Triumph of the Jewish Therapeutic

Andrew R. Heinze. Jews and the American Soul: Human Nature in the Twentieth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. xvi + 438 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $29.95.

The first reference to an explicitly therapeutic Jewish culture is Philo's description of the Therapeutae in the first century A.D. A small sect located along Lake Mareotis in Egypt, the Therapeutae were distinguished from contemporary Jewish sects (among them Essenes and Christians) by an extreme mental discipline and asceticism that consisted of continuous study and piety. They refused to interrupt their readings of the Holy Scriptures even for meals or drink during the daytime, "since they hold that philosophy finds its right place in the light, the needs of the body in the darkness." Philo was most impressed with their constant study of the "laws and oracles delivered through the mouth of prophets," which, apparently, tripped over from conscious to unconscious knowledge: "They keep the memory of God alive and never forget it . . . even in their dreams."¹ Soon after came the rabbis of the Talmud, who, had they felt a need for a systematized theory of mind and behavior, could have pieced one together, as has been attempted recently by Sacha Stern in his study of rabbinic identity.² Finally, Maimonides did systematize and rationalize the principles of Jewish psychology in Hilkhot Deot (Laws of Temperament) of the Mishnah Torah, though the logic was no longer Talmudic but rather Greco-Islamic. Like his forbears, Maimonides emphasized that psychology made sense only in relation to sacred community, Creator, and Torah. Later kabbalistic musings on therapy such as Isaac Luria's doctrine of tikkun (or repair) departed from the medieval rationalism of Maimonides but shared the crucial characteristic which made Luria's tikkun a discernibly Jewish therapy—the healing of both cosmos and individual came by doing God's commandments.

How far these saints seem from the subjects of Andrew R. Heinze's new book about Jews and the twentieth-century popular phenomenon of psychology. It is very hard to compare the Jewish psychology of previous generations with that of the twentieth century, whether we consider Freud's sex-obsessed theory, Alfred Adler's self-empowerment therapy, or the many Jewish-American practitioners of psychology, including Dr. Joyce Brothers, who, for instance, advised that a "liberated marriage"—in order to enjoy a "flexible power structure"—ought to include extramarital affairs, so long as the affair could be kept secret from the spouse (p. 316). Is this the inheritance of Jewish therapeutic thinking?

Andrew R. Heinze has taken upon himself an enormous task: "to uncover and track the flow of Jewish values, attitudes, and arguments into the mainstream of American thought," predominantly in the arena of psychology and in popular musings over human nature (p. 2). The task is vast on both sides of the equation. On the one side, to determine what constitutes "Jewish values, attitudes, and arguments" regarding human nature and mind is, in itself, a worthy project. The difficulty is compounded by the fact that Heinze cannot limit himself to viewing Jewish psychology as simply emanating from the Jewish religion. The musings of the Therapeutae and Maimonides may be a start, but Heinze is all too aware that "the definition of 'Jewish' has been unstable since ancient times." "Jewish" sometimes refers to religious practices (which vary in time and place); it is sometimes a nationalism; sometimes it is an ethnicity; often it has been a legal status. Nowadays scholars hedge their position by offering that "Jewish" refers to the sets of views and behaviors considered to be Jewish by (many of) those who call themselves Jews. Despite this perennial difficulty in definition, to Heinze, "Jewish values exist as a real, identifiable, and consequential force in the history of Western civilization" (p. 2). This also seems right, and those of us in the field of Jewish studies are dedicated to teasing out whatever it may mean to be Jewish. In a very...