Joseph H. Berke - The Hidden Freud: His Hassidic Roots

I am very grateful for all the help I have received in the writing of this book.

In particular I wish to acknowledge the contribution of my friend and colleague, Prof. Stanley Schneider, of the Hebrew University. Much of the work I present is based on the papers and book which we have jointly researched and written.

I also wish to give special thanks to my wife, Shree, for her patient support, wise comments, and helpful editing.

Many friends and colleagues have enabled this work to come to fruition. Thank you so much for your contributions.

Rabbi Shimon Cowen

Dr. Sanford Drob

Dr. Michael Eigen

Rabbi Mendel Gordon

Professor Robert Hinshelwood

Ms. Ilany Kogan

Rabbi Shmuel Lew

Professor Naftali Loewenthal

Professor Kate Loewenthal

Mr. Alistair Mann

Mr. David Morgan

Mr. Matthew Rosen-Marsh

Mr. Ephraim Rosenstein

Mr. Henry Rotstein

Dr. Morton Schatzman

Ms. Ann Shearer

Rabbi Yossi Simon

Swami Sadasivananda

Mr. Rod Tweedy

My appreciation to Oliver Rathbone, managing director of Karnac Books for commissioning this book and to his staff for preparing the manuscript, and especially to Kate Pearce and Cecily Blench, project managers, and James Darley, copy editor, who have all done so much in seeing the book through to publication.

My appreciation to Rabbi Nathan Lopes Cardozo for sharing with me the correspondence between Dr. Samuel Eisenstein and Rabbi Alexandre Safran, and for permission to reproduce it.

My appreciation to the Freud Museum for permission to reproduce in Hebrew Jacob Freuds message to his son Sigmund on the occasion of his thirty-fifth birthday.

My appreciation to the staff of the Royal Society of Medicine, London for assisting my research.

Joseph Berke is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist working with individuals and families. He is a lecturer, writer, and teacher and has lived in London since 1965. Beforehand he attended Columbia College of Columbia University and graduated from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University in New York.

Dr. Berke moved to London to study with Dr. R. D. Laing and assisted in establishing the Kingsley Hall Community. There he helped Mary Barnes, a middle-aged nurse who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, to pass through a severe regression. Barnes later became a noted artist, writer, and mystic. The book which Barnes and Berke co-authored (Mary Barnes: Two Accounts of a Journey through Madness, 1972) was adapted as a stage play and has been performed in many countries. It has now been optioned as a feature film.

In 1970 Berke and colleagues founded the Arbours Housing Association in London in order to provide personal, psychotherapeutic care and shelter for people in emotional distress. Later he founded and was the director of the Arbours Crisis Centre.

Berke is the author of many papers and books on psychotherapy, social psychiatry, psychosis, therapeutic communities, and transpersonal psychology as well as Kabbalah and Hassidism. For further information, please visit his website: www.jhberke.co.uk

This book began in the 1980s after I was asked to give a talk about psychoanalysis and Kabbalah at the Leo Baeck College in London. The subject aroused my interest because I am a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and I had been attending seminars on Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition. This led me to explore the relationship between the two disciplines in depth. My question was, Is there a connection between psychoanalysis and Kabbalah. The answer I found was, Yes, a very profound one. So much so, that I concluded that psychoanalysis is a secular extension of Kabbalah. Subsequently I wrote a paper on the subject entitled, Psychoanalysis and Kabbalah (1996, pp. 849863).

A few years later, while meeting with my friend, Rabbi Shmuel Lew, a Lubavitch emissary in London, he told me that the fifth Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Shalom Dov Ber Schneersohn, known as the Rashab, had been to see Sigmund Freud. My reaction was utter disbelief, for Freud was known for his antireligious views and I hardly thought that the leader of the Lubavitch movement would need to consult a therapist, especially a secular one. I told Rabbi Lew that I did not think this was likely. He replied that he had attended a farbrengen (hassidic gathering) at 770 (the name of the Lubavitch headquarters in Brooklyn) in May 1962 when the Rebbe (Menachem Mendel Schneerson) gave a long discourse. In it he referred to the diaries of his predecessor, Yosef Yitzhak Schneersohn (the sixth Rebbe, known as the Rayatz), who said his father (the Rashab) had consulted a famous professor in order to overcome lowness of spirit. The Rebbe revealed that the famous professor to whom the Rashab had turned to for help was Sigmund Freud.

I further discovered that a number of accounts had been published in Yiddish and Hebrew about the encounter between the Rashab (fifth Lubavitcher Rebbe) and Freud. Friends translated these for me. Reading them led to the publication of two papers. The first concerns the encounters between the Rashab and Freud in the period JanuaryApril 1903. The second has to do with the mysterious trip that the Rashab and his son made to Pressburg (now Bratislava in Slovakia) just before the Rashab met Freud.

I have included these papers in the initial chapters of this book. The rest of the book has to do with the relationship between Freud, his work, the Jewish transcendent tradition, and Hassidism. This is a mystical and religious renewal movement rooted in the Kabbalah, and applied to everyday life.