A response to Martin Weimer’s ‘The Talmudic way of thinking cannot suddenly have disappeared from us: Death instinct,anti-Semitism and Jewish traditions in the foundation matrix of group analysis’

Introduction

This article (Weimer, 2021; 2022) generated an ambivalent reading in me. On the one hand, it is well-written and clearly shows a specialized knowledge that is far from common on several historical and theological themes and their possible relations to group analysis. This interests me, since I believe that there is an intimate relation between religion and analysis, and specially between an analyst’s religious upbringing and his or her ideas on and practice of our discipline (Tubert-Oklander, 2009). On the other, I find in this text quite a few assertions and views that are unacceptable to me, and I shall explicate why.

Weimer advocates three theses in his article. These are:

I shall now discuss each of these three themes separately, although they are, of course, related in the author’s discourse.

Death instinct

Weimer starts by saying that ‘We do not need to re-enter the endless debates about the concept of the death-instinct metaphor’ (Weimer; 2022). But such discussion is surely germane when we are dealing with one of Freud’s concepts that has been rejected by most members of the psychoanalytic professional community, who feel that human destructiveness should be understood in psychological terms, rather than being explained away by an alleged primary ‘force’. However, he just accepts the concept at face value, as if it were an established fact, and explains away any divergence from his point of view in psychopathological terms: any explicit or implicit refusal to accept the death drive is not for him a disagreement, but a denial of an obvious reality.

Freud (1920) introduced this concept to account for a whole set of human destructive behaviours, whether directed to the self or to the object, which he conceived as the result of an innate destructive impulse, whose final aim was one’s own death. Weimer refers to it as a metaphor, and Freud himself (1933: 95) seemed to acknowledge this, when he wrote, ‘The theory of the instincts is so to say our mythology. Instincts are mythical entities, magnificent in their indefiniteness.’ So far, so good. Of a metaphor, one cannot say that it is either true or false, but only that it is more or less adequate or happy. However, it is very easy to reify the metaphor and turn it into an actual entity that might be used as a causal explanation for any event or state of affairs. And Freud fell into this trap.

Weimer follows Freud in this reification and takes the death instinct as a reality, when applying it to the understanding of destructive behaviour in human groups. In this, he relies on Morris Nitsun’s (1996) concept of the anti-group. But Nitsun is extremely careful to avoid any reification of the concept and uses it to describe the dialectic between constructive and destructive tendencies in groups and between optimistic and pessimistic views of human nature and life in groups. Weimer, on the other hand, uses the unquestionable affirmation of evil in human existence, in order to explain a certain group’s hatred and utter destruction of another human group, as in the case of anti-Semitism.

Anti-Semitism and group analysis

The whole of Weimer’s argument revolves around the notions of Judaism and anti-Semitism. Given that Foulkes was Jewish, had relocated in Britain in order to escape Nazism, and several of his relatives had been Holocaust victims, the author finds it significant that he never included anti-Semitism in his written works, and interprets this as an instance of denial. This he connects with the omission in Foulkes’s theory of the aggressive and destructive traits of individuals and groups, which resulted in an idealization of groups and a denial of their destructiveness.

All this is based on Nitsun (1996), who interprets Foulkes’s emphasis on the constructive aspects of groups and his omission of the destructive ones as a result of the fact that he was engaged in a dire war of his own, when facing utter rejection as a foreigner from Germany, in the British environment, and also from the orthodox psychoanalytic community, and as ‘a way of balancing the destruction and suffering that he was only too aware of, of evolving a reparative vision of society and psychotherapy, of generating hope’ (Nitsun, 1996: 27).

But from Weimer’s point of view, Foulkes was denying his own Jewishness, in his effort to be accepted as British (as shown by the change in the spelling of his surname and in being called ‘Michael’), anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust. This turned what Nitsun had shown to be an unbalance to be redressed in the group-analytic theory and practice, into a major flaw in its foundation matrix. This contention I deem to be both wrong and unfair to Foulkes and group analysis.

Besides, Weimer’s text tends to show an anti-Christian discrimination. Thus, he writes: ‘Just as there is no group without its inherent anti-group, there is no Christian church without its inherent anti-Judaism’ (Weimer, 2022: 254). This bias is most evident in his account of the Freud–Pfister epistolary dialogue.

Freud had asked, in his letter of October 9, 1918, his friend Oscar Pfister, a Protestant pastor who was a pioneer of psychoanalysis in Switzerland and had an ongoing epistolary exchange with Freud from 1909 to 1939 (Meng and Freud, E.L., 1963), ‘Why was it that none of all the pious ever discovered psycho-analysis? Why did it have to wait for a completely godless Jew?’ (1963: 63), and Pfister answered in the following terms (letter of October 29, 1918):

F . . . In the first place you are no Jew, . . . and in the second place you are not godless, for he who lives the truth lives in God, and he who strives for the freeing of love ‘dwelleth in God’ (First Epistle of John, iv, 16). If you raised to your consciousness and fully felt your place in the great design, which to me is as necessary as the synthesis of the notes is to a Beethoven symphony, I should say of you: A better Christian there never was . . . (Meng and Freud, E.L., 1963: 63, my italics)

Weimer sees this as an instance of a possibly unconscious Christian anti-Semitism in Pfister, and writes ‘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’ (Weimer, 2022: 259). This is a complete misrepresentation. Pfister was an ecumenical thinker and a humanist who felt that the essence of the message of Jesus of Nazareth was not a question of ritual, belief, dogma, or belonging to an institution, but of decency, morals, and a firm commitment with all human beings, so he told Freud ‘You call yourself an infidel Jew, but you are none of that, but the very incarnation of the kind of human being that my religious tradition is striving to develop’.

It is quite obvious that Pfister in no way was negating Freud’s heritage or identification with his community, which he clearly stated in his ‘Address to the Society of B’Nai Brith’ (Freud, 1941), but only challenging the binary either-or oppositions of Jew-Christian and godless-believer. As Weimer himself acknowledges, ‘Jewish identity cannot be defined as a religious one . . . Nor can it be defined as national one’. It is, as Freud noted, a deep emotion.

However, there is no evidence whatsoever that Foulkes, as Weimer claims,

. . . especially in his early English years, was so conspicuously silent on anti-Semitism, because in Northfield he was dealing directly or indirectly . . . with colleagues like the Quaker John Rickman or his former psychotherapy patient Wilfred R. Bion, who openly identified as Christian. (Weimer, 2022: 260)

This speculation not only equates being a Christian with anti-Semitism, but also ignores the fact that bigotry is not only directed to Jews, but also to foreigners and others who are different. No doubt that Foulkes may have been discriminated by the top brass in Northfield, but he was a foreigner, a German, non-military, and, above all, not an Englishman. All this was more than enough, and being a Jew was probably just an addition that compounded the picture.

The Talmudic and rabbinic tradition

This is the most interesting aspect of this article, from my point of view, since it includes much information, based on the author’s ample knowledge of the subject. The idea that the Jewish cultural tradition derives from the original trauma of the destruction of the First Temple and the Babylonian exile, later compounded by the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans, deserves further examination and thought by scholars and analysts. However, the subject of this article is the pervasive presence of this tradition in the inception, theory, and practice of group analysis. In this, I take exception at Weimer’s conclusion that,

. . . the analysis of the traumatic effects of the NS-annihilation-anti-Semitism on the history of group analysis may reveal its hidden prophetic and rabbinical traditions in its foundation matrix. (Weimer, 2022: 253)

The influence of the Jewish mystical tradition on Freud’s thought and practice has been well studied by David Bakan (1958), who points out that, ‘This does not mean that we will be able to read psychoanalytic propositions directly out of Jewish mystical expressions’ (position 53, Kindle edition).

Other authors, such as Malcolm Pines (1989), and Valerie Greenberg (1993) have shown the impact of Freud’s situation as a member of an aspiring Jewish middle class, born at a moment in Austrian history in which Jews have had increasing possibilities for social, political, economic, and professional development. But none of this suffices for qualifying psychoanalysis as a ‘Jewish science’, particularly when we consider the many other national, ideological, philosophical, and religious influences that intervened in its development and evolution.

But whereas Freud’s deep roots in his Jewish identity cannot be ignored, things are less clear-cut when we come to Foulkes. Both thinkers were Jewish, but their personal history and origins were quite different: they came from different social strata and belonged to two contrasting generations. Malcolm Pines (1996), who studied both men in the context of the historical relationship between the Jews and the Germans, emphasizes that Foulkes ‘was part of a well-to-do and socially accepted German/Jewish middle-class family’ and that ‘he seems to have experienced little anti-Semitic discrimination, took an active part in sports, was a member of the German army in World War I and suffered relatively few problems of anti-Semitism until he was forced to leave in 1933’ (Pines, 1996: 162). Clearly, they must have had a different relation with their own Jewishness.

Apart from its philosophical and theological underpinnings, Freud’s method of dream interpretation is quite similar to the Kabbalistic numerological technique. But Foulkes’s method of free-floating discussion has many precedents, starting with the Presocratic tradition of open discussion in order to establish the truth, and it differs from Talmudic discussions in that there is no preestablished text, but rather the construction of a new text, stemming from the dialogue itself. As Weimer reminds us, rabbinic discussions are meant to establish the true meaning and implications of a sacred text, and no extra-textual arguments are allowed. The group-analytic dialogue, on the other hand, refers, just as the psychoanalytic dialogue, to a non-textual basis: the analytic experience (Ferenczi and Rank, 1924), and this accounts for its creative nature.

One final point to be made refers to the diverse ideological influences that have contributed to the present status of contemporary group analysis. I shall offer only two brief examples. The independent Latin-American school of group analysis originated in the work of Enrique Pichon-Rivière, who was born in Geneva of French parents and raised in a rural area of Argentina, where he had the influence of the Guarani native culture. He later discovered Freud and Marx and was a pioneer of psychoanalysis and group analysis in Argentina. Obviously, his cultural origins were quite different from Foulkes’s, but his version of group analysis is similar and complementary to that of the British school (Tubert-Oklander and Hernández de Tubert, 2004).

Sticking to Britain, most of the psychoanalysts that contributed to group analysis identified with the British Independent School of Object Relations Theory, whose main thinkers and authors, such as Donald Winnicott, Wilfred Bion, Marion Milner, Harry Guntrip, Ronald Fairbairn, and Charles Rycroft all came from a Protestant Christian upbringing, which surely had much to do with their particular way of understanding and practising psychoanalysis. And none of this has anything to do with anti-Semitism.

I strongly feel that a scientific and practical discipline such as group analysis should be critically discussed in itself, quite apart from any confessional or identitarian considerations, although the research and interpretation of their influence on its authors is a valid concern, from the historical and analytic points of view.

However, Weimer’s article implies a disqualification of what is radically new in Foulkes’s contribution to group-analytic theory and practice, and its later evolution, to be replaced by a conservative point of view, which seems to correspond to Paul Tillich’s origin-logical thinking, quoted in the text, and I cannot validate such a position.

In sum, although I disagree with most of the contentions put forward in this article, I welcome the opportunity it provides to engage in a most needed critical discussion.