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Overview
Garb follows the gradual disappearance of the soul from modern philosophy while drawing attention to its continued persistence as a topic in literature and popular culture. He pays close attention to James Hillman’s “archetypal psychology,” using it to engage critically with the psychoanalytic tradition and reflect anew on the cultural and political implications of the return of the soul to contemporary psychology. Comparing Kabbalistic thought to adjacent developments in Catholic, Protestant, and other popular expressions of mysticism, Garb ultimately offers a thought-provoking argument for the continued relevance of religion to the study of psychology.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226295947 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 11/23/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 308 |
| File size: | 538 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Yearnings of the Soul
Psychological Thought in Modern Kabbalah
By Jonathan Garb
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2015 The University of ChicagoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-29594-7
CHAPTER 1
The Return of the Soul: Psychology and Modern Kabbalah
The Return of the Soul
In the end, it mattered not that you could not close your mind. It was your heart that saved you. ALBUS DUMBLEDORE TO HARRYPOTTER
In the last two volumes/movies of Harry Potter — the most widespread myth of our times — two clusters of objects compete for the attention of Harry and his friends, and thus of the readers and viewers. On the one hand, we have the Deathly Hallows, with all the connotations of sacredness and power, as well as their close association with the archetypal figure of Death. On the other hand we have the Horcruxes, in which the satanic Lord Voldemort protected the fragments of his soul, culminating with the accidental displacement of yet another fragment in the soul of Harry, whose Christ-like self-sacrifice destroyed it. This enabled Harry to fulfill the plan of Professor Dumbledore by defeating Voldemort, even when the latter was armed with one of the Hallows (and allied with soul-destroying Dementors). Harry's victory was prepared by a complex strategy, which included Dumbledore's care for the soul of Harry's youthful antagonist Draco Malfoy.
This foray into popular culture not only expresses my sharing of Jeffrey Kripal's conviction that this is a central arena for the study of modern mysticism (requiring university professors to study the likes of Professor Xavier, leader of the X-men, and Professor Dumbledore) but also my sense that after centuries of neglect, the soul is once more claiming its due central place in cultural life. Here I join the recent call of Joseph Grange, who has alerted us to the startling gap between the resonance that the idea of the soul still possesses and its marginality in academic discourse. I also share his concern that contemporary cultural and technological developments are leading towards a civilization in which it would be difficult to recapture the world of images and ideas that created the rich history of discourse on the soul throughout the centuries. This is all the more troubling if one accepts Grange's compelling argument that it is soul that enables a sense of the alternative to what he describes as the heartlessness of the corporate-dominated world, including the soul-silencing technocratic management of academia itself.
One may indeed ask, as did Julia Kristeva, in what now looks like an innocent, pre-app decade, "in the wake of psychiatric medicines, aerobics, and media zapping, does the soul still exist?" Kristeva's own answer, though acknowledging "new maladies" not covered in the traditional taxonomy of psychoanalysis, still remains deeply rooted in the Freudian tradition (though via the mediation of Jacques Lacan), the critique of which is one of the main goals of this chapter. Even when acknowledging "Talmudic and cabalistic traditions" in general terms, her move straight from the Bible to Freud bypasses millennia of Jewish psychology, especially the prolific modern centuries covered here.
However, as we shall see in chapter 6, I am encouraged by the return in contemporary mysticism and spirituality of the soul, whose presence has at last begun to command intensive academic attention. In saying this, I must stress that we are not talking here of a religious belief system, but rather of forms of psychological thought and cultural reflection, as well as a form of poetics (as I hope to elaborate elsewhere). As Erich Fromm put it in his pioneering Psychoanalysis and Religion: "It is not true that we have to give up the concern for the soul if we do not accept the tenets of religion." However, I must confess to some sympathy with Christopher Dawson's saying "religion is the soul of culture."
This being said, it is not a religious, but a cultural stance, that is championed when Martha Nussbaum, in her inspiring defense of the humanities, repeatedly appeals to the soul: "We seem to be forgetting about the soul, about what it is for thought to open out of the soul and connect person to world in a rich, subtle, and complicated manner; about what it is to approach another person as a soul ... to talk as someone who has a soul." Nussbaum goes on to say, in a locution that I would wholeheartedly espouse: "the word 'soul' has religious connotations for many people, and I neither insist on these nor reject them. Each person may hear them or ignore them."
A striking example of the return of the repressed soul is Victoria Nelson's The Secret Life of Puppets. This beautiful book shows how the soul denied in modern discourse morphed into various artistic, literary, theatrical, and later cinematic forms, especially in the image of artificial humans (the Kabbalistic variant, which is the golem, as Nelson indeed notes, following the studies of Gershom Scholem and Moshe Idel). From the many rich cultural lodes that she has uncovered, I shall note here only her description of romantic travel adventures as "vehicles for a new kind of soul quest," moving from the physical world to "an internalized soul region outside time and space," as in her analysis of fictional journeys to the poles as "journey to the center of the soul."
Reworking Nelson's historical narrative, one may say that the soul was gradually displaced over the modern centuries, as the body-soul dualism of Descartes and the extreme dualism of Malebranche gave way to entirely materialistic psychologies and philosophies. Hegel's "beautiful soul," maintaining its "purity of heart" through self-defeating withdrawal from the world, can perhaps be said to have marked the last significant presence of the soul in authoritative philosophical conceptualization. I believe that one can locate evidence of awareness of this shift in materials from the turn of the nineteenth century, as in churchman-academic Isaac Milner's complaint: "the great and high have forgotten that they have souls." At the end of Hegel's nineteenth century, the return of the soul to authoritative discourse (as opposed to literature, where it still held sway, as described by Nelson and as evident throughout the poetry of that century) was marked by the inception of the ultimate modern mythology — psychoanalysis, with all of its scientific veneer. Naturally, this schematic, perforce linear, narrative leaves out transitional phases, such as attempts to create an empiricist "science of the soul" in the eighteenth century.
This book emerged from the realization that Kabbalah, as an important player in contemporary culture, has consistently preserved the centrality of the soul throughout modernity (second only to God and the Torah as a theme of discourse), while at the same time profoundly changing its psychological theories under its impact. The affinity between these two psychological discourses was expressed in a classic of twentieth-century Jewish literature — Chaim Potok's The Chosen. The main theme of the novel (as well as its sequel The Promise) is the clash between the Hasidic care of the souls as represented by Reb Saunders and the modern science of the soul (first Freudian and then experimental), which inescapably draws his son and heir, Danny. When the patriarch capitulates (on the symbolic date of Passover), it is out of deference to the cry of Danny's soul. It is highly likely that the model for Daniel Saunders is the twentieth-century psychologist fischel Schneerson, a grandson of a Hasidic rebbe, whose main novel Hayyim Gravitzer describes not only the travails of the soul of Gravitzer but also numerous Hasidic teachings on psychology.
While Potok's narrative is heavily modernistic, depicting the move from the Hasidic court to the laboratory as liberation from bondage (as well as strongly Freudian in centering on the Oedipal drama), its valuable insight is that modern Jewish mysticism and the heavily Jewish field of psychology are both concerned with the "yearnings of the soul," as Scholem (who emerged from the same central European Jewish culture as Freud) defined mysticism itself. In the broadest sense, this work merges with the field of psychology of religion, while aspiring to carve out a place of pride for the psychology of mysticism. At the same time, I shall not even attempt to encompass the vast range of scholarship on psychology and religion, especially as the rather influential cognitivist, empiricist, evolutionary, neurological, and poststructuralist approaches leave little room for theories of the soul. Yet within the ever-expanding subfield of psychology of mysticism this is less so, as evidenced in the central treatment of mysticism in the first major twentieth-century work on psychology of religion — The Varieties of Religious Experience (based on the 1901–2 Gifford lecture by William James). Pragmatist that he was, James still used an expression such as "the sick soul" in bringing together melancholic religious writers and psychological aspects of religious pessimism.
Indeed, it was the issue of mysticism that contributed significantly to the great divide between Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, whose debt to James is rather unrecognized. This was the "central tension" (to use Peter Homans' felicitous phrase) that set the stage for all subsequent splits while transforming psychoanalysis from a joint exploration of the depths of the psyche to a set of competing schools and institutions. The Freudian controversies also included Freud's later and lesser-known schism with Otto Rank, whose analysis of the roots of Seelenglaube (soul-belief) deserves far more attention than it has received (despite its later propagation by important psychological thinkers such as Ernest Becker and Rollo May). Rank forcefully criticized Freud for his denial of the centrality of the soul for psychology while camouflaging its presence by means of the ideology of scientism. In presenting his alternative psychology, Rank boldly claimed that "religion was and is as much psychology as our modern scientific psychology is, unavoidably, soul-study" and that "in the animistic era, psychology was soul-creation; in the religious era it was soul-representation; in the scientific era, it has become knowledge of the individual soul," a formulation that will be highly suggestive for my own investigation.
Lately, the history of the movement, as described in John Kerr's groundbreaking A Most Dangerous Method, has also moved into the cinema, the shared language of twentieth-century culture, which was born and grown in tandem with psychoanalysis. Kerr shows that it was Jung (and his mentor Eugen Bleuler) at Zurich who provided the institutional and public ground in which Freud's Vienna-based work could take root. Jung's position on psychology of religion, on mysticism, and on the soul thus plays a central role in our history of the psychology of mysticism.
Another ramification of this finding is that one should view even more skeptically the claims as to Freud's alleged sources in Jewish texts and as to the Jewishness of psychoanalysis, culminating the claim (mentioned by Stephen Frosh) that it is properly part of Jewish studies! Going back to popular culture, it is interesting to note that the notion of Freud as a "closet Kabbalist" has spread from academia to literature (as in Darkness Rising by Frank Tallis). At the same time, one should not entirely remove the soul from Freud's orbit. Bruno Bettelheim, in his Freud and Man's Soul, has persuasively argued that the mistranslation of Freud's German texts in the English standard edition, motivated to a large extent by the attempt to cast a scientific veneer over his writing, has excised the prominent presence of the soul in his writings. Bettelheim sees this as a prominent example of the omission of an entire rich world of cultural allusions, often with religious or mythic antecedents. Furthermore, the gap between Freud and Jung's respective views of mysticism has been somewhat narrowed in an innovative discussion by William Parsons.
Jung's 1937 Terry lectures at Yale University, published as Psychology and Religion, are a relatively early self-formulation of the field that I myself also belong to — the phenomenology of religion — boldly claiming, as part of his self-distancing from materialism, that "the only form of existence that we know of immediately is psychic." In a key formulation that will be relevant to my later discussion of dreams, Jung said: "The very common prejudice against dreams is but one of the symptoms of a far more serious undervaluation of the human soul in general." Despite this, Jung's extensive and multiyear opus cannot be seen as a true return of the soul, due to his constant efforts to cloister his discourse in the rhetoric of scientism: Thus Jung wrote in a central work, Psychological Types (first published in 1921): "By Soul I understand a clearly demarcated functional complex that can best be described as 'personality.'" Yet soon after this passage, Jung inserts the Latin term for psyche, anima, as the inner, feminine, soul-life, largely complementing the outward-directed "persona" (this duality being in turn a major theme in Jung's autobiographical reflection).
Following James Hillman, one may posit that this is a thinly veiled theoreticization of the interior feminine figures Jung encountered and recorded in his visions, together with Elijah, a known favorite of Kabbalistic visions (as is the Shekhina or divine feminine). In doing so, he (like Otto Rank) acknowledged a long-standing relationship between the soul and the feminine (including the narrative of the denial of the soul of women by the council of Macon), profoundly affecting the more recent gender-oriented study of religion. Indeed, it is not surprising that much of the work on Kabbalah's psychology (mostly following Lacanian variants in French feminist theory) focuses on gender. Nonetheless, I shall address treatments of the engenderment of the soul only when it is called for in the modern Kabbalistic texts under survey. This move away from a gender-centric approach to the soul resonates with the approach of the school in which the return of the soul was fulfilled — archetypal psychology.
For it was precisely at the time when the Jungian "heresy" solidified and at times ossified into a set of "second wave" schools, the new heresy of archetypal psychology emerged. In his 1972 Terry lectures, published as Re-Visioning Psychology, James Hillman most eloquently called for restoring the central place of the soul in the life of psychology, especially through John Keats' poetic idea of the world as the "vale of Soul-making." While Hillman himself attacked the Western importation of "Oriental transcendent methods" (which was just then moving towards its present popularity), mysticism has played a central role in the creative work of his "fellowship," perhaps the most vital psychological circle since Freud. Already in this lecture, Hillman claimed mystics such as Plotinus and Marsilio ficino as partaking in his "ancestral tree of thought" (itself a somewhat Kabbalistic image!).
I cannot do justice here to the ongoing and prolific output of this school that has also been somewhat institutionalized through the Pacifica Graduate Institute, and has developed its own schisms, as in the case of Wolfgang Giegerich, whose massive and innovative contribution to the history of the soul deserves a separate study (though see my brief discussion in chapter 6). However, two major discussions of soul in religious texts, resonate with my own project: David L. Miller's archetypal reading of Christianity (though not necessarily mystical Christianity) belongs to the mytho-poetic reading that is currently gaining ground in Kabbalah scholarship. Generally speaking, this approach subordinates soul to myth, while in my reading that of Hillman himself takes the opposite track. However, Miller's reading of Christian texts, though using the term "soul" relatively rarely, brings a religious tradition that shall be much addressed here within the orbit of archetypal psychology. Likewise, Robert Sardello's synthesis of Hillman and early twentieth-century mystic Rudolf Steiner is not merely a representation of a current "spiritual culture based in the reality of the soul," but also an illuminating reflection on classical religious studies themes such as shamanism, apocalypticism, and magic. I was particularly inspired by his depiction of the very act of research on this topic as part of the work of soul-making.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Yearnings of the Soul by Jonathan Garb. Copyright © 2015 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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Table of Contents
Preface1 The Return of the Soul: Psychology and Modern Kabbalah
2 The Safedian Revolution
3 Psychological Theories
4 National Psychology
5 The Soul and the Heart in Twentieth-Century Kabbalah
6 Modern Mystical Psychology: A Comparative View
7 The Soul of the Nomian
Appendix: The Soul in the Work Binyan Shmu’el
Notes
Bibliography
Index
What People are Saying About This
“An original, pathbreaking study of the renderings of the ‘heart and soul’ in the works of major, minor, and even obscure (but important) figures that dot the landscape of modern Kabbalah. In his panoramic sweep, Garb has unearthed a treasure trove of neglected figures and texts, bringing into dialogue their views on heart and soul with those found in other religious and secular authorities. The result is nothing short of astonishing.”
“Yearnings of the Soul is a masterful inquiry into Kabbalistic traditions about the soul that takes full advantage of modern theories of psychology. In this study, Garb offers an erudite argument about the development of Jewish spirituality from the early modern period through present times. This is a fine interdisciplinary study that brings together close readings of mystical texts with the tools of critical theory as developed in the academy over the last century.”
“Once again, Garb has given us a pathbreaking book, this time on the return of the soul into academic discourse after a long neglect and silencing. This is no naive return to simple belief or some premodern certainty, however. This is a rigorously historical study of how modern psychological ideas are indebted to and bound up with various mystical practices and ideas, including those of modern Kabbalah from Luria onwards. This is an argument about how we cannot understand modernity itself, or better, our multiple modernities, without taking into account these same esoteric practices and teachings. I was particularly moved by Garb’s discussion of the textuality of soul via the motifs of the soul of the Torah, the self-text, and Torah study as soul-making. This is yet another sign that the study of religion is returning to its deeper historical roots, which is to say its mystical-critical roots, but now on another level of reflexivity and sophistication.”