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Beginning to read Mikael Enckell's Perspectives from the other side (2012), I was taken aback by the resistance that it seemed to offer. It was only on reading it again that I realized that this volume is not merely a new collection of essays on known themes: the closeness between psychoanalysis and Jewish thought; the challenge of knowing the Other and the obligation to face this challenge in psychoanalysis and in life in general; the riddle of anti-Semitism; the rôle of the mother and the father in the psyche. The book, more movingly than I first understood, bears testimony to the fact that Enckell's attachment to Judaism is not a mere intellectual interest or a passing infatuation, and not merely another admirable defense of one of our cultural wellsprings, but a life-long, almost mystical love relation and his fate to the end. This book is part of an ongoing self-analysis in which Enckell uses his imagined reader as a listener whose presence he, the seasoned analyst, requires no less than does any serious analyzand.
Enckell lets us know that he at one point imagined that he didn't have to write this book, since, in his previous book, On the art of loving the Scripture [Om konsten att älska skriften] (2009), he had provided what he considered the missing link to closing his oeuvre (that notion, too, is a challenge) by writing about the women of literature who had played an important rôle in his life. His earlier work had focused on men: his father Rabbe Enckell, a distinguished writer and poet, and other father figures and male intellectual heroes, often found among Jewish writers, film makers, philosophers, and others, including secret and even “symbolic Jews”.
A prominent representative of the last-mentioned category to whom Enckell returns in Perspectives is the Finnish modernist writer Gunnar Björling. He is awarded this honor for his courage and moral autonomy as well as for his sympathy for the Jews and his position of someone who struggles to think clearly a