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Observers of life are often so intrigued by its organic design and beauty, as to think of it (at least metaphorically) as divine. This is also true of the psychoanalytic inquirer of the mind, although many of us are or, as the Finnish psychoanalyst and essayist Mikael Enckell would probably put it, consider ourselves godless. In his earlier work, Enckell consistently equated a Jewish understanding of God — whose presence as the primary mover is felt or sought by humans, but who nonetheless is unknowable in any direct way — with the psychoanalytic understanding of the unconscious.
The nine essays that comprise Enckell's most recent book, The Soul that wouldn't Shrink: Essays on Jewish Topics (Helsinki: Söderströms, 2001), focus on the history and psychological underpinnings of 20th century anti-Semitism in Soviet Russia and the Western world, in particular Finland and Sweden. In the first essay, “Caliban's face in the mirror”, Enckell discusses an incident in which an invited lecturer, a philosopher, dumbfounded the audience of the Swedish Psychoanalytical Society when he blamed the Jews for the Holocaust and expressed uncannily archaic, anti-Semitic clichés, wrapped in philosophical phraseology and literary jargon. Another manifestation of anti-Semitism in Sweden during the same period, the late 1980s, was the so-called Rami-Bergman affair. A professor of theology, Jan Bergman of Uppsala University, testified in court in defence of the revision of the history of the Holocaust and defamation of Judaism in radio broadcasts (and subsequently on the Internet) by Ahmed Rami, a former Moroccan officer and political refugee in Sweden. Rami and Bergman claimed that Jewish law obliges Jews to kill non-Jews. Scandalously, in the name of academic freedom, the president of Uppsala University supported Bergman.
Another theme of the book is what Enckell considers the specifically Jewish characteristics of the works of Freud, Kafka, Proust, the Soviet filmmaker Eisenstein, the Frenc