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The Jewish Thought and Psychoanalysis Lectures is based on a series of lectures that began in 2013 and were organized by a psychoanalyst, Harvey Schwartz, in a synagogue in downtown Philadelphia. The lectures were attended by a professional and lay audience, including members of the synagogue and urban and suburban Philadelphians.
Dr. Schwartz writes erudite introductions to each chapter and participates in a dialogue with Ruth Calderon about a Talmudic story in the final chapter. Dr. Schwartz discusses the differences and similarities between psychoanalysts and Talmudic thinking. He concludes his Preface to the book with a comment about the mistranslation of psychoanalysis as the scientific study of the psyche—“psyche” should be translated as a soul—a distinction that was first made by Bruno Bettleheim.
The intent of the lecture program was to explore “both the similarities and differences between the psychoanalytic and Jewish world views” (p. xii). Not only was Freud Jewish but his first 18 “disciples” were Jewish and, in fact, all of them or their parents or grandparents came from Galicia, the Polish part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the home of many Eastern European Jews. Galicia was part of the pale of settlement containing small towns, shtetls, whose inhabitants spoke Yiddish. Some were more religious and some more secular. Freud was aware of the genealogy of his followers and was concerned that psychoanalysis should not be viewed as a Jewish science.
Eli Zaretsky, in his lecture Moses and Monotheism, writes that Freud denied that he knew Hebrew, although his father inscribed the volume of the Phillipson Hebrew bible that he gave him on the occasion of his 35th birthday in Hebrew. It is important to note that Freud also denied he knew Yiddish, even though he visited his mother every Sunday and she only spoke Yiddish. These denials were in my view related to his need not to believe. In a paper, “Freud's Need Not to Believe,” I recounted an episode published in