The Talmudic way of thinking cannot suddenly have disappeared from us. 1 Death instinct,anti-Semitism and Jewish traditions in the foundation matrix of group analysis

1. Introduction

I advocate three theses in this article ² :

We do not need to re-enter the endless debates about the concept of the death-instinct metaphor (see Frank, 2011). Apart from its attempted epistemic foundation in the contemporary biological theories by Freud (1920) which resonate in the English translation, ‘instinct’, we are more interested in its social roots. So for our purposes it should be sufficient to point out that Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle appeared in the same year as the German establishment of the NSDAP and its proclamation of an overtly racist and anti-Semitic programme. So anti-Semitism can be group-analytically conceived of as a realization of both the abstract principles of the anti-group as well as death-instinct.

The diverse psychoanalytical theories of anti-Semitism (Beland, 1992) are abstract, metapsychological constructions, and their clinical evidence we must review ourselves. This is not surprising when taking into consideration that psychoanalysis of those early years had not yet discovered the clinical usefulness of groups as therapeutic objects (not to mention Foulkes’ idea of the group as therapeutic subject). Let us just underline with René A. Kaës (2007: 53) that it was always the clinical changes that contribute to the expansion of psychoanalytic theories. With the psychoanalytic treatment of young children, the therapeutic importance of playing was discovered. With the treatment of psychotic personalities, the fundamental relational aspect of the unconscious phantasies and therefore the fundamental involvement of the therapist in psychotic thinking with all the consequences for thinking about countertransference was discovered. With group analysis, the analysability of group processes and the individuals in them was discovered—where as Freud could only assert the cultural relevance of the psychoanalytic findings, but could not therapeutically deal with them, because he did not yet have a suitable setting for this. These innovations that arose from clinical practice each led to specific changes in psychoanalytic theories, and only an orthodox trepidation could not appreciate the progress in this.

So the death-instinct hypothesis, as Freud cautiously formulated (1920), could probably be perceived as speculative in 1920. In 1945, however, European cities and souls lay in ruins. The collective (self-)destructive powers, which almost the entire German large group organized as a nation, as in the maelstrom (Poe, 1999), had sucked perpetrators often, as well as victims into the maw of death. But immediately after the victory over Nazi Germany this same large group collective denied its former dedication to the (self-)destructive forces. My teachers at school told me much of their alleged military exploits as soldiers, for which I hated them as much as I secretly admired them. They were silent about their crimes. That silence was endemic (Wilke, 2007).

Today I relate this point to the œuvre of the german philosopher Klaus Heinrich. I see the main topic in Heinrich’s œuvre in his refusal to reduce Freud’s discoveries to bi-personal, clinical experiences (Heinrich, 2001). So group analysts may profit exceptionally from his work. Rather on the contrary to the bi-personal, clinical condensation of psychoanalytical insights, Heinrich demonstrates the main topics of psychoanalysis in the developments of arts, philosophy and religion in the European tradition since their origins in Greek, Romanian and Hebrew traditions. So we can detect the main features of our group analytic foundation matrix in his œuvre . The most important of these is the philosophical differentiation between origin-logical thinking and Enlightenment. At this point Heinrich refers to the religious philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich, especially his book Die sozialistische Entscheidung (Tillich, 1980 [1932]), as well as to the critical theory of the German Frankfurt school. They both have their roots in the pre-war Frankfurt/Main, especially in the ‘Institut für Sozialforschung’, which has associated itself with psychoanalysis since its foundation (Wiggershaus, 2001) ⁴ . This institute was the source of the well-known creative co-working of psychiatrists like Kurt Goldstein, philosophers like Paul Tillich, sociologists like Karl Mannheim and others, among them the assistants of Goldstein and Mannheim: Norbert Elias and Siegmund Heinrich Fuchs ⁵ .

In Die sozialistische Entscheidung, Tillich traces the ideology of the Nazis back to origin-logic thinking. By this he means tendencies in the history of ideas that refer to a fantasized or real, a historic or imaginary origin ⁶ , to which they trace all current phenomena in a logic of subordination, such as the myth of ‘blood and soil’ in the Nazi ideology. Complete social submission corresponds to a logical submission of the particular to the general, of the individual to the group. This religious-philosophical model of origin-logical thinking is of an almost startling topicality for group analysts, which I want to show in this article. Tillich traces the origin-logical thinking back to the ancient Israelite kingship, which was established with an apparatus of officials around the first Jerusalem temple ⁷ . We can image them living in a narcissistic, self-related world of sham security, in which they were no longer able to realistically perceive the political developments of their time. ‘Yet will they lean upon the LORD, and say, Is not the LORD among us? None evil can come upon us’ (Micah 3, 11).

With this the early biblical prophets of the Jewish bible protest against this origin-logical thinking. Tillich describes on the eve of the Nazi dictatorship an early Jewish Enlightenment movement (Tillich, 1932). In this respect the prophets argue in a de-centring, enlightening thinking, in which Tillich, and after 1945, Klaus Heinrich saw a forerunner of the European Enlightenment. Building on this, I want to show that Foulkes, in a kind of ‘ego training in action’ (1984: 74), redesigned this model of prophetic, enlightenment thinking in the tradition of Paul Tillich and, after 1945, Klaus Heinrich in his development of the group analytical setting. For this reason I understand group analytical practice as a contemporary practice of those Jewish prophetic (and later on rabbinic) traditions. To be sure, we must remember, that Jewish identity cannot be defined as a religious one like Christian identity. Nor can it be defined as national one as Freud (1926: 51) explained in his lecture to the ‘B’nai Berith’. A positive determination of identity always involves violence, as Adorno and Horkheimer showed in their Dialektik der Aufklärung (Adorno and Horkheimer, 2000: 50).

Traces to the biblical prophets in the cultural memory of group analysis will be the topic of the last section of my article. In the following section I describe the anti-Semitic forces in Foulkes’ biography in the context of some psychoanalytical developments of those years.

2

The fact that an object (in psychoanalytical terminology)—in group analysis primarily a group, and in this case the Jews—can be charged by excessive projections and projective identifications to such an extent that it must be experienced as absolutely evil and must therefore be destroyed, was the core of the Nazis’ anti-Semitic madness. It was from this annihilation anti-Semitism that Fuchs and then the Freuds fled to London. All the more striking is Foulkes’ silence on this topic—quite unlike Freud, who was still working on the torso of Mann Moses (Freud, 1939) in his last year in London, in which he addresses anti-Semitism, but also reflects anti-Semitism on to his first publications.

The two realizations of the death instinct—the First World War and the anti-Semitic collective delusion—of course are also condensed in the widely ramified Jewish Fuchs family (Strauß, 2008). Fuchs served in a telephone and telegraph unit on the Western Front during the First World War. It is not known what he experienced there and how. But Norbert Elias (2005: 204), who filled the same position in the First World War on the Western Front, has movingly described its traumatic qualities. We should also recall the dramatic end of Fuchs’ cousin Philipp (10 years his senior), who was a member of the synagogue council of the synagogue in Kronenstraße in Karlsruhe from 1918 to 1933, and personnel manager in the large timber shop of the Fuchs brothers (among them Siegmund Heinrichs’ father Gustav Fuchs).

On November 10, 1938, armed SS men stormed the house where Philipp Fuchs had barricaded himself in the bedroom with his wife. When the SS men threatened that they would now storm the room and shoot him, he is said to have replied that he could do this himself and then shot himself. The couple had agreed that Philipp would first shoot his wife and then himself. But he only shot himself. When the SS men stormed the room immediately afterwards, they scolded the dead man (who incidentally was a bearer of the Eisernes Kreuz (Iron Cross) from the First World War, to which he had volunteered to belong) as a coward. The SS men then withdrew, abused a lawyer in the house opposite and took his daughter away for questioning. When she returned from this and approached Philipp Fuchs, who was laid out in his coffin, she is said to have said to his wife: ‘Be glad, Mrs. Fuchs, that your husband shot himself. At least you know how he died’.

Had Freud himself not said to the more than 40 years younger Foulkes on his visit to Vienna with enough foreboding (Foulkes, 1990 [2004]: 24): ‘What terrible things you may yet have to experience!’? Foulkes later comments succinctly: ‘He was indeed right in that.’ About what? I suspect: it was about the German mass delusion of racial anti-Semitism as the secularized manifestation of Christian anti-Judaism; it was about the death instinct.

Like his cousin, like all the other murdered members of the widely ramified Fuchs family, it was absolutely useless to S.H. Fuchs, having assimilated long ago, and probably quite a-religious. The Nazis were completely indifferent to all of this. This is the way of the death instinct in its unbridled dedifferentiation. Foulkes, as far as we know today, had not experienced the mass mania directly or personally, but the mania had come close enough. Foulkes’ only sister Senta, 10 years his senior, was murdered in Auschwitz in 1943. Foulkes helped to ensure that her two children from Nazi Germany could be saved and survived in a British Quaker family (https://stolpersteine-guide.de/map/biografie/597/senta-bernd). Foulkes’ third wife, Elizabeth Foulkes, née Marx (Strauß, 2007), regularly sent money from London to her mother and sister, who fled to Nice, on the run from the Nazis, after her father died in Nice. In 1942, a money shipment returned with the note: ‘recipient moved unknown’. Both women were murdered in Auschwitz. The mother of Fuchs’ first wife Erna Stavenhagen, Sophie Stavenhagenon (see: https://frankfurt.de/frankfurt-entdecken-und-erleben/stadtportrait/stadtgeschichte/stolpersteine/stolpersteine-im-westend/familien/sichel-hermine-und-stavenhagen-sophie) was deported to Sobibor on 23 March 1943 and was probably murdered there immediately on arrival.

Foulkes may have been anything but religious in person. But we would be wrong to consider Jewish elements in the foundation matrix of group analysis to be religious in the Christian sense. In 1918 Freud rhetorically asked his lifelong friend, the Protestant pastor Oskar Pfister (Freud and Pfister, 1963: 64): ‘By the way, why didn’t any of the pious create psychoanalysis, why did one have to wait for a completely godless Jew’—to which Pfister baptized so to speak Freud on the spot: ‘By the way, you . . . are not a Jew . . . because whoever lives the truth lives in God, and whoever fights for the liberation of love remains according to John 4.16 in God . . . There has never been a better Christian.’

From today’s perspective, one can hardly imagine a more drastic example of the oral narcissistic incorporation of the other, of his quite unconscious destruction by being eaten via incorporation. Freud remains to Pfister silent about this. We can casually see from this example of probably quite unconscious Christian anti-Semitism just how much a consciously opposite attitude in the same person can stand by its side. When Pfister was once again a guest in Freud’s house, Freud’s son Martin (Cooper-White, 2018: 222), who had injured himself in a fight with Nazi boys on the street, reported that Pfister had stood up from the table, shook hands with him appreciatively and congratulated him on having been injured for such a noble cause. Martin Freud comments: ‘This sympathy and kindliness from a dignified leader of the Christian Church heartened me considerably, making me feel less like a battered ruffian’. Anna Freud, however, later considered Pfister’s oral narcissistic appropriation of her father ‘incomprehensible and repulsive’ (Cooper-White, 2018: 275). Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel (1988) and Béla Grunberger (2000) saw the elimination of all differences, as Pfister shows in his letter to Freud, as a characteristic feature of the originally Christian anti-Judaism and later secular anti-Semitism. To risk speculating, could it be that Foulkes, especially in his early English years, was so conspicuously silent on anti-Semitism, because in Northfield he was dealing directly or indirectly in Northfield with colleagues like the Quaker John Rickman or his former psychotherapy patient Wilfred R. Bion, who openly identified as Christian?

Siegmund Heinrich Fuchs came to London in 1933, escaping from the German Nazis. He came to a country whose inhabitants, according to a contemporary survey (Kuriloff, 2014: 51), more than 55% of its inhabitants were of the opinion that Jews were ‘unBritish’ and therefore had hostile feelings towards Jews. In a letter to Edward Glover, James Strachey, Freud’s analysand and translator of his writings into English, writes (King and Steiner, 1991: 33): ‘Why should these wretched fascists and (bloody foreigners) (italics, mine) communists invade our peaceful, compromising island?’ Emily Kuriloff adds that the term ‘foreigner’ was used in government circles during the war years for European Jews who had been able to flee to the island. It was a xenophobic word veiled in British, emotionally controlled, and civilized understatement, the anti-Semitic use of which was part of the symbolic capital of the British establishment at the time of the threatened German invasion. Remember that after his flight to England, Norbert Elias was imprisoned as a Jew for eight months in an internment camp on the Isle of Man (Korte, 2013: 85). He wrote in a letter to Foulkes in September 1941 (Korte, 2013: 176): ‘When I sit down to work, I notice again and again that my memory is destroyed, that I cannot concentrate, and that I have to overcome enormous resistance every time before I can at least write a letter’. We know that Elias was unable to overcome this writing inhibition throughout his life (Schröter, 1997: 226), an example of the traumatogenic compulsion to repeat, as Freud had described in Beyond the pleasure principle.

The very touching, detailed biographical interview (Elias, 2005: 189) that Arend-Jan Herma von Voss and Abram van Stolle conducted with Norbert Elias in 1984 clearly demonstrates Elias’ traumatization by the Nazis and their anti-Semitism. Elias himself says in another interview with Didier Eribon (Elias, 2005: 146) about the genesis of his main work on the ‘process of civilization’ (Elias: 1980): ‘The question of the process of civilization had become very important to me because Hitlerism was about to smash the civilized models of behaviour’.

But hardly a word from Foulkes, who was also deeply affected by the Nazis and their annihilation anti-Semitism, about the Nazis and anti-Semitism! He still limits himself at this point to the field of psychotherapy, for example (Foulkes, 1948 [1984]:133), when he rejects the term ‘leader’ for the group therapist because of the ‘fascist connotations’ in favour of ‘conductor’. But Foulkes remained silent about anti-Semitism as a large group phenomenon and on this point is fundamentally different from Elias. Did he stay silent because he continued to feel to be a ‘foreigner’ in the sense of the contemporary use of the word in those years?

Foulkes (1948: 17; Nitzgen, 2008) refers to this very word ‘foreigner’: when he, as a recognized psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, also from his time with Goldstein in Frankfurt, equipped with experience from the treatment of traumatized First World War soldiers, remained a ‘foreigner’ during the Second World War in Northfield. When he took over the group therapy treatment of war-traumatized soldiers as Major of the Royal Army in Northfield Military Hospital, he was excluded from the simultaneously ongoing planning for selection procedures for officer planning in Northfield by the later Tavistock colleagues, something that had been kept from him. According to his military superior Ronald Hargreaves in a letter to him, his contribution to a written account of the group-related work in Northfield should be explicitly limited to group-analytic psychotherapy. In his first book (Foulkes, 1948), then called: Introduction to Group Analytic Psychotherapy, Foulkes, with the best of British humour, expresses himself bitterly about his ‘foreigner’ identity; it was ‘not possible’ for him to participate in the work of the Bion group, although he had already developed the principles of group analysis applied there before Bion in his therapeutic work at Exeter. All this was certainly due to the ‘unfortunate coincidence of foreign birth, which I regret’. Was Foulkes not in fact one of those ‘bloody foreigners’ about whom Strachey was outraged?

Why does anti-Semitism, this ubiquitous form of anti-group, which devours nearly all Jews, seem to have not particularly affected Foulkes emotionally? As late as 1960, Foulkes gave a lecture at the Lindauer Psychotherapietage on ‘Theoretical and Practical Foundations of Group Psychotherapy’ (Foulkes, 1960). On this occasion, he stepped onto German soil for the first time since his escape from the Nazis, and spoke in front of an auditorium whose protagonists present had just recently been protagonists of the Nazis in the health care system (Hermanns, 2019). Meanwhile: no direct word from Foulkes about this! Let it be clear: Foulkes speaks on the spot of the fact that transference in analytical group psychotherapy sometimes has an ‘almost delusional character’ (Foulkes, 1960: 266). He speaks of the compulsion to repeat and even calls Freud’s writing ‘Beyond the pleasure principle’ (Foulkes, 1960: 267)! Can one imagine—quite in the sense of Freud’s corresponding writing (Freud, 1919) —a more ‘uncanny’ proximity of the death instinct in the group?

For Foulkes, the group certainly was an object desire (Nitsun, 2006; Nitzgen, 2008) and we should conceive this as most important defence against the death instinct in groups, which is founded on traumatic experiences. The problem of Foulkes’ libidinous idealization of the group is scenically evident in the speaking curtain scene that Nitsun mentions in the prologue of his book (Nitsun, 1996: XVI). Out of sheer emotion about the harmonious beauty of a group-analytical psychotherapy session, Foulkes was inclined not to see the dark, threatening, destructive aspects of the group. This is shown in the curtain which Elizabeth and S.H. Foulkes bought in London and which today hangs in the London Institute of Group Analysis. Foulkes bought this curtain after the overwhelming first impression of its beauty and harmony, without having seen (he did not have his glasses with him, according to his wife, who obviously did not point out to him what she did and he did not see) that in this miracle of harmonious beauty ‘devilish’, as Elizabeth Foulkes says, scenes of warring Persian soldiers were woven into it. One can hardly imagine a more eloquent representation of Foulkes’ ‘idealization of the group’ (Nitsun, 1996). It is in this sense that Dieter Nitzgen (2008: 326) mentions Foulkes’ only desire to make the group a space of desire. Without this (traumatogenic, as I would add) desire, Foulkes’ group analysis could not be understood.

I suppose we should understand this idealizing view of the group as a resonance to anti-Semitism, which turned Fuchs into Foulkes in the first place. Just as the shocking example of the psychoanalyst Dori Laub shows, this can also serve as a counter-occupation to horrifying, traumatic experiences like the brutal German anti-Semitism in Foulkes’ biography. Laub, who survived Auschwitz as a young boy, writes about a key experience from his personal analysis:

As a child, I was deported to Transnistria, the part of Ukraine occupied by the Romanian Army, who were allies of the Germans. What I remembered for years was sitting with a little girl on the bank of the River Bug, the demarcation line between the German and the Romanian occupation territory. It was a beautiful summer day; there were green meadows and rolling green hills and a winding blue river. It was like a summer camp. We were having a debate at age five, arguing whether you could or could not eat grass. I recounted this memory in my second week of analysis in 1969 and luckily enough, my analyst was Swedish. His response was, ‘I have to tell you something. It was the Swedish Red Cross that liberated Theresienstadt and took depositions from women inmates in the camp. Under oath some of these women declared that conditions in the camp were so good that they received each morning breakfast in bed brought by SS officers’. There could not have been a more powerful interpretation of my denial. I stopped talking about young girls, green meadows, and blue rivers and started remembering other things, my own experiences of trauma. (Laub, 2015: 318)

Living under the shadow of this object anti-Semitism as part of the second generation (Wilke, 2007) I will propose that we can conceive of each analytic session as a small piece of attempted reparation in the Kleinian sense. This may be at least an impressive example of Morris Nitsun’s (1996) discovery of the creative potential of the analysed anti-group.

3

So let us finally return to the prophetic and rabbinic cultural memories in the group-analytical foundation matrix. Firstly I recall the theory of cultural memory described by Aleida Assmann (1998) and Jan Assmann (1999, 2000), and recently applied by Jan Assmann (2015) to the Jewish cultural tradition. Indeed, this cultural tradition is in itself a post-traumatic construction (Assmann, 2015: 340) which responds to catastrophes such as the two destructions of the Jerusalem Temple as well as the Babylonian exile. Even this post-traumatic dynamic structure connects the historical Jewish tradition with the current group-analytical practice. If we can understand (as mentioned at the beginning of this paper) the tradition of the early Jewish prophets as a response to the trauma of the destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem and furthermore the Babylonian exile, then the same traumatic dynamic is repeated in the emergence of the tradition of rabbinic Judaism after the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans. Here, however, we encounter once again the very different ways in which Freud and Foulkes dealt with this traumatic origin. In contrast to Foulkes’ silence, Freud identifies himself with the founder of rabbinic Judaism at a nodal point in the history of psychoanalysis.

Freud refers to the legend that Johanan Ben Zakkai (Wald, 2007) had himself carried out in a coffin of the Jerusalem temple, which was besieged by the Romans. In this way he escaped a double threat, that of the imperial Romans as well as that of the rebellious zealots in the temple. Outside he sprang from the coffin and then founded the historically first rabbinical school of Torah interpretation in Yavne. One may consider this legend to be a parody of the Christian resurrection myth, but Freud referred to it after the Nazis’ invasion of Vienna in 1938 (Blumenberg, 2012: 347): ‘Immediately after the destruction of the temple by Titus, Rabbi Johanan Ben Zakkai received permission to open the first Torah school in Yavne. We are about to do the same. After all, we have been persecuted by our history, tradition, and some personal experience’.

We must recognize the process of decentred and decentring communication in a group as essential from both the biblical ancient prophetic as well as the rabbinic traditions. Micah (3, 12) foresees the destruction of the former political as well as religious centre, the temple Mount of Jerusalem. Origin-logic thinking is self-blinding thinking (Tillich, 1980). In the same way the rabbinic tradition rejects every origin logic thinking (Ouaknin, 1990). This is exemplified in a condensed form in the treatise Baba Meçia 59 of the Babylonian Talmud (Goldschmidt, 1996), in which the question is discussed as to whether or not a transportable oven must be ritually cleansed before it is used (cf. Weimer, 2015), a question of male supremacy over women. In this discussion, Rabbi Eliezer, after all a disciple of Johanan Ben Zakkai, refers to a divine voice that had given him the generally binding opinion on the matter that was valid in his opinion. It is precisely this alleged transcendental and therefore generally binding claim to truth that the other members of the group now reject. There must be no extra-textual criterion of truth, but in such disputes, which need to be decided at all, a majority must be reached. It is said, the (provisional) conclusion of this controversy is that God mumbled afterwards: ‘My sons have defeated me’. This conclusion is provisional, because after this episode it is still said that the group of rabbis then withdrew in tears from Rabbi Eliezer, precisely because he represented an extra-textual binding authority. One can see that even the noble tradition of a direct descent from the founder—Eliezer was a student of Johannan Ben Zakkai—does not count for anything once the decentration of the understanding of truth is given up. His spiritual genealogy may possess the best possible origin: this does not matter in any way.

This endless process of decentred and decentring communication links group analysis to this rabbinic tradition. Foulkes (1948: 72) says about the ‘group-analytical situation’: ‘The material brought forth, precisely because of its incompleteness, is open to manifold interpretations, stimulates each participant’s own personal complexities to become fully engaged in the process’. Or 1964 (Foulkes, 1984: 54): ‘The discussion is completely loose and undisciplined, a free association of ideas, that can best be described as “free floating discussion”. Ordinary politeness in social intercourse goes by the board and frank disclosure of mutual feelings, reaction and attitude is encouraged’. Finally (Foulkes, 1971: 157): ‘It has not always been understood that by replacing this free association with “group association” in the group—which, I believe, I was the first to have done—we take a decisive step not only in method but also in theory’.

Here we witness a hidden cultural tradition advocating a profound process of reparation after trauma. Auschwitz did not succeed.