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The place of psychoanalysis in the history of the Jews

Talk by Eli Zaretsky (audio recording available)

We know a great deal about the influence of Judaism on psychoanalysis but very little about the influence of psychoanalysis on Judaism. This lecture seeks to redress this imbalance by situating psychoanalysis in the context of Jewish history.

Focusing on such matters as assimilation, Zionism, and the place of the Jews within the German Enlightenment, it takes up Freud̷s famous 1930 question: what is left in Judaism after one has abandoned faith in God, the Hebrew language and national ideals?

recording available

Map with all buildings that belong to the Jewish Museum Berlin

Where

Jewish Museum Berlin
Lindenstraße 9–14, 10969 Berlin

Freud̷s answer: a great deal, perhaps the very essence, but an essence that we do not know. This “not knowing”, it argues, links the modernist sensibility embodied in psychoanalysis to Judaism's ancestral preoccupations.

The glass courtyard is filled with people and illuminated in purple.

Audio recording of the talk by Eli Zaretsky; Jewish Museum Berlin 2005

Where, when, what?

  • When30 May 2005
  • Where Jewish Museum Berlin
    Lindenstraße 9–14, 10969 Berlin
    See location on map

Audio Recordings: Listen to Past Museum Events (67)

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