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This article is based on a presentation given at the Division 39 Spring Conference, April 2014
The theme of this article is clinical work with Orthodox Jewish patients within a psychoanalytic framework. It is derived from a presentation by the four authors at a Division 39 conference in 2014. As such, there are four different voices in the article that hopefully make a coherent whole. Two of the authors are themselves members of the Orthodox Jewish community working analytically with Orthodox patients, one works outside the community but with community members, and the fourth is surveying the whole mix and commenting on it.
A number of questions will be addressed:
Is there a conflict between the psychoanalytic tradition and the Orthodox Jewish tradition that makes work with such patients particularly difficult or, indeed, impossible?
What does one have to know or deal with that is specific to working with the Orthodox Jewish community?
Are their particular transference and countertransference issues in this work?
Freud depicted religion as an illusion (1927/1961) and also wanted very much for psychoanalysis not to be seen as a Jewish science. He thought there was danger of psychoanalysis becoming a “Jewish national affair” (Klein, 1985). The first generation of psychoanalysts mostly carried forward and preserved Freud's notion of religion as an illusion and many also saw psychoanalysis and religion as incompatible. Similarly, some Jewish religious thinkers have considered psychoanalysis as incompatible with religious thought and even dangerous to it, and therefore not a recommended treatment for members of the community.
However, there have been other voices in this controversy—voices that instead point to the similarities of thought between the two systems. Among these voices, Lewis Aron and Libby Henik in their book Answering a Question with a Question (2015) have described psychoanalysis as a technique of searching for meaning, which is in fact a contin