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| Psychology and Kabbalah Tom Averna 10/25/03 In Z’ev ben Shimon Ha Levi’s book Psychology and Kabbalah, he makes the case that Jung and Freud were greatly influenced by Kabbalah and the Tree of Life and he sets out in detail the psychological principles of the Tree. Halevi begins by discussing prior work in psychology starting with the Greeks. We are unaware historically of any detailed emphasis on human behaviour prior to the Greeks. “Philosophers such as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle argued that people were not puppets of the Gods but had free will. They speculated about the source of human knowledge, the nature of mind and soul, the relationship of the mind to body, and the possibility of taking an objective study of these concepts.” (Halevi, 2) Again, this is speculation, but the time of Socrates was preceded by extensive contacts with the outside world. According to Kabbalistic history every patriarch from Abraham to Moses was well versed in the mystical principles of the Tree of Life. There is even very interesting speculation that the concepts of Indian mysticism were influenced by a visit there of Abraham and possibly his son Isaac. Interesting similarities between Vedic words and Hebrew persist including the use of the term Brahman for the highest caste in honor of its founder Abram or Abraham. Therefore it is certainly not out of the realm of possibility that Socrates also was inspired by such teachings and formulated his concepts of man’s free will and the soul’s spiritual connections from these sources. The impact of this interaction stimulated not only an intellec¬tual approach to cosmology, but psychology, as the Greeks began to examine their own myths and extract a rationale to the structure and dynamic of the macrocosm and microcosm of the Universe and mankind. Greek science had concluded that there was a distinct difference between sense and reason, inasmuch as the mind processes what the body perceives. The idea of different temperaments related to the four elements in an “as above so below” formula, so beloved by the mystical philosophers was taught. Around the fifth century B.C.E. the Pythagorean School differentiated between the psyche and the body, which they saw as a prison for the soul while the person was incarnated. The love of Pythagoras for Gematria or numbers is especially prominent in Kabbalism. They believed life was a process of learning as the soul slowly worked towards inner freedom, purifi¬cation and immortality, in its transcendence of the cycle of natural birth growth, decay and death. All of this is presented in the Book of Zohar, the main text of the Kabbalah The schools not so concerned with the developmental aspect focused upon more pragmatic questions; and here we get the great division between the Platonic and Aristotelian approaches, which have split the study of psychology right down to our day. Plato followed the mystical line, or Kabbalistic; in that he saw the universe emerge from an invisible realm into a manifestation, while Aristotle, the scientist, observed that these subtler realms were inherent in the material world. He saw the psyche as the sum or essence of a living body, while Plato perceived it as a non-physical organism, which could be reborn again and again after death. At a more detailed level of observation of the incarnate psyche, the Greeks began to differentiate distinct functions of activity such as the nutritive, sensitive and rational, which corresponded to the plant, animal and human levels of a person. They also became preoccupied with the morality of the psyche and the various drives of the body as they came into conflict. The process of primitive impulses slowly being organized into conscious complex actions was also recognized, as was the principle of wish and fulfillment in dreams, when the higher faculties were asleep and the baser appetite could be released without social condemnation. Many of these early conclusions were incorporated into the various systems that arose in the Hellenic view of the psyche. The Stoics, for example, saw a sense impression as an awareness in the consciousness of the psyche, and they differentiated between imagination and hallucination, and a subjective conviction from an objective reality. They also concluded that the innate reason in animals that caused them to behave in certain ways should be defined as 'instinct' which is quite different from a human being's capacity of conscience, based upon an inner knowledge of the Laws of the Universe. It was not until the Renaissance that psychology started to move again as enquiring people began to look at the field afresh. Work by the anatomist Vesalius in the sixteenth century removed many ideas about the psyche being dependent upon the body as some ancients had said, and social observers such as Machiavelli, who wrote a practical textbook for princes, swept away the academic ideal that people were inherently noble. “It was only too clear in that time of political expediency that the primitive side of a human being could predomi¬nate. This led to a reformulation of psychology and its implications with studies of the effects of society upon the individual.” (Halevi, 25) Here is where the Aristotelian lineage begins to take root as scholars like Thomas Hobbes moved in another direction and developed a mechanistic approach, seeing dreams, for example, as caused solely by external factors. This mode was in line with the influence of Galileo, who had destroyed the ancient picture of the world and all its mystery with celestial mechanics. The Age of Reason that was born out of these standpoints was opposed by the Platonists of the time, such as the Cambridge school of Henry Moore, but they were out of fashion. Even Newton, a mystic of the first order, and provably a student of Christian Kabbalah, had to hide the fact that most of his notes were about religious issues. “Outwardly little real psychological study was carried out during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, although much work was done on the mechanistic and theoretical approach, which led to many conclusions based upon the empirical method.” (Halevi, 32) The next major breakthrough in psychology comes from John Locke, an important philosopher of the early 1600's, who gave us the concept of empiricism. Empiricism is the concept that knowledge is gained through our senses and through experience, not through speculation. It is the basis for the scientific method. John Locke was also responsible for identifying the process that we go through in solving problems. He was the first to systematically identify this process. This study of problem solving is important to the study of Psychology and Social Work as well as every other profession. This line would be fanatically followed for several hundred years almost destroying the thread of mysticism in the realm of science and psychology’s development. The 1800’s once again produced a return to the mystical in opposition to the mechanistic view of the Universe being promoted by the Sciences. This was the Industrial age, but it also produced the Romantics and the Naturalists like Emerson and Thoreau who tried to return us to the mystical. New religious movements like those founded by Charles Fillmore of Unity and Religious Science founder Earnest Holmes tried to restore the balance between science and mysticism and drew heavily from the ideas of Kabbalah. But the prevailing thought in psychological development at this time was one obsessed with machinery and psychological issues were not well understood and treated in the most barbaric way. Out of this melee of scientific mechanism came Freud, who opened up the World of the Unconscious with its powerful forces that permeate consciousness to influence people without their knowledge, causing neurosis, psychosis and occasional irrational behaviour in the so-called normal. Freud's contribution to Western psychology was enormous. Sigmund Freud rejected others' theories about the mind and behavior and pioneered the technique of psychoanalysis in order to understand how the unconscious influences human behavior. He not only rediscovered what the esoteric schools had talked about for centuries, but also began to systematize the mind in a scientific way, although he did meet a lot of resistance from his own profession. The question of whether Freud was actually influenced by Kabbalistic and/or Hasidic ideas is an intriguing one. Freud's father came from a Hasidic background, Freud had a great interest in Jewish jokes and stories (many of which were likely Hasidic in origin), and Freud was apparently familiar with the Zohar and other Kabbalistic works. These issues are discussed at length by Sanford Drob in his book Symbols of the Kabbalah. (Drob) Halevi, however classifies Freud primarily with the Aristotelian line, which would be opposed to Kabbalistic ideas. In this, I would have to side more with the work of Sanford Drob. Freud is obviously influenced greatly by the prevailing scientific method of his day but the germ of his ideas are still even more influenced by his background and understanding of Jewish mysticism as taught by his Hasidic forebears. Ironically Halevi points out that the Kabbalists' psychology is closer to Jung than to Freud, yet the Kabbalists remain quite Freudian in their energetic model of the psyche, in their emphasis upon sexuality and, their view of the family romance as an ultimate imperative in the human and cosmic realms. That the kabbalistic psychology is imbedded within the context of a world view which (though it recognizes the significance of negative forces and the dissolution of the spirit) affirms mankind's role as the completer of creation, should only make it that more attractive to psychotherapists of a humanist and world affirming outlook. “Jung, his younger colleague, who had been developing his own views of the psyche, took up the Platonic stance to Freud's Aristotelian approach. He saw that while the psyche had its primitive drives, it was also subject to a deeper influence coming from the higher levels of the unconscious.”(Halevi, 165) Yet as great as Jung's acknowledged affinity is to the Kabbalah, his unacknowledged relationship was even greater. For every reference to the Kabbalah in Jung's writings there are several to Gnosticism, and perhaps dozens to alchemy: yet the interpretations which Jung places on Gnosticism (itself a close cousin to the Kabbalah), and the very texts which Jung refers to on alchemy, were profoundly Kabbalistic, so much so that one could call the Jung of the Mysterium Coniunctionis and other later works, a Kabbalist (albeit a Christian one) in contemporary guise. Jung has frequently been called a "Gnostic." Interestingly, Jung’s main accuser in this regard was the Jewish philosopher, Martin Buber, who is well known for, amongst other things, his work on Hasidism. Buber held that Jung was Gnostic because he reduced God to the inner divine spark in humans and identified religious experience with a turning inward into the Self, as opposed to a participation in relations with others as the vehicle for relating to a transcendent God. (Buber, 68) Jung is far more Kabbalistic than he is Gnostic, and he is "alchemical" largely to the extent that the alchemists borrowed from and relied upon Kabbalistic ideas. I will also argue that in the 1930s, when Jung was formulating a psychology based on his reading of alchemy, he had a strong motive to suppress the "Jewish" origins of many alchemical ideas. Halevi then devotes the last 70 pages defining major Jungian terms and their origins in Kabbalah. Terms like Archetypes, Collective Unconscious, Persona, Shadow Self, etc all have obvious parallels in the concept of the Tree of Life actively taught by Hasidic Jews some 150 years before Freud. And according to them, the concepts have been around since the time of Adam. Many other concepts have developed in Psychology since the time of Freud and Jung, but they all essentially follow the same basic lines either from Aristotle or Plato. I contend that the most powerful forms of psychology now and in the future will be those that don’t ignore the spiritual aspect of our makeup following the pattern set down by Plato who most likely was influenced by Judaic, Kabbalistic thought. In our next paper, we’ll look into that future. Bibliography Buber, Martin. (1952). Eclipse of God. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humainities Press International, Inc. Drob, Sanford L. (2000). Symbols of the Kabbalah. Northvale, N.J.: Jason Aronson, Inc. Halevi, Z’ev ben Shimon. (1986). Psychology and Kabbalah. York Beach, Maine: Samuel Weiser, Inc. |
