Psychological Transformation: Convergent Themes in Jewish and Psychoanalytic Thinking

Abstract

The potential for psychological transformation is fundamental to psychoanalytic theory and therapy and to Jewish belief and practice. While Freud's rejection of religious experience as a manifestation of personal and cultural pathology had a long-reaching effect in the history of psychoanalysis, the theoretical extensions and advances of some of his followers have made it possible to view religious experience through a different lens. The author explores the convergence of Jewish ideas about the process of repentance (teshuvah) and the integration of psychic polarities conceptualized in the psychoanalytic literature, namely, love and hate in the shift from the paranoid-schizoid to the depressive position (Klein) and separation and reunion in the establishment of the self and the development of sublimation (Loewald).