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Kabbalah and Psychoanalysis
Wilfred Bion once said, "I use the Kabbalah as a framework for psychoanalysis." Both are preoccupied with catastrophe and faith, infinity and intensity of experience, shatter and growth of being that supports dimensions which sensitivity opens. Both are preoccupied with ontological implications of the Unknown and the importance of emotional life. This work is a psychospiritual adventure touching the places Kabbalah and psychoanalysis give something to each other. Michael Eigen uses aspects of Bion, Winnicott, Akivah, Luria and Nachman (and many more) as colours on a palette to open realities for growth of experience. Bion called faith "the psychoanalytic attitude" and Eigen here explores creative, paradoxical, multidimensional aspects of faith. Eigen previously wrote of psychoanalysis as a form of prayer in The Psychoanalytic Mystic. In Kabbalah and Psychoanalysis he writes of creative faith. Sessions as crucibles in which diverse currents of personality mix in new ways, alchemy or soul chemistry perhaps, or simply homage to our embryonic nature which responds to the breath of feeling moment to moment.
- GenresPsychoanalysisPsychology
154 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2012
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
April 19, 2020
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.
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.
August 9, 2024
This book grew on me as I continued reading. I wasn’t expecting it to be a converted transcript of a two day seminar. It definitely flowed more like a conversation and not as an academic thesis.
There were still several insightful parts and pieces and it drew reference to some prominent Jewish Kabbalists. He seemed to draw from Nachman as his Kabbalist mystic and Bion as his Jewish psychoanalyst.
Interesting piece to get you more interested in the intersection of Kabbalistic mysticism and psychoanalysis, so it’s true to its title.
There were still several insightful parts and pieces and it drew reference to some prominent Jewish Kabbalists. He seemed to draw from Nachman as his Kabbalist mystic and Bion as his Jewish psychoanalyst.
Interesting piece to get you more interested in the intersection of Kabbalistic mysticism and psychoanalysis, so it’s true to its title.
June 26, 2013
In two seminar transcripts and seven appendices, Eigen makes forays into the question of what connects psychoanalysis and kabbalah. As you might guess, this is not a very 'orthodox' book, and it's a quite specific and individual vision of 'psychoanalysis' that's on offer here.
Eigen's guiding light is W.R. Bion, who once mentioned that he used kabbalah to inform his theoretical formulations. For Bion, human existence is forever in relation to 'O', a glyph denoting the radically unknown and unknowable. From the encounter with O can arise knowledge, faith in something beyond our ego, or the kind of life-enhancing transformations that psychoanalysis always reaches towards without ever being quite able to specify or define.
This is the kind of psychoanalysis that Eigen presents. One that resonates with the kabbalistic Tree of Life, where O occupies the position of Ain Soph, an aspect of G-d, YHVH, whose emanations undergo transformation in order to burst into manifestation. But manifestation is what simultaneously messes the whole thing up, distorts everything away from its real nature. And so we enter the whole sorry mess of creation, where everything feels as if it's forever missing the point, whilst struggling and failing to get back to where it thinks it ought to be. The work of psychoanalysis is therefore the project described by Luria, the kabbalist, who envisaged the human journey as a mission to release sparks of the divine imprisoned in the mundane ever since the poor thing ruptured. Psychoanalysis seeks to uncover O, releasing it by transforming it via the vehicle of an individual's experience.
On some levels, this is a beautiful and inspiring read. It's also helpful for thinking around how the divine can be so near, yet at the same time so very far removed -- which is probably just another way of exploring how we do our best at being okay in a world in which things are often very far indeed from being okay.
Eigen's guiding light is W.R. Bion, who once mentioned that he used kabbalah to inform his theoretical formulations. For Bion, human existence is forever in relation to 'O', a glyph denoting the radically unknown and unknowable. From the encounter with O can arise knowledge, faith in something beyond our ego, or the kind of life-enhancing transformations that psychoanalysis always reaches towards without ever being quite able to specify or define.
This is the kind of psychoanalysis that Eigen presents. One that resonates with the kabbalistic Tree of Life, where O occupies the position of Ain Soph, an aspect of G-d, YHVH, whose emanations undergo transformation in order to burst into manifestation. But manifestation is what simultaneously messes the whole thing up, distorts everything away from its real nature. And so we enter the whole sorry mess of creation, where everything feels as if it's forever missing the point, whilst struggling and failing to get back to where it thinks it ought to be. The work of psychoanalysis is therefore the project described by Luria, the kabbalist, who envisaged the human journey as a mission to release sparks of the divine imprisoned in the mundane ever since the poor thing ruptured. Psychoanalysis seeks to uncover O, releasing it by transforming it via the vehicle of an individual's experience.
On some levels, this is a beautiful and inspiring read. It's also helpful for thinking around how the divine can be so near, yet at the same time so very far removed -- which is probably just another way of exploring how we do our best at being okay in a world in which things are often very far indeed from being okay.
August 1, 2013
Eigen's newest book is beautiful, moving and profound. My many years practicing psychoanalysis has included an immersion in Buddhism, and most recently included a journey in spirituality. This book has come along at the right time for me and is serving an important bridge. By the way, I do not believe that previous knowledge of Kabbalah is necessary to embrace this book.
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