Freud's Guide in perplexity

A new look brings up the tantalizing possibility that the Rambam, the great medieval thinker, acted as precursor to the originator of modern-day psychoanalysis.

By MORDECHAI BECK
Freud 311 (do not publish again) (photo credit: avi katz)
Freud 311 (do not publish again)
(photo credit: avi katz)
“FOR MOST MAJOR thinkers,” observes David S. Weiss, “one can trace the sources for their inspiration; they had teachers, mentors, they took a variety of ideas and molded them into their own thought process. In contrast, with Sigmund Freud it appears as if his thoughts came from nowhere! “One scholar who was skeptical about this apparent anomaly was the late David Bakan.
In 1956, he published a highly provocative book called “Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition” in which he argued that the great Viennese psychoanalyst’s antecedents were to be found in Jewish mysticism.
This was a remarkable claim, since most people did not associate Freud and Judaism at all. In fact, Freud explicitly distanced himself from Judaism. Bakan challenged this assumption in a radical way.”
Weiss, ordained by Yeshiva University as a rabbi and with a doctorate in psychology, had more than a passing interest in this connection, particularly since Bakan had traced one of the major sources for Freud’s mystical roots to one of Jewry’s outstanding historical figures, Maimonides, or the Rambam as he is generally known.
“The Rambam,” explains Weiss in an interview with The Jerusalem Report during a visit to Jerusalem, “is mainly thought of either as a rabbi who authored the “Mishna Torah,” a major compilation of Jewish religious law (halakha), or as a philosopher who wrote “The Guide to the Perplexed,” or as a doctor who wrote texts on medicine. But he is hardly ever thought of as a mystic. This seems totally out of character with this highly rational thinker whose ideas have played a dominant role in intellectual Jewish thought ever since. Yet here was Bakan claiming that the Rambam provided a key source to the origins of psychoanalysis.”
Weiss eventually met Bakan in 1981 at a conference where the latter was talking on the topic of the “cloak” (the clergy) and the “couch” (the psychoanalyst). “Bakan was a secular psychoanalyst. He wanted to be explicit about the thoughts of Freud and what he saw as parallels with the philosophic works of Judaism and Maimonides.”
“I told him I was a psychologist and a rabbi and he said he wanted me to read a manuscript that he had written. I read it and had many comments on it. He put the manuscript aside and we began a havruta, a one-on-one study of the “Guide” on a weekly basis for about five or six hours each week in Bakan’s house in New York, for the next 18 years. It would spill out over dinner with his wife Millie, a philosopher who was able to introduce modern philosophies into our discussion.”
Weiss’s background in Rambam had started at the Kerem BeYavneh Yeshiva in Israel, and continued when he took a master’s degree in Jewish philosophy at Yeshiva University, under Arthur Hyman who specialized in the “Guide to the Perplexed.” In 1991, and partly as a result of Weiss’s study sessions with Bakan, the latter published a book “Maimonides on Prophecy,” a commentary on that part of the “Guide,” in which Rambam analyzes the story of creation (maase bereishit), its connection with Shabbat, and the maase merkava, which deals with the esoteric world of prophecy.
In 2000, Weiss decided to teach Rambam’s “Eight Chapters,” as his introduction to “Pirkei Avot” (“Ethics of the Fathers”) to his Toronto congregation. “I tried to define the principles that the Rambam was proposing about human virtues and vices and behaviors that are required to be a wholesome, observant Jew. I thought these were consistent with the messages of Yom Kippur. It became clear to me that part of the psychological principles that Rambam outlines in his introduction to “Pirkei Avot” tied in perfectly with his messages in the “Guide,” and the first four chapters of the “Mishna Torah.”
Thus he is a far more integrated thinker than people give him credit for. Moreover, there  are strong parallels between what he was writing and what was written 800 years later by psychological thinkers.”
IN 2004, THE DYING DAVID BAKAN asked Weiss and his fellow psychoanalyst Dan Merkur to visit him at his hospital bedside in Mount Sinai Hospital, Toronto. “He told us that he had about 200 pages of disparate notes that he would like to be put into a book.
Specifically, he asked me to bring more of the content of Maimonides to the book, and also to be the voice of David Bakan – to be sure that this book would be consistent with what he would have said had he lived.”
“The book “Maimonides’ Cure of Souls: Medieval Precursor of Psychoanalysis,” which Weiss wrote in collaboration with Merkur, examines the extensive parallels in the thoughts of Rambam and Freud. For example, both Freud and Rambam attributed mental conflict to the opposition of inborn desire with rational social conduct. Both identified mental illness with involuntary inhibition.
Both discussed hysterical paralysis and blindness as paradigmatic instances of inhibition.
Both regard therapy as a gain in freedom, both had theories of the unconscious, and regarded the recovery of lost understanding as the key to therapy. Both described self-reflective meditation that aimed at the achievement of insight into the self, both perceived interpretation as the therapist’s major contribution to healing, and both attributed psychic reality to the imagination. Intriguingly, both men identified with Moses.
As an example of where the two great minds meet, Weiss instances Rambam’s interpretation of Jacob’s dream of the ladder that reached up to heaven “It was uncommon at that time to do what he did – to take apart the dream and say that the ladder is one thing, the angels are something else, as are the heavens – i.e. every particular component is a separate entity, which parallels closely the dream analysis that Freud uses. It’s not to say that Freud would have approached the dream of Jacob that way. But the process of dream analysis has striking parallels.”
Ultimately, Weiss relates to Rambam as a healer. “He saw how people could become psychologically ill, for example, by deviating from the “golden mean” and what needs to be done to bring them back to health. He also describes how people can become cognitively distorted, which would result in the loss of free choice. For Rambam, when you lose free choice, you are cognitively sick. The solution is to regain free choice, which allows you to make decisions. He doesn’t tell you what decisions you have to make; he believes that if you study science and Torah, you’ll make the right decision; the correct cognition will lead you to the right answer.”
All this might suggest that Rambam ‘healed’ people only if they followed the right path: the Jewish way as defined in his halakhic works. But according to Weiss, Rambam was profoundly opposed to religious people who behave badly: “In the ‘Guide,’ Rambam has a wonderful parable,” he says. “He talks about getting closer to the inner court of the king and that there are different levels. He talks about people who possess cognitive abilities and those who do mitzvot. Obviously he would say that doing both mitzvot and having the appropriate mental attitude – is the preferred combination.”
But look at what Rambam writes about people who just do mitzvot but display poor conduct: “Those that seek to reach the ruler’s habitation and enter it, but never see the ruler’s habitation are the multitude of the adherents of the law and are referred to as ‘ignoramuses who observe the commandments.’” The mitzvot are the entry requirements, the minimum but not the maximum standard. Doing mitzvot puts you in a state of goodness: it enables you to exist in our society, and in the [Jewish] world. But beyond that what is required is to act virtuously and to avoid vices.
If you deviate from that, you will be sick.”
The Rambam was not interested only in the illness of ‘ordinary people.’ He was after all the physician to Saladin’s vizier. Within his Jewish community, too, he was in communication with the elite. “In the opening of the “Guide,” Rambam writes a letter to Rabbi Joseph ben-Yehuda in which he addresses him as someone who is scientific and understands all forms of astronomy. “You’ve developed your cognitive capability and are a good student of Torah – you’re a rabbi,” writes the Rambam, “and yet you’re perplexed.”
“RAMBAM HAS A UNIQUE position in Jewish thought. He understands that anything relating to science, math and philosophy are not uniquely Jewish. The highest level of cognitive development, according to Rambam, is the gaining of an appreciation of the account of creation and maase merkava. The ability to prove the existence of God and of the creation of the world can be done through philosophical analysis, which is not uniquely Jewish. In the “Guide,” Rambam uses Aristotle’s thought, insofar as it contains fundamental ideas that help prove the account of the creation,” observes Weiss.
“The account of the merkava is a different process, one that is accessed only through prophecy. It is not apprehended through philosophy or astronomy. It requires prophecy, which is divine, dreams and visions – the imagination – built on top of strong cognitive capabilities. When Rambam reaches the section about the maase merkava in “the Guide,” he doesn’t rely on Aristotle; it’s all based on the prophecies of Ezekiel and Isaiah, and their prophetic dreams and visions. But if you enter philosophical thought without having a foundation of the mathematical mind that can grasp astronomy, you’d become ill.
“To enter the world of the merkava, you have first to study maase bereishit. To understand the creation of the universe we can use other thinkers and philosophers. But when we approach the maase merkava, we rely only on prophecy which is written in sod, a secret language that expresses itself in metaphor, and reaches the prophet through visions and dreams, enabling him to grasp the deepest insights which are contained in the maase merkava,” notes Weiss.
One of the central discussions in the “Guide” surrounds the akeda – the binding of Isaac about which Rambam shows great interest. He writes in the “Guide”: “God does not tell his prophets to do crazy things. How can God tell his prophet to do something that is abhorrent, to kill his own child!” So Rambam says that the akeda actually occurred to Avraham at the 11th level of prophecy; it was a vision, it didn’t actually happen. It was a prophetic vision.
HOW THOUGH DOES THIS CONnect to Freud? “I think that what Freud is saying,” observes Weiss, “is that this capability of diving into the imagination is not only something for prophets.
Rambam apparently had the view that we need Jews to be good thinkers, to do mitzvot, to behave well. Then those who are at the level of emotional balance and cognitive capability may be eligible to receive that imaginary dream or visions through prophecy.
They’ll be ready for it because they can understand their imagination expressed in the dream and vision.
“Some people would argue that very few people have this capability. What Freud claims is that every human being has the capacity of imagination for dream analysis, and that he can help you through the process of understanding how to cognitively deconstruct it, so that you won’t go crazy from your dreams; you can use it rather to help understand your wish fulfillment and what is happening to you. To say that all people can use their imagination as a power rather than as a distortion is a profound concept.
“With Freud, the whole process of therapy is to discover the unconscious and the unknowable through the vehicle of the psychoanalytic process, allowing the human to access the unconscious, and thereby make the unconscious known. The lifelong journey is to discover the unknown within the human being. There is a powerful parallel between Rambam and Freud. For Rambam the lifelong journey is to understand God.
The metaphors given by the prophets to understand God is their attempt to make the unknown known. For Freud, the psychoanalytic process is the challenge to understand the unknown within the human being,” Weiss points out.
As strong as the parallels between these two great thinkers may be, the authors of the book do not ultimately claim that Freud derived his ideas from the Rambam. What they do suggest is that the possibility of Freud – the young man – encountering the Rambam’s writings offers the tantalizing possibility that the great medieval thinker acted as precursor to the originator of modern day psychoanalysis.
Though they admit that no such text written by Freud acknowledging this debt has yet been discovered, they do bring powerful evidence to demonstrate that such a link is highly likely. Other recent discussions of Freud’s “Jewish” backgrounds (such as the studies by Joseph Berke and Stanley Schneider reviewed in these columns) suggest that Freud was none too keen to openly admit to such a pedigree. In the Vienna of his time it would have been embarrassing, if not indeed dangerous professionally. At best one can say, as J.L. Borges says in his witty pseudo-essay on Kafka’s influences, that “every author creates his own precursors.”
Perhaps, however, this present study has even more profound implications than a mere curiosity of intellectual history. Both Rambam and Freud were drawn to the unknown, the hidden. For the Rambam of the “Guide,” his search ends in the unknowable God of the philosophers, who is made accessible only by leaving aside philosophical speculations and accepting the revelations of the prophets.
For Freud, man’s impenetrability to rational analysis is tempered by the analyst’s ability to read and interpret our dreams. By such means, each thinker discovers the goal of his researches. For the medieval Rambam it is God, in all his metaphysical and paradoxical hiddeness. For Freud, heir to modern and more skeptical times, it is the inner core of man himself, whose apparent irrationality is open to logical analysis.
The present study – by no means an easy read, even for the expert – does at least make this ultimately metaphysical debate both more accessible and intellectually stimulating.