Dr. Wilhelm Stekel on the Psychoanalysis of a Rabbi (Rashab?)

Dr. Wilhelm Stekel (c. 1920s)

“The patient found boundless relief in being able at last to communicate his secret thoughts unconstrainedly. He did not know a soul to whom he could speak about these things. His glance was freer, his manner unconstrained. The art of psycho-therapy consists not only in releasing repressions but also in revealing how human it all is.” – Dr. Wilhelm Stekel

The Wilhelm Stekel’s case of a Rabbi described in the paper published by Maya Balakirsky Katz who identified the Rabbi as Sholom Dovber Schneersohn (שלום דובער שניאורסאהן‎), AKA the Rashab‎. This synopsis of the psychoanalytic sessions is documented by Dr. Wilhelm Stekel’s in his book Conditions of Nervous Anxiety and their Treatment. The book was originally published by Urban and Schwarzenberg in 1908. Dr. Wilhelm Stekel wrote in his autobiography that the memorable client was referred to him by Dr. Sigmund Freud. The case is described in the second part of this book The Phobias, in the chapter Vocational Neurosis (ten tightly printed pages starting from page 211 in the Routledge edition):

This is the full text of the chapter Vocational Neurosis in pdf, please read before you skip to the comments here.

1. The age of marriage is 18 while the Rashab married when he was 14. The ten pages about the Rabbi is a shorthand, multiple visits condensed. As Wilhelm Stekel wrote: “Let me be spared the description of the toilsome roundabout ways by which I arrived at my results. The conversations at our sittings would fill volumes“. Why distract the reader with the freakish Jewish customs? It might require an unnecessary for the flow of the anonymous case,  explanation, perhaps even apologetics, it will make the Rabbi appear as a barbarian to the enlightened German speaking audience. Especially in the atmosphere when Stekel was clearly cognizant of the antisemitism, etc. All he wanted to say was that his patient married young, 18 will do. It’s interesting that the “Rabbi’s chapter” is titled Vocational Neurosis and the chapter immediately following it is Neurosis of a Priest (same in the original German?).
2. The comment at the end about the Rabbi sending his “daughter” five years after the case (that would be 1908 when the book was published). As I already wrote, while in Vienna the Rashab cared for two orphans as he would care for his own daughters. The Rayatz describes there that his father married them off to a perfect strangers, literally found on the street. If two orphaned sisters are married to perfect strangers shouldn’t you expect that in exactly five years at least one would be in need of some therapy or have a crisis? Perhaps Rashab sent the woman to Dr. Stekel writing she is “like a daughter to me” and that became I was “treating his daughter” remark, especially because the Rashab likely paid for the treatment.
3. Who could it be besides the Rashab? Let ‘s see the Rabbi was misbonnen be shem havaya, we now eliminated all the snags who never think about God, just about his alleged laws. Actually we can stop right here, but if you insist… There might be some Chernobeler-Cherkasser-Schneerson mutt like the Uncle Professor Psychiatrist Dr. Fishel Schneerson or some rouge Twersky like Nochum Shpikover. But who would have the sophisticated idea to see a shrink in 1903!!? Whomever this Rabbi was he didn’t go to some general practitioner in Berdichev, he sought out the top, experimental at the time, specialist before even the doctors heard of the psychoanalysis, in fact as Stekel wrote it was one of the first seminal cases. The geographically close Ruzhiner einiklach are just too materialistically remote to see a psychiatrist. The Galizinaner Rebbes, even the Tzanzer dynasty are your garden variety Neanderthals, who else, the Romanian savages? Even Freud himself wouldn’t be able to handle the perversions of that bunch. In other words please come up with another Chassidic Rebbe with a documented trip to Vienna in 1903 (or before 1908 when the book was published), who was exactly 42 years old then, who was involved in the known to his chassidim quarrel with his older brother about the books and who used to mediate about the symbolic meaning (yihudim) of God’s name, gleamed from his grandfather’s manuscript. Moreover find a Rebbe who did as Stekel writes “a great deal of mental work” and “all kinds of people used to come to him from far and wide to ask his counsel in difficult matters”.
4. Even I know that the Rashab traveled widely, could this itinerary mentioned by Dr. Stekel be confirmed: “He sought in vain a remedy for his affliction in Berlin, Vienna, and Paris. He went to Scheveningen [the resort town next to Hague], Homburg, Wiesbaden, Gainfarn, etc. He had stayed some months in Worishofen.”

Sholom Dovber Schneersohn, The Rashab. Rostov, 1920

There is something else that I find interesting, unlike the contemporary vile sensationalist headline seekers, the molestation is downplayed or at least described similarly to other “sexual experiences”. Holding a girls hand left as much impression on the Rabbi as being molested by an older man as a child (btw, I read in Stekel’s autobiography that he considered every human a bisexual by nature).

Noteworthy that the cathartic part of the psychoanalysis was not the revelation about the molestation or the fantasies but the untangling of the associations and images in the shem havaya: “He halted always at the “Adonai,” because this word reminded him not only of his sinful desires but of his inhibitions. For the God of the Jews is a stern, merciless, punishing God.”

Finally the psychoanalysis was in 1903 and just in three years later was the creative eruption known as the Samech Vov. There is no doubt that Dr. Wilhelm Stekel unknowingly released the creative imagination.

Further Reading:
• Dr. Wilhelm Stekel, a 42-year-old Rabbiner and the Rashab
• Wilhelm Stekel and the Rashab’s “daughter”
• The Rabbiner in Wilhelm Stekel’s Autobiography

Tagged as: chabad, psychiatry, psychology, rashab, sigmund freud, wilhelm stekel

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