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Joseph Berke is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist who works with families. He trained at Columbia University and Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, but has lived in London since 1965. He went there to study with R. D. Laing and helped him establish the Kingsley Hall Community, a residential treatment facility for the emotionally disturbed and impaired. He is known for his treatment of Mary Barnes, diagnosed with schizophrenia, who was helped dramatically through treatment “regression” and became a “noted artist, author, and mystic” (Barnes and Berke 2002, p. 14). With her he wrote Mary Barnes: Two Accounts of a Journey through Madness (2002), later adapted as a stage play. There have been other accounts in the literature of the emergence of talented individuals from mental turmoil. A recent example is Elyn Saks, who wrote The Center Cannot Hold (2007).
Berke has written extensively on the treatment of serious emotional disorders. This book, as well as Sigmund Freud and the Lubavich Rebbe (Berke 2015), connects that area of his work with his other interests: Freud studies, Judaism, and Kabbalah. Here he tries to make the case that there is a profound connection between psychoanalysis and the Kabbalah, a connection he first presented in “Psychoanalysis and Kabbalah” in 1996. The Freud Studies section of Centers of Power: Convergence of Psychoanalysis and Kabbalah (Berke and Schneider 2008) details his “discovery” that Freud treated the future Lubavitcher Rebbe, the Rashab, in the first decade of the twentieth century. This fact has been well known in Lubavitcher circles for decades. The story is that the Rebbe, who was living with his followers in Riga, Latvia, became depressed. His group was harassed by the Latvian Government, which was encouraged by the Mitnagdim, the “Jewish enemies” of the Lubavitcher Chasidim. He was advised by members of his following to travel to Vienna and seek treatment from Freud.