Kabbalah and Psychoanalysis by Michael Eigen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Everything Is Broken; But Not Irreparable

Kabbalah is many things to many people. It is a mystical religious guide, a contemplative aid, a philosophy of language, an ethnic tradition. So why not a method of psychoanalysis? It is, after all, most centrally concerned with Tikkun Olam, the repair of the universe. Certainly this includes repair of the human mind. It might be considered as the Jewish equivalent of the doctrine of the Resurrection. Both are directed toward the recovery of the created world from some primal form of error, a mistake that has ramified socially, possibly even genetically, from generation to generation.

Kabbalah distinguishes itself from other forms of arcane teaching by its absence of gnostic content. Although it sometimes uses the language of Gnosticism, Kabbalah doesn’t presume that the world is inherently evil or that it must be escaped in order to become truly who we are. Kabbalah is monistic and proposes a unity between the ‘higher’ and the ‘lower’. What happens in one ‘level’, is reflected in the other in a sort of metaphysical quantum entanglement.

The world in which we live is corrigible and it is the home we were meant to have. Our lives within the world are valuable and meaningful. Our lives may also be sad, painful, even despairing, but these too are symptoms of value and meaning. Psychoanalytically, this is identical to the aim of all therapies. Therefore, on the face of it, there is a case for Kabbalah as a part of therapeutic technique.

Kabbalah is spiritual but it is not dogmatic. It does not insist on doctrine of any kind. Any doctrines it mentions are typically presented as a sort of dialectic of polar opposite interpretations. Its basic principle is that in order to allow a creative cosmos to exist, God withdrew himself from it, giving it room to demonstrate its own creativity and potential. Consequently it does not insist on any religious belief. It calls to anyone who feels broken, alienated, or damaged, not as a command but an invitation.

Kabbalah has parallels and similarities with other forms of thought. The primal error that occurred, the ‘breaking of the vessels’ is a generalized instance of universal trauma. What has happened to the universe happens to every part of it in a particular way. We have all be traumatized, by birth if nothing else, but also by the paradoxes of reflective consciousness. This is consistent not just with classical analytical theory, but also with modern philosophical views. Heidegger’s ‘thrownness’, and Wittgenstein’s ‘interlocutory voices’, for example, express a not dissimilar metaphysics to Kabbalah. Alain Badiou’s project of reconciling the idea of a psychoanalytic subject with the idea of ontology is something to which Kabbalah has significance.

Kabbalah does presume that the universe is benign, that the trauma we experience is a trauma felt by the Creator sufficient to break even his infinite heart. This stance on the world is not one explicitly made in other modes of therapy or philosophy. Nonetheless, it seems to me that it is an implicit necessity to seriously engage in either therapy or philosophy. It is the equivalent of the scientific attitude that there is an inherent order to the material world. Without such a presumption, it would not be able to discover such order. Learning, whether about the world at large or oneself, therefore, requires what Kabbalah makes explicit. The world wants us to know about itself.

Although the great Kabbalistic texts are medieval, the sources of Kabbalistic concepts and practices are contemporaneous with the birth of Christianity. The great Rabbi Hillel, an important contributor to the Mishnah, died about a decade before Jesus’s birth. His religious message was an indication of the the ruling ethos of the Judaism of the period and for that reason similar to that of Jesus: “That which is hateful to you, do not unto another: This is the whole Torah. The rest is commentary — [and now] go study.”

With the exception of the postscript ‘go study’, this could easily have come from Jesus’s mouth. Perhaps this ‘go study’ is the crucially Jewish characteristic of Kabbalah, the mitzvah - both the command and the gift - of learning. Kabbalistic learning is threatening to a highly doctrinal and hierarchical religion such as Christianity. It is ‘uncontrolled’ and even verges on heresy. Therefore the survival of Kabbalah is in a very real sense a recovery of patterns of thought that have been suppressed for two thousand years. Michael Eigen supplies some very good arguments indeed to pursue it for psychological as well as spiritual reasons. Perhaps there is no real distinction to be made between the two.

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