The Hidden Freud: His Hassidic Roots by Joseph H. Berke

Author:Joseph H. Berke [Berke, Joseph H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Psychology, General, mental health
ISBN: 9780429920998
Google: FBZWDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-04-17T20:46:21+00:00

And a second comment in the Zohar avows:

Come and see how intensely a person is attacked, from the day that the Blessed Holy One endows him with a soul to exist in this world! For as soon as a human being emerges into the atmosphere, the evil impulse lies ready to conspire with him_ “At the opening [i.e., at birth] crouches sin” (Genesis 4:7)—right then the evil impulse partners him … because the evil impulse dwells within him, instantly luring him into evil ways. (ibid., Vol. 3, p. 85)

When does the yetzer ha-tov, the good inclination begin? The Zohar clearly establishes this at the age of thirteen—the age of majority, at the time of a boy’s bar mitzvah. Yet, the great twelfth-century Jewish sage, Moses Maimonides (The Rambam) concluded that the good inclination/drive can be found only after the child’s intellect develops (2006, p. 324, fn. 45).

In contrast, the Aboth d’Rabbi Nachman, an ethical treatise that is one of the fifteen minor tractates of the Talmud, insists: “… the evil inclination speaks, ‘Since I am doomed in the world to come, I will drag the entire body with me to destruction’” (chapter 16, p. 15a).

Given Freud’s extensive but disguised knowledge of Talmudic writings, one wonders whether he was aware of this passage and whether it could have been a prelude to Freud’s ruminations about the death instinct. It is striking that Freud had given a lecture to his B’nai B’rith lodge in 1915, entitled: “We and Death.” He had initially thought of calling the talk, “We Jews and Death,” in order to show the extent to which Jews are affected by destructive drives and fears about death. At that time Freud was addressing a specifically Jewish audience on aggressive instincts. In his earlier work (such as in Totem and Taboo (1912–13)) he had already begun to think about the connection between aggression and the death impulse. Obviously, Freud’s understanding of aggressive drives and death changed dramatically after the First World War.

The psychoanalyst Robert Hinshelwood elucidated the issue in his A Dictionary of Kleinian Thought: “He [Freud] raised aggression to the same level of importance as the sexual drives—in a strange way: by imputing to the human being an innate aggressive drive against his or her own existence, the death instinct.” (op. cit., pp. 327–328)

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