Psychoanalysis and Kabbalah

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Psychoanalytic Review, 83(6), December 1996 © 1996 N.P.A.P

Joseph H. Berke

Psychoanalysis and Kabbalah are theories about the nature of existence.

They are also meditations, really methods for restoring shattered lives.
These are lives which have been separated from their source. The
particular domain of psychoanalysis is the head and the heart, that is, the
totality of an individual's mind and emotions, "the self." In particular, I
refer to a person confirmed in his subjectivity, as agent of his thoughts and
feelings, and confirmed in his objectivity, the object of his own activity and
focus of his consciousness.

In contrast the domain of Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition, is the

soul, a person's holy, timeless essence. I refer to an entity which is both
elevated, that is, exists in spiritual realms, and is part of a whole, the
primordial source, God.'

Needless to say, such a capsule definition is limited and limiting. It doesn't

take into account many other facets of psychoanalysis or Kabbalah. Thus,
psychoanalysis, as currently practiced, is not just concerned with an
individual man, woman, or child. On the contrary, it strives to see this
person in relation to his family and friends. And to complicate matters
even more, it considers each person to be a dynamic nucleus of
relationships. Essentially he is a center of energies, a world in and of
himself, containing and being contained by a myriad of other swirling
worlds.

Kabbalah also focuses upon worlds and worlds within worlds. So a further
way of looking at both psychoanalysis and Kabbalah, a further refinement,
is that these two disciplines aim to explore the obvious and the esoteric,
the conscious and unconscious aspects of existence. But they especially
aim to reveal that which is mysterious and profoundly concealed.

As you can see, my introduction stresses the similarities, rather than the
differences between psychoanalysis and Kabbalah. This is because I think
that psychoanalysis may be seen as a secular branch of Kabbalah. Or, to
put it another way, psychoanalysis is secular Kabbalah.

What I have just stated is not necessarily news. Several decades ago, Dr.
David Bakan, who was Professor of Psychology at the University of
Chicago, published a fascinating study of the origins of psychoanalysis
entitled, S19mund Freud and the jewish Mystical Tradition (1965). Let me
quote Bakan:

. . . the contributions of Freud are to be understood largely as a

contemporary version of, and a contemporary contribution to, the history
of Jewish mysticism. Freud, consciously or unconsciously, secularised
Jewish mysticism; and psychoanalysis can intelligently be viewed as such
a secularisation. (1965, p. 25)

Nowadays Bakan's work is generally ignored. This is probably because

psychoanalysts prefer not to be reminded that their origins lie in a
spiritual, as opposed to scientific, tradition. Bruno Bettelheim has
documented this position in his late work, Freud and Man's Soul (1983). It
is also worth mentioning that Bakan himself thought that Freud
emphasized the latter in order to avoid anti-Semitic attacks and
professional invalidation.

In this study I shall consider psychoanalysis from the standpoint of two

pioneers, Signiund Freud and Melanie Klein. I intend to show that their
personal origins, concerns, and methods are intimately rooted in Jewish
religious and mystical traditions. To do so I shall concentrate on two
fundamental features of their work respectively. Each of these has long
been recognized as an outstanding innovation and important contribution
to our understanding of human nature. For Freud this includes "free
associations," his basic methodology, and his theory of unconscious
processes, the view that reality has both a manifest and latent content. For
Klein I shall discuss two of her basic concepts, the container and the
contained, and reparation.

But let me begin with a brief discussion of their personal backgrounds.

There are some striking similarities which help to explain their direct and
indirect connections with Judaism and Kabbalah.

Freud was born in Freiberg, Moravia, in 1856 but spent almost his entire
life in Vienna. Significantly, both his parents came from Galicia, a region of
Poland that, as Bakan points out, was "saturated" with Jewish mysticism,
especially Chassidism. Indeed, Freud explicitly acknowledged that his
father, Jakob, came from a Chassidic environment. Moreover, Freud was
familiar with mystical texts. He had read with great interest the work of
Rabbi Chaim Vital, a renowned sixteenth - century Kabbalist and principle
disciple of Rabbi Isaac Luria (the Ari) and had many books on Judaica, and
specifically Kabbalah, in his library (Bakan, 1965, pp. xix-xx).

Melanie Klein was born in Vienna in 1882 and lived her formative years
there. Many consider her to be Freud's foremost follower. Klein greatly
extended his work by developing the field of child analysis as well as by
pioneering the psychoanalysis of psychotic patients. Like Freud, Klein had
a notable Jewish pedigree. Her father came from an orthodox Jewish
family and her mother was the daughter of a rabbi. Although she was not
observant or formally religious in adult life, she did have a Jewish
upbringing and maintained a particular fondness for Yom Kippur, the Day
of Atonement (Grosskurth, 1985, p. 13). As we shall see, these backgrounds
clearly influenced their accomplishments.

Freud and Klein were healers. Their principal focus was damaged selves,
that is, people who were mentally, emotionally, and socially broken or, to
use the prevailing medical metaphor, "sick." Freud turned to the
psychological realm because he found that the symptoms of mental illness
could not be explained or treated physically. Instead he found that by
utilizing a special relationship, one where his patients were able to speak
freely about whatever occurred to them, their symptoms diminished or
disappeared and their lives became less chaotic. The quality of listening
was a very important element in this "free association" process. Later
analysts called it 1istening with the third ear." It is a listening which is very
attentive, nonjudgmental, and highly sensitive to nuances of thought and
feeling.

Bakan observed that Freud's methods are astonishingly similar to those

developed by the early Kabbalists, notably the thirteenth century Spanish
Kabbalist, Rabbi Abraham Abulafia (1965, pp. 75-80). R. Abulafia strove to
"unseal the soul, to untie the knots which bind it." Basically he developed a
theory of repression and a means to deal with the effects of repression six
centuries before Freud explored similar issues.

Firstly, R. Abulafia emphasised "mystical logic" of letters, the logic of

"God's real world," which for Freud became the logic of the unconscious
especially as elaborated by linguistic processes (Freud, 1910). Secondly, he
described a form of free association which he called, "jumping and
skipping." The scholar, Gershom Scholem, comments that this was:

... a very remarkable method of using associations as a way of mediation....

Every "jump" opens a new sphere.... Within this sphere, the mind may
freely associate. The `jumping" unites, therefore, elements of free and
guided association and is said to assure quite extraordinary results as far
as the "widening of the consciousnes? of the initiate is concerned. The
"jumping" brings to light hidden processes of the mind.... (1955, pp. 135-36)

A comparable method allowed Freud to peel back layer after layer of

disturbance, to penetrate anxiously concealed thoughts and feelings, and
to initiate understanding, first in him, then in his patients. The
transformation from sick to sane took place when the concealed became
revealed, when the unconscious became conscious, and his patients were
able to "know" themselves. Essentially he discovered a process of de-
mystification and de-alienation facilitated by the free association of
thoughts and feelings. Or to put it another way, through encouraging his
patients to free associate, Freud was able to initiate a process of de-
repression. What does this mean?
Freud saw that people lived in two spheres simultaneously. One is the
conscious level. He called conscious thoughts and actions the manifest
content of our lives. The other is the unconscious level. This is not a static,
but a dynamic interplay of experiences which he called the latent content.
Freud saw (fiat it is an ongoing effort to keep things latent or unconscious.
Indeed, much of one's life may be devoted to this effort, while the outer
manifestations of such struggle often emerge as "symptoms." But what are
symptoms? Aren't they simply bits and pieces of behavior, well-worn
responses, that sit astride our personality like so many clothes or
garments? Usually no one considers them to be indications of disturbance
unless they become too painful to wear. And much of this pain has to do
with the inner conflicts which keep a person from being at one with
himself and his source.

Making the unconscious conscious assists people to become less conflicted

with themselves. It helps them to gain peace and wholeness, or, what in
Hebrew may be termed shalom and shalem. Essentially it enables them to
regain choice as to what garments they need carry, which they can shed.
And it determines to what extent the light of their innermost being can
permeate and nourish their lives, and the community in which they live.

The study of Torah involves an almost identical process. I refer to the

interplay between Nigleh, the revealed Torah, and Nistar, the hidden
Torah.' Traditionally, Jews, including students of Kabbalah, of course,
believe that the Torah is the "word of God." It contains, but also conceals,
his direct radiance or illumination. But, it is possible to gain a direct
contact with God, thence the source of all existence, by penetrating the
outer garments or overt meanings of the "word," a process well described
by the Talmudic scholar and Kabbalist Rabbi Adin Even Yisroel
(Steinsaltz) (1988, pp. 20-25).

The Zohar, or Book of Illumination, is the principal text of Kabbalah.

Traditionally attributed to Rabbi Simeon Bar Yohai in the second
century, it consists of a detailed commentary on the Torah in order to
distinguish between what is manifest and what is latent, and to reveal the
basic wellsprings of divine truth.'

In the chapter on Beha'Alothekha, from Bemidbar, the book of Numbers, the

Zohar continues:

Thus had the Torah not clothed herself in garments of this world the world
could not endure it. The stories of the Torah are thus only her outer
garments, and whoever looks upon those garments as being the Torah
itself, woe to that man.... Observe this. The garments worn by a man are
the most visible part of him, and senseless people looking at the man do
not seem to see more in him than the garments. But in truth the pride of
the garments is the body of the man, and the pride of the body is the soul.
Similarly the Torah has a body made up of the precepts of the Torah, called
gufe torah [bodies, main principles of the Torah], and that body is
enveloped in garments made up of worldly narrations. The senseless
people see only the garment, the more narrations; those who are
somewhat wiser penetrate as far as the body. But the really wise, the
servants of the most high King, those who stood on Mount Sinai, penetrate
right through to the soul, the root principle of all, namely, to the real Torah.
(Sperling & Simon, 1984, p. 211)

As this passage reveals, the development of Freudian psychoanalysis has

meant that Kabbalistic forms of interpretation can be used to understand
the profoundly human dilemma of being alive. By this I refer to the almost
universal fate of being imbued with life force and simultaneously suffering
from a self divided and cut off or alienated from itself and from others, as
well as from the source of all things.

The Kleinian contribution relates to the difficulty of containing or holding

what the Kabbalists would call the primary radiance of God, or what
psychoanalysts might term man's instinctual forces, and all their
derivatives. Together with Klein's views, I want to consider the creation of
the world, from the standpoint of Lurianic Kabbalah. This is the principle
stream of contemporary Jewish mysticism and is a development of the
work of Rabbi Isaac Luria. He lived and taught in Safed in the sixteenth
century and is one of the greatest of all Kabbalists. Through his insights,
the Zohar has become accessible.

According to the Lurianic understanding, when God created the world, he

withdrew his light into a single point, thereby creating a primary
nothingness or vacuum that became "the fertile teeming grounds of
creation." This act of withdrawal or contraction is known as tzimtsum.
Then he retracted and sent this light back into the world in the form of a
very fine thread. This is the process of emanation. From this thread a
vessel was created from God's radiance. As is said in Psalm 104, "He draws
forth Light as a garment."

In the vacuum left by the original contraction, light continued to pour in.
But it could not be contained by the vessel that was created to contain,
limit, and shape existence. So the vessel shattered. This is known as
shevirath ha-kelim, the breaking of the vessel. The resultant disintegration of
the Divine Light resulted in a multitude of shards or fragments of the
vessel, also containing bits or seeds of the original light. The fragments
with the embedded light are known as klippot or shells and are responsible
for the existence of evil. Evil therefore can be seen as the manifestation of
uncontainable disintegrative forces, or primary chaos. This results in the
"exile of the Shekinah' the feminine, maternal aspect of God's presence
(Gottlieb, 1989, pp. 17-18).

The whole point of existence is to free the light trapped in the shells, undo
this exile and reestablish God's unity. When a child is born, the unity
between the child and his mother is broken. Then the child cannot contain
the primary impulses, which Freud called eros and thanatos, and which
Klein recognized as the life impulse and the death impulse. Essentially we
can consider the life impulse as the impetus to form and structure,
negative entropy, if you will. Concurrently the death impulse is the
impetus to randomise things, entropy itself (Berke, 1988, pp. 58~59).

Klein pointed out that the child cannot contain these powerful impulses.
In order to protect himself from terrible internal tension (experienced as
incipient death), he splits or shatters his mind and being. Concomitantly,
he tries to deal with the tension by evacuating, literally projecting, large
parts of himself outwards, into others, even into inanimate objects.
Consequently, his outer world becomes full of bad persecuting bits and
pieces, while his inner self becomes emptier and emptier. Then, in order to
deal with the emptiness, he may take back or introject many of the bad
bits. All these activities lead to an internal world which is also highly
threatening, indeed, very persecuting. Klein called this state of affairs, the
paranoidschizoid position. The term denotes a dynamic configuration of
persecutory fears, annihilative and disintegrative defences (splitting,
projection, denial) and "part-objects" or what I call, "part people." that is, a
relation to a function: feeding or cleaning, rather than a complete human
being (1946).

How does the child overcome this dreadful situation. How does he
reestablish his container and containing function. How can the bad bits
become less toxic, more containable? Kabbalists would say that we can
undo the broken vessel and subsequent exile, by establishing and
reestablishing a close relationship with God. In the same vein Melanie
Klein and her colleagues would argue that the child can become a
functioning container of his own impulses (and thereby life forces), by
establishing and reestablishing close relationships with those who love
and care for him.

This process has been very well described by Dr. Hanna Segal, who is one
of Melanie Klein's principal disciples. Segal comments on what happens
during a good mother-child relationship, and, by direct implication, a
good therapist-patient relationship:

When an infant has an intolerable anxiety, he deals with it by projecting it

into the mother. The mother's response is to acknowledge this anxiety and
do whatever is necessary to relieve the infant's distress. The infant's
perception is that he has projected something intolerable into his object,
but the object was capable of containing it and dealing with it. He can then
reintroject not only the original anxiety, but an anxiety modified by having
been contained. He also reintrojects an object capable of containing and
dealing with anxiety. The containment of the anxiety by an internal object
capable of understanding is the beginning of mental stability. (Segal,
1975b, p. 135)

It is worth asking what happens if the child is not blessed with a

containing parent, or the patient with a containing therapist. Usually he
will try to project more and more of his bad feelings, somewhere,
anywhere. And even more ominously, he will do this deliberately and
maliciously. But, malicious projection is an operational definition of envy.
So a failure of containment will lead to the explosion of envy, really evil,
the yetzah harah, into the world (Berke, 1988, p. 268). A world full of bits
and pieces of envious hatred is identical with broken bits of the primary
vessels, each replete with embedded chaos. Interestingly, the Chinese word
for chaos, Luan, also means envy.

The opposite of chaos is order. A strong container and containing function

is a prerequisite for such order, which is closely connected with peace and
wholeness, shalom and shalem. Klein discerned that the time for
accomplishing this goes back to the first months of life. Then the child
begins to realise that the mother he loves and the mother he hates are the
same person. This instigates what she called the depressive position. The
depressive position, when the child becomes more concerned with
preserving another, rather than preserving himself, is a psychological
milestone. It marks the onset of mental and emotional integration. It
means that the child is able to face reality, whatever he feels inside himself,
and sees outside himself. Moreover, it means that he is able to take
responsibility for what he does, good and bad; and is able to acknowledge
and contain a wide variety of experiences: love and hate, guilt and despair
(Klein, 1937; Hinshelwood, 1991).

The onset of the depressive position signals the growing capacity of the
child to be a container of his own impulses. If the elucidation of this
dynamic milestone is one of Klein's major contributions, perhaps her
greatest, is the concept of reparation. Reparation is the means of repairing
an inner world shattered under the pressure of destructive impulses and
an outer world of damaged relationships, peoples, and things. Reparation
is a goal and the moving to this goal. According to Klein reparation is
never complete, rather it is an active process of striving toward
completeness, whether of the head or heart or entire being. It is intimately
related to the Kabbalistic concept of tikkun.

The poet and Kabbalist Pinchas Sadeh has described what the process,
tikkun ha-lev, or restoration of the heart, has meant for him:

This evening, while I was still engrossed in thought on a certain topic, a

thought entered my mind regarding "repair of the heart."

A few years ago, when I edited a book of the writings of Rabbi Nachman
of Breslov, I chose to call it Tikkun Ha-Lev, repair of the heart. I thought that
the meaning of the name, simple in itself, was absolutely clear to me. But I
am thinking that perhaps only now its meaning is becoming clear to me.

. . . Time, fate, life and death - all these powerful forces prevent the
possibility of repairing that which is broken. If so, what is possible? What
remains for man to do, after all? What can save and rescue the things that
are smashed? Maybe only -and even this only through tremendous effort,
through difficult struggle, through great pain -this; repairing the heart. In
other words, repairing the heart, which was broken when all those things
were broken.'

These words convey a particular state of mind, perhaps not unlike that of
Melanie Klein when she was grief stricken after the death of her eldest son
in a mountaineering accident. This shock was the occasion for Klein's
struggle to define "the depressive position." For Klein, this struggle was
her way of mending a broken heart. The resultant tikkun was a powerful
and far reaching conceptualisation.

We all know a popular children's rhyme which expresses similar fears and
needs:

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the King's horses and all the King's men,
Couldn't put Humpty Dumpty together again.

The despair in this refrain echoes with that of Pinchas Sadeh about the
difficulty, even impossibility, of effecting a repair. I think the sentiments
are so moving because they are so elemental. How can one put together a
loved one, loved ones, after we have hurt them? And how strong are our
reparative capacities, really equal to our life forces, when, to quote Dr. R.
D. Laing, "the dreadful has already happened"? (1967, p. 134) Surely this is
the case with Humpty Dumpty. For he is not an ordinary creature. Rather
he embodies the cosmic egg, the primal contents, and container of all life
(Cirlot, 1962, p. 90).

As in Kabbalah, Klein sets out to describe how to overcome fragmentation

and loss, evil and exile. Only the terms of reference are different. Klein is
concerned with the self, and this self in relation to others. To her, exile may
mean separation from Mother. For Kabbalists, evil also means
fragmentation, disintegration and ultimately death. Exile means
separation from God.

The psychologist Harriet Lutzky, in a paper on "Reparation and Tikkun,"

points out that both the Kabbalah and Klein use similar processes and
symbols to effect repair. In the first instance reparative energies involve
"unification/integration," and in the second, "containment/internalisation"
(1989, p. 455).

Similarly, in the Jewish mystical tradition the focus is on the Shekinah, "ima,
" the feminine, maternal aspect of God's presence, while in psychoanalytic
practice it is on a "the good internal object," really a representation of "the
good breast" (Berke, 1988, pp. 78-98).

Hanna Segal has provided an excellent example of this process of

reparation during the course of her treatment of a manicdepressive
woman (1975a, pp. 93-94). It occurred in a dream after the patient had read
a book about the Warsaw Ghetto. The woman dreamed that she was
driving to work. As she was doing so, she felt upset because the electric
current suddenly cut off. What could she do? Quickly she saw that she had
a torch battery of her own and could use it.

Eventually she arrived at her work place. In the dream she realized that
what she had to do was to open up an enormous mass grave. She started
to dig and dig. But she was all by herself and only had the light of her
torch to guide her. After a while she saw that some of the people in the
grave were alive. So she dug them out, and was very pleased when they
began to help her. Then, more and more people emerged, more and more
bodies were pulled out. In the end she had the strong feeling of rescuing
everyone who had been buried alive. They had become her helpers. As for
the dead bodies, she had the satisfaction of removing them from an
anonymous grave and knowing that they would be named and buried
properly.

The patient was able to make amends to those bodies which were beyond
life by properly mourning for them. This meant she had to recognize,
name, and bury each one separately. Thus, the dreamer was able to atone
for her hatreds and become at-one with everyone she had hurt. Truly the
occasion of the dream was a day of atonement.

In this regard, Hanna Segal makes one more point, really a very important
point. A complete reparation involves a third step. It the first has to do
with acknowledging destructive impulses, and the second focuses on
restoring the damaged object or person, then the third has to do with
repairing a wounded relationship. So this last step is unification. It literally
involves re~pairing, bringing together a damaged dyad, and reestablishing
the love and completeness that once existed between them: mother and
father, parent and child, sibling and sibling. True reparation is only
complete when all three tasks have been accomplished.

These formulations of Melanie Klein and Klein's disciple Hanna Segal bear
an exceptional resemblance to Kabbalistic and Hassidic thought. In
particular, I shall refer to the work of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, the great
grandson of the Ba'al Shem Tov. Rabbi Nachman passed most of his short
life (1772-1810) in the Ukraine and Russia. Many of his teachings
emphasize the conflict between good and evil and the possibility of
achieving tikkun hanefesh, restoration of the "soul," even after a person has
sunk to the lowest depths.

There are people who have done so much wrong that they fall to the level
of the "concealment within the concealment." Because of this they come to
believe that there is no longer any hope for them, God forbid. This is
because when a person does something wrong several times, the matter
becomes permissible in his eyes. This is the first "concealment." But when
he does still more wrong, then God becomes hidden from him to the point
of the "concealment within the concealment." Then it is hard indeed to find
him. (Greenbaum, 1980, p. 20)

How does a person overcome these concealments?' Rabbi Nachman

speaks of various means, of which the most basic is prayer, especially
prayers of repentance. These, such as Avinu Malkenu, Our Father, Our
King, begin the repair, the tikkun, by acknowledging the transgression. So,
the first step in overcoming concealment, as with Freud and Klein, has to
do with facing reality.

Secondly, repentance or tshuvah, itself has the power "to transform a

person's transgressions into merits. [So] what was damaged can be
restored" (Greenbaum, 1980, p. 58). Rabbi Nachman goes on to explain that
the reason for this is that transgressions draw down the divine light into
lowly places. Then the light becomes trapped within thick vessels (the
sinner). But repentance refines and purifies the vessels so that they can
receive and hold "a new radiation of light." This process, called "relining
the vessel," corrects the original damage (that is, the effects of
transgression on the transgressor) by allowing divine light to radiate to
places where it might never otherwise reach.

In many ways the consequence of a thickened vessel is similar to that of a

broken vessel. In either case the divine illumination is trapped by its
container. Thus "relining" is like restoring (the broken shards). It draws the
infinite into the finite and permits the third stage of reparation to take
place. This is the process of re-pairing, not just between man and man, but
between man and his maker, the primal source, the Shekinah. In the Jewish
mystical tradition this last step, unification, is a fundamental prerequisite
for overcoming man's wandering in the wilderness, "the exile," for Jews,
and for all mankind.

Unification is the central issue for restoration or reparation, which I have

traced according to the formulations of kabbalah and psychoanalysis. In so
doing, I have shown how these two disciplines are closely related. 1 would
like to conclude by considering how they may differ. That concerns my
point of departure, the subject which requires healing or restoration. In
psychoanalysis this is "the self." In kabbalah this is "the soul."

The "self' is a slippery entity. Although everyone agrees that it pertains to

psychological realms, the term encompasses a plethora of meanings. Most
narrowly, these include identity, self-awareness, a part or parts of the
mental apparatus (the ego), the subject as agent, and the subject as object
of his own activity. On the other hand, Jungian psychology provides a
broader, almost too broad view. It sees the self as "the unifying principle
within the human psyche." Thus, for Carl Jung, the self is both the centre
of as well as the container of all conscious and unconscious contents and
processes (Samuels, 1986, p. 135).

Interestingly, the psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut, whom many consider to be

the progenitor of self-psychology, contends that the self is essentially "not
knowable" (1977). Before reaching this conclusion he reviews various
attempts to refine the term ranging from mental structure to psychological
center. Subsequently he describes the constituents of the self: ambitions,
ideals, talents, and skills. A secure self is a cohesive whole. The converse
lacks cohesion and remains a fragmented, chaotic mess. Ultimately Kohut
refuses to assign a specific, that is, inflexible definition to "the self." While
he may not believe that "the self' is ineffable, he does point out that the
term is best left undefined.

In contrast, "the soul" belongs to spiritual realms. The Kabbalah describes

five levels of soul: nefesh, ruach, neshamah, chaya, and yehidah. For each of
these levels, there is a separate degree of healing or tikkun, a separate
reparation and re-pairation. 1 shall base this final section of the paper on
the model of the soul delineated by the contemporary Israeli Kabbalist,
Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh (1992, pp. 30-31).

The lowest level concerns the work of the physician. He works on the
nefesh. Here healing consists of binding the soul to the body through the
medium of blood. ("The blood is the nefesh.") Nefesh refers to physical or
material consciousness.

Next is the domain of psychology and psychoanalysis. This concerns the

ruach or spirit, and is the level of soul associated with the emotions. Thus,
the tikkun effected by psychoanalysis has to do with perceiving psychic
reality, unblocking the flow of feelings, and reaching towards "spiritual
consciousness."

The third higher level of soul, is the neshamah. This is about as elevated a
state of consciousness as it is possible for a person to attain. And only a
few, those who have risen above egoic concerns, can manage that. At the
level of neshamah, tikkun refers to the power "to draw the Divine influx to
the supra-rational aspects of the soul." Clearly, this is not the province of
psychoanalysis. But by means of psychoanalysis a person might be able to
clear the blocks in himself that prevent him from seeing or reaching
toward transcendental awareness.

Chaya is the fourth level of soul, and is connected with wisdom and pure
consciousness. The degree of healing associated with chaya involves a state
of absolute binding of the soul to Torah and the word of God. I think that
this is the domain of the tzaddik and "corresponds to a true state of
selflessness" and "sense of infinite serenity."

Yehidah refers to a state of unification with the Almighty. A person on this

level might continue to exist even though his body was mortally ill, "as
though the Holy One dwells in his guts." Here healing denotes physical
(and concurrent psychological) resurrection.

The problem with Rabbi Ginsburgh's paradigm is that it refers to realms

which most people don't recognize. Perhaps it is true that "self' and "soul"
denote different phenomena? Does this matter? Isn't it sufficient to
demonstrate the close connection between psychoanalysis and kabbalah
by noting similar methods and goals? Or, could it be that the differences
between "self' and "soul" are more apparent than real?

Jung delineated a close link between self and soul. He argued that the self
is fundamentally a component of a transcendental entity which he called,
the God-image. For Jung the God-image is "a unifying and transcendent
symbol" capable of drawing together different psychic components,
themselves related to "higher" or non personal spheres (Samuels, 1986, p.
61).

Moreover, as we have just seen, Kabbalists themselves specifically equate

the self with the second level of soul, ruach. But perhaps Heinz Kohut has
provided the most moving connection between "self" and "soul," and by
extension, between psychoanalysis and Kabbalah, in his book, The
Restoration of the Self (19 77).

In the epilogue, he ponders the capacity of art and artists to depict the
central dilemma of our age, how man can manage "to cure his crumbling
self." Kohut confides that nowhere has he found a more accurate account
of the yearning to restore a shattered self than in Eugene O'Neill's play The
Great God Brown. Toward the end, the central character, Brown,
contemplates his wrecked life and shattered self. Kohut concludes,
through the words of Brown:

Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue.

NOTES

1. The themes of this paper are being expanded as a book under the
same title by Dr. Stanley Schneider, Jerusalem, and myself. This will
be published by Jason Aronson Inc. in 1997.
2. Torah is the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible. But the term
is also used synonymously with the entire body of Jewish sacred
literature.
 3. The Zohar,also translated as the "Book of Splendor," has also been
attributed, in whole or in part, to the thirteenth-century Spanish
kabbalist, R. Moses b. Shem Tov de Leon.
4. I am grateful to Rabbi Shmuel Lew and Dr. Naftali Loewenthal for
their translation and discussion of this passage.
5. A further way of considering "the concealment within the
concealment" is that it refers to the moment when a person continues
to do the prohibited act, but also forgets the prohibition.

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5 Shepherd's Close
London N6 5AG
England
The Psychoanalytic Review
Vol. 78, No. 1, Spring 1991