Abstract
In the early twentieth-century psychoanalytic case history, Jewish psychoanalysts faced discursive challenges in the presentation of Jewish patients. Under the supervision and guidance of Freud, the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Stekel (1868–1940), authored case histories of a rabbi and a priest, both of whom he diagnosed with “occupational neuroses.” In this article, the author compares the case history of the rabbi (Shalom Dovber Schneersohn) with the case history of an anonymous priest. The author argues that Stekel wrote and Freud edited the case of the priest in such a way as to create a proxy for the case of the rabbi, not primarily to augment scientific claims, but because of Stekel’s and Freud’s self-conscious presentation of male Jewish hysteria to the Viennese medical establishment in the early years of psychoanalysis.
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Notes
Shalom Dov Ber Schneersohn to Yishaya Berlin (January 13, 1903 [14 Tevet 5663]). In a letter first publicly introduced online by AGUCH librarian Shalom Dovber Levine on June 22, 2010 in response to my identification of Stekel’s case history of “der rabbiner” as RaSHaB (Katz 2010a), RaSHaB writes that he went to see Freud who took him to see Professor [Carl] Nothnagel for the pain in his hand (February 5 [18th of Shvat]). For excerpted and transcribed versions of these previously unpublished letters, see: http://bhol-forums.co.il/topic.asp?topic_id=2799147&whichpage=4&forum_id=19616#R_4 (Last accessed June 25, 2010) [Hebrew].
Presumably internist Carl Nothnagel (1841–1905) at the University of Vienna, a specialist in ocular and upper extremity nerve paralysis.
Shalom Dovber Schneersohn to Yishaya Berlin (February 15, 1903 [18 Shvat 5663]).
Despite censure from the scientific community, Franz Mesmer popularized the medical use of magnetic therapy in Vienna and Paris in the mid-eighteenth century. By the late nineteenth century, the technique became somewhat more mainstream, taking the form of electromagnetic treatments that applied electric current in conjunction with the application of magnets in the hopes of stimulating nerve endings (Macklis 1993). Psychoanalysts also made use of the technique to treat “mental states.”
Shalom Dov Ber Schneersohn to Yishaya Berlin, (March 11, 1903 [12 Adar 5663)].
Since RaSHaB refers to this specialist by last name alone, he presumably refers to the famous pathologist Édouard Brissaud (1852–1909), who specialized in motor dysfunction.
Shalom Dov Ber Schneersohn to Yishaya Berlin (February 15 1903 [18 Shvat 5663]).
According to Stekel, a fantasy of sin-compelling robbers drove the rabbi “to circle the forests for days while staying at a health-resort, always in the hope that circumstances might induce a sublime end to his innocence.” RaSHaB’s son, the future sixth rebbe of Chabad, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn wrote that while they stayed in Vienna, he took long walks with his father through the forest “as per doctor’s orders” (1992, p. 82).
The Hasidic and psychoanalytic accounts confirm each other on this point. RaSHaB writes to his cousin that he will leave Vienna and then changes his mind and decides to remain for further treatment, which Stekel confirms when he marvels that the rabbi wanted to travel to see another doctor midway through their psychoanalytic course of treatment, but then changed his mind and returned to Stekel for analysis. As in many of the overlapping Hasidic narratives, the details in Stekel’s case history are confirmed, while the larger context (i.e. psychological treatment) is not discussed.
The pronouncement reads archaically, suggesting a sort of ancient curse: “Ich werde die Bücher nicht aus geben, eher wird man mich von den Büchern wegnehmen.”
For my analysis of how RaSHaB was influenced by his experience with and thinking about psychoanalysis in his own post-1903 writings, see Katz (2010a, pp. 26–31). In short, RaSHaB posits that if one could accept irrational sin based on repressed desire, one must counter with irrational acts of goodness.
In writing his defensive history of the psychoanalytic movement in 1926 in light of his own disenfranchisement from the movement, Stekel used the case history of the rabbi to establish himself as a disciple of Freud as well as to cast his differences with Freud in stark relief (Stekel 1926, p. 133).
Although Stekel takes pride in his success, RaSHaB wrote his cousin after his return from Vienna that his hand returned to its original debilitation (Schneersohn, May 4, 1903).
The Freud-Stekel debates fueled Jewish intellectual gossip into the 1920s. Noam Chomsky takes pride in the intellectual environment in his parents’ home by noting that they debated the Freud-Stekel controversies (Chomsky 2010).
George Makari specifically pinpointed the conflict over the publication of Nervöse Angstzustände to Stekel’s challenging of Freud’s theory of the etiology of anxiety neuroses (2008, pp. 155–160). Stekel also parted with Freud in his belief—not yet articulated in the 1908 edition—that anxiety states (including, for instance, homosexuality) were curable through psychoanalysis. For example, when Stekel explains the psychoanalytic process and its underlying suppositions, he writes in the 1908 edition that he suggested to the rabbi “the view of the famous theory of Breuer and Freud, that severe infantile trauma were pushed out of his consciousness.” When he removed this conceptual suggestion from subsequent editions (which Stekel shared with his patient and no doubt relied on in his analysis), the case history inadvertently categorizes that infantile trauma into a history of repressed sexual experiences, causing a new set of interpretive problems. The 1908 case study, titled “An Occupational Neurosis (Berufsneurose)” and subtitled “Anxiety and Conversion Hysteria,” characterized the rabbi’s symptoms as a disorder in which anxiety resulted in the conversion of psychological conflict into a physical symptom. Stekel considered Freud’s labeling of this phenomenon as “hysteria” erroneous and dropped the subtitle altogether in 1921.
In Freud’s and Josef Breuer’s seminal Studies on Hysteria, Freud lamented that his case histories “read like short stories and that, as one might say, they lack the serious stamp of science” (Freud and Breuer 1895, pp. 19–305). Over a decade later in a letter to Jung, Freud again bemoaned the writing of the case history: “How bungled our reproductions are, how wretchedly we dissect the great art works of psychic nature!…A wretched business” (Freud 1974, p. 238). Freud referred to Stekel as “that writer,” a pejorative description suggesting that Stekel’s appeal was not his scientific claims, but rather his graphic writing style (1901, p. 350). Freud’s biographer Ernst Jones followed suit, describing Stekel as “a fluent if careless writer, a born journalist in a pejorative sense” (1955, p. 135).
Bloch was a writer notorious for his own exaggerations and imprecision.
Within the case history, Stekel mentions that Freud referred the priest to him and Freud’s referrals began only after Stekel’s “first big case” of the rabbi. Stekel ends the case history of the priest by citing a letter the priest sent to Stekel 4 years after his treatment, and given the publication date of 1908, the window of treatment dates appears quite narrow.
The priest exhibits regret at the great expense of “the cure” and endures only a short 6-week analysis because of the strain of being away from his family and community; the same—albeit unrecorded by Stekel—concerns and treatment duration apply to RaSHaB. RaSHaB stayed in Vienna for only 3 months (January 6 to April 5, 1903) and taking into account the time between the initial consultation with Freud and the first appointment with Stekel after the referral, the consequent analysis with Stekel lasted for approximately 6 weeks. In one correspondence with his colleague Shneur Zalman on March 15, 1903, RaSHaB writes that he’d been receiving medical treatment from “the professor” for more than “3 weeks” and that “God-willing I will stay another 2 or 3 weeks” and then take care of the outstanding business matters. Indeed, RaSHaB left 3 weeks after penning this letter. Stekel writes that the rabbi planned on staying “for months” and “suddenly remembered” his clerical and familial obligations. In light of this timeline, although the details of the duration of the analysis appear only in the case of the priest, it is quite likely that the rabbi endured only a 6-week analysis for the same reasons the priest saw fit to return home.
On aspects of Chabad visual culture that led to RaSHaB’s becoming the single leader of Lyubavichi, see Katz (2010b, pp. 19–48).
Stekel presents this rivalry for each brother’s respective wife as illicit desire but never states that any adulterous liaison occurred in the case history of the rabbi.
In contrast to Stekel’s account, RaSHaB’s son, Yosef Yitzchak, goes to great lengths in his memoirs to demonstrate that RaSHaB’s father and grandfather singled out RaSHaB for the post of rebbe. On the most basic level, in Yosef Yitzchak’s telling, the books function as the passing of the dynastic torch from father to rightful son. At the time of the actual debates over the books, RaSHaB wrote a letter to a colleague claiming that just as his father inherited the manuscripts from his grandfather at the age of twenty-two, despite being the youngest of five brothers, he was likewise entitled to the books. RaSHaB argued that he alone should inherit the books because “I am no different from my father” (Ehrlich 2000, p. 79). On RaSHaB’s deathbed, the manuscripts remained on his mind, and he reportedly told his only son: “I am going to heaven; the manuscripts I leave for you” (Ehrlich 2000, p. 79). For further discussion on how the argument over books and manuscripts has historically been intertwined with the post of rebbe, see Heilman and Friedman (2010, pp. 53–55, 216–218). On the hereditary nature of Orthodox priests, see Heard (1887, p. 170).
It is a telling comment, one that should be understood as a popular conceit among Viennese Jews, who saw German culture as superior and particularly suited to the Jewish soul. See, for example, composer Karl Goldmark’s memoir describing his mother’s taste for German books, which he remembered her reading in secret (1922, p. 15).
Sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840–1902), for whom Stekel worked for several years after graduating from medical school, observed that “statistics have been collected with great care to show the percentage of insanity in the various religious sects, and it has been shown that among the Jews of certain sects the percentage is decidedly higher” (quoted in Gilman 1993, p. 143).
See my discussion on the figure of the household servant in Chabad literature (Katz 2010b, pp. 20–26).
Stekel’s further revision of the sexual predator from “man-servant” in 1908 to the more precise “a sexton in his father’s house” in 1940 may indicate Stekel’s refinement of his patient’s predicament in light of Freud’s work on the Oedipus complex, which only became a mainstay of psychoanalysis in the 1920s (Simon et al. 1992). The revision to “a sexton in his father’s house” also speaks to Stekel’s personal sensitivity in his early career to exposing this strain of Jewish communal life to professional critique.
RaSHaB’s “auto-disguise” brings forth another layer to the construction of “der rabbiner’s” identity. Compare the reference to “Jungmann” in Stekel’s interpretation of a dream the priest brings to analysis to Yosef Yitzchak’s recollection of the appellation “Jungermann” given to his father by elders in Vienna (Schneersohn 1992, p. 23).
Freud to Jung, Aug 13 (1908).
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Katz, M.B. A Rabbi, a Priest, and a Psychoanalyst: Religion in the Early Psychoanalytic Case History. Cont Jewry 31, 3–24 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12397-010-9059-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12397-010-9059-y