Agency and autonomy from the Israelites
NY Times Magazine
Letter to the Editor
September 13, 2007
Dear Editor,
In “Defender of the Faith?” (The Way we live now, September 9), Mark Edmundson writes that Freud stressed that the ability to believe in an internal, invisible God vastly improves people’s capacity forabstraction. Quoting Freud, he says, “The prohibition against making an image of God – the compulsion to worship a God whom one cannot see,” he says, meant that in Judaism “a sensory perception was given second place to what may be called an abstract idea – a triumph of intellectuality over sensuality.”
There is another important psychological and cognitive advancement that Judaism contributed to Western culture: the importance of agency and autonomy. Prior to the Israelite religion, if one tribe was defeated by another, it was assumed that the gods of the loser were defeated by the gods of the victors.
Judaism developed the concept of a universal God who ruled over all humanity and not only over the local tribe. This God rewarded the Israelites if they were good and punished them if they were bad. Thus, if the Israelites were defeated by their enemies, they blamed themselves (their actions caused God to punish them by allowing their enemies to be victorious). They did not assume that their God was defeated by another deity. This led to a valorization of individual responsibility. If people have the power to affect the actions of an omnipresent God, they clearly have a great deal of power to affect their interactions
in the world.
This process promoted the development of internal agency and autonomy: that all individuals are have power over what happens to them and they are not simply at the mercy of what goes on around them or of the unseen gods who use them as tools.
Leon Hoffman, MD
Director, Pacella Parent Child Center of
The NY Psychoanalytic Institute & Society
167 East 67th Street
NY NY 10065
212.249.1163
917.767.6575
73542.334@compuserve.com
http://www.theparentchildcenter.org/
Click Here to Read: Mark Edmundson’s New York Times Article on “Defender of the Faith