Jewish mourning practices allow a mourner to gradually face loss, the psychoanalytic process allows a patient to move at her own pace. The agenda belongs to the patient/mourner, not the analyst/comforter. Kohut vehemently rejected the notion of manipulating circumstances to, in a sense, create trauma: “There is never any need—and by never, I mean never— there is never any need to be artificially traumatic” (Elson and Kohut, 1987, p. 91).

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However, even under ideal circumstances, moving at one’s own pace may bring the unavoidable occurrence of trauma. In the wake of my sister’s death, for example, I received extraordinary care from our community during Shiva and Shloshim, the seven‑ and thirty‑day periods after burial. But once each of those periods ended, I felt abandoned. I became angry. I had trouble with the fact that for everyone else, everything went back to normal. Where did everyone go? I wondered. Did they actually think my pain was gone? How easy was it to attend to me for a week or a month and then go on their way? My anger was a defense against the fear of being left alone to bear the loss. My experience was precisely what Heinz Kohut characterized as “optimal frustration.” In the psychoanalytic experience, the analyst and patient create a relationship, which, by its very nature, will inevitably give rise to misunderstandings, unmet needs, and similar circumstances. As those circumstances come to the fore, they may be dealt with. [T]hese experiences [of “optimal frustration”] lead to some accretion of the capacity, very subtly, to handle tensions by oneself. How does this happen? I think what happens is that it parallels the developmental growth of psychological structure. It means if one gives up something that another person performs for one, in subtle and small enough doses, then one will set up a little bit of that other person in oneself.1 And it becomes truly part and parcel of one’s internal armamentarium, permanently so, as part of the psychological structure. (Elson and Kohut, 1987, pp. 93–94)

The Jewish Laws and customs serve as guidance not only for mourners; the community’s role in providing comfort—including when to withdraw that comfort—is spelled out to a great extent. Although within the Jewish tradition the scheduled withdrawal of support has the greater end of building the mourners’ reserves of strength—Kohut’s (1987) observation of the gradual development of a “permanent internal armamentarium” resonates with me—one can only suffer the loss of

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Kohut will later refine this concept to describe the manner in which optimal frustration stimulates structure building. But he will clarify that it is not a “bit of the other person” that is acquired as psychic structure. It is self‑object function which is transmuted into a self function (see Kohut, 1971, 1977, 1980, 1984).

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what one has had. In Winnicott’s words, “One does not miss that which one did not have” (1957, p. 80). My feelings of abandonment after the intense attentiveness of the community during Shiva and Shloshim could also be likened to the weaning process of an infant as discussed by Winnicott (1957), with the community in the role of the “mother”: But all good things must come to an end. . . . It is part of the good thing that it ends. . . . A wish to wean must come from the mother. She must be brave enough to stand the baby’s anger and the awful ideas that go with anger. . . . [T]here is a wider aspect to weaning—weaning is not only getting the baby to take other foods. . . . It includes the gradual process of disillusionment, which is part of the parents’ task. (pp. 82–84)

According to Winnicott, the intense provision for an infant’s nourishment, nurturing, and comfort precedes the weaning process: “The world went to meet the infant, and so the infant could go out to meet the world” (1957, p. 80). Likewise, there is provision for nourishment, nurturing, and comfort during Shiva and Shloshim—provisions essential for the mourner to begin gradually to reenter the outside world. As if to make the parallel literal, on the last night of Shiva all of those present follow the custom of leaving the place where the service was held, walking outside together. The world went to meet the mourner, and so the mourner could go out to meet the world. As Parkes (1972) wrote: Just as broken bones may end up stronger than unbroken ones, so the experience of grieving can strengthen and bring maturity to those who have previously been protected from misfortune. The pain of grief is just as much a part of life as the joy of love; it is, perhaps, the price we pay for love, the cost of commitment. (cited in Aberbach, 1987, p. 515)

Seize the Day The morning of the day my sister was hospitalized, she received an e‑mail from a dear friend. Because of a disagreement, she and my sister had not spoken for three years. The e‑mail expressed the friend’s desire to renew their relationship. My sister immediately answered the e‑mail, acknowledging her part in the misunderstanding. A short telephone conversation followed, with my sister’s promise that it would continue the next day.

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Six hours later, I was admitting my sister to the emergency room, and within twenty‑four hours she was in a coma, never to regain consciousness. Hillel (c. 110 BCE) spoke to the value of acting without delay: One must be sensitive to the call of the particular hour. If not now, when? If I do not seize the opportunity now and imbue the moment with its particular meaning, the opportunity might not be there when I am ready, . . . (Lieber, 1996, p. 44)

We do not know when it will be too late. We cannot assume we will have another chance—no matter our age, genetic makeup, profession, or economic status. Thinking I had time to visit my sister, I saw a patient early that morning. Then, I went to the hospital. By the time I arrived, the doctors had put her on a ventilator and induced a coma. She never regained consciousness; I never spoke with her again. Why did I wait? By doing so I missed her last moments of living with intentionality. I had forgotten how fragile life is. My family’s record of longevity, along with my own experiences surviving critical illnesses and a near‑fatal automobile accident, were testaments to our indestructability. Certainly my sister would survive. I stood by her bed for five days, repeating over and over, “We don’t die!” She always landed on her feet. Surely she would do so this time. I brought my Talit (a large ceremonial shawl worn during Jewish morning prayers) to the hospital and gently covered my sister with it. I felt love, yearning, and tenderness. I did not want her to experience pain, nightmares, or fears. I would like to say there was no magical thinking. But the Talit is often referred to as a Sukkat Shalom (Tent of Peace). I realize now that I was hoping it would protect her from death.

Mi Shebeirach2 The hours passed. No words of hope came from the medical team. For the first two days, I felt a sense of hope when a doctor would ask to speak

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The central Jewish prayer for those who are ill or recovering from illness, it is often recited for those who are too ill to pray for themselves.

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with me. But the news was never good. I came to dread those requests. Then came the night when the lead doctor took me aside and told me to arrange for my mother to come to the hospital—not tomorrow morning, but now. My knees buckled under me. My first thought was to call my rabbi. I wanted her there when my mother arrived. I was terrified, anticipating my inability to console and protect my mother. “She will die, too,” I thought. As my rabbi answered her phone, I broke down uncontrollably. “Debbie is dying, and there’s no one to sing the Mi Shebeirach for her.” The visitors’ area was crowded with a growing number of family and friends. People were coming at all hours of the day and night. They were disbelieving of the gravity of her condition. I informed them that the last doctor said nothing could be done. Along with my mother, my aunt, and me, a small group gathered around my sister’s bed and recited the Vidui, the deathbed confessional of sins recited on my sister’s behalf. I did not know the translation of these prayers, only that they meant death was imminent. I did not want to say the words; I did not want to hear the words. If I don’t recite the prayer, she won’t die. My fear and grief were beyond measure. I wanted to die for her. She had so much to give. She was so loved, so funny and gifted—so young. She brought joy to those who knew her (and through her music, to many whom she had never met). I was numb with disbelief. Lifton’s (1968) term “psychic numbing . . . [an] overwhelming disorientation and fragmentation” (cited in Shabad, 2001, p. 13), is an apt description of my experience. The sting of death was too deep for me to feel the pain, too deep for me to find expression for it.

Arise, My Love Being with my sister as she lay dying in those last days, hours, minutes, waiting for her heart’s final beat, was a truly awful experience, a crushing time. In the early hours of Sunday, January 9, my sister’s nurse came to me. She asked if there was anyone for whom my sister was waiting. I did not understand the question. The nurse explained that although there was no medical explanation for why, my sister’s heart was still beating. Every other part of her body had ceased to work; there was nothing left but a beating heart.

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Yet I remained hopeful. Even immediately after she died, I stood by her bed and I thought, “She’s such a character,” half‑expecting her to pop up and say, “Just kidding!” How could I entertain such a bizarre notion? I did not want to leave her. I numbly held the bedrail; I stroked her forehead. Although I was speechless, every cell of my body wanted to scream until there was nothing left in me. I wanted to do something to express feelings that were more than rage, more than sorrow, more than despondency. But there were no words. Minuchin (1974) spoke of “actualization” and a “’therapy of action,” arguing that “there is considerable value in making the family enact instead of describe” (cited in Aron, 2003, p. 625). I suggest that the “de‑scribing” is an enactment. As Levenson stated: Language does not only communicate but it acts upon the environment. It is a process of making. To put it simply, when we talk with someone, we also act with him. . . . [T]he language of speech and the language of action will be transforms of each other; that is, they will be, in musical terms, harmonic variations on the same theme. (1983, p. 81; emphasis in original)

Both Judaism and psychoanalysis accept, and even anticipate, the need to act or enact at a time when words fail. Kri’ah, the rending of one’s garment, is such an act, providing for the release of emotion at the moment of death. This obligation is an example of a “de‑scribing” act, of expressing an emotion too intense to explain or to feel (see Wilner, 2006). Until months after my sister’s death, I did not know that Kri’ah is not only permitted at the moment of death, it is an obligation (Goldberg, 1991, pp. 84, 94). I deeply regret my misinformed belief that this obligation was only to be performed immediately before the funeral service. My regret is not simply at having failed to perform it at the proper moment: it represents a personal loss. I lost the opportunity to express my anguish in the manner intended by Halakhah. Every impulse led me in that direction, but my reliance on knowledge hindered me in fulfilling those instincts. I am not certain how much time elapsed after her death before I removed the Talit from my sister’s body. I folded it and held it against me. I asked a friend to drive my mother home. I asked everyone to leave, while I remained at the hospital to be certain my sister’s body was properly cared for. I did not let go of the Talit until I left the hospital three hours later.

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Following my sister’s death, her body was taken directly to a Jewish mortuary. The ritual bathing of my sister’s body—the Taharah (purification)—was performed by the women of the Chevrah Kaddishah (a group chosen to prepare a body for burial). There is a detailed protocol that the Chevrah Kaddishah must follow (with minor variations determined by local custom). Two of my sister’s closest friends participated in the Taharah and remained with her body all night and until the funeral service. Their presence gave me some comfort; I knew they would protect her. According to Jewish custom, the coffin remains closed once the Taharah is completed. Lamm (1969/2000) addressed the therapeutic disadvantage of viewing the body of the deceased person: [The] therapeutic value inherent in [an open‑casket funeral] has not been proved clinically and, in fact, appears to contradict the very basic thrust of its method. “Grief therapy”—helping the bereaved to remember a sweet, content, smiling face rather than the vacant, pain‑ridden, drawn look of a cadaver—works, it is claimed, to soften the shock of death. It alleviates the sudden cut‑off. . . . But, if therapy is conceived as a form of self‑enlightenment and self‑understanding, what valid function can viewing perform? It is far more sensible to rely on the faith that man can summon the strength with which to confront the raw, if sometimes bitter, truth without the aid of fabricated distortions. Viewing [the corpse] is as much “grief therapy” as painting a jail with bright colors is “thief therapy”…. When we take a human being to whom we once related as a subject, as an equal … and manipulate him as one would a piece of merchandise, we reduce him to an object, a mere “it.” (pp. 32–33)

The Mourning Comes According to Halakhah, the individuals given the status of “mourner” are the father, mother, son, daughter, brother/half‑brother, unmarried sister/half‑sister, wife, and husband (see Lev. 21:1–3). We mourners had officially begun the period of Aninut, the period between the death and the burial of a close relative. There were several people present while we were making arrangements for my sister’s funeral. Some declared that my sister would want to be buried the next day, according to Jewish custom. I chose to

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postpone the funeral an extra twenty‑four hours because of the many family members and friends whose flights were canceled due to winter storms. It would have been wrong to exclude them, and my sister would not have put the Law over individuals’ needs. That was not her way; that is not the Jewish way. There are numerous examples where Halakhah and custom are superseded by the needs of the individual. For example, the mitzvah of visiting the infirm supersedes obligations pertaining to the observance of the Sabbath. In the psychoanalytic realm, Ogden addressed this issue of meeting the unique needs of an individual: I would hope that if one of my patients were a speck on the wall of my consulting room listening to me work with another patient, patient‑on‑the‑wall would recognize me as the same person, the same analyst, with whom he is working in analysis. . . . That way of being together and conversing that is being overheard would feel somehow “off”…. The interpretations made by an analyst who is wed to a particular “school” of psychoanalysis are frequently addressed to the analyst . . . and not to the patient. When a patient feels that the analyst is speaking in a way that is not meant for him alone, he feels isolated and starved of the opportunity to speak with the analyst about what is true to what is going on in the analysis. (2005/2006, pp. 10–11)

While preparing ourselves on the morning of the funeral, my mother quietly said, “Please don’t leave my side.” We held on to each other all day, each keeping the other from falling. Prior to that week my mother had been a spry, unstoppable woman with a lust for life. That day she was slumped over like an old woman, staggering as she moved through the day. We arrived at the synagogue, and our rabbi escorted our family to her office. It was a familiar and safe place for me. I had been there so many times to meet for lunch or simply to visit. That day, I felt safe in a very different way—as she tenderly took control. I knew when we entered that there were matters to which we would have to attend. Our rabbi lifted the burden from my shoulders. At least on that day, for that moment, I did not have to make any decisions. My mother had to sign some legal documents. I handed the rabbi my eulogy. She listened. She spoke. She comforted us. We cried. We sat in silence. She “held” us in

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every sense of the word. After one week of utter chaos, there was a sense of order. According to Sandler (1984), the Freudian concept of the “somewhat ritualised [sic] external trappings” of the analytic setting, offers a patient a constancy and order that contributes significantly to a “sense of being held”: . . . . Winnicott (1965) introduced the term “holding environment” as a metaphor for certain aspects of the analytic situation and the analytic process. The term derives from the maternal function of holding the infant, but taken as a metaphor, it has a much broader application, and extends beyond the infantile period—where the holding is literal and not metaphorical—to the broader caretaking function of the parent. Winnicott transferred this concept to an aspect of the analyst’ [sic] function with full awareness of the analyst’ [sic] capacity to exercise a caretaking role. But for Winnicott this caretaking was always more than simple support and the provision of a reliable and reassuring presence. As Winnicott remarked, it “often takes the form of conveying in words, at the appropriate moment, something that shows that the analyst knows and understands the deepest anxiety that is being experienced, or that is waiting to be experienced.” (Sandler, 1984, p. 161)

I performed Kri’ah in the traditional manner, tearing the top corner of my blouse. But all of the relief I thought I would have was, to paraphrase Shakespeare, a mere shadow to the unseen grief within me. Although I did not experience a lifting of my anguish and pain, I do not believe that Kri’ah was a meaningless gesture. Each accomplishment of a custom or obligation is built on the previous one, establishing a foundation for healing and yielding a cumulative effect. As a parallel, the psychoanalytic process features levels of depth through which patient and analyst move as their work progresses. At first the pair may need to go through what may seem “merely shadows.” How often do we practitioners hear patients expressing frustration at feeling that talking is getting them nowhere? But then there may be what seems a sudden revelation, an epiphanic moment. This moment is the result of all the talking, the working, the showing‑up. The patient touches places inside that are new and theretofore unknown, places that are revealed to patient and analyst alike slowly, over time.

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We left the rabbi’s study to go into the sanctuary for the funeral service. Two male cousins were holding my mother and me as we took one hesitant step after another. There was a hum in the sanctuary, and I looked up to see a sea of people. I was both numb and terrified. I was going to have to hear, see, and touch things that were beyond comprehension. I knew I would not be able to avert my attention from this reality; I could not be a mere bystander. Family members and close friends sat in the first two rows of pews. Immediately to my left was my sister’s casket, draped in a blue cloth with a Star of David on it, her guitar laid over the top. This is a nightmare, I thought to myself. She’s really gone, and I cannot deny it. I was surrounded by my sister’s absence. I did not want to know that she was gone.

L'chi Lach My sister requested a kosher funeral and burial. When she was alive, she wanted every aspect of her life to be conducted Jewishly; in her death, it was no different. I wrote a eulogy, which my rabbi read. I wanted to protect myself from the moments in the service of which I was most afraid. But I could not. Each of those moments felt like a bolt of lightening through my body, loosening my grip on the irrational hope that my sister was not truly gone. But the service progressed. The casket‑ carriers, accompanied by a few of my sister’s closest friends, took my sister’s body from the sanctuary to the hearse. I do not remember the trip from the synagogue to the cemetery. At the cemetery, my mother and I were escorted to a covered area with chairs near the grave. There was a mound of dirt next to a rectangular hole in the ground. The casket carriers slid my sister’s casket onto the bier. I was helpless, watching my sister’s casket disappear into the ground. Unlike some religions, in a Jewish burial the casket is lowered into the ground in the presence of the family. Near the end of the service, all of us assembled stood to recite the Kaddish Yatom (Mourner’s Prayer). This was one of those dreaded moments, and the recitation gave rise to my anger and obstinacy. This prayer’s effect on me has always been a mystery. It contains no reference

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to death and no explicit comfort to mourners. It is an extolment of God’s attributes and expresses a longing for the establishment of God’s Kingdom on Earth. Then why is it the “Mourner’s Kaddish”? Why, even before my sister’s death, did I have dark and melancholy feelings when I recited this prayer? There is a parallel between how I experience the Kaddish Yatom and Michael Miller’s theory relating to schemas. In psychoanalytic terms, there is discontinuity between the role of the prayer and its message. Repeated episodes of lived experience organize the mind into representational models or prototypes of the events that have been neurologically encoded. These models, called schemas, are then used to interrelate the elements of a particular type of interaction with the surround into a known and meaningful form. Every encounter with the environment is matched to a schema that represents the features of that interaction. An event is understood and experienced as meaningful if its dominant features match the features depicted in the schema. (Miller, 1996, pp. 386–87)3

As We Together Say, “Amen” Someone came to escort my mother and me to the grave to perform the custom of covering the casket with dirt, one shovelful at a time— first my mother, then I, then each of the others at the interment service. The protocol is for the shovel to be held with the scoop upside down, a symbolic statement that death is antithetical to life. This shovel was dirty and rusty, with a splintery handle. It was the same shovel used by the gravediggers; there was nothing ornate or ceremonial about it. I watched my mother struggle to push the shovel into the dirt, wet and heavy from the recent rainfall. The symbolism was difficult enough; not being able to perform this last act of saying goodbye seemed cruel. Two of my cousins got down on their knees, digging their hands into the mud and placing it on my mother’s shovel. When the mud hit the casket, the sound was haunting; the moment was ruthless. Then, it was my turn.

3

See, for example, Hinton, McClelland & Rumehart, 1986; Horowitz, 1988; 1991; Mandler, 1984; Rumelhart et. al., 1986; Singer & Salovey, 1991.

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It is customary to replace the shovel into the mound of dirt, rather than passing to the next person. The act of having to retrieve the shovel oneself speaks to the realization that, in the end, in spite of whatever support we may have, loss must be borne alone by each individual. Ordinarily mourners leave the cemetery after they have dropped their shovelful of dirt onto the casket, with other attendees remaining to effect the final act of the burial. But my mother and I wanted to stay until the grave was covered. When finally I left my sister’s graveside, I was numb. Cousins literally held my mother and me up as we walked between the Shurah, the arrangement of the funeral‑goers into two facing columns. The Shurah stretched the customary distance from the grave to the exit of the cemetery. I remember being afraid of falling. All of these people are here for me. If I fall, someone will lift me. The “holding” I experienced as I walked down the center of the Shurah seemed a literal manifestation of Winnicott’s “holding environment.” Grotstein stated that this “holding environment” provides: . . . [A] prementational or non‑mentational quantitative regulation of emotional turbulence. [It]. . .conveys a background configuration focused upon non‑mentational soothing and interactional regulation (antecedent to autonomous self‑regulation). (1990, p. 268)

In that moment, there was no thought. I was in a state of prementation or non‑mentation. I simply felt a “holding”—and that feeling of safety carried me through. Sandler wrote of “holding”: Here is implied a notion of the analyst as a person who functions as an “auxiliary ego,” who helps to maintain or strengthen an in‑adequate [sic] ego which would otherwise be overwhelmed. And, in addition to this, “holding” has also been used in reference to the analyst’s function of mentally “containing” the patient’s associations . . . anxieties . . . and phantasies [sic]. (1984, p. 175)

According to Sandler, a place where “holding” is clinically indicated is “where object relationships have been arrested at a primitive level” (p. 165). I cannot read that statement without experiencing a visceral reaction—a feeling that my loss was a tearing away of a terribly significant

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object relationship—my relationship with my sister. It seems to me now that the days before and following my sister’s death took me to that very primitive state.

Grant Me Strength to Stand Alone According to Rose, “Loss needs to be acknowledged, . . . [and] may even require cognizance of the fact that a particular emptiness is not to be averaged out. It is irremediable: notes on the keyboard are missing; the melody is broken” (2004, p. 124). Freud (1917) claimed “that reality requires that a mourner must eventually relinquish all libidinal attachments to the lost object and redistribute them” (as cited in Rose (2004, p. 124). But twelve years later, on what would have been the thirty‑sixth birthday of his daughter Sophie, who died in 1920, Freud evidenced a stunning reversal of his understanding of object loss, providing a convincing statement that life informs theory. Although we know that after such a loss the acute state of mourning will subside, we also know we shall remain inconsolable and will never find a substitute. No matter what may fill the gap, even if it will be filled completely, it nevertheless remains something else. And actually this is how it should be. [This] is the only way of perpetuating that love which we do not want to relinquish. (E. L. Freud, 1960, Letter #239, 286 [as cited in Rose, 2004, p. 124])

In the first days after my sister died, I used euphemisms such as, “My sister passed away” or “She’s gone”; but I have since chosen to disallow myself that subtle escape. Debbie is dead. I must live in that reality.

REFERENCES Aberbach, D. (1987). Grief and mysticism. International Review of Psycho‑Analysis, 14:509–26. ____. (1989a). Creativity and the survivor: The struggle for mastery. International Review of Psycho‑Analysis, 16:273–86.

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____. (1989b). Surviving Trauma: Loss, Literature & Psychoanalysis. New Haven: Yale University Press. Alford, C. F. (2009). After the Holocaust: The Book of Job, Primo Levi, and the Path to Affliction. New York: Cambridge University Press. Aron, L. (2003). The paradoxical place of enactment in psychoanalysis: introduction. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 13:623–31. Bion, W. R. (1970). Attention and Interpretation: A Scientific Approach to Insight in Psychoanalysis and Groups. London: Tavistock. Brawarsky, S., & Mark, D. (Eds.). (1998). Two Jews, Three Opinions: A Collection of Twentieth Century American Jewish Quotations. New York: Berkley Publishing Group. Elson, M., & Kohut, E. (Eds.). (1987). The Kohut Seminars on Self Psychology and Psychotherapy with Adolescents and Young Adults. New York: W. W. Norton. Freud, E. L. (Ed.). (1960). Letters of Sigmund Freud (T. & J. Stern, Trans.). New York: Basic Books. Freud, S. (1917). Mourning and Melancholia. Standard Edition, 14:237‑58. London: Hogarth Press. ____. (1965/1998). The Interpretation of Dreams (J. Strachey, Ed. & Trans.). New York: Avon Books‑Harper Collins Publishers. Goldberg, C. B. (1991). Mourning in Halachah: The Laws and Customs of the Year of Mourning. (Rabbi Meir Zlotowitz, Ed., Shlomo Fox‑Ashrei, Trans.). Brooklyn: Mesorah. Grotstein, J. S. (1990). Nothingness, meaninglessness, chaos, and the “black hole” I: The importance of nothingness, meaninglessness, and chaos in psychoanalysis. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 26:257‑90. Handelman, S. A. (1982). The Slayers of Moses: The Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in Modern Literary Theory. Albany: State University of New York Press. Keats, J. (1952). Letters, 4th ed. (M. B. Forman, (Ed.). London: Oxford University Press. Lamm, M. (1969/2000). The Jewish Way in Death and Mourning: Revised and Expanded. New York: Jonathan David. Levenson, E. A. (1983). The Ambiguity of Change. New York: Basic Books.

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____. (1988). The pursuit of the particular: On the psychoanalytic inquiry. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 24:1–16. Lieber, M. (1996). The Pirkei Avos Treasury: Ethics of the Fathers; The Sages’ Guide to Living (Rabbi Nosson Scherman, Ed.), Chap. 1. Brooklyn: Mesorah. Lifton, R.J. (1968). Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima. New York: Random House. Masson, J. M. (Ed. and Trans.). (1985). The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887‑1904. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Miller, M. L. (1996). Validation, interpretation, and corrective emotional experience in psychoanalytic treatment. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 32:385–410. Ogden, T. H. (2000). Borges and the art of mourning. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 10:65–88. ____. (2005/2006). This Art of Psychoanalysis: Dreaming Undreamt Dreams and Interrupted Cries. New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis. ____. (2008). Bion’s four principles of mental functioning. Fort Da, 14:11–35. Psychoanalytic Dialogues (1993). An interview with Christopher Bollas. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 3:401–430. Rose, G. (2004). Between the Couch and Piano: Psychoanalysis, Music, Art and Neuroscience. New York: Brunner‑Routledge. Sandler, A. (1984). On interpretation and holding. Scandanavian Psychoanalytic Review, 7:161–76. Shabad, P. (2001). Despair and the Hope of Return: Echoes of Mourning in Psychotherapy. Northvale, NJ: Jonathan Aronson. Shakespeare, W. (c. 1595). King Richard II. Act IV, Scene I. Stern, D. (2003). Unformulated Experience: From Dissociation to Imagination in Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis. ____. (2010). Partners in Thought: Working with Unformulated Experience, Shadows, Dissociation, and Enactment. New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis. Wilner, W. (2006). The analyst’s embeddedness and the emergence of unconscious experience. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 42:13–29.

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Winnicott, D. (1957). The Child, the Family, and the Outside World. Cambridge, MA: Perseus. ____. (1965). The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. London: Hogarth Press. Wolfson, H. A. (1929). Talmudic method in Crescas’ critique of Aristotle. Retrieved from http://ohr.edu/judaism/articles/talmud.html.

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Across a Lifetime: On the Dynamics of Commemorative Ritual1 Joyce Slochower

In memory of my parents, Muriel Zimmerman and Harry Slochower, and my maternal grandmother, Belle Zimmerman

Traumatic loss is sometimes writ small. Orphanhood came to me in middle age and so I am among the fortunate. I escaped the extraordinary suffering of those who lose loved ones in childhood, through horrific accidents, disease, war, or acts of terrorism. My parents had lived full lives and I was an adult when they died. But we do not experience death comparatively. It had been an especially difficult year, punctuated by my mother’s increasing vulnerability and frequent middle‑of‑the‑night calls for help. She did not live alone but might as well have; it was always I whom she called. That night, she phoned at 2 a.m. I went once again, did what needed to be done. But then I left. And so the morning call announcing her death was especially traumatic. Had I stayed, I might have gotten help, saved her. Her soft face, her stillness in death, evoked a depth of longing for her that had been disavowed. Shock, grief, love unexpressed, overtook me. If only. 1



Based on a presentation given at the 2009 Annual conference of IARPP, Tel Aviv. I am grateful to Lew Aron, Steven Cooper, Sue Grand, Bethamie Horowitz, Margery Kalb, Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanofsky, David Kraemer, Barbara Pizer, my son Jesse Rodin, Nancy Sinkoff and Leora Trub for their thoughtful input, and Minyan M’at for providing a context in which memory is marked, held, and honored.

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My father’s death a decade earlier had also been unexpected, and in this sense, traumatic. I had not felt implicated, but I was not prepared. His death disrupted, indeed, dismantled my own illusions—of timelessness, of my going on being his child forever. I sat shiva, worked over the grief and regret with which I struggled, was comforted by my children and friends. Gradually, I emerged and got on with life. My mother’s death faded as my father’s had, but the insulation created by time was never thick. It could be pierced—by the first bar mitzvah without him; by the first child’s wedding without even one grandparent. In each instance, the acute awareness of a hole returned: I was now the oldest generation. The porous nature of that insulation fueled my wish, more intermittent than chronic, to formally remember and honor my parents. I was in a good treatment during some of those years and had help working through these losses. However, I wanted and needed something more, and found it in memorial ritual. Struck by ritual’s emotional power, I found myself thinking about its role and dynamic functions. Here I turn a psychoanalytic lens on these processes.

Bereavement Ritual and Traumatic Loss Psychoanalysts have long assumed that since bereavement rituals represent a response to acute mourning, the need for acts of memorial would fade with time. Mourning, it was thought, should be followed by working through and decathexis (Freud, 1914) rather than sustained, affect‑laden remembering. Classical writers primarily view prolonged grief as evidence of unresolved conflict and pathological mourning (Akhtar & Smolan, 1998). But Loewald (1962; 1976) moved our thinking away from the goal of decathexis by underscoring the mourner’s need to internalize rather than relinquish the object tie. From this perspective, the capacity to sustain an inner attachment to deceased loved ones is less pathological than integrative (Rubin, 1985; Klass, 1988; Silverman, Nickman, & Worden, 1992; Gaines, 1997; Shabad, 2001; Lobban, 2007). Yet despite this shift and the privileged place psychoanalytic theories accord memory and grief, we rarely explore the dynamic function of commemorative ritual. Indeed,

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like religion (Freud, 1927), ongoing acts of memorial are traditionally viewed as a sign of psychopathology, as regressive rather than integrative. For while we expect that our patients will dip in and out of the past over time, we also anticipate a progressive diminution in the intensity of that process. We tend to hear repetitive remembering as evidence of massive trauma, unresolved loss, intense conflict, or guilt that must be worked through rather than enacted and from which our patient will ultimately emerge. We aim for separation, hoping to help release our patients from the weight of loss, to free them (and ourselves) from the binding encumbrances of early, conflicted ties. We valorize, indeed idealize, “moving on” and “letting go.” We believe in our capacity to leave the past behind. The ideal of separation and the affects with which it is associated collide rather directly with those embodied in acts of memorialization. Commemorative rituals are aimed neither at decathexis nor at moving on, but instead at countering the absence created by death by re‑evoking loss and attendant, affect‑laden memories. The few psychoanalytic papers on memorialization explore its function for victims of massive trauma. Jeanne Wolff Bernstein (2000) uses Shimon Attie’s 1991‑1993 photographic creation The Writing on the Wall, an open air exhibition held in Berlin’s former Jewish quarter, to describe the function of the memorial act. Attie superimposed past on present by projecting photographs of the lives of Berlin’s pre‑holocaust Jews onto the city buildings where they once lived. As the citizens of contemporary Berlin confronted shards of an earlier time, a complex memory space was constructed. The exhibition captured the destruction of an entire culture—the culpability of parents, grandparents, neighbors—indeed, the entire nation. A not‑so‑subtle reminder of national and personal responsibility, the exhibition countered a culturally embedded need to forget, stimulating nostalgia, guilt, memory, perhaps even a desire to make reparation. Like much post‑holocaust artistic expression (Ornstein, 2006), the exhibition offered viewers an antidote to the experience of absence. Attie’s memorial was as transient as it was powerful, for the lights of the projector opened and then permanently closed down the exhibit. It is far more common for acts of commemoration to be regularly ritualized

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across time. Annual memorial rituals, almost always a response to the trauma of war, terrorism, and/or genocide, typically take place at the site of physical memorials like the Vietnam Memorial Wall in Washington, DC, Yad Vashem in Israel, and similar memorials worldwide (see Homans & Jonte‑Pace, 2005). These sites have the potential to function as symbolic grave markers, “missing tombstones” (Ornstein, 2008) or what Volkan describes as “shared linking objects” (2007, p. 53).2 Donna Bassin’s powerful film Leave No Soldier (2008) depicts a memorial ritual in movement. She follows the activities of a group of American Vietnam War veterans as they participate in an annual parade that ends at the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C. That parade embodies and reenacts the trauma to which the veterans were exposed: decades after the end of that war, the vets continue to mark, remember, and grieve their losses.3 Bassin’s film underscores the veterans’ need to reenact, relive, and remember the destruction to which they were subjected and in which they participated. A similar response to national loss may be found in the annual Israeli observance of Yom Hazikaron (Israel Remembrance Day). On that day, a one‑minute siren stops the country’s Jewish population in its tracks. Highways halt; stores become still; banks freeze in the midst of transactions; people stand silently next to their cars, offices, and shops. Absence is concretized and for a moment, Israel becomes a country of mourners who simultaneously share and witness each other’s losses. Then the minute ends and life goes on. Socially and nationally constructed acts of memorial are, of course, variously experienced, shaped both by one’s connection to the cultural/ political context within which memory is honored and by the quality and

While memorial sites can usefully evoke loss, they can also block the process of remembering. Spitz (2004), Volkan (2007), and Bassin (1998) all underscore how easily memorial edifices become “dead” monuments. The physical place closes off rather than opening up the past by doing the remembering for us. 3 The name of their organization, Rolling Thunder, Inc., refers to the thunderous bombing campaign against North Vietnam in which many of them participated. The parade is also a political act, an attempt to draw attention to the plight of those missing in action or prisoners of war, a protest against marginalization (Bassin, personal communication). 2

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intensity of the particular losses being marked. For some, the memorial moment establishes or reinforces a sense of community, while for others it functions mainly as an opportunity to honor and grieve personal losses.4 When effective, commemorative ritual has an additional impact: by creating a space of linkage, of “like subjects” (Benjamin, 1995), indeed, “like mourners,” it facilitates the construction of group memory. Although psychoanalysis has given such experiences short shrift, there are rich sociological and historical literatures on collective memory, particularly among scholars of Jewish history. In Zakhor: Jewish History, Jewish Memory, historian Josef Yerushalmi invokes the term “collective memory” to describe the functions of memorial ritual. Arguing that memory flows “above all, through two channels: ritual and recital” (1982, p. 11), Yerushalmi underscores the Jewish injunction to remember history as a religious imperative. He suggests that commemorative ritual re‑ actualizes memory by fusing past and present (see Myers, 2007, for a review of Yerushalmi’s contribution). Yerushalmi’s work was followed by a proliferation of sociological (e.g., Halbwachs, 1992) and historical writings on collective (traumatic) memory. In Les lieux de mémoire (The Sites of Memory), Nora (1984‑1992) explores the location of cultural memory in both physical space and commemorative acts. He notes that sites of memory act to “to stop time, to block the work of forgetting.” Describing how ritual narrative shaped, even rewrote, the Israeli national tradition, Zerubavel (1995) details the interplay of remembrance and forgetting, continuity and change. She suggests that both secular and religious memorial acts in the Jewish holiday cycle commemorate the past while separating it from aspects of history and chronology. Sensitive to the interplay and simultaneity of past and present in shaping post‑traumatic narrative, these writers identify the core place of memorialization in cultural, religious, and national identity rather than in individual experience. What remains to be explored is the intra‑psychic impact of commemorative ritual and the role of such ritual in instances of “ordinary,” rather than collective, traumatic loss. 4



And of course, for subgroups that are dis‑identified with the mainstream, communal acts of remembrance are more likely to create a sense of alienation or bitterness than one of connectedness.

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Perhaps we psychoanalysts have tended to be suspicious of commemorative ritual because it is largely embedded within cultural and religious practices that have their own strong—and often alien—ideologies (see Hagman’s 1995 critique). Yet we are hardly averse to ritual itself; on the contrary, analytic work uses more than a few rituals of its own. Quiet more than flamboyant, our psychoanalytic rituals (Hoffman, 1998) are lodged in the predictable, organized practices that shape therapeutic time, place, physical position, how we begin and end the session, and so on. As analysts, we act as recognizing witnesses to our patient’s remembering, and in this sense the dyad co‑creates a wide memorial space within therapeutic walls. This kind of memorialization is a byproduct of analytic process, for we do not structure our sessions with commemoration as a goal. Acts of “doing” have a very small place in psychoanalytic work; we abhor that which is prescribed, including the deliberate evocation of particular affect states and memories or explicit attempts to stimulate intra‑group connectedness. Instead, analytic ritual is constructed in ways that minimize externally generated evocation in order to make possible maximal access to interior experience, whatever its particulars. While as witnessing analysts we sometimes participate in our patient’s remembering, therapeutic process tilts us toward the former function; it is our patient—not protocol—who shapes the session’s content and the process of remembrance. If there is an element of commemorative action embedded within psychoanalytic process, it is more often implicit than performative. Essentialized, the very notion of commemorative ritual collides with the psychoanalytic relationship to time. For although we work within a treatment space buffered by an illusion of timelessness (Hoffman, 1996; Slochower, 2006b; 2014b), we also assume—and rely on—the existence of a constructed ending. Indeed, termination is both the fate and goal of psychoanalytic process. The considerable literature on termination (see Pedder, 1988; Bergmann, 1985; 1997; and Salberg, 2010) focuses largely on what facilitates (or impedes) the relinquishment and internalization of the analytic relationship. From this perspective, commemorative ritual reflects an underlying, problematic resistance to facing loss, a resistance to be analyzed rather than enacted. Do acts of memorialization evoke a

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core psychoanalytic anxiety—that we never do lose our need for the other or our need to rework old connections—that we cannot fully separate, cannot fully terminate (Slochower, 2011)? Have we yet to fully encompass this impossibility and its implications? It is my belief that at their best, acts of commemorative rituals—in their multiple incarnations—mimic aspects of psychoanalytic work by helping us deepen emotional connectedness and facilitating integrated remembering in a way that, rather than binding, enriches and frees us. In what follows, I explore the dynamic functions of memorial rituals, using both my own experience with Jewish memorial ritual and some clinical vignettes to illustrate the variegated impact of such practices. I begin with a brief discussion of rituals associated with death.

Loss and Memory Rituals that represent a response to the immediate shock of loss are ubiquitous across time and culture. Formalized in a myriad of burial rites and cultural/religious practices, these traditions make plenty of space for grief and remembrance. In previous essays (Slochower, 1993; 1995; 1996; 2006a; 2010) I explored the therapeutic function of Jewish mourning rituals using my experience with shiva and post‑shiva rituals to illustrate. Shiva is a tradition characterized by a rather extra‑ordinary set of social rules that together create a setting reminiscent of the therapeutic holding environment (Winnicott, 1964). By establishing barriers against superficial social interchange, shiva both prescribes and proscribes behaviors that simultaneously express and contain the mourner’s state of grief. Grief is concretized in a range of ways: the mourner sits on a lowered chair (to symbolize her lower emotional state and closeness to the dead); she is served by others (like a sick or vulnerable person); she wears a torn garment or black ribbon throughout the week of shiva. Perhaps most powerful is the custom that the caller waits for the mourner to initiate conversation; if the mourner remains silent, the caller does as well. Like the patient who has the freedom to begin each analytic session in her own way, this custom creates a protected space for mourner who can grieve when she needs to and disengage affectively when she does not. The community of visitors holds the mourner’s grief by allowing her to

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be the single subject in the mourning context, to use the other without regard for her needs (i.e., ruthlessly).5 Within this “container for absence” (Becker & Shalgi, 2010), the mourner is not expected to shift out of her own frame, to engage in mutuality (Winnicott, 1958; 1971; Benjamin, 1995; Aron, 2001).6 Like most mourning rituals, shiva is relatively brief, lasting less than a full week.7 Although Kaddish continues to be recited for the next three months (or in the case of a parent’s death, for eleven months), it too comes to an end. Feelings of absence, of course, do not, and many are pulled to find other ways to honor personal losses across the lifetime. A range of socially and religiously constructed commemorative practices create these opportunities. Mexicans observe the yearly Day of the Dead; Roman Catholics celebrate Mass; Muslims read a portion of the Koran; Jews observe yarzeit and say Kaddish and Yizkor. Others engage in regular personal acts of remembrance; a periodic visit to a cemetery; an afternoon spent with the photographs, books, letters, and songs of earlier years; annual visits to the family home or town. Performed decades after a death, these acts come to shape the individual’s memories of—and inner relationship to—the deceased by at once countering and re‑evoking the absence created by death. The memorial tradition of Yizkor8 offers an interesting frame within which to explore the function and dynamics of commemorative ritual. See Lamm (1988; 2004) for a thorough review of the Jewish mourning ritual. Despite the heavy emphasis on the mourner’s need within the shiva context, Jewish tradition introduces the needs of the community into the mourning space in small ways. Indeed, there is an intrinsic tension between the mourner’s need to mark her loss and the community’s need to get on with life and celebrate it, and aspects of that tension are embodied in the structure and calendar of shiva. Thus, there are times when community ritual collides with the mourner’s need to mourn (e.g., Shabbat), and shiva is interrupted or even cancelled in deference to religious laws concerning the observance of these holidays. Here, the community need to celebrate overrides the mourner’s need to mourn. 7 The precise timing of death in relation to major holidays determines whether shiva is observed in a truncated fashion, or not at all. 8 The oldest reference to this practice of “recalling souls” dates to a thirteenth‑century text called the Mordechai (David Kraemer, personal communication). It is important to note that rituals beside Yizkor also commemorate 5 6

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Yizkor is observed as part of a synagogue service that takes place on four major annual holidays (Yom Kippur, Shmini Atzeret, Passover, and Shavuot). While it is not surprising that Orthodox Jews observe Yizkor, it is notable that a full sixty percent of non‑Orthodox American Jews participate in some aspect of this tradition.9 In fact, many secular Jews make a point of attending only this portion of the synagogue service when it takes place on some of these holidays.10 Yizkor literally means “he will remember,” but more colloquially is understood as remembering or remembrance. Although anyone can recite Yizkor in memory of those whose losses leave no family, it is ordinarily said for one’s parents, siblings, spouse, or child. There is no end point to Yizkor ritual; it is recited for the first time a year after a death, and then across the mourner’s lifetime. Notably, this commemorative ritual is not uniquely linked to traumatic loss; it represents instead an “ordinary” way of memorializing both “ordinary” and traumatic loss. Yizkor falls about halfway through the service, at which point many synagogues become unusually packed with congregants. It is notable that whereas most of the service unfolds fluidly, Yizkor is always announced; this gives people who have not lost a close relative an opportunity to leave the room, to (somewhat superstitiously) underscore their distance from those who have losses to mourn (Becker, 1973). There is a powerful enactment here, for in reaffirming the “real” relationship with living

the anniversary of a death (Yarhzeit) in Jewish tradition. It is common, for example, to visit the graveside and light a special (Yarhzeit) candle that burns for twenty‑five hours. Some fast, study, or give charity to mark the anniversary. Observant Jews say a memorial prayer (El Moleh) for the deceased on the preceding Shabbat. They may sponsor kiddush (a celebratory meal following services) or lead services. On the actual Yarhzeit, the mourner recites Kaddish in synagogue. In some synagogues, the names of those observing Yarhzeit are publicly announced and a memorial prayer is read aloud. Many name a baby after a deceased relative, thereby linking the dead to the living (in Sephardic communities, children are named after living relatives as well; this is considered to be a way of honoring them). 9 Bethamie Horowitz, PhD, personal communication. She analyzed the United Jewish Communities National Jewish Population Survey 2000‑2001 data set. 10 Attendance at Yizkor is especially common when the parents themselves were religious (Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanofsky, personal communication).

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loved ones is embodied a simultaneous denial and acknowledgment of death. We (and our loved ones) are alive—for now. The particulars of the brief Yizkor service vary rather widely as a function of culture and Jewish denomination; non‑orthodox synagogue rituals have tended to expand the Yizkor service beyond its very brief traditional form by including additional psalms and other ritual elements that elevate the place and emotional power of the memorial service. My own experience is primarily within American conservative synagogues. Although in many synagogues the bulk of the service is accompanied by some degree of chatting among congregants, the announcement of Yizkor seems to evaporate the desire for social contact, and the congregation quiets. In many communities, the Yizkor service begins immediately; in others (including mine) it is sometimes introduced with a short talk by a synagogue member, usually a brief personal meditation about a lost loved one. While these talks vary in affective quality and content, they tend to create a reflective mood. After a psalm is chanted aloud, the congregation silently reads separate memorial prayers for loved ones; the name of each lost relative is inserted quietly into a separate version of the prayer.11 Next, one or more communal memorial prayers are either chanted or spoken aloud in unison. Prayers are sometimes included that honor the memory of holocaust survivors (those with no one to say Kaddish for them, whose names remain unknown) or Israeli soldiers lost in war. In some synagogues, the names of all deceased members of the congregation are read aloud. In my community, Kaddish is then recited in unison by nearly everyone present and a concluding psalm is sung communally. Until need and loss brought me into this communal space, the affective power of Yizkor remained somewhat elusive, its texts sounding stilted and formulaic. Personal loss changed that. While participating in

Part of this prayer includes a promise to “perform acts of charity and goodness” in the name of the deceased. That pledge honors the dead and, perhaps, represents a concrete attempt at expiation on the part of the mourner, a “giving back” to the lost object who is no longer there to receive love or remorse in symbolic form.

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this ritual occasionally feels like an obligation, I more often experience a kind of urgency that pulls me to attend it. On Yom Kippur (the first Yizkor service in the year following my mother’s death), I found myself caught up short when it was announced. I somehow was not expecting it, and the prospect of acknowledging her loss came upon me like an unexpected shock. Feeling suddenly and utterly alone in the crowded room, I did not so much read the requisite words as fall into an intensely private, sad space. My loss was fresh and raw; this was the hole of traumatic loss and there was no relief in saying Yizkor. But unlike the acute and often prolonged period of grief that follows a death (or that which can be evoked within the analytic setting), here memory and grief are touched very briefly—for literally moments later, pulled along by the sound of turning pages and the awareness that I also wanted to say Yizkor for my father, I left my mother, moved away from the acuteness of a recent death and entered a quieter place, colored by softer affect, nostalgia, and a flood of memories. My father is gone for nearly two decades. He missed the bar and bat mitzvahs, the weddings he so longed to attend. He died before I could fully appreciate his brilliance or the intellectual exchanges we could have had. Remote to my middle‑aged self, my father suddenly became alive, a warm presence smiling at me and my children, filling empty memory spaces as I contemplated what might have been. All this in less than ten minutes! My first experience saying Yizkor for both parents did not serve as a blueprint for future enactments of the ritual, however. My experience has shifted with time, mood, and other factors. At the risk of telescoping and to some degree flattening what has been a complex trajectory, I identify two dominant paths: re‑experiencing and reworking the core affect states associated with loss, and rediscovering and reshaping emotional memory. Some years ago on Yom Kippur, I found myself pulled into memories of my eldest son’s wedding, which had recently taken place at the country home my father built in the late 1930s, the place where I spent the summers of infancy and childhood. Evoking a visual memory of the wedding ceremony, its power and warmth, I suddenly realized that we had been standing on the very patch of lawn where, as a very small child,

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I had watched my father clear the trees. For just a moment I could hear his voice; I saw him, axe in hand, tugging out tree roots as he enlarged our lawn. From there I went forward in time, returned to the recent past, inviting my parents in. Thinking about the joyous dancing at my son’s wedding, I now imagined my mother dancing at her granddaughter’s wedding. It had been her dearest wish, but she died a decade too soon. Still, I had seen her dance with my daughter at age three; I now folded that image onto the present and envisioned that same daughter, now all grown up and very beautiful, dancing a hora with my mother. Surrounded by family and friends, my mother’s smiling face replaced the frown that had accompanied her painful aging. Symbolically repairing her absence at the weddings, I recreated the past, memorialized her, and soothed myself. I then turned to the memorial prayer I always read for my maternal grandmother (the only grandparent I knew). My thoughts moved away from my mother to my beloved “nanny” and I recalled a very worn black and white photo of her sitting in a lounge chair on that same lawn, holding me as an infant. I had forgotten about that chair, and for the first time contacted a body memory of its soft, faded green canvas warmed by the sun, an echo of my grandmother’s warm arms around me. Her palpable pleasure in the photo became her happiness at witnessing her great grandson’s wedding. A wistful sadness overtook me as I remembered the tenderness with which she held my eldest son in his earliest days. Yizkor had opened and shifted memory space, allowing me to recapture the past and connect disparate events as a new emotional narrative coalesced—a personal story of my relationship to place and person. That narrative helped me link my grandmother to my father, my mother, me, and to my children, who barely knew her. With that linkage (Loewald, 1976) came a sense of restoration, as if I had invited my grandmother into her great grandson’s wedding, back into my life. It partially repaired the grief with which her life had become associated by adding new (old) memories to more recent ones. Absence was filled with presence; with a reconstructed image of these object ties. For just a moment I undid all the separations that come with living and losing.

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Perhaps because I am not ordinarily immersed in the past, Yizkor provides me an opportunity to go where I rarely do, to re‑contact memories and associated self‑states, to bridge the very distant past by imbuing it with aliveness. I want to emphasize how this new narrative facilitated the restoration and reworking of affect states within a protected, transitional memory space. The nostalgic memories evoked by Yizkor facilitated mourning (see Impert & Rubin, 2011). Certainly the recitation of Yizkor can be rote, perfunctory, a synagogue ritual that feels flat or automatic. But when creatively accessed, Yizkor ritual makes room for both connection and separateness, for merger and isolation (Winnicott, 1951). We do not challenge the “reality” of our loved ones’ simultaneous absence and presence (Bassin, 2003; 2006; 2011; 2013a) just as we do not challenge the actuality of the analytic relationship. During Yizkor I surrender to my parents’ absence, and in that moment of surrender I recreate and re‑enliven our relationships. The trajectory of this new relational memory space is softer and more nostalgic, but it is no less imbued with emotional content. Now, I mostly remember the youthful parents of my childhood more than their aging selves or the shock of their deaths. There is pain and loss in remembering, but there is also richness and a comforting sense of continuity.

Private and Shared Loss: From Shiva to Yizkor Mourning rituals like shiva establish a protected space within which to grieve. They limit the press of the other’s subjectivity so that the mourner becomes—temporarily—the single subject in relational space. But after the short shiva week we return to our lives and away from traumatic loss, re‑entering the arena of mutuality. The shift from object relating (an object created by the subject) toward usage (an object recognized to have its own separate existence; Winnicott, 1971; Slochower, 1996; 2014a) is mirrored in the shift from rituals of mourning to commemorative acts like Yizkor because the latter include an intersubjective element. Unlike the traditions of acute mourning, commemorative ritual does not privilege individual experience, but instead creates a context for shared remembrance. It invites reflectivity while simultaneously moving us into a complexly organized space that invites acts of mutual witnessing: we

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stand together even as we remember our individual losses. In so doing, we affirm our communal bond and relocate personal grief within a wider social context. This shift, symbolized in the movement from shiva to Yizkor, is also embodied—indeed, enacted—within Yizkor itself. The service usually begins with a psalm read aloud, a collective call to remembrance that underscores the tension between the communal experiences of loss and the utter isolation that death inevitably evokes. We are a community in temporary mourning, yet during this brief service we rarely make explicit contact or comfort one another. Alone and together, the service enacts both sides of this tension, moving between group and individual prayers. We silently read prayers for those we have lost, touching personal memories, joys, and pains, remembering our own dead. But only briefly, for moments later we explicitly turn to the collective, whether to read prayers for those who died in the holocaust or war, or (as in my synagogue), to say Kaddish in unison. A prayer for the dead said for eleven months following a death and on its anniversary (yarzeit), Kaddish can only be recited in a communal context. Except at Yizkor, Kaddish is said by individual mourners only during the formal mourning period following a death or on the anniversary of that death.12 During Yizkor, we are all mourners: we all say a prayer for all our dead. In so doing, we symbolically underscore the experience of shared loss and shared witnessing. In some synagogues, Yizkor concludes with a psalm (Psalm 23: “the Lord is my shepherd”) that is sung communally. It is less the text of this psalm than the music that is evocative; its haunting, familiar melody touches and opens affect, triggering and assuaging individual grief while creating a group context that contains and holds (Solomon, 1995; Orfanos, 1997; 1999). As we sing together, we co‑create a group of like mourners who function for one another as holding objects, witnesses, and, of course, participants (Hagman, 1996; 2001). There are years when singing this psalm makes me weep; at other times I enter a space dominated by This tradition is a new one; the recitation of Kaddish is traditionally reserved for those in mourning or on the anniversary of the deceased’s death.

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nostalgic remembering; at still other times I am a bit disconnected from myself and far more aware of those for whom Yizkor has triggered intense grief than of the losses in my own life. But whatever its particular shape, the act of communal singing creates a sense of linkage; my awareness is of being one in a temporary community of mourners, and that awareness holds me and holds us. The inherent collision between holding on and letting go is embodied in memorial rituals like Yizkor. We begin by evoking (and thus recreating) the lost object and reaffirming our lasting connection to it. Only moments later, though, we leave that object and turn to remembering another, symbolically reenacting and normalizing the death of the first. Then, we return to the quotidian, to our “separate” life, freed, perhaps, to do so by virtue of our capacity to remember.

Outside the Synagogue Acts of memorialization take many forms, some of which are lodged well outside ritual space. We speak of absent loved ones at weddings and other celebrations; we name our children after them; we dedicate objects large and small and give charity in their memory. Autobiographies and memoirs can represent another kind of explicit, though non‑ritualized attempt to revisit the past and, potentially, to honor lost loved ones. This brings me back to the consulting room. There is almost always loss inherent in an analytic relationship. While these connections are as intimate as any in our lives, they ordinarily end artificially rather than with actual death. Certainly the process of termination helps us say goodbye, but once our goodbyes are said, neither analyst nor patient has easy ways of either marking or memorializing their relationship. Do these endings, sometimes quite stark and final, require their own memorial acts? I suspect that professional writing and speaking function in part—on a more procedural than conscious level—as symbolic acts of memorial. By writing about our patient (or analyst), we evoke and rework that relationship, and, to some extent, memorialize it. I illustrate this process with a clinical experience that cast a long shadow over my professional life. It has been over twenty years since I have seen Robin, but she remains alive in my mind’s eye, a good treatment that ended violently. Robin

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came to me in extraordinary distress, suicidal, almost self‑less, palpably helpless. I can still see her tall frame, straight brown hair, the Laura Ashley dresses that embodied the disavowed childlike self‑state she mostly inhabited. In this, one of the first analyses I did, Robin re‑found her past; in that process she contacted and reworked memories of neglect and abuse so excruciating that we sometimes cried together. She began to articulate desire, left a sadistic husband, found a kind man for herself, connected with professional ambitions, began a good career, came alive. A great deal changed, but our work was far from over; Robin remained emotionally fragile, unable to experience anger, in some ways, still masochistically attached. About seven years into the treatment, a family member went into a precipitous decline and Robin went home to care for him until his death. We kept in touch by phone as she struggled with his illness and death, her mother’s vulnerability, and the traumatic memories of abuse triggered by that homecoming. And then, abruptly, everything changed. On our first session following this visit, Robin entered my office transformed, her face etched in a grimace of hate. Without sitting down, she coldly informed me that our work was over; I had been helpful to a point but that point had passed. She was unwilling to discuss what had happened, what I had done or not done, and abruptly left in the middle of a session. Shocked, angry, and hurt, I tried to get Robin to come back, to tell me what had happened. After holding out for some weeks, she did return but remained furiously adamant, unwilling to talk about her experience with me, no matter to return to treatment. Our connection destroyed, Robin vitiated memories of intimacy between us, rejected even the idea of expressing, mourning, or working through her disappointment and anger toward me. Without an apparent interpersonal trigger, Robin had ejected our mutual attachment. Her rageful negation of the work and our relationship felt shattering. Robin had changed in so many ways; how had our connection so suddenly collapsed? Not inclined to blame her, I searched my memory for how I had failed. Could I have done more to access her anger? Could I have gotten her to work it through rather than leaving precipitously? I wrote about this rupture in Psychoanalytic Collisions (Slochower, 2006b; 2014b), using it to illustrate the complex dynamics underlying

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joint idealizations and their vulnerability to rupture. But what I did not say—what I was not fully aware of—was that my essay was also a response to the destruction of relational memory. Unable to understand or talk through with Robin how I had failed and become toxic to her, I had been left in a state of solitary grief until I turned to my own words in an attempt to recapture the more complex dimensionality of our relationship. In so doing, I symbolically repaired a damaged treatment (and damaged analyst), re‑found, revitalized memories of Robin, and facilitated a newly shaped therapeutic narrative that helped me make sense of the treatment, her leaving and my (partial) failure. Of course, that narrative also represented a communication to Robin, a symbolic attempt to restore a relationship interrupted. Robin and I never met again, although I still think of her when I pass the block where she works, or used to work—for I do not know where she is or how she is. I have struggled to encompass the abrupt destruction of a rich relationship, writing about Robin to move out of solitary grief into a memorial space that is private, yet also has a communal element, one shared by the potential reader.

What We Keep As we write about our patients and our analysts, we enact the ritual of remembering; we re‑tell the story of a lost relationship to ourselves and in the process we reconstruct and perhaps repair it—if we can and if we dare. In his brief 1915 essay “On Transience,” Freud described how the evanescent nature of beauty and love can block pleasure, linking that difficulty to a “revolt in their minds against mourning” (p. 306). Freud noted that the price to be paid for avoiding the pain of loss is, paradoxically, a diminution of pleasure. It is as if the person says “I won’t love what I can’t have, what won’t last forever. If I love I’ll have to lose. So I won’t.” Our phobic response to death has become, to some extent, culturally embedded. We avoid acts of commemorative ritual in order to let sleeping dogs (people) lie, to keep an emotional lid on distress. This dynamic emerges noisily in work around the theme of schizoid detachment but

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can infiltrate, even dominate, our response to traumatic loss. These losses (especially early traumatic losses) are not always remembered, much less fully mourned, because dissociation shuts down affect and forecloses engagement with memory. My great grandfather’s sudden death in 1929 was a trauma that the family could not encompass. My grandmother sent the children away for some weeks without saying a word about why; they only learned about their father’s death weeks later from a neighbor’s son. My mother was not allowed to attend her father’s funeral, no one sat shiva; indeed, in an effort to get on with life, his name was never again mentioned. And so the family carried on with a loss neither mourned nor communally remembered, grieving silently, suffering physically but never speaking of their psychic pains. There were no family stories about Grandpa Louis, no reminiscences. When my maternal grandmother died decades later, this avoidant dynamic resurfaced: my mother, terrified of entering the arena of loss, begged the rabbi to conduct the funeral without requiring that she go to the cemetery. Determined to remain upbeat and solid, she could not grieve and could not remember. And so, in my own life, I have carried the desire to remember for us both. In writing the present chapter I have enacted my own wish to honor the memory of my parents and grandmother. For my mother’s family, acts of memorial threatened to disrupt a fragile overlay that covered traumatic loss. For others, these acts have no emotional impact until they become connected with a particular loss. David, a secular Israeli, regularly engages in memorial ritual to honor the memory of his parents, both deceased decades ago. His parents were traditional but not observant Jews, and David rarely saw the inside of a synagogue during his childhood in Israel. But David’s parents, both holocaust survivors, left him with a powerful Jewish identification that was activated when he moved to the U.S. about twenty years ago. And so David began lighting yarzeit candles and, on Yom Kippur, attending the Yizkor service. He finds comfort in hearing the congregation reciting Kaddish (a prayer he recalls from boyhood) and in lighting the candles, something that he distantly remembers his grandmother doing. David

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uses these moments to access his connection to his parents in a way that leaves him feeling both vitalized and soothed. The inability/refusal to remember, to participate in acts of memorial, sometimes emerges as part of a wider picture of emotional difficulty. Susan, now sixty‑eight, has a history of early trauma and dislocation; she has struggled with dissociative symptoms all her life. Susan is phobic about illness and death and cannot sustain even a nostalgic emotional connection to her parents, who are long deceased. When her mother died (Susan was in her late twenties), Susan threw out everything belonging to her; her sister Bonnie saved everything. When, many years later, Susan’s son married, she refused to permit her parents’ names to be included on a ceremonial wedding booklet that named and memorialized three other sets of deceased grandparents (those of the bride and Susan’s husband). Bonnie’s yearly reminder to Susan about their mother’s Yarzeit is met with hostile indifference. “I don’t need to light a Yarzeit candle,” she irritably declares. Susan reacts to Bonnie’s easy shift in and out of their shared history with a mix of derision and anxiety, mocking Bonnie’s participation in commemorative ritual, clearly made uneasy by it. Refusing to visit their parents’ grave with Bonnie or even talk about their parents, Susan maintains some degree of emotional equilibrium by sealing off memory space. This inability to engage in acts of commemoration also infiltrates the present. Susan’s adult sons wonder about the complete absence of any family stories; they have grown up as a solitary generation. And even more problematic, Susan cannot be empathic when her friends are ill, cannot tolerate anxiety or loss even at a distance. She denies all evidence of illness; at times this has put family members in some danger. Thus, a small grandchild’s acute injury was met with impenetrable denial: “she’s fine, she doesn’t need to go to the emergency room.” For Susan, both death and vulnerability are unbearable and disorganizing; denial dominates her experience, bleaching her own life of a sense of connectedness and emotional richness. Susan’s desperate effort to avoid affective flooding and disintegration shows itself in multiple ways that undermine the present while also cordoning off the past.

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There is, of course, an obverse, equally problematic edge to this dynamic: addiction to loss and memorial ritual. When we remain absolutely embedded, “un‑separated” from lost love objects, remembrance of things past interferes with our ability to embrace the present; this melancholic position is what stimulated the psychoanalytic emphasis on decathexis and working through. When Christie’s fifty‑five‑year‑old brother died of heart disease some years ago, she was bereft; neither her husband nor children could offer her much comfort. Christie’s sense of grief felt understandable to the family for some time. Nearly a decade later, however, their understanding has lessened. Christie’s friends and family helplessly watch as she remains embedded in bitter longing. Surrounding herself with mementoes of Jonathan’s life, reading the books he loved, she withdraws into her bedroom and remains detached from family life. Her grief is frozen and overwhelming, blocking her re‑entry into the quotidian. Because Christie feels her grief to be “normal,” she resists therapy and rebuffs her family’s attempts to reach her. For Christie, Jonathan died yesterday; there is no buffer against acute grief, no access to a transitional realm that would help her move in and out of the experience of absence; Christie is as stuck in mourning as Susan is in denial. It’s unsurprising that so many flee from the kind of experience in which Christie is submerged. We need to believe in the future, to embrace hope, and history can feel like a counterweight to that sense of optimism. Yet at their best, memorial rituals allow us to access both the desire for connection and for separateness, creating a liminal space within which these experiences can be touched without permanently overpowering us. Whatever their particular shape, the dynamics of deep attachments are layered and complex. Our personal memorial stories exist at some distance from “truth,” representing a more cohesive, emotionally meaningful, and consistent vision of our love objects and our ongoing relationship to, and separateness from them. Over time, we may continue to memorialize, but this process is not static; the emotional point of entrée for commemorative ritual is altered by new losses, a growing awareness of our mortality and our shifting dynamics. Since I began saying Yizkor, I have confronted my own aging, experienced other losses and other joys. My first grandchild was born, named after my father; little Harry has made my father come

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alive again in a different way. I have become more able to imagine my way into my parents’ responses to me and find it easier to identify with aspects of their own experience. Yet at the same time, my parents have become far more remote than in earlier years. I rarely think or speak about the world of my childhood; I have left that part of life, along with analysis, behind. Still, when a major family event takes place, as when I lost a dear friend, earlier losses reemerge, reminding me that I am at once connected to and separate from my parents. Yizkor offers me a fixed door through which to remember, to find what is lost but not forgotten. Unlike the transitional objects that are remembered but are no longer imbued with emotional meaning, we remain, for better and worse, deeply attached to those we lose even as we struggle (and sometimes long) to detach (see Kohut, 1984). I suspect that our need for an illusion of separateness has led to a psychoanalytic idealization organized around renunciation and working through. That idealization contradicts our need to shape and reshape a personal, historical narrative about our connections to lost loved ones. Commemorative ritual does more than counter the illusion of separateness or the need to sidestep the pain that death creates; it allows us to appropriate our own history. These rituals preserve a continuity of experience that can coexist with a sense of ourselves apart from our losses (Levi‑Strauss, 1985). Acts of memorialization imbue the concrete with symbolic meaning (Bassin, 1998; Grand, 2000). They invite us to confront our non‑pathological concerns about the meaning of life and death, helping us face our losses and affirming their aliveness within us so that we can live more fully in the space created by death. It is time for us to reject once and for all the psychoanalytic idealization of renunciation and separation, to embrace our (conflicted) desire and capacity for connection.

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____. (1996). The holding function in mourning. In: Holding and Psychoanalysis: A Relational Perspective (pp. 116‑126). Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press.

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____. (1995). The therapeutic function of shiva. In: J. Reimer (Ed.), Wrestling with the Angel. New York: Schocken Books. ____. (1993). Mourning and the holding function of shiva. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 29:352‑367. Solomon, M. (1995). Mozart. New York: Harper Collins. Volkan, V. (1981). Linking Objects and Linking Phenomena. New York: International Universities Press. ____. (2007). Individuals and societies as “perennial mourners” their linking objects and public memorials. In B. Willock, L. Bohm, & R. Curtis (Eds.), On Deaths and Endings (pp. 42‑59). New York: Routledge. Winnicott, D. W. (1951). Transitional objects and transitional phenomenon. In: Through Pediatrics to Psychoanalysis (pp. 229‑242). New York: Basic Books, 1958 ____. (1958). The capacity to be alone. In: The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment (pp. 29‑36). New York: International Universities Press, 1965. ____. (1964). The importance of the setting in meeting regression in psycho‑analysis. In: Psychoanalytic Explorations (pp. 96‑102). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. ____. (1971). Playing and Reality. London: Tavistock Publications. Witenberg, E. (1976). Termination is no end. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 12:335‑338. Yerushalmi, Y. H. (1982). Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory. Washington, DC: University of Washington Press. Zerubavael, Y. (1995). Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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The Testimonial Process as a Reversal of the Traumatic Shutdown of Narrative and Symbolization Dori Laub

Abstract Through a detailed clinical vignette and a review of the relevant literature this paper illustrates the failures in narrative formation, symbolization, and even in the process of psychoanalytic listening and comprehension that occur in the wake of events of massive psychic trauma. Inexplicable gaps and absences occur in what should be all too evident and readily known, and the processes of exploratory curiosity come to a halt. The author attempts to explain this phenomenon through the cessation of the inner dialogue with the internalized good object, the “inner thou” that is annihilated in massive trauma. This leads to a shutdown of processes of association, symbolization, and narrative formation. The act of remembrance and of keeping a mental and written record as part of the Jewish tradition and injunction of “Zachor” is described as an attempt to resist such erasure from memory and from history. This struggle for repair continues through the process of testimony. Implications for psychoanalytic psychotherapy with severely traumatized patients are discussed and illustrated by another case vignette.

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A Case of Countertransference Blindness The analyst was a candidate in psychoanalytic training and this was his first control patient. He himself was a child survivor who had spent two years between the ages of five and seven in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II. Before he started working with this patient, the analyst’s immigration status in the United States was in question and threatened to interrupt his psychoanalytic training. He was advised by the institute that if he could not assure his stay in the U.S. for a sufficient length of time, he could neither start his first control case nor could he proceed with his classes. He felt he was about to be deported again, exiled from the country he lived and worked in, and banished, or at least not protected, by the institute in which he was training. An unexpected change in U.S. immigration law allowed for a resolution of this crisis, and he was referred his first control patient. The supervisor of the case was an eminent psychoanalyst, also a refugee from Nazi‑occupied Europe. He was known and admired for his flexibility and tolerance and for his original writings on the new object relation experience psychoanalysis offered, which would allow reexamination of damaging object relationships in early childhood, thus setting a healing process in motion. The candidate’s control case was a woman in her late twenties, single, working as a teacher. She was the older of two children, with a brother five years younger of whom she was intensely jealous, because she regarded him as the parents’ favorite. Aside from working, her life was pretty empty. She had very few friends and no social life to speak of. She had never had a relationship with a man, and had never fallen in love. Her symptoms were episodes of depression, hopelessness, and panic attacks, one of which landed her in the emergency room. Once on the couch, she became very suspicious of the analyst, reading all kinds of feelings into his abstinence. She felt that from the moment she came into his office, he treated her with contempt, put her down, and was cold and always critical. She likened him to her mother, whom she thought of as distant and very harsh. Transference interpretations, however, did not change the situation. She had frequent angry outbursts,

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yelling in such a loud voice that the analyst next door, a colleague, humorously asked the candidate what he was doing to this patient. Was he torturing her? Upon reflection years later, the analyst thought that the question might have been relevant. From past history, it emerged that the patient was born shortly before World War II and her father was drafted soon thereafter. He served in the Pacific Theater. As early as 1942, he disappeared, and his fate was unknown. He was considered missing in action. The mother regarded him as dead. The analyst could imagine a little girl with a depressed, grieving mother, who was perhaps unavailable to her. Reconstructions of this kind, however, made no difference. Many of the feelings the analyst harbored in the supervisory setting and toward the institute that nearly interrupted his training were permeated by his childhood persecution experiences and inhibited his creativity and his analytic freedom to explore. As things were not going well in the analysis, the supervisor suggested that the candidate sit the patient up and speak to her face to face. The candidate was afraid that he was going to lose the credit he needed for the completion of his analytic training if he followed this advice. He was also afraid that he would be asked to leave his training, as almost half of his class had been, because of unsatisfactory progress. The threat of near deportation that had preceded the work with his patient was also very much on his mind. Further details from the history of the patient showed that the father miraculously returned at the end of the war and was decorated with the Silver Star. There was still no information, nor were there any questions by the analyst or by the supervisor, as to the whereabouts of the father during his several years’ absence. Neither registered surprise that would have led to inquiries. The analytic process was stalemated. The patient’s angry outbursts occurred again and again. After nearly four years of rather barren work, the analyst told the patient that he could not see how he could further help her and that another therapist might. All this happened between 1969 and 1973. Shortly after the interruption of the analysis, the analyst served as a psychiatrist with the IDF forces in the Yom Kippur October War in 1973. He was stationed in a treatment facility in Northern Israel, which received casualties from the

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Syrian front. To everybody’s surprise, the proportion of the psychiatric casualties was staggering. Reservists had been called up from synagogues, thrown into makeshift units and sent into the battlefield to stem the Syrian advance. The abruptness of the transition into combat, the absence of a familiar social support network with the comrades in arms from their regular unit, with whom they trained and served provided, the enormity of losses, dead and wounded, and above all the level of violence they were exposed to, lead to the psychological decompensation of many. What the analyst observed was that the most severe and least treatable casualties were children of the Holocaust survivors. One such case arrived in a deep depressive stupor. He had no name, no family, no memory. Spending hours upon hours in a dimly lit tent with him and gently prodding him, the analyst gradually learned that he had been a radio operator on the front line, who saw tank crews stop on their way to the battlefield and then listened to their voices on the radio. He heard their last messages before they went silent. They were out of ammunition and surrounded by Syrian tanks. To him, it strongly resonated with the images of many family members who had been murdered in the Holocaust and whose names were mentioned, but little was said about them. They were, nevertheless, ubiquitously present to him in their very absence, in their silence. Gradually, as he was making this connection, he emerged from his stupor, remembered his name, and recognized his wife, who was about to give birth to a baby. The baby, a son, was named after one of the fallen tank commanders. Another example was a soldier who came to the analyst in a state of psychotic agitation. His utterances made no sense; his affect and his behavior were severely out of control. He was a military policeman whose duty was to prevent civilians from reaching the front line. He had failed to stop a car with two men in it, only to find it later destroyed with two mangled bodies inside. He proceeded to boot a Syrian POW officer in the head. In his ramblings, he told of his father’s stories of SS men smashing the heads of Jewish children into a wall. The front line brutalities triggered the memory of the tales of brutalities he grew up with and that was more than he could contain. His mental state did not improve in

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spite of robust pharmaco‑ and psychotherapeutic interventions, and he had to be transferred to a chronic facility. The familial exposure to Holocaust violence in these two men increased their vulnerability to the violence on the battlefield. Whereas other soldiers would better insulate themselves from it by using the customary defenses against traumatic experiences, such as dissociation, derealization, depersonalization, and others, for these two, such defenses no longer worked. Extremes of violence had for them a personal‑historical context that was continuously present and, therefore, could not be pushed aside. In the years that followed these experiences, the analyst became very much involved with clinical work with PTSD and the transgenerational transmission of trauma. Reflecting on his analytic case, described earlier, he began to piece things together in a new and different way. It dawned on him that a very likely explanation for the father’s absence for several years was that he had been detained in a Japanese POW camp. The analyst had read of the severe treatment of American POW’s by the Japanese and could now better understand why the father had been awarded the Silver Star. Did he possibly undergo torture, and did that experience intrude itself into the analytic space? The analyst realized that after the father’s return, the joyful couple celebrated the occasion by having a new baby. The patient, appropriately, was excluded from this celebration. It was imaginable that the father, after years spent in a POW camp, could have been suffering from PTSD symptoms and some of his traumatic experiences might have been transmitted to his daughter. The analyst suddenly felt that he understood the patient’s terror, helplessness, and resultant rage, but unfortunately it had not occurred to him to ask the question that would have enlightened him about the father’s whereabouts during the war or his symptomatology after he came back. Belatedly, he could only guess that the father might have suffered from nightmares for years. In addition, the father’s PTSD symptoms might have caused the emotional withdrawl from his little daughter, which was repeated in the transference and in the patient’s relationships with men. In retrospect, what is striking here is the absence of such curiosity, the lack of creative speculation, and the question of whether the analyst’s

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own childhood camp experience had defensively blinded him to the possibility that the patient might have encountered trauma in her childhood. It was as though the analyst himself experienced a shutdown of reflection and self‑reflection that led to a lack of curiosity about something that was very close to the surface, if not obvious. He failed to notice that he did not know the reason for the father’s absence and his whereabouts during that absence. What is also striking is that the supervisor, who was known for his open‑mindedness and clinical sensitivity, had not asked this question either. Was he too, perhaps, unaware of the effect of his own traumatic experience? Did the suppressed memory of his own persecution exert a force that blinded him to the possibility that a similar event might have happened in the patient’s family? Years later, the analyst wondered whether this was a case of double‑counter transference blindness—his own, and that of his supervisor. What is striking in this vignette is the inexplicable absence, or rather shutdown, in both analyst and supervisor, of the processes of analytic hearing, associating, integrating, and ultimately comprehending, through the processes of symbolization, exactly what the patient experienced and reenacted in the analytic setting. The father’s disappearance and the implications of his return, which lay clearly in front of their eyes, had not been acknowledged or explored. How can we explain this? Is it possible that the patient’s transgenerationally received traumatic experience reverberated with echoes of the massive life trauma that both analyst and analytic supervisor had experienced? Is that what stopped the analytic process in its track, allowing for no empathic inquiry, for no associative linkages to be formed and thus keeping the three traumata discrete and frozen in their place?

The Nature of the Traumatic Experience Clinicians and scholars (Laub & Auerhan, 1993; Oliner, 1996; Caruth, 1996) describe trauma as occurring “out there,” not as an event related to an experiencing subject, the “I.” It is likened to an external event dissociated from the narrator who has gone through it. Often, survivors emphasize that they indeed live in two separate worlds, that of their traumatic memories (which is self‑contained, ongoing, and

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ever‑present) and that of the present. Very often they do not wish, or are completely unable, to reconcile these two different worlds. The memory is thus timeless, the experience is frozen. It is automatic and purposeless, bereft of meaning. Caruth states, “Traumatic experience… suggests a certain paradox: that the most direct seeing of a violent event may occur as an absolute inability to know it” (1996, pp. 91‑92). Elsewhere, Caruth tells us, “It is not simply, that is, the literal threatening of bodily life but the fact that the threat is recognized as such by the mind one moment too late. The shock of the mind’s relation to the threat of death is thus not the direct experience of the threat, but precisely the missing of this experience, the fact that, not being experienced in time, it has not yet been fully known” (p. 62). Yet in spite of, and perhaps because of, their separateness, their having a life of their own, the power the memories of trauma exert on the continuance of life is immeasurable. Van der Kolk, McFarlane & Weisaeth state, “Terrifying events may be remembered with extreme vividness or maybe totally resist integration.… Trauma can lead to extremes of retention and forgetting” (1996, p. 282). These memories remain intense, yet frozen, immutable and unaltered by the passage of time. They are not subject to assimilation or to evolutionary change through integration in the associative network. They remain discrete, retaining their magnetic power in their contradictory detailed and persistent clarity and in the concomitant dense yet absorbing opaqueness that enshrouds them. They are qualitatively different from ordinary memories.

Attempting to Understand the Absences How are we to understand these “absences,” these “blanks” in our experience and the framing, distancing strategies put in place when atrocities penetrate our consciousness? To come to know something is to process new information, to assimilate and integrate an experience into one’s own inner world representation. It is essentially to build a new construct inside ourselves. Richard Moore defines memories of trauma as “new constructions of a previously constructed reality which was originally based on some particular direct experience” (1999, p. 167). These, in fact, can even be someone else’s experiences.

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Dori Laub That which might otherwise be constructed overwhelms the construction process and therefore the constructor…. We know this has occurred only when others are able to supply a narrative. The traumatized person lacks the ability or the opportunity, or both, to initiate, create or integrate this interaction. Potential reality overflows the capacity to construct it, and the result is not a reality created by one’s experience, but the loss of one’s capacity to participate in it at all. (p. 168)

What specifically overwhelms the process of construction and therefore the constructor himself, resulting in a total loss of one’s capacity to participate in one’s own reality? To process information, to make it our own, we employ the process of symbolization. In “Symbol Formation in Ego Development,” Melanie Klein states, “not only does symbolism come to be the foundation of all fantasy and sublimation, but more than that, it is the basis of the subject’s relation to the outside world and to reality in general” (1930, p. 221). Therefore, to perceive, grasp, or participate in reality, the process of symbolization needs to be in place. “Symbol formation,” according to Hannah Sigal, “governs the capacity to communicate, since all communication is made by means of symbols” (1951, p. 395). She proceeds, “Symbols are needed not only in communication with the external world, but also in internal communication”: that is, with oneself (p. 396). “The capacity to communicate with oneself by using symbols is, I think, the basis of verbal thinking, which is the capacity to communicate with oneself by means of words” (p. 395‑396). Freud (1891) himself, in one of his earliest works, emphasized the importance of associations between words and of words with other (sensory) elements in order to create meaning. He posited an aphasia of the first order, verbal aphasia, in which only the associations between the single elements of the word representations are disturbed. An aphasia of the second order is the asymbolic aphasia, in which the associations between word and object representations are disturbed. Freud postulated an internal psychic event, a “thing” representation, which came to be linked to another psychic event, a psychological word representation. A linkage between the two psychic events created the symbol—the psychological word. “All object representations that are linked to a word are a

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symbol. To speak then is to symbolize in words, the representations of a bodily mind” (Rizzuto, 1993, p. 124). Rizzuto emphasizes that for Freud, listening was an active process. “It requires a certain inner speech to ourselves. The word we understand is the combined word of the person who spoke and the inner word we spoke to ourselves. This inner word has a psychic history already. Listening, therefore, means associating external words to inner words, and in the end, we hear ourselves internally” (p. 124). In other words, Freud saw the formation of the symbol as occurring in the context of such internal communicative processes. Such an understanding of symbolization is based on an internal dialogic process. One comes to know one’s story only by telling it to oneself, to one’s internal “thou.” Reality, therefore, can be grasped only in a condition of affective attunement with oneself. Massive psychic trauma, however, is a deadly assault, both on the external and the internal “other,” the “thou” of every dialogic relationship. The executioner does not heed the victim’s plea for life, and relentlessly proceeds with the execution. The “other,” the “thou,” who is empathically in tune and responsive to one’s needs, ceases to exist, and faith in the possibility of communication itself dies. There is no longer a “thou,” either outside or inside oneself, a thou whom one can address. An empathic dyad no longer exists in one’s internal world representation. There is no one to turn to, even inside oneself. It is an utterly desolate landscape, totally void of life and humanity, permeated by the terror of the state of objectlessness. Kirshner has written in a similar vein about his definition of trauma as an interpersonal event or experience that disrupts the symbolic framework and thereby threatens to damage the internalized “good object.” He emphasizes that “the good object—and here I refer explicitly to an internalized sense of goodness in its most symbolic sense—is essential to the capacity for emotional participation in the world of others and perhaps for psychic survival” (Kishner, 1994, p. 238). In summarizing the work of other psychoanalytic theoreticians, he states: “I argue that what is fundamentally at stake across the theories of trauma of Ferenczi, Klein, Winnicott and Lacan (and the list could be expanded) is the constant threat of destruction or loss of ’the good object’ and that the therapeutic

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efficacy of psychoanalysis is, therefore, closely connected with its function of maintaining or restoring this symbolic object” (p. 239). I would add that it is the very presence of this good object that enables and safeguards the communicative process of symbolization, the dialogue with the internal “thou” that names, enhances meaning, and creates narrative. Trauma, by abolishing the good object, precipitously (or gradually) shuts this process down. Conscious memory is the first casualty of the abolition of the internal good object. Furthermore, erasure of traumatically lost objects, and of the traumatic experience itself, may lead the survivor to complete oblivion, or to doubt the veracity and the authenticity of his own experiences. His sense of identity and continuity may be compromised; his ability to invest in intimate relationships may be severely impaired, leading to a life with a sense of doomed aloneness. In the absence of an internal responsive “thou,” there is no attachment to nor cathexis of the object. To follow André Green’s line of thought, with the loss of the good object (the dead mother complex), the primary ego, which is melded with the object, relentlessly relives its loss and becomes “as disinterested in itself as in the object, leaving only a yearning to vanish, to be drawn towards death and nothingness” (1996, p. 13). Later, Green even more eloquently points out that when “the lost object becomes an inaccessible good object, we come to deal with nothingness [the blank psychosis] … characterized by blocking of thought processes, the inhibition of the function of representation.… The final result is paralysis of thought … a hole in mental activity [and an] inability to concentrate, to remember, etc.” (Green, 1996, p. 40‑41). Although I find the formulation just described both compelling and accurate, the limits the author sets on its applicability render it incomplete, in my opinion. Green (1996) limits this phenomenon to the understanding of “failures” of favorable evolution. The infant, when growing up with an “emotionally dead” mother, instead of separating into an individual invested in himself, ends up narcissistically depleted in a “deathly deserted universe” (Green, 1996, p. 167). He buries part of his ego in the “maternal necropolis.” At this point I want to underscore how my view differs from Andre Green’s. I believe that the same dynamics and a comparable

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phenomenology hold true not only for the infantile symbolic maternal loss, but also for the traumatic loss of the good internal object at any age. The analytic candidate in the vignette that opens this essay made the same mistake Green makes. He related the patient’s empty life and the reenactment of the bad object in the analytic transference to maternal deprivation—or to put it in Green’s (1996) words, to the “dead mother complex.” He did not entertain (nor did his supervisor) the possibility that it was the father’s likely severe traumatic experiences in a Japanese POW camp (father’s loss of the good object through his possible torture experience) which, through intergenerational transmission, introduced the bad object into the analytic space.

 emory, Testimony, and the Resilience of the Struggle M for Repair At the center of contemporary human experience lie the world wars and genocides that are the legacies of the twentieth century. The Holocaust is paradigmatic of such experiences. Trauma and traumatic memory are, therefore, ubiquitous elements that permeate, albeit unconsciously, every layer of societal and personal experience. Psychoanalytic theory and psychoanalytic practice are inevitably informed and impacted by these historical societal events. In the next section of this chapter, I shall elaborate on testimony of Holocaust trauma, which counteracts the debilitating effects of traumatic erasure. The goal of the Nazis was not only to physically exterminate the Jewish people, but also to annihilate their experience, their memory, and their being known and remembered—to ensure their ultimate erasure. The methodological brutality of the Nazi subjugation did not permit the existence of Jewish agency for survival or otherwise. There were no means and no effective measures to fight for their lives, even though the effort and determination to stay alive existed. Instead they fought by using the traditional Jewish response to existential and psychological crises: they meticulously kept records of what transpired at any moment they could. They followed the ethical Jewish injunction of “Zachor.” Lewis Aron, quoting Avishai Margalit, explains that “Jewish tradition is filled with the commandment to remember…. The Hebrew Bible has no

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hesitation in commanding memory, using the word Zachor no less than 169 times” (Yerushalmi, 1982, p. 82). Zachor became their equivalent of the battle for physical survival they could not wage, a battle for reality, sanity, and truth, setting limits to the destruction. They continued thereby the ageless Jewish tradition of preserving memory as a way of survival of the Jewish people. The Nazi project as articulated by Himmler was to erase the Jewish people from the world and from the history of the world (The Posen Speech; Oct 6, 1943). The relics of their culture and religion were to be exhibited by the Nazis in a special museum in Prague. What I shall describe is the Jewish struggle against this erasure, a struggle to arrest and perhaps even prevent the previously described destructive effect of the massive traumatization. This is best exemplified by Historian Simon Dubnov, who had chronicled the history of the Jews for over half a century. He is said to have called on his companion Jews, “Good people, do not forget! Tell! Write!” shortly before he was murdered on December 8, 1941 during the liquidation of the ghetto Riga (Wierioke, 2006, p. 4).

The Erasure of the Genocidal Experience from History The Nazi campaign to achieve the “Final Solution of the Jewish Problem” was cloaked in secrecy. Terms like “extermination,” “liquidation,” or “murder” were rigorously avoided. A whole vocabulary of euphemisms was created—“special treatment,” “population movement,” “relocation to a new work place,” “cleansing operations,” “disinfections,” etc.—in order to disguise the murderous acts as they were being carried out (Cesarani, 2004, p. 114). Evidence was destroyed, bodies were exhumed and burned. “The essence of the Nazi scheme was to render itself—and to make the Jews—essentially invisible” (Felman & Laub, 1992, p. 209). The incommunicable nature of the horrors experienced by survivors is captured by the following vignette: Simon Wiesenthal, the famous “Nazi‑hunter,” closed his memoir with a reproduction of a conversation he had with an SS man—a conversation in which the SS man taunted him with the world’s doubt: You would tell the truth [about the death camps] to the people in America. That’s right. And you know what would happen, Wiesenthal?

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The Testimonial Process as a Reversal of the Traumatic Shutdown of Narrative and Symbolization They wouldn’t believe you. They’d say you were mad. Might even put you into an asylum. How can anyone believe this terrible business— unless he has lived through it? (Wiesenthal, 1967, p. 338; Tauber, 1998, p. 24‑25)

The SS officer’s disdainful prediction proved to be accurate in foreseeing the incommunicability of the brutalities the victims endured. The Holocaust was to be, and indeed to a large extent became, an “event without a witness” (Felman & Laub, 1992, p. 75). Therefore, what really took place included not only the ruthless massive killings, but also, for those who did not die, the murder of the experience itself. The intent was clear: no knowledge of the genocidal experience was to survive the extermination of the Jews. The truth itself was doomed to oblivion. The realities of the war played a minor role; the killers continued their brutalities almost until the moment of their total defeat. Testimonies of survivors preserved and stood their ground despite and against this near delusional thinking of the killers. They hold on to events which almost perished together with the people murdered in them. To mention a few examples: Out of 600,000 Jews brought to the Belzec death camp, only two survived. Except for a brief report by the Polish underground, nothing is known of the spontaneous act of resistance in Belzec, which took place on June 13, 1942 at the site of the removal of the gassed corpses. The report notes that four to six Germans and all of the Jews were killed (Arad, 1987). Official documentation exists only of the Sobibor uprising (October 14, 1943), because an estimated eleven SS men were killed, and therefore the German authorities had to report it. There is neither any official documentation of the Treblinka uprising (August 2, 1943), nor of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando revolt (October 7, 1944) (Hilberg, 1973). The death marches at the end of the war, for obvious reasons, had no official record, either. Were it not for the testimonies of the few that survived, hardly any trace would have been left of any of these events. Since it was part of the extermination process that the very ability to name, describe, and witness the Holocaust was also targeted for destruction, integrating survivor testimony in the historical narrative is a restorative process, defying the perpetrators’ original aim to create an event

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without a witness. Without this methodological refinement researchers put themselves at risk to repeat or continue the genocidal impetus.

The Advent of Testimony Against the backdrop of oblivion and suppression created by the Nazis, a persistent struggle by victims took shape with a purpose to inform. This was an act of resistance. They knew they were facing death, but did not want their history to be erased or written by their murderers. If they could not physically save their lives, they could at least prevent the murder of the truth of their experiences. French historian Annette Wieviorka (2006), in her book The Era of the Witness, eloquently traces this struggle from its very beginnings. It is devastating to read about European Jews’ pervasive imperative to document their experience. Their “writings from beyond the grave were a protest against death, and a refusal of it, through the creation of memories that would outlive them” (Wieviorka, 2006, p. 19). The early testimonies include, to cite only a few, the Archives of the Warsaw Ghetto, gathered by historian Emmanuel Ringelblum (Kassov, 2007), and a group of scholars closely working with him, as well as Ringelblum’s own diary; the Chronicles of the Lodz Ghetto from February 1941 to July 1944; and the book Am I a Murderer? by Calel Perechodnik, a member of the Jewish Police in Warsaw, who knew he would not survive and was therefore quite open in his self‑disclosure. While many more documents exist and still continue to surface, the majority of the material from this period must be assumed to have perished. A tragic example of such contemporaneous reporting, which reached the Allies but remained unheeded, is the testimony of Polish courier (between the government in exile and the Polish underground) Jan Karski, who gave his eyewitness account of the horrors of the Warsaw Ghetto and an execution of over 5,000 Jews in the Belzec death camp, which he infiltrated in the uniform of an Estonian guard, to British foreign minister Anthony Eden and U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, as well as many other public figures, in 1942. Karski (1944), in his position as an emissary, did not achieve the result his Jewish dispatchers had hoped and pleaded for: to convince the Allied leaders and the public that the Jewish situation

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was unprecedented in history and required an immediate response of the Allied military, or at least a threat that the perpetrators would be prosecuted after the war, which could have served as a deterrent to the ongoing mass murders committed by the Nazis. His autobiographical book, Story of a Secret State, published in the U.S. in 1944, did not draw much attention either. Karski’s interview with Claude Lanzmann in the film Shoah, after thirty‑five years of silence, illustrates the fragility and the precarious nature of his testimony. He almost breaks down, he wants to flee, he does not want to go back there. Karski struggles as a witness forty years after the war not simply because as a messenger he failed “to elicit the political response requested,” and “his testimony was itself kept secret by the Allied governments” and thus deprived of having any “bearing on the course of the military or political events” (Felman & Laub, 1992, p. 233‑34). He also has to come to terms with his own encounter with a world so utterly strange that its “otherness” can hardly be translated to those outside of that world. His observations emphasize how irreconcilable and unbridgeable this “otherness” remains in his interview with Lanzmann: “…but I reported what I saw. It was not a world. There was no humanity. Streets full, full…. Those horrible children … it was some hell … a Jew standing without moving … he is dying. They did not look like human beings” (Lanzmann, 1985, p. 172‑74). After liberation, there was literally a flood of testimonies. Between 1945 and 1949, about ten to twenty thousand testimonies were recorded in Poland, Germany, Hungary, and other countries. Special emphasis was placed on testimonies from children who survived. Their stories led to renewed hope and Jewish solidarity, and potentially impacted public opinion in the struggle for a Jewish state. Thousands of such testimonies were obtained, and anthologies of testimonies were published in Poland, Palestine, and Argentina (Cohen, 2007). There was no audience that listened to this early flurry of testimonial activity. Survivors continued to talk amongst themselves and a whole literature of Yizkor [memorial] books for the destroyed Jewish communities emerged. Discussions between friends and Landsmannschaften were the only places where Holocaust experiences could be related. In other

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contexts, they were generally unwelcome. No public space had been created yet for such testimonies to find a home. It was mostly in Yad Vashem, the Jewish peoples’ living memorial to the Holocaust, established in 1953, that the momentous amount of work of documentation, research, education and commemoration unabatedly continued. According to Wieviorka, it was only the Eichmann trial in 1961, the purpose of which was “to create a memory rich in lessons for the present and the future,” that brought witnesses to the foreground in the public setting of a court of law. One hundred eleven survivors gave testimony, and their experience, much more than the accused perpetrators’ actions, was given priority, in the form of extensive space and time, in the court proceedings. For the first time, the atrocities were related in public, broadcast, and televised throughout the world.

Implications for Therapy How can we mobilize libidinal forces that can be put to use to counteract traumatic erasure? The genuine experience of surprise in analyst and patient at the totality of a large blind spot, not seeing the self‑ evident, may in itself be re‑libidinizing, especially if such surprise is spontaneous and mutually shared. The therapeutic alliance makes an essential contribution to such re‑libidinization. Kohut’s self‑object and Winnicott’s “holding environment” are useful concepts in understanding how the re‑libidinization of the self and object and the connection between the two occurs. Auerhahn, Laub, & Peskin state, “It is only when survivors remember with someone, when a narrative is created in the presence of a passionate listener, that the connection between an ’I’ and a ’you’ is remade” (1993, p. 436). As Moore put it, Recovery from trauma apparently requires an experience, probably not dissimilar from that originally shared with a parent in whose arms shared constructions were first initiated.… The infant in the mother’s arms cannot ask if the mother believes her; it is the mootest of points. Correspondingly, for the severely traumatized person, the issue is not whether rape occurred or whether Auschwitz existed. There is no clinical point in involving theory to qualify such powerful and painfully established realities. The point is that such experiences be shared, constructed and reconstructed in a manner that mobilizes and repairs

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To follow Green’s thinking, “the goal to strive for is to work with a patient in a double operation: To give a container to his content and a content to his container” (1996, p. 42). It is providing what is needed to set a process in motion again. In Green’s own words, “It seems to me that the only acceptable variations of classical analysis are those whose aim it is to facilitate the creation of optimal conditions for symbolization” (p. 295). Can we consider the possibility that in the case of severely traumatized patients, the traditional analytic setting no longer offers the safety that is necessary for the analytic process to unfold? The analytic setting itself can become the very locus of reenactment of the traumatic event, which according to Simitis has a desymbolizing effect (1984, p. 17). When trauma is at the center, “The feeling is that something is happening which acts against the setting” (Green, 1996, p. 45). Both analyst and patient feel it, but more so the analyst, who has to protect the setting from something acting against it. When the analyst is able to achieve a certain degree of structure, “having succeeded in binding the inchoate and in containing it within a form” (p. 46), his own internal process of symbolization has begun. “He constructs a meaning which has never been created before the analytical relationship began” (p. 48). Whether such meaning is accurate, or how much of it he conveys to the patient, or how much of it the patient is able and willing to accept, are functions of the ongoing clinical process in which continuous mutual attunement and future revisions of such constructions are inevitable. The important thing is that the analyst takes such initiative in the construction of fact and of meaning, and remains a step ahead of his analysand in his readiness to know what it is all about (Simitis, 1984, p. 20). Kirschner states: the establishment of a condition of relative safety which I’ve defined in terms of maintenance of the good object in its capacity to represent the symbolic order, is a pre‑condition for a clinically useful transference repetition of trauma.… It must be said that more active measures

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Dori Laub seem to be necessary to provide an atmosphere of safety and confidence required for analytic work to be sustained. I refer here to overt expressions of interest and concern, willingness to participate in discussions about “external reality” as experienced by the patient, and attention to empathic contact. (1994, p. 240)

I end this essay with a clinical vignette from the training analysis of the candidate whose blind spots I described at the beginning. It is presented in the first person, because he himself is the reporter. It illustrates the approach of his own training analyst, who is not only a step ahead of his analysand, but offers him at a certain moment an item of historical information that is compellingly relevant to the aforementioned blind spots. As a child, I was deported to Transnistria, the part of Ukraine occupied by the Romanian Army, who were allies of the Germans. What I remembered for years was sitting with a little girl on the bank of the River Bug, the demarcation line between the German and the Romanian occupation territory. It was a beautiful summer day; there were green meadows and rolling green hills and a winding blue river. It was like a summer camp. We were having a debate at age five, arguing whether you could or could not eat grass. I recounted this memory in my second week of analysis in 1969 and luckily enough, my analyst was Swedish. His response was, “I have to tell you something. It was the Swedish Red Cross that liberated Theresienstadt and took depositions from women inmates in the camp. Under oath some of these women declared that conditions in the camp were so good that they received each morning breakfast in bed brought by SS officers.” There could not have been a more powerful interpretation of my denial. I stopped talking about young girls, green meadows, and blue rivers and started remembering other things, my own experiences of trauma.

Conclusion The inevitable conclusion of this essay is that in cases of massive psychic trauma, it is necessary to establish a setting “which allows the birth and development of an object relationship” in which the analyst participates in the construction of “a meaning which has never been created before the analytic relationship began … the analyst forms an absent meaning” (Green, 1996, pp. 47‑48). This is so because the survivor, in solitude, continuously faces the horrendously difficult task of dealing with his own inner voids, as well as with whatever he has fabricated or taken in to fend off the terror of these inner voids. In the last mentioned

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vignette, it was the fairy tale of the “summer camp” on the banks of the river Bug, a “pseudonarrative” at best. In addition, as highlighted in the discussion of Holocaust testimony, societal processes may pose formidable barriers that prevent traumatic experience from being heard and being known. A lot of resistance had to be overcome to recognize and address these voids. Such resistance is illustrated in the first vignette as operating in all three persons involved—patient, analyst, and supervisor. The contribution of Green’s concept of the “dead mother complex” is of greatest value. As I mentioned earlier, his error lies in limiting its relevance to the absence of maternal care. I find that it applies to all cases of massive psychic trauma where the internal “good object” has been destroyed. The mistake the analyst made in the first vignette was believing what Green believes, that maternal deprivation alone was at the root of his patient’s difficulties, thus not allowing for the possibility of the destruction of the good internal object through the traumatic experience that her father is assumed to have suffered.

REFERENCES Arad, Y. (1987). Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Aron, L. (2011). “Living memory”: Discussion of Avishai Margalit’s “Nostalgia.” Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 21:181‑91. Auerhahn, N., Laub, D., & Peskin, H. (1993). Psychotherapy with Holocaust survivors. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, Practice, Training, 30:434‑42. Caruth, C. (1996). Unclaimed Experience: Trauma Narrative and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Cesarani, D. (2004). Becoming Eichmann. Great Britain: Da Capo Press. Cohen, B. (2007). The children’s voice: postwar collection of testimonies of child survivors of the Holocaust. Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 21:73‑95. Felman, S., & Laub, D. (1992). Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History. New York: Routledge.

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Ferenczi, S. (1950). Child analysts in the analysts of adults. In: J. Rickman (Ed.), Further Contributions to the Problems and Methods of Psychoanalysis (pp. 198‑217). London: Hogarth Press. Freud, S. (1891). On Aphasia. London: Hogarth Press. ____. (1930). Civilization and its Discontents. Standard Edition, 21:59‑145. Green, A. (1996). On Private Madness. London: Rebuz Press. Hilberg, R. (1973). The Destruction of the European Jews. New York: First Viewpoint. Karski, J. (1944). Story of a Secret State. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Kassov, S. (2007). Who Will Write our History?: Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kirshner, L. (1994). Trauma, the good object and the symbolic: A theoretical integration. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 75:235. Klein, M. (1930). The importance of symbol formation in the development of the ego. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 11:221. ____. (1975). Love, Guilt, and Reparation and Other Works, 1921‑1945. New York: Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence. Kohut, H. (1971). The Analysis of the Self. New York: International Universities Press. Lanzmann, C. (1985). Shoah: An Oral History of the Holocaust. New York: Pantheon Books. Laub, D., & Auerhahn, N. (1993). Knowing and not knowing: Forms of traumatic memory. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 74:287‑302. Ley, R. (2000). Trauma: A Genealogy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Moore, R. (1999). The Creation of Reality in Psychoanalysis. Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press. Oliner, M. (1996). External reality: The elusive dimensions of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis Quarterly, 65:267‑300. Rizzuto, A. M. (1993). Freud’s speech apparatus and spontaneous speech. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 74:113‑27. Sigal, H. (1951). Notes on symbol formation. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 38:391‑97. Simitis, I. (1984). Vom konkretismus zur metaphorik. Psyche, 38:1‑28.

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Tauber, Y. (1998). In the Other Chair. Jerusalem: Gefen Publishing House. Van der Kolk, B., McFarlane, A., & Weisaeth, L. (1996). Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society. New York: Guilford Press. Wiesenthal, S. (1967). The Murderers Among Us. New York: Bantam Books. Wieviorka, A. (2006). The Era of the Witness. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Wilson, J., & Lindy, J. (1994). Countertransference in the Treatment of PTSD. New York: Guilford Press.

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Holocaust Memories and their Transmission1 Annette Furst

It is said that the children of Holocaust survivors “bear the scar without the wound” (Cohen, 1981, p. 2). The burden is on the second generation to make some meaning of the stories they hear and that inevitably become part of their memory. The following is an attempt at a psychoanalytic explanation of how it is that scars form without the wound. The numbers of terms used to try to capture the entity of inherited memory is indicative of its elusive nature. It is alternately referred to as the belated memory, prosthetic memory, vicarious witnessing, and memoire trouee—a memory shot through with holes (Hirsch, 2012, p. 3). These terms reflect that the descendants of survivors of massive traumatic events have such an intimate connection with the events that transpired in the previous generation that it feels like memory is the appropriate description even though it is not, in fact, a true memory. Marianne Hirsch, a feminist literary critic, indicates that postmemory is a very particular type of memory in which the connection to its source is mediated more through imagination than recollection. “Postmemory characterizes the experience of those who grew up dominated by narratives that preceded

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I would like to thank Paul and Anna Ornstein and Darlene Ehrenberg, who were kind enough to read this paper and offer valuable suggestions. Very special and deep gratitude goes to Jonathan Slavin, who offered superb mentoring. Jonathan was demanding, rigorous, critical, thoughtful, and exacting. I am deeply grateful for his devotion to seeing this paper to fruition and for our friendship that grew out of this endeavor.

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their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation and shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor re‑created” (Hirsch, 1997, p. 22). The term “transgenerational memory” suggests that the parental trauma is somehow transmitted to the next generation. But what is transmitted? How can one transmit an experience that could barely be assimilated by the person who experienced it directly? Is there something fundamentally different in working through a trauma experienced by proxy? Is the trauma the result of the fact that it is a child hearing about assaults on the people he counts on to be his ultimate protectors? Freud in Totem and Taboo wrote about the fact that “no generation is able to conceal any of its important mental processes from its successor” (1950, p. 159). So it is not only ideas that are passed on throughout history, but the unprocessed thoughts, the unknown, are transmitted as well.  There is a compulsion of many survivors to retell their stories. Why is there the need to recreate the trauma over and over again? In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1961), written shortly after World War I, Freud opens with the observation that the victims of shell shock returned persistently to the trauma of the war in their dreams. If dreams are wish fulfillments, how can one explain the compulsive repetition of an experience that was deeply disturbing? One of the theories that Freud offers for this compulsion is that by repeating the original trauma, whether in thoughts or in dreams, the person is trying to actively assert control; it is a desire for mastery. Freud gives the famous example of the “Fort‑Da” game, in which the child whose mother has disappeared tries to master his anxiety by repeatedly throwing away and then retrieving a toy. Each fresh repetition seems to strengthen the mastery that the child is in search of. Jonathan Shay, in his book Achilles in Vietnam (2003), says that there is much that we do not know about trauma, but we do know that Homer, who sung the tales of Troy, was seen as the doctor of the soul, and that soldiers who heard his stories would weep over and over again. There are

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two profound lessons from this—the need for traumatized people to tell their stories, and the need for them to mourn their losses. These are as basic to mental wounds as antiseptic is to physical wounds. Shay talks about how narrative can reestablish authority over memory by taking things that we re‑experience involuntarily and converting them into memory. One can only imagine that some survivors are compelled to tell their stories. Siegel (2012), writing about the development of the mind, says that in the sharing of the narratives (for those who were capable of doing this) there is the hope and attempt at fostering self‑coherence. It is, after all, psychoanalysis that advocates the “talking cure” to facilitate rendering a traumatic event. But in trauma, the parent often is incapable of conveying coherent narratives. Often, what emerge are tormented emotion‑eruptions of fragmented memories and doleful refrains of pain. If trauma events are, as Freud suggested in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, not fully assimilated, then what is actually being remembered and what is being transmitted in the telling? What does it mean “to transmit and to theorize around a crisis that is marked not by a simple knowledge but by the ways it simultaneously defies and demands our witness” (Caruth, 1996, p. 5)? I want to explore the way unmetabolized trauma by its very nature not only leaves its mark on the survivor, but can re‑traumatize others in the wake of its transmission. Memory, among other things, is also the way past events affect future function. I would like to present a vignette in the attempt to understand how, as a child of Holocaust survivors, I heard stories from my parents that were not my memories, but became my memories—at least in the sense of the powerful effect they exerted in shaping my life. I went to medical school and became an oncologist. In a sense, that was the least likely path for me. When I made this plan known to my analyst, she abandoned her neutral stance and expressed concern about the potential impact on me of being immersed in so much suffering. I could not explain the compulsion that drew me to this specialty. It felt more like a forcefield. In addition to finding myself in this curious situation, at some point I realized that there was one other thing that gnawed at me. I knew when I was considering the Oncology Fellowship that if I were the cancer patient I would not take chemotherapy or

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radiation as a treatment. I had to admit that it was an unconventional stance for an oncologist. It made no sense to me since I did believe in the efficacy‑–albeit somewhat primitive efficacy‑‑of chemotherapy, but I was still very clear that I, personally, would or could not take it if offered and that I did not know why.   My mother was thirteen when World War II broke out. In the telling of my earliest memories of her experiences, I hope that some sense of the forces that were working in me at this juncture in my career will become clear. My mother and her family lived in Czechoslovakia and, unable to escape, they endured the years of the war in hiding from the Nazis. One of my earliest memories was being told the story of my grandfather going to pick up his four‑year‑old daughter, my aunt, from nursery school. They returned to an empty house and soon realized that the entire family—his wife and the four other children‑‑had been rounded up and taken to a ghetto. My grandfather, terrified and bereft, wept like a child. He then took his daughter’s hand and walked over to Gestapo headquarters, where he turned himself and his daughter in to the “authorities” in order to be reunited with his family. In the ghetto, he found my grandmother deeply embroiled in a scheme designed to get the family out of the ghetto. She had surreptitiously arranged with the bread delivery man who brought his meager fare to the ghetto to smuggle one member of the family out of the ghetto every evening when he exited. This unlikely plan worked miraculously as my grandmother and the five children were secreted away—every night another precious charge lay still in the crumbs of the daily delivery. When the wagon appeared to take the last member, my grandfather, out of the ghetto, he refused to go. Whether he could not stand to contemplate the terrifying consequences of being captured or he did not want to abandon the others confined to the ghetto, his reluctance to leave led to his demise in Auschwitz.

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So I, like so many other children of the second generation, was plagued with the thought: what would I have done had I been there? Could I have survived this? Would I have been my grandmother full of spunk, determination, and fearlessness or would I have succumbed to my fate and followed in the footsteps of my grandfather, who I imagined to be gripped by fear? I moved from one fantasy to the other. I was my grandmother, the rescuer, and as a child, overwhelmed with these stories, I was obsessed with fantasies of rescue that made anything that my grandmother did pale in comparison. The other part of me totally identified with what I imagined about my grandfather. I remember thinking I too would have not risked the dangers of being caught and subjected to the torture that my five‑year‑old brain envisioned would follow captivity. And so my career as an oncologist was the logical occupation for me. I put myself in the position of my grandmother, the savior. In my role as an oncologist, I took innocent people whose lives were threatened through no fault of their own and who were terrified, and I told them that I had a plan, an escape route. It was not an easy one. It would involve a brief stay in the “camps,” where they would be subjected to horrors of losing their hair, maybe even becoming emaciated and too weak to function. All of this would fill them with despair and hopelessness. But they would not be abandoned. I would be there to accompany them on the proverbial train. Then, in the end, under my guidance they would be saved and free to live life fully. If they were unlucky enough not to make it or to be recaptured, in which case death was inevitable, I would never abandon them, and I would have effective and soothing drugs to ease their pain. For twenty years I worked out this issue. I was like my grandmother—tireless, determined, stubbornly pursuing life. I think the mystery of not wanting to take the chemotherapy myself if I were the one to find myself with cancer became clear to me only while writing this paper. That was the part of me that identified with what I believed about my grandfather. The unknown, whether it is chemotherapy or Nazis, is too scary, too daunting and too risky to contemplate. Either one can transform you into the bald, enfeebled, anorectic “victim.” I think part of my mind opted to go with my fate and thereby remove the unspeakable tension that my childlike mind

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found unbearable. So I played out both sides of the dilemma, not so much to reach any conclusions as much as to immerse myself and attempt to work through these questions that preoccupied and tormented me. At some point, I was taken aback as I realized that in my interpretation and understanding of my role as an oncologist, I had omitted seeing the part of myself as administering the poison. Although the poison in this case was ultimately the cure, I think there was a dissociated part of me that could not own the aggression. The way oncology clinics are set up these days, in most hospital clinics, it is the doctor who writes the orders and the nurses who administer the chemo. It allows a doctor who is ambivalent about aggression to be one step removed from the process. I do remember, however, when working as an intern in a New York hospital where part of our rotations were in smaller suburban hospitals, we were required to administer the chemo. I remember having a very strong antipathy to this but never really understanding why. So, as an oncologist, I got to play out all the roles that haunted me as a child—the savior, sweeping down and saving lives, and the aggressor (albeit one step removed). Janet (1925) talks about people’s reactions to trauma and observes that the persistence of the feeling of being traumatized is related to the fact that either no action was taken during the traumatic event, or the action taken was ineffective. Effective action can bring resolution. He goes on to say that people need to “repeat the recital that constitutes memory, to make that recital independent of the happening and to settle it into its appropriate place in our life history” (p. 666). He claims that the failure to act effectively in response to traumatic events is what creates depression in traumatized people. Janet thought that uncovering memories was only the first part of the therapy and that the memories actually needed to be modified and changed and reconstructed in such a way that a meaningful narrative could be created. “Janet saw memory as an act of creation rather than a static recording of events” (van der Kolk & van der Hart, 1989, p. 1537). He thought that the healthy response to stress was the mobilization of adaptive action. From the ancient Greek tragedies to plays and movies of modern‑day wars, there seems to be a need to create dramatic enactments in which action‑oriented events help overcome and transform traumatic

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experiences. We need a different narrative and a different physical experience that contradicts the helplessness associated with the trauma (van der Kolk, 2002, p. 388). The force field I described that compelled me to immerse myself in the field of oncology and surround myself with the anxieties of my Holocaust memories was the dissociated part of my experience. “In order for ongoing experience, thought and action to become conscious, a link must be made between the event and the mental representation of the self as the agent or the one experiencing the event” (Kihlstrom, 1987, p. 1451). Every day as an oncologist I was able to relive the affective memories of fear and helplessness and rewrite them into a different narrative, with myself as the one with agency. 

Memory The brain has many ways to remember experience. The memories that are stored in the brain can then influence how one reacts to different events in the future. Autobiographical narrative memory, which occurs when the individual has a sense of personal ownership of the memory and the events it conveys, both contributes to cohesion of one’s personality and serves a relational function. It is a way to connect to other human beings and to be known by them.  Traumatic memories are different from narrative memory. They often consist of visual images and sensations that can be terrifying. The traumatic event feels like one is reliving the event; it is much more a creation of the mind than a representation of the event. Traumatic memories are automatically re‑activated by specific stimuli known as triggers. The following is an example of one of these “triggers” in my life as an illustration of how re‑activation can occur. When my son was about to enter nursery school, I went to visit a Temple nursery for its suitability. On the appointed day I stood with all the other eager mothers to observe the class when all of a sudden I was overwhelmed with the flood of emotion. I ran out of the room crying. In the car, on the way home, I realized that seeing the group of four‑year‑old Orthodox Jewish boys wearing kippahs triggered an association for me.

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At a different time in history, not that long ago, this group of boys would have been singled out for murder by the Nazis. Needless to say, my son was eventually enrolled in a different preschool. The following was the trigger for this story. My mother, who was endowed with blond hair and blue eyes and lived through the war as a Christian, was entrusted with saving the lives of her neighbors’ two young children, a six‑year‑old boy and a four‑year‑old girl. My mother lived in constant fear that someone might notice that the little boy in her charge was circumcised, and that revelation would mean certain death to all. One day my mother found herself trapped with her two young charges in an area where the partisans were hiding. My mother tried to convince the Nazis that she and the children were in the vicinity fortuitously and needed a ride down to the next village to get “home” safely. The Nazi soldiers believed their story and my mother and the kids joined their convoy. At one point the little boy started to cry and said that he needed to “pee.” My mother somehow averted this potential disaster, but one has to wonder whether this memory of the potential lethal external signs of vulnerability etched in my mind from this story were reactivated in the unconscious while I was observing the nursery school class. Janet would have described the nursery school story as an example of what happens to people who are terrified or overwhelmed by extreme emotions. Because they are overwhelmed, they are unable to link the experience that they never could assimilate in the past with the rest of their personal history. The overwhelming “vehement emotion” causes disruption in the coherence of their experience. That was exactly what happened to me as the synthesizing functions of my psyche failed me in that classroom filled with happy children. The terror I had experienced when hearing this story from my mother, of the potentially dire consequences of exposure of the little circumcised boy, were resurrected when I saw the external sign of vulnerability, the kippahs, on the heads of the little boys in the nursery school .

Attachment Theory We know that after massive trauma there is often a transmission of images that can become enmeshed with the core identity of the person

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receiving the stories as a historical legacy (Volkan, 2002, p. 16). How can we understand this process? Freud focused on what the child projects into objects from the workings of their internal world rather than what was put into them from others. Later, theories developed that took into account the dimension of reciprocal processes that transpire between children and their caregivers. This was very clearly recognized by Loewald (1960) when he stated that not only do children internalize images of their mothers, but they also incorporate parents’ images of themselves at the same time. Bowlby (1973) formulated an alternative model of internalization, because he believed that psychoanalysis defined this process too mechanically. Bowlby’s theories put more emphasis on how the interpersonal field is created by both individuals within a relationship. The emotional availability of a caregiver is the crucial factor. How the parent is with the child is more important than what the parent does. Stern (1995) holds that it is the nature of the relationship—“the experience‑of‑being with” and not just the object or self‑representation that is critical. In order to better understand what happens in trauma, I turn to the work of Mary Ainsworth and Mary Main (1995), who created a tool to assess the security of attachment called the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI). The AAI is a narrative assessment of “an adult state of mind with respect to attachment” (Siegel, 2012, p. 104). What they found was that the parent’s pattern of narrating the story of her early family life within the setting of the interview could be predictive of her attachment to the child. It seems that the AAI is assessing some fundamental mental process of the parent during the subjective recollections of the parent’s history that ultimately impacts the communication with the child. “How we talk with people reflects our internal processes” (Stern, 1995, p. 104). Coherence of the narrative in the AAI was a reflection of secure attachment of the parent and predictive of secure attachment of the infant. This reflects a source of intergenerational transmission (Hesse and Main, 1999). A subcategory in the AAI classification accounted for unresolved trauma. It is the state of mind of the mother that determines the quality of attachment, and a key factor for this determination was whether the mother had unresolved grief. “In unresolved states, the mind’s ability

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to integrate various aspects of representations within memory into a coherent whole is impaired” (Siegel, 2012, p. 136). Emotional regulation is affected and confusion of past and present is common, so a person may seem disoriented in an interview. There are abrupt shifts in state of mind as intrusive memories are recalled, and this can result in difficulty maintaining a collaborative communication. It seems that loss itself does not necessarily create the trauma, but rather the fact that the trauma is unresolved. The stories that I heard from my mother were fragmented and pressured and created feelings of confusion and distress. In spite of this, there was a compelling need to absorb the stories coupled with the desire to tune them out because of their toxic nature. Eva Hoffman (2004), a child of Holocaust survivors, beautifully captured the texture of this in her book, After such Knowledge. But in our small apartment, it was the chaos of emotion that emerged from their words rather than any coherent narration. Or rather, the emotion, direct and tormented, was enacted through the words. The memories—no, not memories but emanations—of wartime experiences kept erupting in flashes of imagery; in abrupt fragmented phrases, in repetitions; broken refrains…. Speech came in frail phrases, in litanies of sorrow…. The speech broken under the pressure of pain. The episodes, the talismanic litanies, were repeated but never elaborated upon. They remained compressed, packed, sharp…. The inassimilable character of the experiences they referred to was expressed and passed on through this form. For it was precisely the indigestibility of these utterances, the fearful weight of densely packed feeling, as much [as] of any specific content, that I took in as a child. The fragmentary phrases lodged themselves in my mind like shards, like the deadly needles I remember from certain fairy tales, which pricked your flesh and could never be extracted again. (p. 11)

Hoffman’s description of how unresolved trauma was communicated helps shed light on how the trauma that was not mine was etched in my mind, and how the scar, if not the actual wound, was formed. Is there a way to understand how these stories, which reflect unresolved trauma, reverberated and echoed across generations? If the parent can dissociate and become agitated while recalling the story of her life, it is certainly conceivable that she could become

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dissociated or agitated at other times as well. If the parent is preoccupied with her own past and her past continually intrudes into her present, the parent can become filled with sensations of fear or anger, which can color her experiences with her child. Implicit memories are activated and have no explicit counterparts in reality. These implicit recollections are not subject to a process of self‑reflection. The flooding can then easily impair the capacity of the parent to be sensitive to the child’s signals and to achieve attuned communication. If the parent is preoccupied with emotions that are not connected or relevant to the current situation, this would certainly interfere with the child’s ability to look to the parent for guidance to “know how to feel.” These inconsistent interactions could leave the child having difficulties learning to regulate her own internal states. Fonagy (1999) explains the “children of survivors” syndrome by postulating that survivors of the Holocaust may have been unduly challenged by the experience of child‑rearing. Their infants might have triggered memories that led to “unbearable psychic pain,” which would result in the parent seeking refuge in dissociation (conference paper). When the parent is anxious and responds with fear to the infant’s distress, the child cannot be seen as an intentional being. The child’s distress does not elicit the desired results, so the best strategy to deal with this might be dissociation in order to absent himself mentally from the situation he finds intolerable. In this way, it is easy to see that what happened in the previous generation can create fears and ideations that impact the next generation. The traumatic experience is, of course, not “real” for the second generation in the sense that it did not happen to them. “What is real is the developing child’s interaction with a parent whose behavior at times reflects his or her original traumatic experiences, fears, and fantasies” (Hesse and Main, 1999, p. 530).

Agency Slavin (1997) presents the disruption of personal agency as a common feature of trauma. Personal agency in this situation refers to the ability of people to feel that they can act for themselves and have others interact

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with them in a relational context. The child derives self‑states by tuning into the mental state of the other. It is this back‑and‑forth interaction that allows for affect regulation and the creation of the sense of agency. We need to see that what we do has meaning and impacts the other. It is the ability to experience oneself as an agent, separate from the events and from the others in them, that allows us to have autobiographical narrative. When that does not happen, and when someone is not in control of the outcome of an interaction, it is what Jessica Benjamin (2007) refers to as being “done to.” When this happens, the sense of agency is threatened. When the caregiver’s narratives of their childhood attachment relationships convey cohesion, it is likely that the child will experience himself as an intentional being. What he does matters. This is agency. Mothers who had not worked through their own pasts were more likely to interact in such a way as to create fear in their children, essentially forcing their own mental states into their infants and leaving no space for the child’s own spontaneous experience (Main and Hesse, 1990). The child, who hears things that are so profoundly disturbing and incomprehensible, has no way to process, encode, or assimilate the information. The “being done to” is the feeling generated in the child who does not feel capable of stopping the onslaught because there is a certain momentum and urgency to the stories that do not allow room for reflection or escape. In this context, the ability to feel that one is one’s own agent within one’s mind is severely compromised. Not only does the child not have a sense of agency in his own internal experience, but the parent shares this state, and this compounds the trauma. The stories conveyed by the parents are not narratives where the parents themselves were in control of the outcome. Part of the urgency to tell the stories is to try to create a narrative where in the telling the parent can reclaim some ownership and thereby regain a sense of agency. The child wishes to reverse the content and the outcome of the stories, and the inability to do this contributes to the sense of helplessness. I know this was the case for me because the impotence (loss of agency) I experienced as the recipient of these “emanations” translated into endless heroic reveries of grandiosity in an attempt to assuage the helplessness I experienced as these barrages of horror were hurled my

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way. For the parent, there is release but not much relief in the telling of these dissociated stories. Not only is the child’s affect not responded to, because the parent is totally absorbed in his pain, but the child is also impotent to affect the mood of the distressed parent. For memory to be linguistically encoded, for it to be able to form the glue of psychic integrity, requires a sense of agency in relation to others (Slavin, 2007, p. 308). The parent who is preoccupied with her unresolved trauma creates feelings of fear and distress in her child, and this impairs secure attachment. The result is that the child is unable to feel like an intentional being. The failure of the parent to be able to see and recognize the child’s subjectivity and allow that subjectivity to have an impact subverts the sense of agency. The stories convey helplessness, both in content and in transmission, by a parent whose role should be that of helper. In this way, the trauma is compounded. Agency is lost in the face of this onslaught and because it cannot be encoded, it is stored as implicit memory, which comes back to haunt the already traumatized child. The following is a story that reflects how this impacted me. When I was five years old and found myself looking at the only remaining tattered picture of my grandfather, I asked my mother who the man in the picture was and why was he was sporting a long beard and hat. She launched into a sad and agitated story about ghettos and crematoria, alternating between affects of rage and grief. She needed a witness and a vehicle to give her traumatic story some coherence. My mother struggled to establish her own agency in an attempt to transform her trauma into autobiographical narrative. There was obviously no way she could see or feel the pained and panicked emotions I exhibited when hearing her story. My agency was quietly subsumed in her distress.

Memory: A Jewish Perspective Jews have six senses: touch, taste, sight, smell, hearing … memory. While Gentiles experience and process the world through the traditional senses, and use memory only as a second order means of interpreting events—for Jews memory is no less primary than the prick of a pin, or its silver glimmer, or the taste of the blood it pulls from the finger.

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Holocaust Memories and their Transmission The Jew is pricked by a pin and remembers other pins. It is only by tracing the pin prick back to other pin pricks—when his mother tried to fix his sleeve while his arm was still in it, when his grandfather’s fingers fell asleep from stroking his great‑grandfathers damp forehead, when Abraham tested the knife point to be sure Isaac would feel no pain—that the Jew is able to know why it hurts. When the Jew encounters a pin, he asks: what does it remember like? —Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated (2003, p. 198).

To ask “what does it remember like?” is to challenge the boundaries of memory. The term memory, as it refers to facts and details, constrains. “To remember like” is to engage one’s own experience and imagination into the past. Perhaps it is useful to return to my original question of how one transmits memory and ask: what is actually being transmitted? Is it a kind of existential memory, or is it a personal dialectic that allows us to communicate and engage each succeeding generation? The exploration of memory from a Biblical perspective offers unique insights on how memory and its transmission across generations can be understood. Memory is central to Judaism. Indeed, the commandment to remember and to transmit memory is rooted in a 5000‑year‑old tradition. Yerushalmi claims that the Old Testament injunction to remember is a “religious imperative” (1996, p. 9). The Hebrew word for memory, ”zachor,” is mentioned no less than 169 times in the Old Testament. We are commanded to remember the Sabbath, remember the destruction of the temple, remember Amalek, and remember the Exodus. Remember the days of old, Consider the generations long ago: Ask your fathers to recount it, And your elders to tell you the tale. (Deut. 32:7)

The theme of memory pervades the Exodus story. We are enjoined to remember the event even before the actual liberation takes place. Moses,

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forty years later, again repeats the injunction to pass on memory to future generations. “Only be careful, and watch yourselves closely so that you do not forget the things your eyes have seen or let them slip from your heart as long as you live. Teach them to your children and their children after them” (Deut. 4:9). Yerushalmi claimed that if there was a secret to Judaism’s survival, it was surely success in making individuals “remember” things that never happened to them (Wieseltier, 1984). But how do we bridge the temporal and the psychological distance between the original events, and how we understand them today? “Jewish tradition gives us tools to take a collective story from the past and make it our own story and none of this is predicated on historical accuracy. Rather in each case you are creating something that made it your own personal narrative” (“Questions,” 2012, Ledger blog). One of the ways this is done is through Midrash, which is an interpretive narrative of the Bible. Midrash can serve the function as a kind of “second generation writing of the Torah” where an “imaginative narrative” is composed after the initial narrative has happened, thus filling in the gaps between past and present (Horowitz, 1997, p. 290). The two seminal events in the Torah that we are enjoined to remember as if we were there were the Exodus and the giving of the Torah at Sinai (Horowitz, 1997, p. 288). Memory is at the heart of the Exodus story. We are told multiple times to remember the Exodus and to pass it on to the generations to come, but interestingly, the recorded story is light on dates or details. Names or descriptions of the Pharaoh and the textures of the hardships endured are conspicuously absent. The Haggadah, which, translated, means to tell a story, similarly is devoid of any survivor testimonies. There seems to be an acknowledgement that it is not necessarily important to remember the historical details of these milestone events. So what, in fact, is so critical that we are commanded to remember and equally emphatically enjoined to pass on through the generations? Yerushalmi, referring to the Passover Seder, says: “That which is remembered here transcends the recollection of any particular episode in an ancient catastrophe” (1996, p. 44). The memories that are unleashed by rituals and liturgies are “not a series of facts to be contemplated at a

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distance, but a series of situations into which one would somehow be existentially drawn. Both the language and gesture are geared to spur, not so much a leap of memory as a fusion of past and present. Memory here is no longer recollection, which still preserves a sense of distance, but reactualization” (p. 44). The Passover Seder invites us to collapse the distance of time and space by imagining ourselves into the events of the ancient story and acknowledging the aspects of those struggles in our own life. Just as at the Seder, one must imagine oneself into history in order to acknowledge one’s own presence in history, Horowitz invokes Midrash to help create for the Holocaust a “narrative of presence rather than absence” (1997, p. 289). She quotes Lang, who proposes that each Jew tell the story of the Holocaust as though he or she had passed through it, thus “occupying a space between history and imagination” (ibid.). If Midrash, as a mode of interpretive narrative, is asking us to place ourselves at the Red Sea and Sinai, it is through “an act of imaginative interpolation” (ibid.). The act of imaginative interpolation, so central to Judaism, feels more challenging in regard to the generation post‑Holocaust. The children of survivors feel the psychological impact of the Holocaust as immediate and compelling, but there is a profound gap between what we know intellectually and what we can grasp emotionally. Freud recognizes how difficult it is to “feel our way” into the mind that suffers the consequences of trauma (Freud, 1930, p. 89). As a result, “The Jew who comes after oscillates between a presence and an absence” (Horowitz, 1997, p. 290). Just as Midrash fills in textual gaps and lets us imagine things that the Torah does not explicitly tell us or things that we have not personally experienced, Holocaust narratives can be a vehicle that helps us fill in our own reactions and interpretations to events that are pivotal to our experience as a people, but that we were not present for. This can sometimes serve as a way to work through some of the complex issues that were so difficult for the survivors to process and resolve. In this way, Jewish memory allows us to be bound to the past even while we reinterpret the past. It allows us to be part of a narrative that precedes and outlasts us. It allows us to create an identity around stories and visceral

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experiences in which we may not have been physically present. In each case, it allows us to create our own personal narrative (Kurtzer, 2012). Zornberg, in her book on the Exodus, reinforces this idea when she reflects that testimony operates in bridging the gap between history and imagination. The original historical events of the Exodus had a “rawness” to them. This certainly applies to Holocaust events as well. Zornberg suggests that because of this “rawness,” the “self” that was liberated from Egypt could only experience a limited, fragmentary version of events and a provisional sense of his or her own self. She maintains that through the narration, “…by the continuing interaction between parents and children that transformed versions of the self … will be generated” (2001, p. 5). We saw how trauma is often dissociated because of “vehement emotion” that overwhelms. It is the trauma victim’s inability to appropriate their own story that makes the story a matter of “endless testimony,” for “each generation thus has an exclusive opportunity to reorganize, reorder what was originally inchoate, disoriented” (p. 12). A fuller, more complex rendering of the narrative evolves as future generations with a more complex sense of self grapple with its meaning. Memory thus becomes the sacred link between past and future. Zornberg says that “narrative needs time to do its work—to renegotiate the sense of total presence of fullness that the self craves…. This is the core tension that the Midrashic narratives explain” (p. 6).

Is There a Way that Memory also Informs the Future? Memory becomes the imaginative narrative that infuses meaning into history. The Haggadah, by recording the musings of the descendants of the survivors, presents us with memories that are less bound by what actually transpired and more concerned with what lessons they might learn from it. “It speaks to the culture that teaches us the importance [of knowing] how to draw from the past in order to dictate how we act in the present” (Kurtzer, 2012, p. 23). We remember the Exodus so we will be kind to the orphan and the stranger. “When you harvest the grapes in your vineyard do not go over the vines again. Leave what remains for the alien, the fatherless and the widow. Remember that you were slaves in Egypt” (Deut. 24:21). The

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numerous ways to be kind to the widow, orphan, and stranger are explicitly outlined in this chapter. We are commanded to love our neighbor only once: we are urged to love the stranger no fewer than thirty‑six times in the Torah. Moses tells the Israelites even before they have left Egypt that they must not oppress the stranger because “you were strangers in Egypt” (Deut. 10:19). After 210 years of slavery, this could hardly be a message solely for the benefit of the just‑liberated slaves. As important as it was to remember that you were slaves, it was equally important to learn the lessons that must flow from this experience of oppression. It is a hopeful message of the potential transformative possibilities of trauma over time. “We remember for the sake of future and for life” (Sacks, 2006, pp. 39, 24). While the Torah understands that things need to be remembered, there is a clear message that these memories are to be inextricably linked with action and agency. Growing up, I was immersed in the feelings of helplessness that I experienced in hearing the traumas of my mother’s Holocaust past. I needed an action, like the one Janet talked about, that would enable me to “repeat the recital that constitutes memory, to make that recital independent of the happening and to settle it into its appropriate place in my life history” (Janet, 1925, p. 666). Memories needed to be modified, transformed, and ultimately reconstructed into meaningful narratives. Through my work as an oncologist, I remembered the “helpless” and the “other” and through action and agency, I tried to transform the memory into something more than just “slavery.” I looked at the patients in my clinic who were grappling with life and death, and by asking myself “what does this remember like?” I was able to create my own interpretive narrative. These approaches to healing are evocative of the ancient teachings and seem reminiscent of the rabbinic injunction many centuries ago: “in every generation each of us must see ourselves as if we personally had come out of Egypt” (Mishnah, Pesachim, 116b).

Discussion I have tried in this chapter to convey how the memories of the Holocaust, although not my memories, insinuated themselves into my

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everyday existence. Volkan, in his book The Third Reich in the Unconscious (2002), talks about how parental unconscious fantasies and parental worry and affect can be transmitted transgenerationally. It becomes the child’s task, again unconsciously, to try to repair the worry of the parent. He gives an example of a child who was chronically obese trying to reassure the mother (who was starved in the concentration camps) that threats of food depravation would never haunt her again. I offer here my own personal vignette along these lines, which I hope will illustrate how I unconsciously took on the task to alleviate what I thought was a concern of my mother’s. When I first heard the Holocaust stories from my mother, she was a new immigrant and spoke English very poorly. The word she used to describe her fugitive status was “running.” She would say: I was running in the woods; running with the partisans; running with the kids; running away from the Nazis. In my mind’s eye I saw her always in the act of running away, while being hotly pursued by the Gestapo, and I could visualize the chase and feel with horror the menacing breath of the pursuers on her neck. With totally unconscious motivations, I became an avid runner. For years I could not understand why during my runs I was often flooded with terrifying images. By running I re‑created the image I had of my mother, who I imagined as fleeing—out of breath and terrified. The running continued to be a passion (or a necessity?) in spite of the intrusive, unsettling fantasies, and one could wonder whether there was an element, besides endorphin satisfaction, that supported this activity as a potential for a life‑saving skill. This unconscious resonance between me and my mother seems to support the view that tasks are given by a person in one generation to a person in another without either of them being fully conscious of the message. This is how internalized object images can pass from generation to generation and the chosen trauma they carry can assume new functions and new tasks in the transmission. The kind of imagery that I received as a legacy from my parents served as a source of unconscious fantasy that, in turn, had the power to organize important aspects of my identity. The Holocaust literature discusses how normal developmental feelings of aggression toward

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parents are often complicated by guilt when layered with the Holocaust stories that graphically spoke to the real consequences of aggression. The normal separation and individuation process can, when colored by parental losses, become profoundly implicated in the development of Holocaust‑related attachment narratives. I found my mother more than once dialing 911 when I failed to return home at a designated time. Although I somehow learned to “stay my hand” when I, as a parent, found myself in a similar circumstances, the “dark places” I went to were not dissimilar. Do these developmental challenges, when superimposed on the imagery, lead to an imagining of a horror even worse than the one depicted in reality? The following story reflects that question. Anna and Paul Ornstein, psychoanalysts and survivors of the horrors of concentration camps and labor camps respectively, have long since despaired of having my company when they attend movies or plays that depict Holocaust themes. They are unique and extraordinary individuals. In a way that seems to transcend their personal equanimity, they seem to have no problem watching these theatrical iterations, certainly not without strong affect, but with an equanimity that I, and many others as the children of Holocaust survivors, find impossible to achieve. Is it because for them the stories, although deeply disturbing, did have an end—liberation of the camps, reuniting with family members? For us, they are images—not our memories—that we passively receive and for which there was no “ending.” Does this allow those images to sit in our imagination suspended in all their horror, with never a prospect of relief? For the child, there is no historical, political, or social context for the trauma. The child did not grow up with the drumbeat of the approaching terror. What we hear is a horror story—nightmarish enough within a context—but perhaps even more bewildering without one. The child who absorbs the story is often younger than the parent was when he or she suffered the trauma. This alone can rob the child of a certain innocence, and what reinforces that loss is that there is no time in the child’s life that was ever ”pre‑Holocaust.” Part of that loss of innocence is that the unthinkable and the unimaginable had already taken place. Again, this is so eloquently described by Eva Hoffman: “…

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the dread‑inducing stories were passed on and conveyed a universe of absolute forces and absolute unreason, a world in which ultimate things happen without cause or motive, where life was saved or lost routinely and through reflex movement and where the border between life and death was dangerously permeable. Irrational as the world my parents endured had been, I made of it something more utterly irrational still” (2004, p. 12). So for us, the second and third generation of the Holocaust, there never was a world without crematoria, as for our “post‑9/11” children there will never be a world without suicide bombers. I began my paper referring to Freud, who talked about the need to repeat in order to achieve some control or mastery over a situation. There is little doubt that in my work as an oncologist I absorbed the sense of anxiety about the fear of death from my parents, and even though I transformed it into a very “different outcome,” the need to be immersed in it never felt like a choice. The engagement with loss, absence, and death is the existential challenge that we all grapple with. This human universal can take on a particular power and urgency when the Holocaust stories are delivered in one’s mother’s milk and course through the veins of everyday life.

REFERENCES Benjamin, J. (2004). Beyond doer and done to. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 73:5‑46. Bowlby, J. (1973). Attachment and Loss: Volume Two; Separation, Anxiety and Anger. New York: Basic Books. Caruth, C. (1996). Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Cohen, A. (1981). The Tremendum: A Theological Interpretation of the Holocaust. New York: Crossroads. Epstein, H. (1979). Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors. New York: Penguin. Foer, J. Safran (2003). Everything Is Illuminated. New York: Perennial.

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Fonagy, P. (1999). Attachment, the Holocaust and the outcome of child psychoanalysis: An attachment‑based model of transgenerational transmission of trauma. Paper presented at the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute Conference. Freud, S. (1950). Totem and Taboo. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul LTD. ____. (1961). Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Standard Edition, 18. Hesse, E, & Main, M. (1999). Second generation effects of unresolved trauma in nonmaltreating parents: Dissociated, frightened, and threatening parental behavior. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 19:481‑540. Hirsch, M. (2012). The Generation of Postmemory. New York: Columbia University Press. ____. (1997). Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hoffman, E. (2004). After Such Knowledge: Memory, History and the Legacy of the Holocaust. New York: Public Affairs. Horowitz, S. (1997). Auto/Biography and fiction after Auschwitz. In: E. Sicher (Ed.), Breaking Crystal: Writing and Memory After Auschwitz (pp. 276‑94). Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Janet, P. (1925). Psychological Healing, Vol.1. New York: Macmillan. Kihlstrom, J. (1987). The cognitive unconscious. Science, 237:1445‑52. Kurtzer, Y. (2012). Shuva: The Future of the Jewish Past. Waltham: Brandeis University Press. ____. (2012, June 6). Being Jewish Without Trauma: Retrieved from http. www.myjewishlearning.com/blog/members‑of‑the‑scribe/author/ Kurtzer. Lang, B. (1990). Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide. London: University of Chicago Press. Loewald, H. (1960). On the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 41:16‑33. Main, M. (1995). Attachment: Overview, with implications for clinical work. In: S. Goldberg, R. Muir, & J. Kerr (Eds.), .Attachment Theory: Social, Developmental and Clinical Perspectives (pp. 407‑474. Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press. Main, M., & Hesse, E. (1990). Parents’ unresolved traumatic experiences are related to infant disorganized status: Is frightened and/or frightening parental behavior the linking mechanism? In: M. T. Greenberg,

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D. Cicchetti, & E. M. Cummings (Eds.), Attachment in the Preschool Years: Theory, Research and Intervention (pp. 161‑182). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Questions and answers with Yehuda Kurtzer: Author examines memory anxiety of contemporary Jews. (2012, April 12). Retrieved from http:/ www.jewishledger.com/category/nationalworld. Sacks, J., Rabbi (2006). Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’s Haggadah. New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group, Inc. Shay, J. (2003). Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character. New York: Scribner. Siegel, D. (2012). The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are. New York: Guilford Press. Slavin, J. (2007). Personal agency and the possession of memory. In D. Mendels & H. B. Soreq (Eds.), Memory: An Interdisciplinary Approach (p. 308). Switzerland: Peter Lang Publishers. ____. (1997). Memory, dissociation and agency in sexual abuse. In R. Gartner (Ed.), Memories of Sexual Betrayal: Truth, Fantasy, Repression and Dissociation (pp. 307‑8). New York: Aronson. (Revised version of chapter published in Gartner, Memories of Sexual Betrayal, 1997.) Stern, D. N. (1995). The Motherhood Constellation. New York: Basic Books. van der Kolk, B., & van der Hart, O. (1989). Pierre Janet and the breakdown of adaptation in psychological trauma. American Journal of Psychiatry, 146:1530‑40. ____. (2002). Post‑traumatic therapy in the age of neuroscience. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 12(3):381‑39. Volkan, V. D. (2002). The Third Reich in the Unconscious. New York: Brunner‑Routledge. Wieseltier, L. (1984, January 15). Culture and collective memory. New York Times. Retrieved from http:/www.nytimes/com/pages/books/ review/index.html. Yerushalmi, Y. H. (1996). Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Zornberg, A. (2001). The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodus. New York: Doubleday.

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In Bed with a Collaborator: Reenactments of Historical Trauma by a Granddaughter of Holocaust Survivors Nirit Gradwohl Pisano

Over the past two decades, researchers and clinicians alike have grown curious about the impact of the Holocaust on the lives of its third‑generation descendants.1 Nevertheless, the literature regarding grandchildren of survivors remains sparse, and repeatedly points to “contradictory” hypotheses and conclusions yielded by pertinent studies in the field. While many inquiries trace the long‑sensed and increasingly recognized intergenerational transmission of Holocaust trauma and memory (Felsen, 1998; Rubenstein, Cutter, & Templer, 1989‑1990), others underscore survivors’ and their offspring’s “resilience in the face of adversity” (Sigal, 1998, p. 582). Although “resilience” rightfully honors the struggle and endurance of survivors and their descendants in a post‑Holocaust world, it is often interpreted as an absence of Holocaust themes, sensitivities, and reverberations in their day‑to‑day lives. For example, a number of researchers suggest that the transgenerational transmission of trauma has altogether ceased by the third generation (Bachar, Cale, Eisenberg, & Dasberg, 1994). Such conclusions invite questions about the concept of intergenerational 1



The following discussion, including the interview below, appears in my book, Granddaughters of the Holocaust: Never Forgetting What They Didn’t Experience (2012).

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trauma and the apparent efforts to either prove or refute its existence; the hunt for psychopathology versus the pursuit of a broader psychodynamic understanding of the third‑generation experience; and the implications of tracing “trauma trails” (Atkinson, 2002) two generations following such horrors. Inconsistent findings have been accounted for by differences in sample, procedure, measures, and other methodological details. In an attempt to “resolve the divergence of the clinical and non‑clinical findings on intergenerational transmission of trauma, between qualitative and quantitative approaches, and between methodologically more robust versus less robust studies,” Sagi‑Schwartz, van IJzendoorn, and Bakermans‑Kranenburg (2008, p. 106) conducted a meta‑analysis of research on the third generation. However, despite their defined objective, Sagi‑Schwartz et al. excluded all qualitative publications from their investigation, noting that such studies “do not fit into a meta‑analysis paradigm” (p. 111). Furthermore, they acknowledged their attempts to retain a more “homogenous” group by including only non‑clinical samples, thereby allowing their findings to be more “robust” (p. 111). Thus, their conclusion that “participants showed no evidence for tertiary traumatization in Holocaust survivor families” must once again be understood within the margins of their research questions and criterion (p. 105). Sagi‑Schwartz et al. recognize at the start of their paper that “the field still seems to beg for further systematic examination of third generation effects…” (p. 107); indeed, with the completion of their work, this yearning persists. Alongside others, Bar‑On addresses the deductions of quantitative analyses such as those described above, emphasizing the ways in which these studies “undermine what voices within the second and third generations tell us, and the echoes these stories have within us” (2008, p. ix). He elucidates the problem with the notion of “methodologically more robust” studies (Sagi‑Schwartz et al., 2008, p. 106), impelling us to question whether or not such models exist. For example, Bar‑On questions the concept of “control groups,” often comprised of “families of Jewish European descent who did not live under Nazi occupation,” as a contrast to experimental groups of Holocaust survivors and their offspring (2008,

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p. xi). Specifically, he emphasizes that members of “control groups” may have fled from Nazi‑controlled territories, lost family members and friends in the Holocaust, and themselves wrestled with a complex experience of bereavement: So, they go through processes of mourning, of silencing these losses, as they “have no right to feel effected” in the eyes of the survivors, or in their own eyes, and in my view therefore cannot be counted as a control group in any deeper psychological meaning. (p. xi)

Bar‑On further addresses the refutation of intergenerational trauma, linking this impulse to the shame and silence that surrounded one’s identity as a Holocaust survivor during the emergence of the State of Israel (p. x). That is, the persistence of this historically‑rooted dynamic may motivate individuals to deny the ongoing impact of the Holocaust in an attempt to assimilate with the “normal” lifestyle and mentality of the collective consciousness surrounding them. In addition, Bar‑On suggests that the disavowal of intergenerational trauma transmission may reflect researchers’ apprehension about imposing an additional, multi‑generational burden or responsibility on survivors. He states of these researchers: They may have reacted to the assumption that relational aftereffects can be seen as some kind of an accusation toward the survivors who suffered so much, who were stigmatized enough, that they should not be burdened with any unnecessary additional stigma. This approach puts the survivors’ assumed needs to be protected above those of their children and grandchildren. (p. x)

Yet, what is the value of “protecting” survivors from recognizing the long‑lasting impact of their traumatic experiences? Litvak‑Hirsch and Bar‑On depict the increased opportunity for grandchildren of survivors to achieve “psychological freedom,” particularly through their unique ability to address “undiscussable” themes within their families (2006, p. 475). In doing so, these grandchildren are able to initiate new narrative possibilities among family members, breaking down the “double wall” of silence (Bar‑On, 1995, p. 20) created by survivors and their children. Furthermore, the needs of the third generation are highlighted in Echoes of the Trauma, which explores the second generation’s upbringing by

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survivor parents as well as survivors’ children’s experience of parenting their own adolescent children (Wiseman & Barber, 2008). While Wiseman and Barber emphasize the ways in which the second generation’s “quest to heal the echoes of the parental past is a powerful motivator for generational change,” they simultaneously recognize that amending one’s “intergenerational transmission of problematic parenting” is not a simple pursuit (2008, p. 227). They describe a conflictual scenario between a second‑generation parent and her third‑generation adolescent child, noting: “In some cases the communication was portrayed as more open through their parents’ eyes than through the adolescent’s eyes, perhaps representing the gap between the parents’ explicit attitudes and actual behavior” (p. 226). From a perspective of health, Chaitin (2003) investigated how families contend with and work through their history by exploring the coping styles amongst two or three generations of twenty families of Holocaust survivors. Utilizing and advancing Danieli’s (1988) classification of post‑war adaptation, Chaitin identified six distinct coping patterns exhibited by her participants, categorizing them as: “victim families,” “fighter families,” “those who made it,” “numb families,” “life goes on,” and “split families” (2003, p. 305). Chaitin’s life‑story interviews revealed that coping styles, as well as traumas, are transmitted to and incorporated by family members across generations. In the realm of psychopathology, Fossion, Rejas, Servais, Pelc, and Hirsch (2003) identified a direct relationship between the trauma experienced by survivors and the psychiatric symptoms developed by their grandchildren. Specifically, they described the thwarting of the developmental process in an atmosphere of silence, as the grandchildren they encountered in their clinical work lacked a historical root that might provide context for their parents’ way of being: “Due to the impossibility of referring to past experience, these families were continually confronted with new situations at each stage of life—particularly when facing issues of separation and independence, thus generating an insurmountable crisis” (Fossion et al., 2003, p. 523). In the best case scenario, grandchildren of survivors are able to recognize the intergenerational patterns at play, utilize words to

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metabolize their emotional experiences, and associate their knowledge of historical traumas with present manifestations of past suffering. When this does not occur, however, traumas are “paradoxically re‑created” generation after generation, with or without conscious awareness (Talby‑Abarbanel, 2011, p. 230). In her case presentation of a third‑generation survivor named “Ann,” Talby‑Abarbanel captures the incessant enactments that occur in the face of unspoken and unspeakable grief and loss. Ann is first described as wrestling with “un‑integrated” parts of herself without a framework for the origin of such disintegration (p. 219). While confronting her mother about their tormented relationship, Ann learns of her Holocaust history for the very first time; she is subsequently able to comprehend the root of her past obsession with Holocaust books and films, her lifelong creation of artwork centered around themes of relocation and isolation, and her vivid, complex dreams of “separateness” and “attachment” (p. 233). Talby‑Abarbanel writes: Ann added that by avoiding the trauma and by refraining from working it through, they [her parents] paradoxically re‑created the same atmosphere in their own family, from which she now needed to distance herself. Indigestible non‑verbal terror, unbearable pain, and apocalyptic fantasies were always in the air. (2011, p. 230)

Having a place to explore and symbolize their experience allows third‑generation survivors to promote connection and growth within their families, to discover words that might heal the torment of unexpressed emotions and dynamics, and to honor their history while reworking its previously debilitating impact on generation after generation. Bar‑On relays a personal experience with a student in one of his workshops, who claimed disbelief about the concept of a “second generation” of the Holocaust despite her technically belonging within this group (2008, p. x). Bar‑On recalls the impassioned responses of this woman’s peers, who understandably felt their own experiences contested by her bold, dismissive statement. The disagreements within the field of third‑generation Holocaust research elicit reactions of parallel intensity, highlighting the personal investment and far‑reaching implication of these studies to the individuals conducting them. Bar‑On

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writes: “The ambivalence of researchers in this domain can be understood, as we study a complex phenomenon many years after the original occurrences, effected by several simultaneous processes” (2011, p. xi). Yet as the grandchildren of survivors are continually motivated to confront their parents’ and grandparents’ experiences, to articulate multifaceted narratives, and to pursue an intergenerational perspective at once removed from and connected to the Holocaust, it has become increasingly imperative for their traumas to be acknowledged and their voices to be heard. Following is a discussion of one of ten interviews I conducted with American and Israeli granddaughters of Holocaust survivors. All interviews consisted of one 60 to 120‑minute session, depending on the scope of the narrative. The discussions began with my open‑ended statement, “Tell me about yourself,” as was done by Ewing (2004) in her studies. The conversations then took the form of psychoanalytic interviews, in which I remained as minimalist as possible in my interventions and used my free associations in reaction to the interviewee. As each narrative unfolded, I kept track of the thoughts, feelings, and desires that were elicited in me, then utilized these responses as pieces of information to inform my questions and comments. Most women spoke fluently and eagerly throughout the interview; however, if a participant remained relatively unresponsive or limited in the depth of her narrative, I posed specific questions in order to stimulate the conversation, keeping the following questions in mind: Who is this person? How does she identify herself? What does she know about her family history? What does she not know and why? Where does she come from? How does that affect her? What is her role within her family? How do the limitations of her knowledge impact her experience? How might she know more? This approach was selected in order to encourage participants to speak openly and freely about their Holocaust history, and to allow me to respond to the content and mood of their stories as well as to my own reactions to the narratives. Following each interview, I kept a log of my own thoughts, associations, and reactions to the participants’ narratives, as well as any feelings or observations that arose during and after the interview. This log served

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to both keep track of the ideas that were developed throughout the course of the interviews and to engage with my unconscious. The interviews thus became a dynamic event—a process—that explored features of both the transference and countertransference. Furthermore, my exploration was informed by the literature of Packer and Addison (1989) and Josselson, Lieblich, and McAdams (2003), who maintain that underlying narrative research is the belief that human nature cannot be captured by a single theory, much like text analysis cannot be encapsulated by one person’s perspective or interpretation. As Packer and Addison explain, “Interpretive research emphasizes that the researcher must not act as if he or she is a value‑free researcher who can objectively see things as they ’really’ are, or that the ’data’ collected is, in some way, independent of the person who collects it” (1989, p. 42). Instead, throughout the interview process, the researcher should bear in mind, “I was the one who was taking notes, asking questions in the interview, and selecting what aspects of documents and literature were significant for my purposes” (Packer & Addison, 1989, p. 41). Thus, the interviews represent the spoken and unspoken elements of communication and understanding between two individual people. In drawing conclusions from the data, I utilized a thematic analysis to examine the emergent themes, both in the actual interviews and in my own reactions to the narratives, which signified responses to Holocaust trauma. I looked for recurring ideas, for metaphors that evoked particular images, and for words that seemed laden with meaning. I also made a point of focusing on both explicit and implicit information—including pauses, repetition, slips of the tongue, hesitation, laughter, tears, and tone of voice. Hence, the “data” by definition encompassed both verbal and non‑verbal features of the narrative. While this method allowed for layers of meaning to emerge, the complexity of analyzing non‑verbal aspects of verbal accounts was also the greatest obstacle inherent in this approach. For example, differentiating between what was purposely left unsaid and what was unconsciously avoided was not always possible. Ultimately, however, within an unencumbered space that welcomed words, silences, and everything in between, these women’s life stories began to unfold.

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Miriam M: I also have kind of a rebellious side. I’ve gotten a lot of emotional satisfaction out of feeling… sort of rebuffing what I’m supposed to be. Another interesting piece… my first love was this Slovak guy from Eastern Europe who was Christian … wore a cross around his neck… and it was like years of devastating… I didn’t date him for years, but… [he was] not Jewish, he was from Eastern Europe, from Slovakia. I went to visit him once with his grandmother and like, they had, like, chicken soup with matzo balls but they were long and not round, and there were like, donuts with jelly on the side and… I was very, very pulled to him… like, oh my God, his grandmother was a collaborator with the Germans. And he’d tell me stuff and anyway… I played out a lot of stuff around a lot of rebelliousness. Also, I think I felt close to him. In some ways there was a lot of cultural difference… but I think I also felt really comfortable with him. There was something comforting for me with him. He was from Eastern Europe and anyways there was a lot of kind of intrigue… N: How was that for you? The religious differences, background differences… all the things that came to mind? M: It felt really wrenching. I think for a while he didn’t tell his family that I was Jewish. He had an uncle who was a priest, and thought he would be disapproving… like, took me to see the area that used to be the Jewish part of town... it was clearly abandoned. Told me the Germans had taken over his grandfather’s house and the backyard and stuff and I really had this sense of like… it was awful, I felt like I was in bed with a collaborator and it was killing my grandmother, and my mom was extremely opposed to it; said it wasn’t going to be good for me, that I would have… you know, there was a lot of deterrence. I felt really fragmented. I didn’t know how my Jewish self was going to be. It was also really interesting and intriguing to be like in a church in Slovakia and Kristallnacht was there. It was also exciting… I definitely played it out like constantly.

“I’ve gotten a lot of emotional satisfaction out of feeling… sort of rebuffing what I’m supposed to be,” says 29 year‑old Miriam, a half‑ Israeli, half‑American, third‑generation descendant of the Holocaust. Her tale of her “first love” powerfully captures how history comes alive in her present‑day existence. “I was very, very pulled to him,” she reflects, and the meeting of a Jewish descendant of a Holocaust survivor and a Christian descendant of Slovak “collaborators” is saturated with images linked to past and present. Miriam conveys the “comforting” but also

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“wrenching” effects of this bond; after all, the connection they shared was established three‑quarters of a century ago, under circumstances diametrically opposed to the present. Through her “rebellious” nature, Miriam blurs the boundaries between love and hate, rebelliousness and allegiance, owned and disowned identity. While she feels she is “rebuffing” who she is “supposed to be”—referring to herself as divided from her ancestors—it is precisely in this “rebuffing” that Miriam summons her roots. In a sense, she “plays out” an existence entrenched in repetition and reenactment: finding herself in a “comforting,” yet “wrenching” dynamic, struggling to grasp and loosen the tie of history. To do so, she reenters her ancestors’ world, “in bed with a collaborator,” “killing” her grandmother, feeling “fragmented,” “intrigued,” and fused with the experience of the Holocaust. Miriam goes on to verbalize feeling “tortured” and “haunted” by this experience years later: M: He was basically… I had come back and he was finishing up another year and I was graduating from college and trying to figure out what to do with myself. And he was really ready to move out to Chicago. I was totally tortured and I just thought, well, what kind of job is he gonna get and am I going to have to move out to Slovakia? What do I do? And the religion thing was huge, and I didn’t know what to do, and so I broke up with him… but then I really felt haunted by it for like years later. We still write each other cards in the mail. He’s been with the same woman for… I don’t feel like it’s processed… often when I talk about it I’ll start crying. I felt like he was this ghost that was like haunting me for years and I really regretted breaking up with him. N: Yeah, in a way he represented so much more… he was himself, but he was also… M: Right. He was this whole different world, he was also… I was playing out everything—relationships, power… it was extremely exciting for me.

By “playing out everything—relationships, power…,” Miriam and her “first love” engaged in an enactment of their shared history, both attempting to master something unknowable and inexplicable. As she took on the more powerful role and ended the relationship, Miriam instantaneously challenged the course of history in the present (in her

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exertion of power), but also left history untouched (in that it can be forever replayed but not changed). Furthermore, the impact of terminating this connection was devastating for her, as Miriam experienced a sense of loss and distance from this man, and from the history that bound them together. She states, “I felt like he was this ghost that was like haunting me for years….” That is, with the termination of the concrete, their bond evolved into an elusive, ever‑present awareness of all that was lost. While this man seems to have entered a new relationship, Miriam is left feeling that the entire experience remains unprocessed, and that she might “start crying” whenever she speaks of it. Therefore, her statement “it was extremely exciting for me” speaks to the exhilarating revival of history and all of the accompanying emotions and dynamics. In the ensuing discussion of Miriam’s subsequent decision to date only Jews, Miriam reveals: M: I think it felt better to me. I think for a long time it really felt like… maybe as I’ve gotten older and I’ve gotten closer to sort of feeling like wanting to get married or something like that it just felt better… but I think for a long time I think “Jewish” meant being married with a white picket fence and stuck and boring and suburbia… acquiescing and not being an individual… which makes sense in my family. I tend to be attracted to people that have some good amount of push and pull with religion. N: Do you envision raising your kids Jewish? M: Yeah, although when I think about what kind of stories I’m going to tell them, I don’t know very many… N: Well, you have your own stories. M: Right, I have my own stories.

In Miriam’s perspective, “Jewish” seems to stand for “free of conflict,” lacking a “push and pull with religion” and also with history. She explains, “’Jewish’ meant being married with a white picket fence and stuck and boring and suburbia… acquiescing and not being an individual.” Miriam’s definition of the word “Jewish” means to give up “being an individual,” and falling into a preformed mold that might

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prevent her from asserting control, expressing her individuality, and developing a unique sense of self. Interestingly, the image of the “white picket fence” serves as an American symbol of the ideal middle‑class suburban life, with a family, a sizeable house, and a serene existence. Unsurprisingly, Miriam feels impelled to escape this standard, as it does not capture her individual or collective identity. As she explicitly states in the opening of her interview: “My grandparents had accents and I was very convinced that was the normal course of things, although it also made me feel different than my American Jewish peers. I just didn’t quite identify with American Judaism.” In her rebellion against “American Judaism,” Miriam simultaneously searches for her roots. In retrospect, my comment “well, you have your own stories” seems to address the fact that whether or not she knows her ancestors’ specific tales, she quite evidently and concretely merges with her history, discovering parts of herself along the way. Ironically though perhaps not surprisingly, Miriam later discusses her grandmother’s “secretive” nature, and reveals a striking parallel between her grandmother and herself, stating in passing, “She was in love with a non‑Jew and you know there was all this… she’s just very, very secretive.” This intergenerational repetition of patterns reveals Miriam’s ever‑present connection with history, even in her disconnection from the details.

Binging on History Miriam contextualizes the fact that she does not “know” very many stories through a description of her mother’s lifelong accumulation of “all” the family stories: I think she feels it’s her responsibility of the second generation to like have all the information. She must have sensed a lot of the sadness of her parents having lost that old world, and their approach, I think, was try to forget it, and hers was to try to recover it and contain it. I’m sure she and I in very different ways have tried to find ways to master and try to make sense of a lot of pain and disruption, and that was her way of doing it.

Miriam’s insight regarding her attempts to “master” and “make sense of a lot of pain and disruption” is compelling; while her grandparents attempted to “forget” their sadness and her mother worked

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hard to “recover it and contain it,” Miriam is left with a determination to not “acquiesce” to either pattern. Thus, she chooses not to take in the stories, yet to maintain a connection to her history in her own way. Miriam continues: M: I feel like I… I think it’s probably typical… my mother like wants to be… sees herself as the memory receptacle. She’s constantly asking extremely detailed questions to my grandmother and my great aunts and uncle about, like, before the war and during the war. She wants the details and the history and you know… at this point she has more of it than my grandmother does because my grandmother kind of gets confused… or she’ll remind my grandmother what was in her house, or you know… or she’ll like trace... she’s obsessed. The first thing she does is finds out a last name and tries to trace like family lineage in Eastern Europe and she... like, she can be diagnosed with PTSD. She’s extremely fearful. There’s always impending disaster. She’s very good in crisis. N: Can you give an example of that fear… how that impacts her? M: My father has commuted to Chicago for the last five years and she won’t sleep in bed without him, she sleeps on the couch, and has like a scissor under her cushion and the alarm is on and she will often… whenever I go out somewhere she’ll tell me to take my ID with me and I’ll ask her why, and she’s like, “In case you die they can identify the body.” She’s just overprotective throughout and just has issues… She’s definitely gotten better. You can just see she has the worst‑case scenario… she’s highly anxious, she’s really reactive… she probably has survivor skills. She’s obese, she has diabetes; she cannot take care of herself. She spends a lot of time obsessing about my grandmother. I guess that’s another reason why my grandmother is alive… with the case of survivors, they can’t let themselves go because they’re worried that if they do die it will destroy their children. And my mother’s like really concerned about keeping her alive even though she’s in a wheelchair and catheterized and quite unhappy a lot of the time.

Miriam’s mother serves as the “memory receptacle” for her family, growing increasingly obese with all that she takes in. In order to “master” her history, she is impelled to “recover and contain” all of the historical pain, literally and figuratively stuffing herself full. As Miriam describes, “she’s like a repository for all this terrible stuff.” On the one hand, therefore, her mother’s obesity symbolizes her ancestors’ starvation; on the

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other hand, Miriam’s mother is literally overextended by the burden of the past. She cannot possibly “take care of herself,” because she is far too busy “obsessing” about Miriam’s grandmother, spending an entire lifetime “keeping her alive.” The transmission of anxiety, distrust, and fear are evident in Miriam’s concrete examples of her mother sleeping with scissors under her cushion and demanding that Miriam carry an ID so that her dead body might be identified. Furthermore, as Miriam states, “she can be diagnosed with PTSD. She’s extremely fearful. There’s always impending disaster. She’s very good in crisis.” That is, traumatized by her ancestors’ experiences, Miriam’s mother “can be diagnosed with PTSD,” as though she survived the Holocaust herself.

Attempting to Restrict the Past Miriam describes the ways in which she disconnects from her mother’s stories, and more generally establishes boundaries between her mother and herself: M: I mean, she usually doesn’t get totally through a story. I mean, she’ll start to tell me something and I’ll kind of try to listen because like she’s trying to tell me something and part of me thinks I’d want to know some of this stuff in the future. And about two or three sentences later I haven’t heard a word she’s saying. We’re somewhere in the middle of like Poland or Russia, and she’ll talk for a while and I’m not listening but I’m kind of nodding, and then at some point I’m just like, I can’t hear any more. Thanks, I’m done. N: Is that generally kind of your reaction to her? Or mostly just on that topic? M: No, she and I also clash and I find her overwhelming in general, and I think that’s a good classification of things. But, no, I often find her kind of boundary‑bending or there’s stuff kind of spilling over into our world or… I think when I was younger for a long time I felt like… or you know, the beginning stages of therapy… that I had no idea who, or what, were my emotions and what were anyone else’s… I think my father also had a traumatic childhood and I was depressed and I didn’t really have a sense of what it was. I didn’t think it was mine, I think... I mean it was mine, you know, carrying around a lot of their stuff. So I think I got… I tried to create boundaries.

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As the boundaries are blurred and her mother’s experience begins “spilling over” into Miriam’s world, Miriam successfully blocks out the stimuli. “I’ll kind of try to listen because like she’s trying to tell me something and part of me thinks I’d want to know some this stuff in the future. And about two or three sentences later I haven’t heard a word she’s saying,” she explains. Ultimately, she is left with the feeling: “I can’t hear any more. Thanks, I’m done.” Having been completely overwhelmed by her grandmother’s past experiences as well as her mother’s reaction to those experiences, Miriam understands that much of what she is filled with is “a lot of their stuff.” She perceptively states, “I had no idea who, or what, were my emotions and what were anyone else’s.” That is, she had no idea whose emotions she was carrying or who she suddenly embodied. She did, however, sense, “I didn’t think it was mine,” and protectively attempted to set boundaries in place. In separating herself from her mother and from historical narrative, Miriam does not become emotionless or unaware. Instead, her distance from the familial enmeshment and chaos allows her to more fully explore and understand her experience. The importance of her successfully doing so can be seen in her discussion of “crazy‑making” experiences with her mother. That is, Miriam seems to be fighting not only for individuality, but also for her sanity: Something just happened to me the other day and it’s… oh, I got home and she was cooking and I said, “Is dinner going to be soon? I’m hungry and I’m wondering if I should have a snack or not.” And she said, “No, it won’t be for a while,” which to me means hours. So I had a larger snack. Fifteen minutes later my dad is home and she said, “Whenever you guys want to eat” and my dad said, “I’m hungry” and I said, “Didn’t you say dinner would be in a while?” and she denied the two of us having had that exchange. Later I said, “You know, if you forgot or changed you mind or made a mistake, it’s not a big deal. But when you deny the exchange happened, it makes me so confused about reality. It makes me feel like I’m crazy.” She just can’t… she’s like, “Why do you get so angry?” You know. There’s just no way of talking to her most of the time. We often get into a clash which will be about something and then we just let it drop and come back together and we’re fine… instead of talking it out. I don’t know.

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Miriam attempts to explain “…when you deny the exchange happened, it makes me so confused about reality. It makes me feel like I’m crazy.” That is, in addition to not knowing which thought or emotion belongs to her, Miriam also cannot trust the events that unfold in her everyday life. She winds up feeling “so confused” about reality, as she cannot distinguish true from false, hers from theirs, reality from fantasy. While she confronts her mother about the impact of altogether denying a real exchange, it seems that there is often “no way of talking,” no true communication, between mother and daughter. The lack of a shared language, therefore, sheds further light on Miriam’s desire not to know her family’s stories, nor to actively seek out past trauma; after all, the present is already brimming with the trauma of the past, and is in and of itself overwhelming. Along these lines, Miriam explains her conscious effort not to engulf herself in Holocaust‑related films or books: I feel like there is this place in me that can just be totally bottomed out and I know where it is and have done enough of it and I’m just not interested... I feel like it floods me or I get flooded. Like, I don’t understand what purpose it has for me. Like, as an educational tool… the same questions as my mother’s stories. Like, do I need any more details? Like, I certainly don’t know very much about it. Like, I feel like the acquisition of that information just feels like an emotional overload. I don’t know what purpose it has for me. I don’t know how to translate the “Never forget” message… do I think it’s important? Do I identify with the AJWF global social justice movement approach? But no, I… I don’t know… I don’t want to be inundated with it. I want it to be useful to me. I’m not using it in a generative way. I don’t know… maybe it’ll change…

In an effort to not be “totally bottomed out,” but rather make her family’s experience “useful” for herself, Miriam attempts to acquire historical information in moderation. She adds, “I find my way of dealing with it is to download articles or something.” That is, “articles” related to her Holocaust history seem to provide an accessible amount of information, which serve a “purpose” and remain a “generative” tool. Indeed, it seems Miriam’s established boundaries between herself and her history are firm. However, in a brief discussion about her father’s lineage, Miriam reveals a much more extensive curiosity and connection

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to his experiences of loss and grief. When asked what might have drawn her more to her paternal history, Miriam suggests, “Maybe I was trying to piece together my dad more. He could be very calm but then some sort of invisible wire will trip him. You know, it was really very clear what was going on with my mom….” Despite her clashes with her mother, Miriam innately understands and identifies with her mother’s experiences. Furthermore, regardless of her established boundaries or desire for distance, Miriam maintains an instinctive closeness to, and knowledge of, her Holocaust history. With or without the details, the past is inescapably a part of her.

Maintaining Weight and Substance M: I went to a nutritionist senior year of high school and I got myself to a therapist my sophomore year of college and I think I constantly negotiated issues around like having a very loving family, it’s very enmeshed, it’s very sad in some ways—being a part of the family means sort of being sad and depressed and having my mother in particular sort of make these clinical, global statements about the family. N: “Everyone’s depressed? Everyone’s sad?” M: Right, and if my sister’s not… it’s strange, how did that kind of emerge? I mean, my sister also has her own anxieties. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. So, I think it’s individuating and being not severely depressed, but all those things that come with fears of being abandoned. N: How did you get yourself to a nutritionist? M: I had some kind of weird eating habits in high school. It wasn’t awful but it was uncomfortable and I think I instinctively have like, “something’s wrong and I’m gonna take care of it” approach. N: So you were eating a lot or you were constricting? M: Both. I sort of remember I wasn’t eating until I got home from school, and I was binge eating and tried to make myself throw up a few times and I just couldn’t. I was really eating a ton of food. It felt awful.

Describing how she found her way to a nutritionist and a therapist— and later, into the mental health profession—Miriam reveals some of the

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insights she acquired along the way. For example, “Being a part of the family means sort of being sad and depressed and having my mother in particular sort of make these clinical, global statements about the family.” A number of questions arise from this exploration: How much of herself does Miriam have to sacrifice in order to remain an accepted member of the family? Will she be able to balance “individuating and not being severely depressed” with her “fears of being abandoned”? Or will she continue to contain other people’s emotions and experiences, regardless of her attempts to establish distance and boundaries? Miriam reveals the difficulty of truly separating, as fears of being “alone” ultimately carry her back to her family: There was some point in grad school where it felt very clear to me I was done being depressed, and all of a sudden I was extremely anxious and kind of panic attack‑y. And occasionally, in the last five years, there have been times when I’m really afraid I’m gonna get really, really depressed and that just hasn’t happened. I think I’m now less anxious than I was in the first sort of kind of flip. I don’t think it’s uncommon that those mix together. Not recently but I certainly like… when I was in graduate school in the middle of the night there was this sudden like, “I’m alone” and worried about my parents dying and constantly visualizing…

In acknowledging that she was “done being depressed” and finding herself feeling “less anxious” than before, Miriam separates herself from her family. Moments later, however, she reveals an arising fear of her parents dying. On some level, it seems that separating and finding herself to not be anxious, or to not be depressed, is a dangerous pursuit; one that might even kill off her parents. It is no wonder, therefore, that statements like “everyone’s depressed” and “everyone’s sad” provide a sense of safety for Miriam and her mother. After all, “clinical, global statements about the family” are by definition “global,” so Miriam will not have to carry them on her own. Thus, Miriam responds to a question about depression with, “No… I don’t feel depressed. I think my baseline might be a little lower….” Her “baseline” is indeed “lower,” because if it were higher she might find herself “alone.” Miriam concludes her interview by questioning her choice of social work as her profession and doubting her ability to feel “empathetic” towards others:

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While Miriam hopes to achieve some “mastery” and “control” over her feelings, believing she was “way too sensitive” in the past, she has thus far been unable to separate from the “murky, complicated vortex of feelings” that dominates her day‑to‑day life. Hopefully, she will never completely separate from this type of existence. After all, while she claims, “this doesn’t have to be my role,” she finds herself pulled toward helping “people” and more fully understanding herself. Thus, the question, “do I want to hear about other people’s problems, or is this about my own stories?” seems superfluous. It is through her own stories and experiences that she will better understand, tolerate, and feel empathy for “other people’s problems.”

Conclusion In his paper entitled “When the Third is Dead: Memory, Mourning, and Witnessing in the Aftermath of the Holocaust,” Gerson discusses the illusion of “working through” past trauma, suggesting that the best one can hope for is a courageous “living with” historical atrocity (2009, p. 1351). The notion of “living with” intergenerational suffering, however, represents the most fundamental and absurd dichotomy, as the potential of life and the nothingness of death collide in eternal opposition. Miriam’s story demonstrates this intersection: although members of the third generation did not endure the horrors of the Holocaust, they nevertheless remain inextricably linked to devastation and destruction. As historical trauma overwhelms and directs the course of her life, Miriam strives to separate from her collective narrative. Instead, she

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winds up reenacting an old familial script, filled with themes of power, rebellion, and “wrenching” relational dynamics, in an attempt to engage with and master her traumatic past. Miriam reflects on these repetitions and reveals that despite “rebuffing” what she is “supposed” to be, she cannot escape her legacy. Holocaust themes dance at the periphery of every aspect of Miriam’s being—her partner choice, relationship with food, mental health profession, conflicted views of Judaism, struggle with depression, even her choice of reading material—highlighting the ways in which intergenerational trauma continues to manifest itself in Miriam’s cultural, psychological, and spiritual identity. As the granddaughters of survivors engage with Holocaust themes, emotions, and enactments—and the deceased come to life within their hour and a half‑long interviews—the dichotomy between life and death grows increasingly dim. Divergent, muddled attempts at “living with” the trauma simultaneously highlight the understandable longing for “working through.” While Miriam’s grandmother yearns to forget her history and her mother acts as a “memory receptacle” for the details of their traumatic past, Miriam is left to process and heal the torment of two preceding generations. She subsequently establishes emotional boundaries in an attempt to identify an authentic self with discrete thoughts, feelings, and reactions that are unquestionably her own. At the same time, Miriam is terrified of fully separating from the family’s “global,” shared way of being, as individuality might challenge familial collusions, damage the “enmeshed” dynamics, and leave Miriam isolated amidst intergenerational turmoil. Given her predecessors’ unresolved losses, separation and individuation would first require Miriam to continue the work of mourning for her family – a responsibility she resents and a role she has yet to fully accept. Indeed, the emotional work of resilience is an immensely difficult venture. The challenge for members of the third generation of the Holocaust is heightened by the denial and dissociation of two preceding generations. While some families enlist a tacit agreement of silence and secrecy in order to protect themselves and future generations from past anguish, others enwrap themselves in the tiny particulars of history in an attempt to confront and overcome past trauma. In either scenario,

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the message of suffering is ever‑present, yielding an unmistakable cry for help from future generations. How will we answer this cry? If collective memory inevitably outlives us, what is the value of sorting through family dynamics, constructing an intergenerational narrative, or tracing historical trauma in seemingly benign, everyday experiences? That is, when we search for a contextualizing, reparative link between all that was and all that remains, do we proceed with hope and anticipation of change? When we speak of “resilience” or “progress,” do we do so within the scope of collective trauma, or do we innately believe that healing requires distancing? What of the weight that accompanies this emotional work, a heaviness that combats any hint of lightening and perseveres with force? Aron writes, “In psychoanalysis, we do not dwell on the past in order to heighten its significance, but to the contrary, we linger on memories to divest them of their power to limit present day learning and experiencing” (2011, p. 286). In “living with” the trauma, we forever “linger” on Holocaust memories, hoping to create something of nothing, to seek growth from destruction, to live in spite of attempted extermination.

REFERENCES Aron, L. (2011). “Living memory”: Discussion of Avishai Margalit’s “Nostalgia.” Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 21(3):281‑91. Atkinson, J. (2002). Trauma Trails—Recreating Song Lines: The Transgenerational Effects of Trauma in Indigenous Australia. North Melbourne: Spinifex Press. Bachar, E., Cale, M., Eisenberg, J., & Dasberg, H. (1994). Aggression expression in grandchildren of Holocaust survivors: A comparative study. Israeli Journal of Psychiatry and Related Disciplines, 31(1):41–47. Bar‑On, D. (1995). Fear and Hope: Three Generations of the Holocaust. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ____. (2008). Foreword. In: H. Wiseman & J. P Barber (Eds.), Echoes of the Trauma: Relational Themes and Emotions in Children of Holocaust Survivors (pp. ix‑xiii). New York: Cambridge University Press.

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Chaitin, J. (2003). “Living with” the past: Coping and patterns in families of Holocaust survivors. Family Process, 42(2):305‑22. Danieli, Y. (1988). The heterogeneity of post‑war adaptation in families of Holocaust survivors. In: R. L. Braham (Ed.), The Psychological Perspectives of the Holocaust and of its Aftermath (pp. 109‑127). Boulder, CO: Social Science Monographs, Holocaust Studies Series. Ewing, K. P. (2004). Anthony Molino in conversation with Katherine Ewing. In: A. Molino (Ed.), Culture, Subject, Psyche: Dialogues in Psychoanalysis and Anthropology (pp. 80‑97). Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press. Felsen, I. (1998). Transgenerational transmission of effects of the Holocaust: The North American research perspective. In Y. Danieli (Ed.), International Handbook of Multigenerational Legacies of Trauma (pp. 43‑68). New York: Plenum Press. Fossion, P., Rejas, M., Servais, L., Pelc, I., & Hirsch, S. (2003). Family approach with grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. American Journal of Psychotherapy, 57(4):519‑27. Gerson, S. (2009). When the third is dead: Memory, mourning, and witnessing in the aftermath of the Holocaust. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 90:1341‑57. Josselson, R., Lieblich, A., & McAdams, D. P. (Eds.). (2003). Up Close and Personal: The Teaching and Learning of Narrative Research. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Litvak‑Hirsch, T., & Bar‑On, D. (2006). To rebuild lives: A longitudinal study of the influences of the Holocaust on relationships among three generations of women in one family. Family Process, 45(4):465‑83. Packer, M. J., & Addison, R. B. (1989). Entering the Circle: Hermeneutic Investigation in Psychology. Albany: State University of New York Press. Pisano, N. G. (2012). Granddaughters of the Holocaust: Never Forgetting What They Didn’t Experience. Boston: Academic Studies Press. Rubenstein, I., Cutter, F., & Templer, D. I. (1989–1990). Multigenerational occurrence of survivor syndrome symptoms in families of Holocaust survivors. Omega: Journal of Death and Dying, 20(3):239–44. Sagi‑Schwartz, A., van IJzendoorn, M. H., & Bakermans‑Kranenburg, M. J. (2008). Does intergenerational transmission of trauma skip a generation? No meta‑analytic evidence for tertiary traumatization

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with third generation of Holocaust survivors. Attachment & Human Development, 10(2):105‑21. Sigal, J. J. (1998). Long‑term effects of the Holocaust: Empirical evidence for resilience in the first, second, and third generation. Psychoanalytic Review, 85(4):579‑85. Talby‑Abarbanel, M. (2011). “Secretly attached, secretly separate”: Art, dreams, and transference‑countertransference in the analysis of a third generation Holocaust survivor. In A. B. Druck, C. Ellman, N. Freedman, & A. Thaler (Eds.), A New Freudian Synthesis: Clinical Process in the Next Generation (pp. 219‑237). London: Karnac Books Ltd. Wiseman, H., & Barber, J. P. (2008). Echoes of the Trauma: Relational Themes and Emotions in Children of Holocaust Survivors. New York: Cambridge University Press.

366

CONTRIBUTORS

Lewis Aron, Ph.D., is the Director of the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. He has served as president of the Division of Psychoanalysis (39) of the American Psychological Association; founding president of the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (IARPP); founding President of the Division of Psychologist‑Psychoanalysts of the New York State Psychological Association (NYSPA). He is the co‑founder and co‑chair of the Sándor Ferenczi Center at the New School for Social Research, an Honorary Member of the William Alanson White Psychoanalytic Society, and Adjunct Professor, School of Psychology, Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) Herzliya, Israel. Lewis Aron was one of the founders and is an associate editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues and is the series editor (with Adrienne Harris) of the Relational Perspectives Book Series (Routledge). He is the Editor of the Psychoanalysis & Jewish Life Book Series (Academic Studies Press). Dr. Aron is in private practice in New York City and has extensive experience in organizational and executive consulting. He is well known for study/reading groups both in NYC and live on Skype around the world. Dr. Aron is the author of A Meeting of Minds and, with Karen Starr, A Psychotherapy for the People. He was the co‑editor, with Libby Henik, of the first volume of Answering a Question With A Question (Academic Studies Press). [email protected] http://www.lewaron.com https://www.amazon.com/author/lewaron Ofra Eshel, Psy.D., is faculty, training and supervising analyst of the Israel Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, and a member of the

367

Contributors

International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA); co‑founder, former coordinator and faculty of the Program of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy for Advanced Psychotherapists at the Israel Psychoanalytic Institute; co‑founder, coordinator and faculty of the Israel Winnicott Center; lecturer at the Program of Psychotherapy, Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel‑Aviv University. She is the Book Review Editor of Sihot‑Dialogue, Israel Journal of Psychotherapy. Her papers have been published in psychoanalytic journals and presented at national and international conferences. In recent years, she was the receipient of the Leonard J. Comess Fund grant at the New Center for Psychoanalysis (NCP), Los Angeles, in 2011; visiting scholar at the Psychoanalytic Institute of North California (PINC), San Francisco, in 2013; awarded the Frances Tustin Memorial Prize for 2013. She is in private practice in Tel‑Aviv, Israel. She was featured in “Globes” (Israel’s financial newspaper and magazine) as the sixteenth of the fifty most influential women in Israel for 2012. [email protected] Cheryl Friedman, J.D., Psy.D., is in private practice in Southern California. She is a graduate of the University of Minnesota, Drake Law School. She is a 2011 graduate of The Newport Center for Psychoanalytic Studies. During her tenure at Legal Services Corporation of Iowa, she specialized in Homeless and Mental Health Law. Her private psychoanalytic practice centers around issues of grief and loss. [email protected] Annette Furst, M.D., received her BA in archaeology from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and her M.D. from McMaster Medical School in Ontario. She was a research assistant to Dr. T. Berry Brazelton at Children's Hospital Medical Center in Boston and completed her medical training in internal medicine and oncology at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston where she was a clinical instructor at Harvard Medical School. After practicing oncology for 20 years she made a career transition to psychoanalysis, graduating from the fellowship in Psychodynamic

368

Contributors

Psychotherapy at Massachusetts General Hospital and completing her psychoanalytic training at the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis. She is currently in private practice in Newton, Massachusetts. [email protected] Dr. Cheryl Goldstein received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UCLA and her MA in Rabbinic Literature from the University of Judaism (American Jewish University). She is currently a Clinical Research candidate at the Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis (ICP) in Los Angeles, where she has a private practice. [email protected] Libby Henik, LCSW, is in private practice in New York and New Jersey. She is a graduate of the Wurzweiler School of Social Work of the Yeshiva University and a graduate in Psychodynamic Psychotherapy of the American Institute for Psychoanalysis of the Karen Horney Psychoanalytic Center. She also holds a Master of Arts in Hebrew Literature from Hunter College. Ms. Henik studied biblical exegesis and Hebrew literature with Nechama Leibowitz at Bar‑Ilan University and with Professor Milton Arfa at Hunter College. She has taught ulpan in Israel, the United States and the former Soviet Union. She has lectured and presented papers on the bi‑directional influence of psychoanalysis and Jewish thought in examining biblical text. [email protected] Dr. Ruth Kara‑Ivanov Kaniel is Postdoctoral Fellow in Ben‑Gurion University; Interdisciplinary Fellow at the Tel Aviv Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis (TAICP), and at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. She was a fellow of the post-doctoral program at the Tikvah Center in NYU and HBI Center in Brandeis Institute. Her book Holiness and Transgression: Mothers of the Messiah in the Jewish Myth was recently published by Hakibbutz Hameuchad Press, as part of the Hilal Ben-Chaim Series in Jewish Studies. [email protected]

369

Contributors

William Kolbrener, Chair of the English Department of Bar Ilan University in Israel, has written extensively on early modern English literature, including Milton’s Warring Angels (Cambridge, 1996) and a co‑edited collection on the proto‑feminist Mary Astell (Ashgate, 2008). His book Open Minded Torah: Of Irony, Fundamentalism and Love was published by Continuum in 2012; the current essay is part of a larger project on Freud and the Rabbis. [email protected] Richard L. Kradin, M.D., is a physician, pathologist, and psychoanalyst at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, a training analyst at the C.G. Jung Institute in Boston, past research director of the Mind/Body Medical Institute, professor at Harvard Medical School, and visiting professor at Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem. He is the author of The Herald Dream (Karnac, 2008); The Placebo Response and the Power of Unconscious Healing (Routledge, 2010); Psychosomatic Disorders: The Canalization of Mind into Matter (Routledge, 2012); and more than 200 articles in the medical, psychiatric, and psychoanalytical literature. He received the 1998 Gradiva Prize for Best Paper in Psychoanalysis entitled “The Psychosomatic Symptom: A Siren’s Song.” Dr. Kradin holds a master’s degree in religion from Harvard University and one in Jewish Studies from Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts. He is presently preparing a new text on Jewish mysticism and the roots of psychoanalysis to be published by Academic Studies Press in 2015. [email protected] Dr. Dori Laub was born in Cernauti, Romania on June 8, 1937. He is currently a practicing psychoanalyst in New Haven, Connecticut who works primarily with victims of massive psychic trauma and their children. He is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine and Co‑Founder of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. He obtained his M.D. at the Hadassah Medical School at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel and his MA in Clinical

370

Contributors

Psychology at Bar Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel. He was Acting Director of Genocide Study Program (GSP) at Yale University for the years of 2000 and 2003. Since 2001, he is also serving as Deputy Director for Trauma Studies for the GSP. Dr Laub has published on the topic of psychic trauma, its knowing and representation in a variety of psychoanalytic journals, and has co‑authored a book entitled Testimony‑Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History with Professor Shoshana Felman (Taylor & Francis, 1992). [email protected] Nirit Gradwohl Pisano, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist working in private practice in Scarsdale, NY. Her psychodynamically informed practice provides individual, family, couples, and group psychotherapy to children, adolescents, and adults. Dr. Pisano earned her degrees from Tufts University and Adelphi University’s Derner Institute of Advanced Psychological Studies, and was trained at Bellevue Hospital, Jacobi Medical Center, and Bronx Psychiatric Center. Dr. Pisano recently published her first book, Granddaughters of the Holocaust: Never Forgetting What They Didn’t Experience (Academic Studies Press, 2012), which informs her work with survivors of atrocities. She has presented her findings at conferences in the United States and abroad, and conducted related workshops at Jewish Community Centers in the New York Metropolitan area. [email protected] Menorah Rotenberg is a psychotherapist in private practice in Teaneck, NJ. She has published articles in various books and journals. Her most recent essay, “On the Loss and Reconstruction of the Self,” appeared in 2012 (Body & Soul: Narratives of Healing from Ars Medica). Her next piece will be an extension of her Davar Torah, “A Hidden Master Plot,” written for Forward (12.19.05) about the hidden references to the sacrificial in the “Joseph Cycle” in Genesis. [email protected]

371

Contributors

Joyce Slochower, Ph.D., APBB, is Professor Emerita of Psychology at Hunter College & Graduate Center, CUNY; faculty, NYU Postdoctoral Program, Steven Mitchell Center, National Training Program of NIP, Philadelphia Center for Relational Studies & the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California in San Francisco. She is the author of over 60 papers and two books: Holding and Psychoanalysis: A Relational Perspective (1996; 2014) and Psychoanalytic Collisions (2006; 2014) and is in private practice in New York City. [email protected] Moshe Halevi Spero, Ph.D., full professor and director, Postgraduate Program of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, School of Social Work, Bar‑Ilan University; Senior Clinical Psychologist, Herzog Psychiatric Hospital; Weinstock Oncology Day Hospital, Shaare Zedek Medical Center, Jerusalem; Scientific Associate, the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry; Editor‑in‑Chief, Ma’arag, The Israel Annual of Psychoanalysis (Magnes/Hebrew University Press). [email protected] Avivah Zornberg holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from Cambridge University. She is the author of three books: Genesis: The Beginning of Desire (JPS), which won the National Jewish Book Award in 1995; The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodus (Doubleday, 2002); and The Murmuring Deep: Reflections on the Biblical Unconscious (Schocken, 2009). Her latest book, Bewilderments: Reflections on the Book of Numbers, will be published by Schocken in 2015. Zornberg has grown to world acclaim through her writing and teaching of biblical interpretation. [email protected]

372

INDEX

A

Aaron, 103–104 Aberbach, D., 256 absences, understanding, 307–311 active-passive ‘garb, 90 Addison, R.B., 351 Adult Attachment Interview (AAI), 330 adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse, 139 aesthetic conflict, 41, 58 agency, 332–334 agony of early breakdown, 1410–141 Ainsworth, Mary, 330 Akedah, story of, 177–178 ambiguity, 17 analytic listening, 133 annihilation, 112–114 antagonism, 121 Anzieu, Didier, 217n23 aphasia, 308 archaic mind, 66 Aristotle, 66 assumptions, 96 contemplative life, 95 dianoetic life, 82 divine, 81 epistemology, 66–68, 73, 79, 82 ideal contemplative figure, 81 man’s fate, 95 Prime Mover of, 83 unity of knower and known, 68, 70–71, 78, 81, 84 Aron, Lewis, 11, 311 artistic creativity and psychoanalysis, relationship between, 41 atonement, 90–91 attachment theory, 329–332 Attie, Shimon, 275 authentic self, 40 autobiographical narrative memory, 328 autobiographies, 287

B

Baba Bathra 16b, 164 Bahktin, Mikhail, 179 Bakan, David, 156 Baldwin, James, 14 Balint, Michael, 50, 56 Barber, J.P., 348 Bar-On, D., 346–347 Bassin, Donna Leave No Soldier, 276 bereavement, psychoanalytic assessment of complicated, 225–229, 274–279, 347 impact of ego “accepting” death of the other, 226 Jacob’s bereavement and inability to mourn, 230–238 torn coat, biblical story of, 230–238 beta elements, 51 Bible, the, 27 biblical creation myth, 44 Hokhmah and Bina, 53 Bina (cosmic womb), 51 Bin-Gorion, Micha Josef (Berdyczewski), 213n20 Bion, Wilfred, 42, 51, 124, 148 birth memories, 57 Birthright (B’Khorah), 176 Blessing (B’RaKhah), 176, 184 Boesky, D., 12 bohu, 44 Bollas, C., 41, 47–48, 257 Book of Daniel, 45 Book of Job, 153, 157, 159, 160-162, 165-167. see also Job Oedipal issues, 169–170 Proverbs 1:7, 159 YHWH’s revelation on Creation, 167–168 Bowlby, J., 330 buzina de’kardinuta, 43

373

Index

C

Caesura, Freudian notion of, 57–58 Caesurian bridge, 58 Caruth, Cathy, 137, 141 catastrophes, 100 catastrophic chance, 147 catechisms, 17 cathartic mourning, 154 Cavell, Stanley, 112–113 Chaitin, J., 348 childhood trauma, 138–139 adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse, 139 “children of survivors” syndrome, 332 child sacrifice, psychology of, 156–157 Christianity, 16 clothing, psychoanalytic inquiry of, 203, 203n3, 204 coat of many colors, psychoanalytic perspective, 208–210 ambiguity in, 208–209 bridal veil, 221 coat as a magical object, 218 as a fertility-god symbol, 203 Frye’s views, 203 Matthews’s views, 203 Rachel’s bridal gown, 221, 221n26 role of clothing in Joseph’s later trials in Egypt, 203–204 in superficial sense, 210 torn coat, biblical narrative of, 230–231 “veil of deception,” 221–222 coat of passim, 218–219 cognitive gaps, 14 Cohen, Rabbi Heidi, 250 commemorative rituals, 277–279, 285, 293 Yizkor service, 280–287 concentrated point. see “dot,” psychological-symbolic level of conscious memory, 310 container–contained model, 51–52 containment, 50–55 contemplative cognition, 82 contextual relationships, 30 control groups, 346–347 cosmic narcissism, 41 cosmic union, 55 countertransference, 13, 40 countertransference blindness, 302–306 creativity, 256 crying voice of early trauma, 137, 146 curiosity, 255

374

D

Danieli, Y., 348 Davar, He-amek, 120–121 death, 20 day of, 259–260 dealing with, 250–252, 255–260, 273–274 phobic response to, 289 private and shared loss, 285–287 psychoanalytic process of working with patients, 252 therapeutic disadvantage of viewing the body of deceased person, 263 dedication, 250–260 depersonalization, 50 desire, issue of, 31–38 desires, 67 detailed inquiry, 12–13 Deuteronomy 1:19, 128 1:25, 106 1:26, 125 1:27, 122 1:32, 125 3:25, 128 4:32, 93 6, 134 10:12-15, 187 10:15, 124 16:20, 192 31:17, 182 dissociation, 12 divine auto-genesis, myth of, 42 divine self-sufficiency, 81 “dot,” psychological-symbolic level of, 44, 51–55, 57–58 Douay-Rheims Bible, 212 double wound/double wounding, 137–138, 141 Dubnov, Simon, 312

E

eavesdropping, 183 Echoes of the Trauma, 347 Eden, Anthony, 314 Edmundson, Mark, 116–117 Efes, 101, 103, 113–115, 117, 120, 127–128 ego, 86 Egypt, 99–100 Eigen, Michael, 52, 124 Ein-Sof, 43–44, 50, 52 Eisenmann, M., 165 Elberfelden Bible, 213 emanation, 42, 44 Emet, Sefat, 115

Index emotional regulation, 331 empathic listening, 184 empty hysterical gesture, 90 Erikson, Erik, 181, 192 eschaton, 90 Eshel, Ofra, 19 Ettinger, Bracha, 48 evil, 19 Exodus, 157, 336, 338 2:23-25, 184 3:8, 105 13:17, 99 14:3-4, 99 14:7-10, 103n12 14:11, 100n1 16:3, 100n1 17:3, 100n1 24:11, 50 34:7, 177

F

“failures” of favorable evolution, 310 fantasy, 19 fear, 101 fear of breakdown, 146–147 female seduction, 18 female sexual desire, 31–38 Ferenczi, Sandor, 138–139 fertility, 114 fetishistic ritualization, 228 figurative language, 30 First Noble Truth of Buddhism, 173 forced reduction, 55 formless-essence, 18 formlessness, 41–47, 49, 58 tohu and bohu, 44 “Fort-Da” game, 323 fort-da game, 119 Foucault, Michel, 42 free associations, 12 freedom, 254 Freud, Sigmund, 11, 237, 255–256 aphasia, 308 attachmment theory, 330 Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 323–324 concept of trauma, 136, 138 Interpretation of Dreams, 253–254 intrapsychic drive model, 138 Jewishness of, 17 knotenpunkt (knot-point) in a text, 206 law of mutual exclusivity, 209n13 memories of sexual abuse, 139 Moses and Monotheism, 66 Mourning and Melancholia, 154

nachtraglich, 89n11 notion of a “Caesura,” 18 psychoanalytic theory, 135 repression, 216 significance of boundaries and thresholds (Schwellen), 216 “switch [Wechsel] words,” 207 “the wound and the voice,” 137 “thing” representation, 308 Totem and Taboo, 323 understanding of object loss, 269 Friedman, Cheryl, 20 Furst, Annette, 21

G

Gaon, Rav Saadia, 164 Gaster, Theodore, 212 Geertz, Clifford, 73 gender difference, 49 Genesis 1, 43, 53, 55 1:1, 167 1:26, 44 11:32, 180 12:1-4, 180 12:1-4, 180 15:1, 190 15:2, 6, 191 15:6, 181, 190 16, 182 16:2, 184 17:15, 16, 186 17:18, 187 17:19, 187 21, 182 21:1-12, 184 21:17, 184 21:19-20, 182 22:1, 186 22:3, 186 22:16, 186 22:17, 186 23:9, 193 24:7, 180 24:57, 188 24:66, 188 25:23, 188, 192 25:24–28, 188 27:1, 183 27:5, 183 27:15-16, 218 27:21-23, 185 28:20, 191 29:16-18, 189

375

Index 31-35, 230 32:25-30, 15 37:3, 189, 194 37:4, 189, 194 37:14, 194 37:18, 194 37:23, 230–231 37:31, 230, 232 37:33, 208, 233 37:34, 230 37:35, 231, 234–235 37–38, 18 38:14, 221 39, 18 39:7, 181 39:12-13, 221 42:6-34, 194 42:31, 190 44:1-17, 194 45:4-8, 193 45:5-8, 179 45:22, 189 48:10, 192 48:17, 192 48:17-20, 192 50:20, 193 84, 231 97:6, 219 Genesis Ancestral Saga, 20, 176–178 Abraham cycle, 180–182 Abraham’s preferential love for Isaac, 187–188 act of trust, 181 conversations between Sarah and Abraham, 184 coveted “Blessing,” 192 Divine Hand of God, 183 encounter with God, 180–183 Esau’s cry, 184–186 Hagar and Ishmael cycle, 182 Isaac’s instant love for Rebecca, 188–189 Joseph cycle, 192–195 lead words, 178–179 notion of sacrifice, 180 psychological defense of projective identification, 194 Rebecca–Isaac cycle, 183–186 Rebecca’s preferential love for Jacob, 189–190 sense of trust and mistrust, 190–195 trust in unseen God, 191 voice, hearing, listening, cry, 183–186 Genogram, 177 Goethe, 201–202

376

Dichtung und Wahrheit, 201 Goitein, L., 160 Goldstein, Cheryl, 18 goodness, 19 good object, 309 Gouri, Haim, 177 Graetz, Naomi, 180 Green, André, 146–148, 310 Illusions and Disillusions of Psychoanalytic Work, 142 Greenblatt, Stephen, 114 grief, 20 therapy, 263 Guttieres-Green, Litza, 142–145

H

Halakhah, 263–264 Halbertal, Moshe, 45 Hancock, Elise, 183 Handelman, S.A., 253–255 hate/hatred, 19, 123–125 Hazony, Yoram, 15–16 healthy exhibitionism, 49 hearing heart, 19, 133–135, 138, 142, 147–148 Hebrew Bible, 16–17, 178, 185, 311–312 helplessness, 339 Hernandez, Max, 141 heterotopias, 42 Hitbodedeut, 50 Hoffman, Eva After such Knowledge, 331 holding environment, 316 Holocaust, 21–22, 178, 182, 311 Holocaust memories, 322, 325–328, 339–342 intergenerational transmission of, 345–346 third-generation experience, 345–346 women’s life stories, 352–357 Holy Qu’ran, 222–223 Hopkins, Gerald Manley, 121 humanity, transition of, 55 humanizing trauma, 53

I

id, 55, 89, 92 idealization, 45 ideal self, 86 ikunin or icon, 237n40 image of God, 44 imaginative interpolation, 337 implicit memories, 332 inability/refusal to remember, 291 individual self, 93

Index individuation, 68 individuation, process of, 86 “infantile nature” of religious experience, 66 inner prison, 55 inner space, 50–55 “inner Thou,” 21 inquiry, 11 intergenerational transmission, 21–22 of Holocaust trauma, 22 organizing of myths, 177 of problematic parenting, 348 intergenerational trauma transmission, 34–347 women’s life stories, 352–362 internalization, 330 internalized “good object,” 309 Isaac, R., 50 Isaac from Acre, 49

J

Jacob’s bereavement, 20 Jacob’s wrestling with the angel, story of, 15–16 Jakobson, Roman, 29–30 association of displacement with metonymy, 29–30 Jewish mourning obligations and rituals, 21, 251–252, 255 analyst–patient relation, 258 bereavement ritual and traumatic loss, 274–279 Chevrah Kaddishah, 263 custom of covering the casket with dirt, 267–268 dealing with patient/mourner, 257–258 development of permanent internal armamentarium, 258–259 funeral, 263–266 Kaddish, 280 Kaddish Yatom (Mourner’s Prayer), 266–267 Kri’ah, 262, 265 Lech L’chah, 266–267 loss and memory, dealing with, 279–285 Mi Shebeirach, 260–261 period of Aninut, 263 private and shared loss, 285–287 psychoanalytic theoretical models, 255–256 shiva and post-shiva rituals, 279–280 during Shiva and Shloshim, 258–259 Shurah, 268 status of “mourner,” 263

Sukkat Shalom, 260 Taharah (purification), 263 Talit, 260, 262 Vidui, 261 Yizkor service, 280–287 Yom Kippur, 283–284 Jewish mystical literature, 44 feelings of fear and awe, 46 feminine and masculine aspects of divinity, 49 metaphor of the “gaze” and “light,” 45–46 “positive aspects” of seeing and reflecting meaning, 46 Jewish mystical texts, 41 Jewish mysticism, 18 Jewish “phylogenetic inheritance,” 66 Job attitude towards his new children, 171 on catastrophic losses, 155 complaints about YHWH, 159–160 defenses against productive mourning, 160 dialogues between “comforters” and, 153, 157, 160–163 encounter with YHWH, 154, 165–172 feeling of unconscious guilt, 159 on Ha Satan, 155–156 influence on behavior, 162 Jung’s treatment of, 154 mystical experience of, 165–166 narcissism of, 162 nuances of personality, 158–159 problem of theodicy, 153 psychology of personal plight, 153–154 self-sacrificing of, 155 societal standing of, 155 suffering of, 19 transformation, 171–172 YHWH’s response to Job, 173–174 Joseph, biblical story of, 201–203 Josselson, R., 351 Judaism, 97, 177, 255, 337 dealing with death, 252 psychoanalysis and, 17 Jung, Carl, 154 representation of a repressed inner “feminine,” 170 treatment of Job, 154

K

kabbalists, 42–45, 47–51, 53, 58 Kahn, Jack, 157 Kaniel, Ruth Kara-Ivanov, 18

377

Index Karski, Jan, 314 Katz, R. L., 159 ketonet passim, 203–205, 203n3, 208, 225n30 as Coat of Thresholds, 214–217 definition of, 210–214 differences between the Judaic and Islamic traditions, 224 Hebrew term passim, 210–211, 215 Joseph’s personality in, 205 Laban’s point of view, 221 multifaceted dimensions of, 230 non-Hebrew translations of, 211 Speiser’s review, 212n18 terms pas and saf, 214–215 transformation of, 238–242 King James’ New English Bible, 213 King Solomon, biblical story of, 133–134 Kohut, Heinz, 258 Kolbrener, William, 18 Kradin, Richard, 19 Kris, Ernst, 50 Kuhn, Thomas, 74 Kushner, Rabbi H., 157 kutonet, 206 in rabbinic midrash, 217–220 Thomas Mann’s interpretation of, 220–225

L

378

Lacan, Jacques, 116 Lakish, Reish, 91 Lamm, M., 263 Lanzmann, Claude, 315 Laplanche, Jacques, 53 Laub, Dori, 21 Law, the, 18 law of mutual exclusivity, 209n13 law of the father, 55 Lear, Jonathan, 65–66, 118–119 act of interpretation, 87 Aristotelian perspective, 70–71, 75 conception of sublimation, 85–86 The Desire to Understand, 75, 81 epistemology, 67 epistemology of, 79–80 excursus on love, 80 expression of love and care, 79–85 figuration of Oedipus, 87–88 Freudian appropriation of Aristotle, 75–76 harmony, 87 human personality, 80 human soul, 87 Jewish worldview of a creator, 96

knowledge, 67 Love and Its Place in Nature, 75 objective use of objectivity and subjective use of objectivity, 76 process of individuation, 86 psychoanalytic love, 86 psychoanalytic worldview of, 96 “scientific image” of objectivity, 76–77 subject-object distinction, 76 Leibowitz, Nehama, 11 Leontes in A Winter’s Tale, 113 Levenson, Ed, 13 Lieblich, A., 351 linking objects, 227–229, 227n32 Little, Margaret, 49–50 Lodge, David, 30 Loewald, Hans, 66, 77, 85 genuine appropriation, 87 interpenetration of temporal modes, 91 unconscious forms of experiencing, 86 longing, 125 loss, 20 bereavement ritual and traumatic, 273–279 dealing with, 279–285 object, 269 private and shared, 285–287 love, 19, 79–85 in Aristotelian philosophy, 83 as a “cosmic metaphysical principle,” 83–84 loving figures, 80 Lurianic Kabbala, 52 Luther, Martin, 211–212

M

Maimonides, 166–167 Main, Mary, 330 Mann, Thomas, 202, 237 Joseph and his Brothers, 213, 220 on Joseph’s death, 235–237 Joseph und Seine Brüder, 202 on midrashic sources, 213–214, 213n20 neo-midrashic insights, 220, 220n25 use of phrase “coat of colors,” 213 veiled garment, 221–222 massive psychic trauma, 309 maternal necropolis, 310 matrixial border-space, 48 McAdams, D.P., 351 McCraken, David, 187 memorialization, 275–27, 275–277, 287–293 clinical experience, 287–289 memorial rituals, 276–277

Index memorial sites, 274–276 memories of sexual abuse, 139 memory, 22. see also Holocaust memories; traumatic memories Biblical perspective, 335 and information about future, 338–339 Jewish perspective, 334–338 Meno’s Paradox, 254 Merkur, Daniel, 153, 162 metaphor, 29 metonymy, 29–30 association of displacement with, 29–30 Lodge’s definition, 30 Midrash Tanchuma, 102 mirroring, 45 Mi Shebeirach, 250, 260–261 Mishnah, 10 Modern Jewish Orthodoxy, 172 Moore, Richard, 307 Mosaic Law, 170 Moses, 16, 50, 100, 103–104, 118 emotional connection between his people and God, 124 on goodness of the Land, 108–110 rift between people and, 128 and spies’ mission, 105–106, 108 mother–child relationship, 41 mother–infant relations container–contained model, 51–52 as healing process of psychotic patients, 49 mother as a “transformational object,” 47–48 mutual transformations, 48 pre-natal matrixial realm, 48 processes of interconnectivity, 48 murderous fantasies, 46 murderous God, 156 mystical union, 50 myth-making as psychoanalytic process, 205n9

N

Nachman (Ramban), Rabbi Moses ben, 172 Nachträglichkeit, 237 Nadab, 50 nameless dread, 51 Nazi subjugation, 311–312 negative capability, 55 neurotic “melancholia (depression)”, 154–155 neutral observer, 72 “new beginning,” 41–47, 56 “new opportunity for development,” 56 nodal moments in a textual narrative, 206–208

Freedman group’s views, 207 object relationship, 207 Nora, P. Les lieux de mémoire (The Sites of Memory), 277 Numbers 4:8, 219 11:20, 100n1 11:20, 122 13:27, 101 14:6, 104 14:9, 104 14:10, 104 14:11, 126 14:32, 104

O

objective reality, 209 object loss, 154 object permanence, 181 objects, psychological representation of, 204–205 Oedipus complex, 30–31 Ogden, Thomas, 177, 256–257 Old Testament, 222, 335 ontological heterogeneity, 74 optimal frustration, 258 Ornstein, Anna, 341 Ornstein, Paul, 341 orphanhood, 273 otherness of sexuality, 55 Otzar Haim, 49 Oz, Amos, 17

P

Packer, M.J., 351 Parkes, 259 Passover Haggadah, 10 Passover Seder, 336–337 pathological mourning, 274 Perechodnik, Calel, 314 Am I a Murderer?, 314 personal memorial stories, 292 Pisano, Nirit Gradwohl, 22 playfulness, 55 pleasure principle, 47, 136 Potiphar’s Wife attempts to seduce Joseph, story of, 31–38   “pre-beginning” state, 58 primal vitality, 40 primary process mentation, 66 psychic differentiation, 85 psychic unity, 89, 91 psychoanalysis, 15, 41, 66, 78

379

Index Psychoanalytic Collisions, 288 psychoanalytic theory, 18 psychoanalytic trauma theory, 20 psychoanalytic treatments, clinical examples, 12, 142–148 countertransference blindness, case of, 302–306 forty-year-old woman, Ariane, case of, 142–146 implications for therapy, 316–318 psychological freedom, 347 psychology of madness, 146 psychotics, 50 pure objectivity, 73 pure subjectivity, 73

Q

quantum physics, 73 questioning in Jewish tradition, 10–11

R

380

Rabbah, Bereshit, 27 Radnitzky, 253 Rashi comment on Genesis 3:8, 28–30 dual meaning of va’yishmu in Genesis 3:8, 30 forms of sexual responsibility, 32 interpretations of Aggadah, 28 metonymic connection between text and narrative construction, 32 quality of interpretative style, 27 relationship between Joseph and Judah’s characters, 32 relationship between process and interpretative purpose, 28 use of trilateral root y,r,d to, 32 Rashi’s Reading of Genesis 39, 18 “bread” as a euphemism, 34 construction of Law of the Father, 38 double meaning of va’yishmu, 29 engagement of metonymy and metaphor, 34 forms of titillation, 34 Genesis 39:6, 33–34 Genesis 39:7, 34 Genesis 39:9, 33 Genesis 39:11, 35 historical narrative of rabbinic thought, 29 importance of Joseph in Potiphar’s household, 33–34 invocation of Jacob’s image, 36–38 invoking an Oedipal scene, 31 issue of desire, 31

Jakobson’s association of displacement with metonymy, 29–30 Joseph’s position of power, 34–36 Lacan’s structural connection of metonymy with desire and narrative, 30 lexical connections, 32 metaphorical connections between eating and sex, 33–34 narrative coherence between Genesis 38 and 39, 32 Potiphar’s wife as a narrative and thematic “teaser,” 32–33 Potiphar’s wife’s attempts to seduce Joseph, 31–38 reading of Genesis 39:1, 31–32 theory and praxis, 27–29 Rat Man case, 11–12 reality principle, 136 reciprocal love, 80 regression, 50 religious personality, 75 remembering, ritual of, 289–293 Renik, O., 156 repression, 86 Reshit, 42, 44, 51 “first point,” 52 Ringelblum, Emmanuel, 314 Archives of the Warsaw Ghetto, 314 Chronicles of the Lodz Ghetto, 314 Rizzuto, A.M., 309 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 314 Rose, Phyllis, 188

S

Sandler, A., 265, 268 Sarna, Nahum, 212 Schifferdecker, Kathryn, 158 seduction, 50–55 Sefer Bamidbar, 99 Sefer Yetzirah, 43–44 Sefira of “Hokhmah”, 50 Sefira of Keter, 44 selective inattention, 12 self, 67 self-knowledge, 69 self-object, 45 separation, ideal of, 275 sexual desire, 18 Shay, Jonathan, 323 Achilles in Vietnam, 323 Shekhinah, 49 Sigal, Hannah, 308 skeptical bridegroom, parable of, 110–112

Index skepticism, 110–114 skin ego, concept of, 217n23 Slochower, Joyce, 21 Soloveitchik, Rabbi Joseph, 65–66, 85, 172–173 Aristotelian epistemology, 73–74 atonement, conception of, 90–91 conception of individual agency and responsibility, 82 disciplinary pluralism, 71 epistemology, 67 etiological perspective of religious act, 74 generic homo religiosus, 88–89 Halakhic Man, 69 “halakhic man,” 89 Halakhic Mind, 69, 71–72 individual self, 93 integration between past, present, and future in psyche, 92 knowledge, 67 Maimonidean appropriation of Aristotle, 70, 78, 84–85 narrative about the self, 90 past, present, and future, 89–90 problem of dualism, 88 quantum physics, 78 secret of cleaving to God, 69 subject-object distinction, 69–72 teshuva, conception of, 88–89, 93–95 And From There Shall You Seek, 68–69, 71 From There Shall You Seek, 91 unity of knower and known, 70, 83 Soloveitchik, Rabbi Joseph B., 18 space, 17 Spero, Moshe, 21 spies, narratives of, 99–100 aspects of emotional development, 123–125 Caleb/Joshua and God’s glory, 103–105, 121–122 “difficult freedom,” 106–110 disruptions of imagination, 115–116 divine desires, 125–126 external and inner reality, 114–117 fantasies in, 117–118 game of loss, 119–120 God’s love, 121–122 land’s goodness, 108–110 in Midrash Tanchuma, 102 mortality, 120–121 of skeptical bridegroom, 110–112 spies’ mission, 105–107, 110–112 story about fear, 100–105

subjective vision, 115 theme of the giants, 101–102 tov (good) and ra (evil), 105–106, 124 transparent eye-ball vision of land, 114–117 visual impact of land, 113–114 wilderness, 126–128 splendorous image, 237n40 Steinsaltz, Adin, 11 Stern, D.N., 15, 254–255, 330 stranded object, 226n31 sublimation, 65, 68, 85–88 Sullivan, Harry Stack, 12–13 super-ego, 86 survivor’s problem, 251 symbolization, 226–228, 308–310, 317 communicative process of, 310 symmetrical logic, 209n13

T

Talby-Abarbanel, M., 349 Talmudic method of text study, 252–253 Tanach, 15 Taylor, W. S., 157 teshuva, 65–66, 68, 85, 88–95 causality of, 91 self in, 91–92 Soloveitchik’s conception of, 88–89, 93 testimonies, 314–316 text analysis dream text and interpretation, 253–254 Handelman method, 253–254 Talmudic method, 252–253 theoretical life, 93 therapeutic regression, 56 therapist’s questions and patient’s narrative, 14 Tibrisi, ’Allamah, 223 tohu, 44 Torah, 100, 125 stories in, 205n9 transference, 15, 40 transformational object, 41, 47–50 transgenerational memory, 323 transgenerational transmission of trauma, 345 transitional objects, 227–228, 293 transitional play, 228 transparent eye-ball vision, 114–118, 128 trauma/breakdown, notion of, 135–142. see also childhood trauma in the clinical situation, 139 intergenerational transmission of, 22 trauma theory, 53

381

Index traumatic loss, 273–279 traumatic memories brain and, 328–329 disruption of personal agency, 332–334 erasure of genocidal experience, 312–314 Holocaust, 311 nature of, 306–307 resilience experiences, 311–312 testimonies, 314–316 triggers, 328 trust, 181 truth in Judaism, 17 Tustin, Frances, 217n23 twinship, 45 The Tyndale, 213 tzimtzum, 52

U

unconscious, 30 unformulated experience, 12 unio-mystica, 50 union with God, 53

V

vehement emotion, 329, 338 verbal aphasia, 308 Vietnam Memorial Wall, 276 Volkan, V.D. The Third Reich in the Unconscious, 340

W

Wiesel, Elie, 251 Wieviorka, Annette The Era of the Witness, 314 wilderness, 19, 99 narrative, 128–129 Wilner, W., 256 Winnicott, Donald, 50, 123, 140–141 concept of mirroring, 182

382

weaning process, 259 wisdom of psychoanalysis, 147 Wiseman, H., 348 Wolfson, E.R., 252 Wolpe, David, 10 wound-trauma of psyche, 137

Y

Yad Vashem, 316 Yahrzeit, 251 Yerushalmi, Josef, 335–336 Zakhor: Jewish History, Jewish Memory, 277 Yitzhak, Rabbi Shlomo, 18, 164 Yizkor ritual, 21 Yom Hazikaron (Israel Remembrance Day), 276

Z

“Zachor” (remember), 21, 311–312, 335 “zero space” images, 51 Zohar’s rendition of Creation, 42, 55–56 aspects of a person, 46 connection between God and human, 53–54 cosmological “new beginning,” 43 God’s first speech-act, 56 metaphor of “gaze” and “light,” 45–46 obscure and mysterious terms, use of, 43–44 opening chapter of, 42–43 process of emanation, 44 “similarity of process” between the divine and human realms, 44–45 symbolic “dot,” 44 tohu and bohu, 44 Zornberg, Avivah, 19 Zucker, H., 14 Zusya, story of, 11