The Rabbinate after Freud: American Rabbinical responses to psychological thought and practice, 1912-1980

This study explores nearly a century of American rabbinic interaction with psychological thought and practice. Ranging from early debates over Jewish and Christian Science, to post-war consensual models, to the rise of havurot and Jewish healing centers, rabbis struggled to recover emotional and spiritual aspects of Judaism lost in the wake of modernization and secularization. Some employed psychology as a hermeneutic of retrieval to reinfuse depth to liberal religion. Yet more traditional rabbis were also challenged to reexamine the relationship of Judaism to the cultural dynamics at large. Wariness of psychological concepts abounded, given perceptions of incompatibility between Freud and Judaism on religion, morality and human nature. Some found attempts at spiritual healing a Christian phenomenon, despite precedents in Biblical, rabbinic, medieval, and Hasidic traditions. Others, concerned with public agendas of respectability and acculturation, disputed the erosion of the rabbi's role as teacher and preacher. Still others became "avatars of psychiatry," fusing the goals and language of religion and psychiatry.;To what extent Judaism and psychology clashed in their essential goals, and how independent of psychological models rabbinical counselors should remain in their work, formed one of the most engaging rabbinic struggles of this century. While liberal rabbis began to question whether their glorification of science and psychiatry had been achieved at the expense of specifically religious values and visions, not until the 1960's did realizations about essential and intractable differences between religions and the psychologies, or between the roles of psychiatrist and rabbi, become widely explored.;Despite its curative aspects, rabbis began to perceive the psychological ethic as one facilitating self-realization at the price of permanent social disengagement. Innovations stemming from social upheaval, institutional challenge, and the search for religious alternatives in the 1960's, however, helped to reinfuse Jewish religious life with emotional and spiritual connection, without relying upon the psychological as the sole form of affective retrieval. Recent developments in Jewish spirituality appear to have refuted the solipsism of the "psychological Jew," permitting retrieval of elements central to personal religious experience, while affirming the fundamental moral and communal legacy of the Jewish healing tradition.