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. Judaism and Jungian Psychology. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1992. Pp. xi + 156. £32.50; $36.50.
Although both these books refer to Judaism in their titles, they are concerned with very different aspects of the Jewish experience. Freud and Judaism, a collection of essays mainly by Italian psychoanalysts but including a previously unpublished version of a paper by Freud, concerns itself hardly at all with the religious or spiritual aspects of Judaism, but rather with the social and cultural context of Freud's Jewishness, especially anti-Semitism, and its impact upon psychoanalysis, his life's work. By contrast, Judaism and Jungian Psychology, mainly a collection of papers given by Spiegelman to Jewish audiences, virtually ignores these issues in favour of a spiritual idealism which focuses almost exclusively on the religious aspects of Judaism.
However, there is a common thread: whether a Jew defines himself by his religion as does Spiegelman or by ‘the obscure emotional forces … of a common mental construction’ as did Freud, the problem of identity and belonging remains acute. Where does the Jew belong in the modern world? How can he or she remain true to the heritage which defines them while participating in the non-Jewish host culture?
These questions have immediate relevance for all Jewish readers and, as Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel points out in her chapter on Freud and the Nazis in Freud and Judaism, need also to be addressed by the analysts of Jewish patients. She argues that the long history of oppression has created an inevitable conflict in all Jews between remaining faithful to their Jewish heritage and a wish to deny their Jewishness. This conflict needs to be made conscious but cannot be resolved. Many Jews have attempted to get out of the conflict by opting for only one position - either by turning their back on the modern world in a rigid adherence to the old religious traditions or by assimilation and conversion. Ch