It’s Déjà Vu All Over Again

Rabbi Lawrence Kushner suggests that scripture is a refractive lens through which we discover who we are, and additionally, since each person hears and interprets scripture differently, even a return to the same scripture evokes new learning for the individual (Eyes Remade for Wonder, 2002, 33l). The Biblical word is a repository for the infinite and each word or letter can be an entrance to new meaning. Anderson believes that the technique of apposition found in the Talmudic study of scripture was a foundational platform for Freud’s creation of psychoanalysis.

Having been a minister for over 40 years and a student of applied psychoanalysis for 15, it is my conviction that theology and autobiography (and, therefore, psychoanalysis) are connected or linked. In this brief response, I wish to support Anderson’s thesis and also to add my own personal critique: that, aside from early hermeneutics, in Freud’s time the only tools available to understand scripture were argument (the Talmudic approach) and allegory, a form of literalism. The former provided the opportunity for real-world discussion of scripture’s intent; the latter, a “why-because” solution, unacceptable to scientific application. Despite light-year advances in scriptural studies, literalism reflects a form of scriptural interpretation that is dominant today.

I distinguish between two types of religion: what I call for lack of better terms “critical” and “uncritical” religious thought. In

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Talmudic study, in Kushner’s words, “scripture is expounded, interpreted, plumbed…manipulated, massaged, psychoanalyzed, inverted, sliced and diced.” Much like this appositional argument, in critical religion one employs diverse disciplines such as archaeology, history, and linguistic analysis in an attempt to capture a shared story of a people and their god(s). For critical religion, such examination is conducted in an attempt to get scripture’s truth. Understanding scripture is, therefore, an ongoing and often an argumentative process.

Uncritical religion holds that scripture is the literal word of God or “fact”; scripture is often cherry-picked for explanation and when that doesn’t work, it is to be accepted despite its many eccentricities and contradictions. In the Abrahamic religion there are two creation stories, talking turtles, verses concerning smashing children’s heads against stones, and, in expanded Christian, Hebrew, and Islamic scripture, references to “end times,” and they are, by and large, accepted as truth beyond our understanding; as one bumper sticker reads, “God said it; I believe it; that settles it.”

Returning to Anderson, Freud’s Jewishness was a matter of ethnic and cultural affinity at a time when obsessive prejudice was rampant in Vienna. Literalism and notions of “election” inspired fascism. Freud’s Protestant colleague, Carl Jung, was a member of the Anti-Semitic Union; theologically uncritical religion reigned. It was natural that Freud would find intellectual and emotional support amongst his fellow Jews; it is no stretch of the imagination to say that the Talmudic method would influence his approach to psychological theories of individual and mass psychopathologies.

Today, only the names and places have changed. A like sense of “election” reigns over Christian America. We are, in Reagan and Winthrop’s words, a “shining city upon a hill”; in George W. Bush’s a “light to the nations”; and in our current race for the presidency, former Senator Rick Santorum leads a charge to get our “guns and Bibles back.” In my home state, two bills face the legislature: one to allow the teaching of intelligent design beside the “theory” of evolution, and the other to allow parents to circumvent any aspect of public education that they deem inappropriate to their personal belief system. As Vamik Volkan has demonstrated, the projected enemy is “out there and not one of us,” rather

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than within. In the ministerial and psychoanalytic circles in which I live, we struggle against our own and other people’s projections, following in the path Sigmund Freud.

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