Psychoanalysis, antisemitism and the miser

The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2012

Presenting some case material, Neri described a patient in terms of three distinct fields: the company field, the narrative field and the analytic field. The first involved the world of the patient's work situation. This concrete and elusive field included the patient's lack of individuation from the work situation. It also contained diminished and rigid affect. It was important for the analytic process for Neri as analyst to become involved and engaged in this company field. Through his attentive listening and understanding of the patient's company field, affect from the patient's early experience began to emerge. The work within the company field led to the development of the patient's narrative field. This was a less concrete and more livable field in which a greater range of affect was expressed. The narrative field afforded a perspective on the company field. Neri described how, in the analytic field, the analyst can perceive the quality of the patient's other fields. The subsidiary fields inhabited by the patient must be handled with care. The analyst must not interpret such fields, but rather listen attentively within such a field. He emphasized the importance of recognizing that when a patient is trapped inside a field the analyst cannot interpret too soon. The analyst must share this field and understand its reality for the patient. Only then can he slowly bring this subsidiary field of the patient into the analytic field. At such a time, the analyst can begin to interpret and work with the patient on a subsidiary field. The third presenter, Ted Jacobs, gave his paper on Reflections on field theory. Jacobs stressed the central role of countertransference and the fact that the analytic situation involves a bi-personal field. He distinguished his conception of a bi-personal field from the Barangers' field concept. His model is weighted towards the intrapsychic, with the analyst's task being to understand and interpret the patient's unconscious constructs. Such constructs, Jacobs stressed, are rooted in the patient's early experience. In Jacobs's model, the patient's troubles are not related to the interaction between his mind or fantasies and those of others. The patient's troubles have their source in internal, maladaptive compromise-formations arising from wishes, fantasies, drives, defences and long-standing identifications with internal objects. The analyst's task is to identify, explore and interpret these, lending a more mature way of thinking to the patient in the process. The analyst uses both countertransference and the shared fantasies that constitute the material of the third to gain access to the patient's mind. One means of such access is through enactments. Jacobs emphasized that the proper use of the analytic instrument requires total immersion in the listening process. Immersed in this process, the analyst may become aware of a shared fantasy or defence. Such shared elements are crucial to advancing the analytic process. It distorts the listening process if the analyst focuses on his subjective experience in sessions or on the material of the field. In other words, Jacobs stressed, the analyst must listen to-not for-the countertransference or material of the analytic field in the listening process. The analyst's awareness of countertransference and the analytic field must arise as a product of undiluted listening. A lively discussion followed the presentations, with much debate between the panelists and several questions and comments from the floor. There was recognition that different field models had been presented, one by each panelist. Aisemberg noted that three different field concepts were discussed and that Neri was describing the patient's different worlds, but not fields. Neri replied that he was describing the different sorts of fields that the patient inhabits and stated that the analytic field is an analytic tool to detect how the patient is under the influence of other fields. One central difference in the panelists' field concepts is that, for Aisemberg, there is a core common unconscious fantasy between analyst and patient. This holds for Neri's analytic field but not for his general concept of the field, and it is not part of Jacobs's field theory. In Jacobs's field concept, an enactment can define a field; for Aisemberg and Neri, an enactment does not define a field. In Aisemberg's and Neri's field concepts, taking the field into account widens the listening process whereas, in Jacobs's model, concentrating on the field narrows the listening and understanding processes. The panel provided much food for thought concerning the future use of field theories and the work that remains to be done to clarify the concepts theoretically and for clinical work. Psychoanalysis, sociology and European Jewish culture 10 Eliahu Feldman, Reporter Arnold Richards opened the panel, stating that he had presented a paper in China on the theme of Freud's cultural and religious influences. He had been surprised by the interest the atheistic Chinese had shown in Freud's Jewish influences, albeit mainly directed at intellectual aspects. He then described the Freud family's Galician origins and their connection with their Jewish past. Although Freud's origins were Moravian, he said he was not a 'Galizianer' and was from the Rheinland 10

JAPA, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 2015

Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society

In some recent work on decolonization, there has been an attempt to claim some Jewish writers of the twentieth century as participating in a rethinking of ''barbarism'' that aligns Jewish thought with the decolonial movement. This is problematic, especially because post-Shoah and Zionist discourses have positioned Jews normatively as part of European ''civilization'' opposed to barbarism. Nevertheless, the reclaiming of a radical Jewish tradition allied with other movements of the oppressed may provide resources for ''barbaric thinking,'' using ''barbaric'' here in the positive sense to mean that which confronts the hegemony of European colonial thought. The relative absence of psychoanalysis from this discussion is striking. Given the place of psychoanalysis both as a ''colonial'' discipline and as a contributor to critical and postcolonial thought, can it be seen in the positive tradition of Jewish barbarism? This article offers an account of Jewish barbaric possibilities and suggests ways in which psychoanalysis might connect with them.

International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2003

This work aims to portray the effects of Freud’s anxiety about antiSemitic violence on his political theory and metapsychology. Taking as its entry point Freud’s reorientation of anti-Semitism as aggressive action, I argue that Freud’s fear of the violent mob can be located in three interconnected dimensions of his work, all deeply informed by Hobbesian imagination. First, Freud accepted a Hobbesian vision of social antagonism into his political theory; second, he formulated a deeper, more efficient defence mechanism against mob violence with his notion of psychical guilt; third, Freud’s fears penetrated his metapsychology. Suffering from anti-Semitism, Freud was not only quick to accept a Hobbesian perspective – he also reconstructed it to a degree that radically changed its meaning. Freud’s third and most pervasive manoeuvre destabilized one of Hobbes’s fundamental theoretical tenets by suggesting that the Hobbesian State of Nature is inherently a non-human reality.

Journal für Psychoanalyse

The arrival of psychoanalysis in pre-state Israel in the early 20th century presents a unique chapter in the history of psychoanalysis. The paper explores the encounter between psychoanalytic expertise, Judaism, Modern Hebrew culture and the Zionist revolution. It offers a look at the relationship between psychoanalysis and a wider community, and follows the life and work of Jewish psychoanalysts during World War II. The coming of psychoanalysis to pre-state Israel, where it rapidly penetrated the discourse of pedagogy, literature, medicine, and politics, becoming a popular therapeutic to establish its identity in the face of its manifold European pasts and discipline, is regarded as an integral part of a Jewish immigrant society’s struggle with its conflict-ridden Middle Eastern present.

In Analysis, revue transdisciplinaire de psychanalyse et sciences, 2022

Addressing the intersection of two polemical concepts, psychoanalysis and the University, exposes us to the intersection of various taboos that risk parasitizing the logical coherence of our proposal. The taboos of psychoanalysis are well-known, since they are at the origin of its exclusion from academic and clinical circles: persistence of theoretical dogmas, methodological and epistemological failures, etc. The taboos of the University do not confront us with controversies concerning the individual unconscious, but rather with those concerning the economic unconscious. The latent elements of the economic unconscious have been largely integrated by the public and institutions thanks to economic propaganda and the standards of modern life, which exploit the individual unconscious to the point of saturation. In the case of the University, it is increasingly a matter of industrial and corporatist way of knowing (Gaudillière, 2015) and determining what knowledge is legitimate; that seems to lead to aberrations in the evaluation of research (Gingras, 2014) and to capitalist logics based on the production, extraction and permanent accumulation of knowledge for the profits of the military-industrial complex (innovate to win the war – Rasmussen, 2015). Probably in this case, as elsewhere, we are in a binary perspective (as we will see with Gheorghe; in press) or even algorithmic: target or waste, 0 or 1, go or die. “Some universities, such as Manchester or Paris VI, will have as their only reference their world position in (academic) research. They will be evaluated and will find their public and private funds according to the international rankings that will have been imposed in the European and world market” (Laredo and Paradeise, 2010, §20). This complex system of “laws”, disciplinary norms, guidelines, scores, measures, monitoring, regulations, financing, rewards and creation of professional careers has become, consciously or unconsciously, consensual; on it depends the future of those who project themselves into a high level professional future, assuming the accumulation of capital and knowledge. “The ‘keep on knowing’ imperative that sustains the knowledge regime contains a dual requirement: to organize knowledge in such a way that it serves the production of subjects of capitalism and contributes to the stabilization of the economic Other”, Tomšič, 2015 suggests.

Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations

The year is 1902. Five men sit in a close circle on a red velvet upholstered couch and matching square-backed chairs, around a Victorian turn-legged table bearing papers and journals, black coffee and cake. The air is thick with tobacco smoke. There is an urn that contains ballots with all the members' names, so that speakers can-and must-speak, in random order. 2 A meticulously dressed, bearded man sits in a chair a few inches apart from the rest of the group, drawing on his cigar, appraising them all with gimlet eyes. He is biding his time to speak until all the others have weighed in. A floor-to-ceiling ceramic coal heater chuffs somewhat ineffectually in the corner; it is the discussion that is generating the heat. The topic is religion. The bearded man is Freud, of course, and this is his waiting room. Here and in the next room-his consulting room proper, with its carpet-draped couch-the walls are covered with pictures, and every surface is filled up with ancient archaeological figurines. With affectionate irony, he calls them "my old and dirty gods"-"meine. .. alten und dreckigen Götter." 3 These figures represent both an 1 This lecture was a summary preview of the main arguments in my book Old and Dirty Gods: Religion, Antisemitism, and the Origins of Psychoanalysis (London & New York: Routledge, 2017), and adapted from an article based on a plenary presentation to the Society for Pastoral Theology (Cooper

The Psychoanalytic Review, 2004

Psychoanalysis is not Jewish, but the idea that it might be has occupied the minds of many for over one hundred years. Th ere have been several reasons for this preoccupation. Sigmund Freud himself feared that the early psychoanalytic "movement," composed primarily of Jews, might be interpreted along ethnic lines, which he believed would seriously jeopardize its prospects as a science. Th is concern was unfounded, as Gentiles came to join his camp and as Jews more often than not rejected his fi ndings. Later, Freud's German-speaking opponents increasingly denounced psychoanalysis as a Jewish invention that originated in a specifi cally Jewish psyche. Th is obsession hardly made an impact elsewhere, as laypeople and professionals alike continued to ponder his system of thought rather than agonize over its pedigree. In the second half of the twentieth century, historians, literary theorists, and psychoanalysts returned to the subject, off ering three distinct explanations for the emergence of Freudianism: a sociological one, frequently involving psychological reasoning; an intellectual one, usually examining the scientifi c, religious, and ideological progenitors of psychoanalysis; and, more recently, a racial one, controversially positing an unconscious ethnic bond that made psychoanalysis (and Judaism as such) possible. Although it is diffi cult to establish a chronology of these approaches, the sociological explanation, with its reliance on place, appears to carry less and less weight today, often being replaced by accounts that embrace Freudian speculation about transgenerational (epigenetic) inheritance, a perspective that ignores place altogether. We have moved, in short, from territory (the Habsburg Empire, Vienna, or the B'nai B'rith chapter in the Austrian capital) to a Rosenzweig-like Jewishness that lies beyond this world.