Remember Joe Burke, the therapist of Mary Barnes at R D Laing’s Kingsley Hall? Thought some of you might like to know:
THE HIDDEN FREUD: HIS HASSIDIC ROOTS BY DR. JOSEPH BERKE
Book launch on 24 June 2015 at the Freud Museum, published by Karnac Books.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
New book by Dr. Joseph Berke examines the connection between Sigmund Freud’s Jewish roots and the resulting input of Jewish mystical tradition into Western psychoanalysis.
Freud’s ancestors were Hassidim going back many generations and included famous rabbis. He even had a connection with the first and only King of Poland, Saul Wahl (1586). Freud chose to deny these roots in order to be accepted as a secular, German professional. However, his Jewish background also informed the development of his ideas about dreaming, sexuality, depression and mental structures, as well as healing practices. The Hidden Freud: His Hassidic Roots considers how the ideas of Kabbalah and Hassidism profoundly shaped and enriched Freud’s understanding of mental processes and clinical practices.
Dr. Joseph Berke examines Freud’s relationship to the Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition, while he was developing a ‘science of subjectivity’. This involved the systematic exploration of human experience, uncovering the secret compartments and deepest levels of the mind (such as preconscious and unconscious methods of thinking), expanding human consciousness beyond ‘objective’ reality, and the revelation of hidden, unconscious thought processes by free association and dream analysis (all linked to Kabbalistic forms of thinking such as ‘skipping and jumping’).
Berke uses meetings that took place in 1903 between Freud and the great Hassidic leader, the fifth Lubavitcher Rebbe, the Rebbe Rashab, as a point of departure to consider Freud’s Jewish identity. While Freud may have felt himself to be “completely estranged from the religion of his fathers”, he still remained a man who “never repudiated his people, who felt that he was in his essential nature a Jew, and who had no desire to alter that nature”, as so many of his colleagues had done. Freud lived the life of a secular, sceptical Jewish intellectual. This was his revealed persona. But there was another, concealed Freud, who revelled in his meetings with the Rebbe, Kabbalists and Jewish scholars; who kept books on Jewish mysticism in his library; and who chose to die on Yom Kippur, 1939, the Day of Atonement. This book considers the implications of the ‘concealed Freud’ on his life and work.
The Hidden Freud: His Hassidic Roots also reflects on Freud’s many distinguished descendants including: the child psychoanalyst, Anna; the painter, Lucian; the politician and TV personality, Clement; the writer, Susie Boyd; the fashion designer, Bella; and the publicist, Matthew, founder of Freud Communications.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Joseph Berke is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist. He is a lecturer, writer and teacher and has lived in London since 1965, after completing his medical training in New York.
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. Mary Barnes: Two Accounts of a Journey Through Madness, which Barnes and Berke co-authored, 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 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 as well as religion and spirituality. His forthcoming book, The Hidden Freud: His Hassidic Roots, will be published in June by Karnac Books.
REVIEWS:
‘This is a virtuoso performance that consults obscure texts, and re-reads familiar ones. That the practice of psychoanalysis may resemble the mystical contemplations of the religious does not diminish psychoanalysis, nor idolise mysticism. It merely locates important developments in our culture within their proper contexts. But it is the living history of the way our cultural ideas and attitudes grow and bear fruit. This is a book that searches at the heart of the fruitfulness of psychoanalysis.’
— Professor R. D. Hinshelwood, University of Essex
‘The relationship between psychoanalysis and Judaism has long been a topic of controversy. Freud was an atheist and rationalist, yet clearly maintained his Jewish identity. In this ground-breaking book, Joseph Berke retraces the paradoxical visions of Freud and other psychoanalysts, to show how closely their perspectives relate to Jewish mystical concepts. Dr Berke demonstrates both the striking parallels between psychoanalysis and the Jewish mystical tradition, and how each contributes to a psychological and spiritual process of reparation and healing.’
— Stephen Frosh, Professor of Psychology, Birkbeck, University of London
‘A thrilling work uniting rigorous scholarship with profound care and devotion. It compellingly investigates the intertwining of Jewish mysticism and psychoanalysis. Berke adroitly examines Freud’s life and relationships, and not only exhumes but brings to life a profound creative spirit. The Freud you meet here is not the Freud you might expect from watered down caricatures. What he tapped was too alive and real to fit into neat borders.’
— Michael Eigen, PhD, author of Kabbalah and Psychoanalysis, The Psychoanalytic Mystic, and Faith
‘In this highly original book psychotherapy and cultural commentary overlap, as Berke discloses Freud’s carefully hidden Jewish self. This is not just a book about Freud, but also a subtle disclosure of the self-deceptions at the heart of western culture.’
— Naftali Loewenthal, Director, Chabad Research Unit; Adjunct Lecturer in Jewish Spirituality, Dept of Hebrew and Jewish Studies, University College London