From Yeshiva to Critical Pluralism: Autobiographical Reflections

From Yeshiva to Critical Pluralism:Reflections on the Impossible Project ofIndividuality

C A R L O S T R E N G E R , PH.D.

PSYCHOANALYSIS DEALS WITH THE MOST INTIMATE OF MATTERS: LOVE,HATE,

sex, the body, self-esteem, the balance between the public and theprivate, yearnings and fantasies, the pain of frustration and unfulfilledwishes.

Throughout most of its history, psychoanalysis has carefully pre-served the illusion that these issues can be resolved, or at least dealt with,through impersonal theory. The dominant voices of psychoanalysis,Freud, Jung, Klein, Lacan, Winnicott, Erikson, and others, all presentedsupposedly objective theoretical accounts of how human beings develop.The official story of psychoanalysis was that each of these dominantcontributors empirically discovered some developmental aspect by fo-cusing on his or her clinical experience each emphasizing a particularaspect of human experience. If this were so, why do different analysts“discover” different things in the same patient? Critics of psychoanalysishave argued for decades that clinical data cannot provide confirmationof developmental and etiological theories.

Intersubjectivists like Atwood and Stolorow (1993) argue that psy-choanalytic theories reflect their authors’ personal struggles and strains.Psychoanalysts cannot reflect themselves out of their own subjectivities,

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Carlo Strenger, Ph.D. is Faculty, Department of Psychology and the Program forPsychotherapy at Tel Aviv University; Founding Member of the Tel Aviv Institute forContemporary Psychoanalysis.

either as clinicians or as theorists; all we can do is to be as aware aspossible of the personal dimension of psychoanalytic theorizing. Theepistemological self reflection of psychoanalysis in the last two decadeshas led many analytic writers to come to terms with the idea that clinicalwork cannot possibly be the foundation of a theory of human nature.

In the last decade or so, psychoanalytic culture has changed funda-mentally; it has become possible, indeed en vogue, to speak in a subjec-tive voice. The fear of revealing the subjective roots of one’s clinical andtheoretical views has given way to greater openness. This developmentis beneficial because in psychoanalysis the most intimate and personalissues are inextricably interwoven with one’s professional view andidentity. How else might it be?

Nevertheless, talking about one’s development is no simple matter:there are too many ways in which one can go wrong. I know in advancethat the story I am about to tell is only partial. The rights to privacy oftoo many others, family, teachers, analysts, friends and lovers, are to berespected, and there is, of course, my desire to preserve my own privacy.I do not wish to hide behind the rationalization that my professionrequires me to remain hidden from my present and future patients.Experience has shown me that patients often can know things about theirtherapist without its impairing the therapeutic process.

No: it is simply that, like most people, I wish to have a private life.Like all of us, I need a persona that protects me from unbearableimpingement. Hence any account that I can write will be partial; it willbe guided by my need to protect myself, and my desire to look good.“Carlo Strenger” is the name of an individual, but it is also a nom deplume.

I wrote (Strenger, 1998) of the desire to have a sense of authorshipover one’s life. At least in Western societies, the sense of having createdone’s self to some extent out of one’s own desire and inclination has beentaken to be essential to human nature. It is the cornerstone of theconception of the self of European romanticism that is still central tocontemporary Western culture.

Writing about the impact of life events on one’s psychoanalytic beliefstouches on authorship twice over: it is about the way you have becomethe author of your own life. And through writing, you become the authorof the narrative of your life, that is, your autobiography.

The story I want to tell is centered around one dynamic crucial to mylife, linked to a relatively public fact. I was born into an orthodox Jewish

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family and left my religion. Thus I became a perpetual questioner offrameworks, theories, and ideas, always yearning for space and relent-lessly fighting boundaries, rules, and limitations, inner and outer.

Now, reviewing this paper, I feel it is ironic that my narrative belongsto a certain genre: Many people before me have told their biographiesalong the narrative line of self-liberation from confining circumstances.It is a story both personal and generational. Even though I have my ownparticular version of it, it is also a story reflecting a historical process thathas involved dozens of millions of people in the second half of the 20thcentury. Nevertheless it is also very much my story, and I will tell its tale.

Adolescence

The Jewish community in Basel, Switzerland, is small: there are about2500 Jews organized into two communities. One of them, the smaller, isexclusively ultraorthodox, while the larger one integrates the wholerange, from completely orthodox to Jews who are relatively disconnectedfrom Judaism qua religion.

My own family was formally associated with both. My father’smaternal grandfather had been one of the founders and the first presidentof the ultraorthodox community, and most of the extended family on myfather’s side was exclusively associated with this community. My fatherwas the first and only member of his generation to receive an academiceducation, which only happened because a famous rabbi intervened withhis parents to let him attend university.

His father had immigrated from Poland right after the first world war,and he always retained the state of mind of the shtetl: it was very clearhow to be a good Jew: you put on tefillin (phylacteries) at the beginningof the morning prayer, you prayed twice more (afternoon and evening),you said dozens of benedictions a day for everything from food todefecation, and there was to be no day without some religious study. Likemost ultraorthodox people, he was deeply suspicious of the secularworld: were not these ideas and this form of life responsible for millionsof lost Jewish souls who had left the faith of their ancestors? There wereJews and there were goyim, gentiles. He would be friendly with them, hewould do business with them, but there was an unbridgeable chasmbetween him and them.

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My mother’s family had suffered losses and sufferings during theshoah. The Holocaust had given the narrative of Jewish self-understandingas a persecuted minority its ultimate culmination. The first born of threechildren, I grew up with stories about how my maternal grandparentsheroically preserved Jewish tradition under circumstances of great ad-versity. Judaism and Jewishness were at the center of all of my educationand of my family identity, even though my parents were open-minded,and Western culture, from classical music to modern art, was an integralpart of what they taught me to cherish.

Growing up in a small Jewish community means that you constantlylive with a sense of being part of an endangered minority. I was in factbeaten up once or twice for being Jewish. I felt that I did not truly belong:always wearing a yarmulka meant to be looked at strangely; the Swissare not particularly open-minded. Even though anti-Semitism was notrampant, Switzerland has even had a Jewish President of the Federationsince the period I write of, it was nevertheless there to be felt.

The dominant factor in the sense of exclusion was not so much afunction of the gentiles, though; it was the central thread, the backbone,of Jewish education. “Thou [God] hast chosen us from all people.” asone of the prayers say. As a Jew you are better; you are different, andyou must stay different. If you lose your identity, you will have betrayeda history of thousands of years.

For many years the sound of church bells evoked unbearably melan-cholic pain and yearning in me. This sound that filled the air of Basel,particularly on Sundays, meant that I was forever excluded from belong-ing where I was. Churches were the ultimate danger; becoming a Chris-tian the ultimate betrayal. Hence I grew up in a city that was both myhome and a place that I could never be fully a part of. Except for homeand the compound of the Jewish community, there was a distinct senseof being in exile.

There was no Jewish high-school, so from age eleven I went to aregular high school; forever different, I would not go to school onSaturdays, I could not participate in any activity involving food, as ourfamily was strictly kosher, and more often than not, when my classmatesplayed soccer, I would go to Jewish religious instruction, including thebible, the talmud, and halakhik instruction.

In my early teens I began to feel progressively less comfortable withJudaism. Most of its commandments made little sense to me, and the


justification as resting on God’s word seemed flimsy. But at age 14 or15, I could not yet conceive of leaving Judaism behind. The strong tiesto my parents, the knowledge that their life projects were irretrievablyconnected to orthodox Judaism, seemed to make this impossible.

So I embarked on a project that seems in hindsight both preposterousand quixotic: I proceeded to construct a rationalistic defense of Judaism.I tried to come up with arguments as to why the Jewish way of life wasthe right one, if one just followed logical arguments. At the time I wasunfamiliar with previous attempts to argue this point, from Maimonidesin the twelfth century, to Herrman Cohen in the early twentieth century.One might wonder where I gained the confidence to do so, but actuallyit was far less a matter of confidence than it was a dire necessity. I hadto resolve somehow the unbearable conflict between my need for free-dom of mind and autonomy on the one hand, and loyalty to my parentsand my people on the other.

I toured the city with my arguments; invited by Jewish nonorthodoxand Christian youth organizations, I would expound my newfoundrationalistic defense of anything from dietary laws to the prohibition ofpremarital sex (at the same time that I was yearning for it wildly).

This attempt to synthesize rationality and Judaism worked for aboutone and a half years. Its final demise occurred at a school camp. Thosecamps were weird experiences for me: I would have to bring my ownfood and could not participate in many of the activities because ofreligious prohibitions.

One evening, my friends and I got into another round of discussionabout Judaism. I continued my creationist lines of argument. Again I wastrying to see whether my version would stand up to attack. The need tofight it through again and again was probably motivated more by the needto silence my own doubts than a true desire to convince others. In anycase my arguments were not good to begin with; what carried me throughthose endless discussions was rhetorical proficiency rather than logicalcoherence.

At some point, around ten o’clock at night, our English teacher, a manof strong analytical capacity and wide reading, sat down in the room,observing the discussion silently. I was apprehensive; I knew he wassmart and knowledgeable, and I respected his thinking. For two hours hesaid nothing, but around midnight, he joined the discussion. Whatfollowed was a four-hour demolition of the house of cards that I hadconstructed. By two o’clock none of the original participants were still

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there, except for one classmate who came from a completely assimilatedJewish family who remained to the bitter end, silently and intentlyobserving how my arguments were taken apart methodically, systemati-cally and, in the end, fatally.

I was close to seventeen years old when this happened. Though itwould sound good, it would be an exaggeration to view this discussionas the turning point of my development. There would have been ways toevade the dismantling of my rationalist defense of Judaism if I hadwanted to evade it; I could have said that it was late at night, or that Ineeded to look up some of the facts the teacher was quoting. I think Imust have been ready for this dismantling because I was dimly awarethat my attempt at compromise between loyalty and autonomy simplydidn’t hold water. Moreover my argument was not authentic, because,while I was still holding on to it, a rather momentous development hadalready set in.

In the 1970s, the Fischer Verlag began to publish an affordablestudy edition of Freud’s works. Bound in red carton covers, It con-tained roughly seventy percent of Freud’s published writings. I wassixteen years old when I bought the first of these volumes: Freud’sintroductory lectures. It seems almost unimaginable that I was stillmaintaining my rationalistic defense of Judaism while at the sametime devouring Freud’s works. But the mind, as we know, can main-tain contradictions for some time, and for about a year I waveredbetween the two. At age seventeen, the process swung toward whatseems the inevitable conclusion.

I worked my way from volume 1 through volume 9 that contained TheFuture of an Illusion, Freud’s critique of religion. Looking back at thisperiod, it seems to me that these volumes (they, of course, still stand inmy library) constituted something like a set of transitional objects. Theywere my safety net, allowing me to negotiate the perilous journey out ofa form of life that was both stifling and protective, and toward an as-yetonly vaguely imagined freedom.

There was the tremendous excitement of reading works of someonewho spoke the unspeakable. Somewhere there were people called psy-choanalysts who could make sense of the terrors, anxieties, confusionsthat were carefully hidden behind my façade of arrogance and intellectualsuperiority. The fantasy of having an analysis became my own versionof the way to paradise. My sense of what it meant was, of course, vague,and rather theoretical.


Then I began to read philosophy and soon came across Nietzsche. Thetwo works that struck the deepest nerve were Beyond Good and Evil andThe Genealogy of Morals. In the latter work, Nietzsche argued thatreligion was essentially a morality of the weak, a rationalization of thewill to power that he saw as the driving force behind all human motiva-tion. This shook me down to the center of my being; it felt even moreright than had Freud’s reduction of the moral sense to an internalizationof parental authority.

At age seventeen, I ceased, but still secretly, to put on tefillin, an actthat meant that I no longer considered myself to be an orthodox Jew.Very soon more visible consequences followed: I resigned from myposition in Bnei Akiva, the orthodox-zionist youth movement, and beganto voice my doubts about Judaism more openly.

Then came the morning, shortly after my eighteenth birthday, when Ihad a crystal-clear thought: there is no God. Exhilarated and frightenedat the same time, I experienced a sense of freedom, combined with theterror the Christian philosopher Blaise Pascal (unbeknownst to me at thetime) had described so powerfully three centuries earlier: being alone,thrown into the vast abyss between two infinities.

Thus began the most terrifying period of my life. I had severaloverwhelming anxiety attacks in which I was afraid of losing my sanity.For some time to come I was to dread the return of these attacks, and waspretty sure that I would go crazy. This period until I left Basel was sheerhell. I had broken with Judaism inside, but I felt the need to protect myparents from the full impact of what I knew had happened to me; I knewthat my overt break with Judaism would be no less than an existentialcatastrophe for them. It would turn their project of imparting to their firstborn son Torah ve’derekh Eretz, the combination of Jewish orthodoxyand openness to Western Culture, into a failure.

Those familiar with the sociology and history of Judaism know howcentral its identity is tied to the narrative of the heroic struggle of theJewish people to survive throughout a history of 3500 years. The Dias-pora added to this struggle the dimension of passing on Judaism underconditions of relentless persecution and suffering. In this view theindividual who leaves Judaism cuts the chain of suffering and heroicstruggle, rendering this chain meaningless. Perceived as an act of treason,some orthodox families enact the ritual of shiv’ah, mourning the dead,when their child leaves religion.

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One dream I remember from that period indicates that unconsciouslyI experienced my move out of the world of faith and practicing Judaismas a strange combination of patricide and an attempt to save my life.Somehow I managed to get through the final exams of a high schoolwhere only 20 percent of those who entered, finished.

I reached a compromise: while telling my parents about my state ofmind, I still agreed to go to yeshivah full time for one year. Partially thiswas, again, in order to protect them; partially it was to make sure that noone could ever tell me that I had left something I didn’t know in depth(this even though I had religious instruction every day of my life untilthen). It was to take years before they could fully accept what for them,at least at the time, was a real tragedy: that their eldest son had becomean apikoires (the Yiddish term for nonbelieving Jews). It is to their credit,and to the credit of my sister and my brother, that I never felt that myrelationship with them was threatened because I went my own way.

The year at the yeshiva became, in many ways, a test of will andstamina. After a while I told the heads of the yeshiva, who were relativelyopen-minded, that I had religious doubts, and that I wanted to take theafternoons off to read whatever I wanted. They agreed. In addition theymade me an offer: I could pick whomever of the rabbis I wanted andmeet with each of them once a week in order to discuss my doubts.

I ended up meeting four different rabbis for extended talks, voicingmy arguments, listening to theirs. Each discussion made it clearer to methat my mind was made up, that none of what they offered was acceptableto me. The discussions with two of these rabbis were fascinating to me,because they were interesting, charismatic, and intelligent people.

In my free time I continued to devour Western philosophy. I readanything from Aristotle to Wittgenstein, gradually getting a sense of thehistory of philosophy and beginning to settle into a world of values andideas that was becoming my new frame of reference. At the same timethe shakiness of my mental state subsided, my anxieties abated, andtoward the end of the year at the yeshiva, I felt that I was finally on myway out, taking steps toward a life lived according to my own desiresand values—a process that would turn out to be a lot longer and morecomplex than I had anticipated.

These years (and aspects of my childhood that I needn’t discuss here)eventually made me fall in love with Winnicott’s writings. I felt that hispsychoanalytic version of the romantic narrative of the true self forced


to hide from unbearable impingement made sense of many of myexperiences, and of my long search for an environment that would allowfor an authentic life. I began to find fellowship on this journey, first,again, through books. During my time at Yeshiva, I read Philip Roth’sPortnoy’s Complaint, written a decade earlier, and I felt that I had founda twin brother who gave voice to my rage at being condemned to guiltfor the very fact that I wanted to be myself. Later I would meet manypeople who had gone through this same journey, and to this day I feelthat we as a group share something difficult to communicate to others.

Looking back today I feel a bit cheated: I had to go on my own througha process that had begun a decade earlier as a social upheaval, a culturaland intellectual movement that changed the face of the West. My owndeconstruction of certainties, the reshuffling of categories, reflected therevolution that had started in the sixties. I joined it, on my own, andbelatedly. By having to go through it alone, I missed the pleasure of it.The secret privacy of the fight, and the terrors associated with it, gavethose years a facet of tortured loneliness. The years of living betweenpublic compliance and private doubt, rage and conflict, robbed me of themore pleasurable aspects of adolescence, and of the solidarity that linkedthe participants of the 60s generation.

Jerusalem, the Hebrew University, and anIntellectual Odyssey

In the professional context, I think of my twenties as the period in whichI acquired the foundations of what now constitutes my intellectuallandscape. During my undergraduate studies, philosophy played a moreimportant role by far than psychology which I found a terrible bore. Idealt with the latter by memorizing the textbooks two days before examsand regurgitating the, to me, uninteresting facts and theories during theexams.

In contrast, philosophy was an intellectual adventure. These were thedays when the split between analytic and continental philosophy was stillat its peak. There was the constant push and pull between the lure of theanalytic vision of philosophy as a strictly argumentative discipline, andthe fascination of the great pictures of the continental philosophers fromHegel through Heidegger and Foucault.

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The lonely struggle with the dogmas of religion had immunized meagainst the temptation to sell my soul to any particular style of philoso-phizing. Even though I often was appalled by the obscurantism of somecontinental texts, I kept questioning the value of what I felt to be uselesshairsplitting by analytic philosophy. So I never took sides in the ratherpolarized atmosphere of the philosophy departmentat Hebrew University.

There was the sheer excitement of just getting to know new ways ofthinking. There was the immersion in the vast landscapes of Westernintellectual history. Anything from quantum physics through mathemati-cal logic, the history of science, anthropology, sociology, political phi-losophy, evolutionary biology to the history of art and literary theoryseemed not only fascinating but utterly indispensable as a tool forunderstanding anything at all.

I delved deeply into some of these fields, dabbled in some, and onlypeeked into others. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the VanLeer Foundation proved to be endlessly stimulating. Besides the facultythere was an endless parade of all the VIPs of academia ranging fromHilary Putnam, Emanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, and Richard Rortyin philosophy, to living monuments like Paul Dirac in physics and IsaiahBerlin in intellectual history.

Then there was teaching. I had teaching appointments at the depart-ment of philosophy and at the graduate program in the history andphilosophy of science from my fourth year of study onwards. I hadremarkable freedom: besides required courses like epistemology andmetaphysics of the 17th and 18th centuries, I could teach what I wanted.Whenever a topic interested me, I would announce a course on it, whichwould force me to get going: I would move from courses on disputesbetween Chomsky and Piaget, through Schopenhauer, to a seminar onFoucault I gave with a colleague.

Time and again I would give courses on the foundations of psycho-analysis. While I was teaching philosophy and writing my thesis at theuniversity, I had started my graduate training and internship in clinicalpsychology—and now things had become interesting again. Clinicalwork threw me back into reading psychoanalysis. I gave courses onFreud—which gave me an occasion to read him once again from begin-ning to the end. I devoured all the classics, from Melanie Klein (whomI hated) through Winnicott (whom first I didn’t understand) throughKohut (who, I felt then, explained me to myself).


I was lucky enough to develop a close relationship with JosephSandler who was teaching in Jerusalem at the time. First of all, he was agreat teacher, giving us a historical perspective on psychoanalysis, apragmatic attitude toward theory, and glimpses into his clinical style ofworking.

But most of all, Joseph Sandler gave me personally the beginnings ofself confidence, the sense that I might be worth something. Although Ihad received many accolades, scholarships, and prizes, I still doubtedthat I would ever amount to anything. There were years in which Icouldn’t finish anything. Having finished my BA in two years, I thendeveloped a writer’s block: I began dozens of projects, and could not getgoing on any of them.

I had constant fights with Sandler (I fought with everybody: takinganything for granted was against the most fundamental tenets of mycharacter), and, lo and behold, not only was he not threatened by myargumentative barrages, he would enjoy them. Once, after expounding apoint at some length, he paused, looked at me and asked: “Carlo, don’tyou have any objections?”

In the midst of all that, Sandler once told me dryly that he knew Iwould leave my mark on the history of psychoanalysis. When he leftJerusalem to return to London, I cried my heart out; one of the mostsignificant people in my life up to then had left.

Thus, gradually, my twenties provided the intellectual building mate-rials that helped me consolidate the position that had emerged during theyears of my fight with, and abandonment of, Jewish orthodoxy. Now thatno one could tell me anymore what to think, I devoured ferociouslywhatever caught my interest. Moving between disciplines made me evermore immune to the temptation to take any theory or point of view forgranted.

Intellectual history helped me to see the contingency of the positionsat which we arrive at any moment. Philosophy of science provided toolsfor the critique of claims to knowledge. Literary theory showed theintrinsic problems of claims toward ultimate interpretation. Philosophyof language showed the intricate relationship between forms of life,concepts, and the structuring of reality. And all of it together engendereda reverence for Kant’s definition of the Enlightenment: sapere aude; dareto know—and free yourself from the self-imposed tutelage of the mind.

Hence, in my mid-twenties, I began to gravitate toward the combina-tion of psychoanalysis and philosophy that was to characterize my work

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later on. The intellectual odyssey of my twenties culminated in thewriting of Between Hermeneutics and Science (Strenger 1991), myattempt to come to grips with the question of what we know—and, moreimportant, do not know—in psychoanalysis. It is certainly no coinci-dence that my first extended intellectual effort was an epistemologicalcritique of the discipline that I was about to enter.

Personal Analyses and Two Crucial Decisions

These years were of course not only an intellectual odyssey: I finallymoved into the world of freedom in many other domains as well. Theunrequited craving for sex and the love of women of my religiousadolescence finally gave way to great loves, some happy and someheartbreaking, and a lot of sexual adventures. I discovered the world ofbars, parties, and nightlife, and settled into a secular lifestyle.

Nevertheless the confusions, anxieties, and profound doubts aboutmyself did not abate. The injunctions, prohibitions, and values of myupbringing had not simply disappeared from my psyche. Truly finding(or creating) a new identity and lifestyle turned out to be a long andtortuous journey. And now I embarked on what I had imagined in myteens to be the road to paradise: I went into analysis.

I won’t go into details here. Let it be said that the first analysis was atthe same time helpful and confining. I wanted it to be a classical analysis,and I wanted nothing more than to make sense of the contradictions,confusions, and anxieties that permeated my soul.

In the twenty years that followed, I’ve had treatment with severalanalysts of different orientations and temperaments. My main conclusionfrom these experiences is that what I internalized from each of theanalysts was her or his distinctive, personal voice and presence; theparticular personality of each analyst was more influential than thetechnique employed. I felt that hiding behind technique is itself a personalchoice, and it reflects a character trait that will also express itself in theinterpretive and narrative lines taken.

I believe that the junctures at which I felt harmed during my analyseswere precisely those in which analysts denied that particular aspects oftheir personality influenced the way they had worked—for better or forworse. Reticence vs. generosity, defensiveness vs. openness, belief inhuman potential vs. the hermeneutics of suspicion, relaxedness vs.


anxiety about one’s sexuality, adventurousness vs. conformity;emotional warmth vs. coldness; these (and many other of the ana-lyst’s personality traits) color the therapeutic interaction more thananything else.

My growing skepticism about theory and technique, and my sense thatrigid conceptions of psychoanalysis can easily become procrustean bedsfor both clinicians and patients, led me, toward the end of the classicalanalysis, to make two crucial decisions. The first was that I would not gointo the analytic institute in Jerusalem.

The second was, possibly, even more momentous. After I had finishedBetween Hermeneutics and Science, Joseph Sandler invited me to givea Sigmund Freud Memorial Lecture at London University and a talk atthe Institute of the British Psychoanalytic Society. The first lecture waslater published under the title “The Classic and the Romantic Vision inPsychoanalysis” (Strenger, 1989) and dealt with the ways an analyst’sWeltanschauung impacts clinical work; the second was based on chapter5 of Between Hermeneutics and Science (1991) and grappled with thepossible truth value of psychoanalytic reconstruction.

Joe Sandler, ever the pragmatic politician, made a large number ofphone calls to find out about the reaction to my lectures. Then he invitedme to move to London. He would help me to finish the institute relativelyquickly, and, assuming that my publications would remain up to standard,he would do everything he could to help me get his Freud Professorshipat London University upon his retirement.

I was stunned: here I was, not yet thirty, getting a career offer I neverdreamt of. I remained in London for several days and tried to make senseof my feelings. I felt overjoyed, but there was an almost physical senseof suffocation whenever I tried to envisage what my life would be like.I told Joe how grateful and proud his offer made me feel, but that I neededsome more time to make up my mind.

Some days later it became clearer to me why my most basic reactionwas reticence and suffocation. On the face of it I was being offered theworld on a silver platter. But, I felt, I would become a prisoner in a goldencage. I would have to go through training that required a great deal ofcompliance; and I would have to play by rules that I was very skepticalabout. I would have to publish in a language that I did not believe in, andeven my lifestyle would be a matter of constant scrutiny.

After a month or so I told Joseph Sandler that I would not come toLondon. I am, to this day, moved by the generosity of his reaction.

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Throughout the next ten years, until his untimely death, we stayed inwarm contact. Whenever I was in London I would drop by and have achat with him. I felt that he truly accepted that I had to do things my ownway. The last expression of his support was a very warm endorsementfor Individuality, the Impossible Project, a book that in theoreticalorientation and clinical style is far removed from Sandler’s own views.

Tel Aviv—My Thirties: Toward Finding My Voice

At age thirty-one I moved to Tel Aviv. Unlike Jerusalem, Tel Aviv is notcrushed by the weight of history. The city bustles with life. The combi-nation of restaurants, theaters, poetry readings, concerts, bars, the cultureof trance parties, high tech startups, the various media and venture capitalfunds create a postmodern mix. Hedonism, sensuality, competitiveness,and the cult of celebrities have replaced the austere ethics of labor-ori-ented socialist Zionism. Tel Aviv is Israel’s secular city par excellence,and here I finally found an environment suitable to my own temperament(or personal idiom, as Christopher Bollas would put it).

I went into private practice and began teaching at the Department ofPsychology and the Postgraduate Program for Psychotherapy at Tel AvivUniversity. My consulting room came to reflect the wide social mix thatcharacterizes urban life: Managers of high tech companies and financialinstitutions hiding their terrors behind yuppie façades, men in their sixtieswho didn’t understand why they could not stop with their philandering,bulimic fashion models panicked by gaining two pounds, middle agedwomen trying to come to terms with having missed the opportunity tomake careers for themselves, artists who doubted the authenticity of theirvoice, professors who wondered whether they ever had anything of valueto say, university students afraid that they were really no good intellec-tually, women and men in marital crises, and of course a wide variety ofsingles trying to figure out why none of their relationships worked.

The treatments varied from a few sessions (rarely) through a fewmonths (not too common), mid range (two to four years), and long (upto eleven years). What impressed me most was the sheer variety andunpredictability of the course treatment followed.

Some people were natural analytic patients. There was, for example,a well known and highly successful businessman of Sephardic originwhose psyche had never come to terms with the painful upbringing in a


family that never fully integrated into Israeli society. He virtually rein-vented free association for himself. Without any explanation on my sidehe would let the material come up and be swept along by it. He had anintuitive grasp of the dialectics between working alliance and transfer-ence. He could, with closed eyes, tell me how he wanted to choke me todeath, rip my innards out, and then gradually reemerge into the here andnow and reflect on the tremendous hatred he felt for Ashkenazi Israeliswho had made him feel second rate during his adolescence. Yet again hewould see deeper strata stemming from his father who, caught in thebitterness of having lost his status by moving to Israel, had nothing butscorn and slaps left for his youngest son.

There were other patients less interested in and capable of the slowdeciphering of historical layers of experience. It turned out that many ofthem could be helped rather efficiently, if I were flexible enough to adaptto their needs and inclinations. I may have enjoyed working with themless, but at this point I began to feel that there were two legitimatechoices:either to work with them in a way that suited their personalities, or, if Ifelt I didn’t have that in me, to refer them to colleagues more suited towhom they were.

My own experience with patients reflects something that Existential-ists and Jungians had claimed for decades: therapeutic processes are firstand foremost personal encounters between two human beings. ReadingYalom’s (1980, 1989) highly personal accounts of his therapeutic workmade me feel that there was something deeply honest in his view ofpsychotherapy as an idiosyncratic, irreducibly contingent meeting be-tween two particular human beings, even though I often felt uncomfort-able with aspects of his clinical style.

I grew increasingly allergic to a certain type of psychoanalytic casestudy that made all patients sound the same. I rarely felt that these casehistories gave me a true sense of the person who had occupied the couch.Even the crises and doubts in the therapy could be predicted by theanalyst’s theoretical predilections. Nevertheless I find thinking in termsof transferential reenactments an indispensable tool, because many pa-tients can only be liberated through a deciphering of the historical layersof their experience. Psychoanalysis has remained indispensable to me inthe richness of its understanding concerning the complexity of humanlife and the human psyche.

Throughout that time I kept teaching psychoanalytic theory andtechnique at Tel Aviv University. Refusing to sell my students theories

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and techniques that were simpler than my experience of clinical reality,I developed a method of teaching in dialectical pairs: I would pitchSchafer’s austere modern Freudian approach in The Analytic Attitude(1983) against Yalom’s encounter-oriented Existential Psychotherapy(1980). Winnicott’s poetic universe of transitional experience was jux-taposed by Lacan’s unforgiving vision of the neurotic as a slave waitingfor his master to die. Greenson’s lucid differentiation between workingalliance, real relationship, and transference was taught along the inter-subjectivist’s radical critique of these differentiations. I still have no otherway of teaching. Whenever I think of settling for one, nondialectical lineof thought, I feel that I would be lying.

I am drawn to anthropologically oriented accounts of psychotherapy:all therapy (including psychoanalysis) is an attempt to integrate mute,nonunderstood suffering into culturally entrenched symbolic systemsthrough enactment of a ritual (Lévi-Strauss, 1949). This fits well withthe intersubjectivist view that all analytic theory reflects the personalityand existential struggles of their authors (Atwood and Stolorow, 1993).Through the years I have come to accept this as inevitable: if there is no“natural” way of living, visions of life have to be created. The greatfigures of the history of psychoanalysis are not just, as Freud said, oftenfrustrated novelists. They are creators of existential cultures, of differentaesthetics of existence (to use the term of Bollas and Eigen). Therefore,their visions should be judged as creations rather than as scientifictheories (as to which one of them is up to standard).

Reading analysts’ biographies seems to substantiate this point ofview: Freud’s life was exemplary of the stoic cast of mind that permeateshis theory (Gay, 1988). Jung’s personal search for a myth to replaceChristianity culminated in the creation of his own myth of the racialunconscious (Noll, 1994). Melanie Klein’s life, full of loss and frustra-tion and the desperate need to control her children, led her to write aboutlife as the perpetual struggle with rage, envy, and guilt (Grosskurth,1986).

It has struck me for a long time that Kohut’s patients somehow allseemed to have the same biography: a borderline psychotic mother whowas both seductive and intrusive, and a nice but remote father. I beganto wonder whether Kohut wasn’t projecting his own personality into allof them. When it turned out that his famous paper “The two Analyses ofMr Z” was really covert autobiography (Cocks, 1994), I almost felt relief:so I wasn’t all that wrong In my suspicions.


I have ceased seeing a problem in this subjective origin of psychoana-lytic theory and practice. Living life is not a science but, at best, an art.Ideals of developed individuality are not facts of nature, but culturalcreations. I do not see the great authors of the psychoanalytic traditionas victims of their characters who were unaware of the unconsciousdetermination of their supposedly objective writings; I see them insteadas cultural heroes who created visions and versions of human lives,inspiring for many, and helpful in accompanying patients on their jour-neys toward richer lives.

What then, is the difference between psychoanalysis and other psy-chotherapeutic schools? I consider every therapeutic school to be acombination of a metanarrative and what Foucault called a discipline ofthe self. It has a narrative of what it means to be a fully developedindividual, and of the pitfalls on the way to becoming such an individual;it also had a set of rituals geared toward helping people on the journeytoward developed individuality. Psychoanalysis is one such culture ofthe self governed by an aesthetic of existence that favors complexity oversimplicity, authenticity over pragmatism, and that prefers the tragic overthe comic vision of life (Strenger, 2002).

Such conceptions of developed individuality can be sharply opposedto one another. The very idea of one “natural” standard of maturity wasan Illusion, and actually a rather pernicious one. It had fed into what Itend to call developmental moralism, the categorization and judgment ofindividuals according to a neatly ordered developmental schema: theearlier you were fixated, the more ill you were, and the more removedfrom the exalted natural state of maturity (that, of course differed fromschool to school).

There are different ideals of the good life, each with its perks and itsprices. There are choices to be made, and any attempt to have one’s cakeand eat it, too, ends up both existentially and intellectually wrong. Thusemerged one of my deepest beliefs about psychoanalysis and psycho-therapy: There could not possibly be one theory or technique that wasgoing to be right for everybody, in the same manner that there could notbe a single lifestyle that would suit all human beings. For me this hadless to do with postmodern relativism (for which I have very littlesympathy), and more to do with the application of the essentials of theEnglish liberal tradition, from John Stuart Mill onwards.

This began to connect with the central insight of the political philoso-pher and intellectual historian Isaiah Berlin, whose voice has been with

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me since a sunny afternoon at Hebrew University (I was twenty two yearsold) when I read his “Two Concepts of Liberty.” I remember the senseof shock when I came upon the last paragraph of this paper, one of themost influential pieces written in the political philosophy of the twentiethcentury:

One belief, more than any other, is responsible for the slaughter ofindividuals on the altars of the great historical ideals—justice orprogress or the happiness of future generations, or the sacredmission or emancipation of a nation or race or class, or even libertyitself, which demands the sacrifice of individuals for the freedomor society. This is the belief that somewhere, in the past or in thefuture, in divine revelation or in the mind of an individual thinker,in the pronouncements of history or science, or in the simple heartof an uncorrupted good man, there is a final solution. This ancientfaith rests on the conviction that all the positive values in whichmen have believed must, in the end, be compatible, and perhapseven entail one another. “Nature binds truth, happiness, and virtuetogether as by an indissoluble chain” [Berlin, 1958, p. 167].

This paragraph is easily translatable into the context of individuallives. There are objective values that pull us into different directions:individual fulfillment vs. adherence to tradition, excitement and risk-tak-ing vs. safety and calmness, emotional intensity vs. rational calm andefficiency, to give but some examples. The idea that there is one way oflife that would combine all these ideals into the optimal solution is asmuch of a wishful illusion in the personal as it is in the political sphere.

It turns out that patients are often helped by the insight that Naturedoes indeed not “bind truth, happiness, and virtue together as by anindissoluble chain.” They often feel that there is something wrong withthem, because they cannot combine all good things in life (excitementand calmness, novelty and stability, passion and serenity) to work inharmony. Choices entail paying (sometimes high) prices for the pleasuresand satisfactions achieved.

My life reflects these tensions no less than my clinical work. To givethe simplest example: I definitely have no desire to harm myself physi-cally. But I feel that the price of renouncing the jouissance I experienceriding motorcycles is too high, and so I continue riding them (hoping, ofcourse, that I will not end up hurting myself). I find stability and the


lucidity of austere discipline in my professional work, but I always needadditional activities that keep me in touch with wider social reality. Iwork with managers and business people on their leadership style, aminvolved in political talk-shows and in attempts to mediate between thebitterly opposed groups of Israeli society.

Every mode of analytic work entails a price as well. Every analystneeds to ask herself what her view of life is. Analytic approaches builton distance, and what the French call “absence,” bring out other materialsand qualities in the patient than therapeutic work that is more dialogicaland interactive. Emphasis on lack, infantile yearnings, and defenses leadsto different results than emphasis on the patient’s striving for the reali-zation of her full potential.

The differences between the various psychoanalytic schools are there-fore primarily differences in how they conceive of the good life. Findinga therapeutic voice means to find an amalgam of personal voice and styleof conducting the therapeutic dialogue. In short: I began to understandthat it was my fate to be what Berlin (1951) called a fox rather than ahedgehog:

For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, whorelate everything to a single central vision, one system less or morecoherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think andfeel . . . and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, oftenunrelated and even contradictory, . . . seizing upon the essence ofa vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are inthemselves, without, . . . seeking to fit them into, or exclude themfrom, any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contra-dictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary vision. The firstkind of intellectual and artistic personality belongs to the hedgehog,the second to the fox [p. 22].

As a fox I emphasize the danger In selling one’s soul to one of thegreat theories and narratives. I call attention to the great danger involvedin fitting patients onto procrustean couches of purist theories and prac-tice. The safeguarding of the patient’s right to a subjectivity of her ownhas become one of my central topics—and I am happy to join thegeneration of analytic authors (e.g., Aron, Benjamin, Hoffmann,Mitchell, Phillips, Stolorow) who share this concern. At the same time Ibelieve that existentialist and Jungian traditions were right throughout

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their history in pointing to the intensely personal nature of the therapeuticencounter. Hence every analyst needs a voice of her own. My position,critical pluralism, puts great demands on the clinician:

Critical pluralism is . . . not supposed to be a compendium ofalternatives, or an arid type of learned intellectualism. Isaiah Ber-lin’s work exemplifies critical pluralism at its best; he maintains hisown philosophical view in the way he presents other voices.Whether he deals with Tolstoy, Vico, Herder, or John Stuart Mill,he succeeds in amplifying their perspective while letting his ownvoice shine through clearly.

This is what I take psychoanalytic therapy at its best to be about:the therapist’s task is to amplify the patient’s subjectivity and todevelop her voice. This cannot be done by sheer neutrality orabsence. Just being there for someone to develop her voice turnsout to be a highly active and personal matter. Great therapists(Greenson, for example) have a distinct presence in their writingsand clinical work. Their voice is strongly present, but it is a voicewhich fosters the presence of others instead of drowning it.

Psychoanalysis tries to provide a space within which the ana-lysand can find himself. The terminology of potential space, andthe unfortunate term object which often denotes individuals haveobscured the fact that the analytic space is intensely personal. Thepatient’s need is for dialogue, not for a sounding box. Such dialogueas she needs must be carefully attuned to the patient’s needs in orderto prevent her losing her own voice again, as she has many timesbefore in her life. The art of letting the patient’s voice reverberateis inevitably one of having a voice of one’s own which is offeredto the patient for consideration, and not imposed as fact or dogma[Strenger, 1997].

I gradually began to feel that I had to put all of these strands of thoughttogether. In 1993 I wrote Individuality, the Impossible Project: Psycho-analysis and Self Creation (Strenger, 1998), which deals with the waypeople try to gain a sense of authorship over their lives by recreating theirselves. The years of trying to find my own voice (what I call a sense ofauthorship over my life) had made me sharply aware of how difficult thisprocess is. One of the book’s central theoretical concepts, the ontologicalprotest of subjectivity, reflects my personal experience of protesting


against the existential fact that I (like everybody else) had no possibilityof choosing my early environment. The book traces several existentialstrategies of recreating the self through detailed presentations of fivecases.

A second thread in the book is that I made a point of telling the storiesof the encounters with my patients as openly as I could. I tried to showthat the therapeutic process is not the orderly series of deep insights orempathic attunements that the professional literature often presents it tobe, but that it is more messy than some of us would like it to be. Morethan anything I tried to show how the goals of therapy evolve through aconstant negotiation with the patient and should not be imposed througha theoretical framework.

Finally the book as a whole is a sustained reflection on the dialecticbetween freedom and fatedness. Psychoanalysis has always tended to seecharacter as fixed early through a variety of inborn factors and earlyenvironmental influences. As opposed to this perspective, there is thepostmodern view of the self as a collage to be created freely. In thetheoretical chapters of the book I tried to maintain this dialectic as far asI could. I likened human beings to bricoleurs, artists who do not buy theirmaterials but find them in junkyards. None of us chooses the basicparameters of life. Whether or not we gain a sense of authorship over ourlives (i.e., truly experience it as our own), will hinge on what we canmake out of the materials given to us by the dice of fate.

The warm reaction to Individuality, the Impossible Project in Israelhas been particularly comforting because the book reflects my ownpersonal struggles no less than those of the patients described. It seemsto have given many readers some insight into the dynamics of theirown lives and made them feel more comfortable with themselves. Itmakes my own sense of fatedness, the existential sense that I havebeen forced through more struggles than I cared to have, more bear-able and meaningful.

No Resting Place

I (Strenger, 2002) attempted to give a coherent account of what it meansto find a clinical voice without relying on established developmentaltheory and theory of technique. Psychoanalysis, in this view, is a clusterof cultures of the self, forms of life designed to acquire the virtues praised

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by each particular school. Psychoanalysis is, of course, a highly disci-plined form of dialogue and interaction. I would now rephrase the ideathat the analyst needs to subjugate her personality to the goal of thetreatment with a significant twist: gaining a clinical voice is the processthrough which a clinician learns to deploy his or her personality in waysthat are both authentic and useful to patients.

I am profoundly aware that my character and life story have turnedme into a therapist who is better for some patients than for others.Enamored with (and now I sometimes feel locked into) the narrative ofbreaking out of confines, I am more helpful to those who by temperamentand inclination are themselves in search of liberation. My soul reverber-ates with theirs, and I think they are helped by my solidarity with theirquest.

I also know that I am less successful with patients who need a moreself-effacing therapist. There is, of course, sadness and the guilt when Ithink of some patients who were not helped enough (the case of “Daph-nah” in Strenger, 1998, is such an instance). In some cases I can identifywhat went wrong; in others it is more difficult to say.

I have told my story along the narrative line of breaking out ofconfines. I am aware that this narrative has its limitations. Lately I ambecoming more aware of the deep continuity of my life with my familyhistory. I sometimes see my own development as a logical conclusion ofa family saga that I can trace back several generations. On my father’sside it is the move from the shtetl to the attempt to balance faith andintellectual openness. On my mother’s side it is the story of Jewishorthodox women who were expected to subdue any personal ambition tothe task of raising the next generation of Jews. I sometimes feel that Ihave been no less the recipient of an unconscious call (that I can traceback to my grandmothers and to my parents in quite some detail) to fulfilltheir unrequited desires and to go all the way to liberty than I have beenthe rebel that I overtly am.

As an aside I want to mention the one woman in this saga who brokeout of this mold, Bertha Pappenheim, better known as Anna O., who wasmy maternal grandmother’s cousin. After Breuer’s unsuccessful attemptto cure her, she was hospitalized at the Binswanger clinic in Kreuzlingen.This didn’t help either. When she finally broke with her family andmoved to Germany, she became a well-known writer, the founder of oneof the first Jewish women’s support groups, and a social activist. Sheseems to have suffered far less from sexual repression than from attempts


to turn her into a meek, submissive woman exhibiting the passivity thatwas thought to define femininity (a myth Freud perpetuated). Once shebroke free, she could flourish. In any case, the lineage that links me toher seems to make my association with psychoanalysis almost inevitable(a hypothesis that bears some weight, given that my sister is a musictherapist and my brother a clinical psychologist, even though bothcontinue to be practicing orthodox Jews).

Recent psychoanalytic writing has tended to be so preoccupied withthe minute details of clinical interaction that one rarely finds detailedhistorical reconstructions of patients’ family histories and the familymyths that shaped their unconscious. By this I do not mean the projectionof hypothetical events into a theoretically constructed early infancy, butthe attempt to do some serious historical work and to build the narrativeon as much evidence as possible (see Strenger, 1991, ch. 5). In myexperience, such narrative construction often helps patients enormouslyin becoming aware in this way of the generational forces that have shapedtheir view of themselves and others.

At present I am preoccupied with gaining a deeper understanding ofthe impact of the dramatic social changes of the last decades on theexistential and psychic tasks of contemporary individuals. I feel thatpsychoanalytic writing has tended to be so preoccupied with the mi-crouniverse of the consulting room that we have lost touch with widerreality. The notable exception Is the psychoanalytic dialogue with femi-nism and the recent thought on gender that has, indeed, generatedimportant changes in theory and practice.

I sorely miss the wide, psychosocial perspective of Erik Erikson. Theproblem is that his work reflects the social reality of the mid-twentiethcentury that, at least in America, had a stability and clarity of valuesnowhere to be found now in the floating world of the global village. Ihope that psychoanalytic discourse will begin to interact with work beinggenerated by social commentators coming from disciplines like publicpolicy (Fukuyama, Huntington), sociology (Giddens), journalism (TomWolfe, Thomas Friedman, David Brooks), and from philosophers (Rich-ard Rorty, Charles Taylor, and Alasdair McIntire) who have very inter-esting ideas about the contemporary crisis of liberal thought and itsimpact on social and individual life.

I also wish there was more interaction between psychoanalysis andthe current evolutionary psychology that has taken up Freud’s originalprogram of deciphering the phylogenetic inheritance governing the

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unconscious. Freud’s program failed because of his Lamarckism (psy-choanalysis has been curiously blind about both the program and itsconceptual underpinnings, as Sulloway, 1979, has shown), and evolu-tionary psychology is coming up with interesting ideas from a rigorousneo-Darwinist point of view.

The result of all such interaction, I believe, will not be some grandnew psychoanalytic theory, but an enrichment of our perspective. Ibelieve we owe it to ourselves and to our patients to seek such enrich-ment. Once the illusion of grand theory and pure technique is discarded,all we can offer is a personal voice that is disciplined by professionalethos and informed by a breadth of associative range that will make usmore suited to mentoring psychic growth.

It may be fitting to conclude with an afterthought related to Freudwhose work was so crucial in my personal and intellectual odyssey. Inone of his more famous remarks (and he made quite a few of those) hewrites that psychoanalysis, after education and governing, may be thethird impossible profession. Given that we need to do our jobs withoutthe reassurance of established theory, and that we need to constantlyrecreate a precarious balance between subjectivity and objectivity, Iwholeheartedly endorse his point. It is comforting to me to think that atleast as far as this thought is concerned, I have remained a loyal discipleof the founder of psychoanalysis.

REFERENCES

Atwood, G. E. & Stolorow, R. D. (1993), Faces in a Cloud: Intersubjectivity inPersonality Theory. Northvale, NJ: Aronson.

Berlin, I. (1951), The Hedgehog and the Fox. Reprinted in Russian Thinkers. Har-mondsworth: Penguin, 1978, pp. 22–81.

_______ (1958), Two concepts of liberty. In: Four Essays on Liberty. Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, pp. 118–172.

Cocks, G., ed. (1994), The Curve of Life: Correspondence of Heinz Kohut, 1923–1981.Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Gay, P. (1988), Freud, A Life for Our Times. New York: Doubleday.Grosskurth, P. (1986), Melanie Klein. London: Maresfield.Lévi-Strauss, C. (1949), The effectiveness of symbols. In: Structural Anthropology, vol.

1, trans. C. Lévi-Strauss. New York: Basic Books, 1963, pp. 186–205.Noll, R. (1994), The Jung Cult. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Schafer, R. (1983), The Analytic Attitude. New York: Basic Books.Strenger, C. (1989), The classic and the romantic vision in psychoanalysis. Internat. J.

Psycho-Anal., 70:593–610.


_______ (1991), Between Hermeneutics and Science: An Essay on the Epistemology ofPsychoanalysis. Madison, CT: International Universities Press. Psycholog. IssuesMonogr. 59.

_______ (1997), Hedgehogs, foxes and critical pluralism: On the clinician’s yearningfor unified conceptions. Psychoanal. & Contemp. Thought, 20:111–145.

_______ (1998), Individuality, the Impossible Project: Psychoanalysis and Self-Crea-tion. Madison, CT: International Universities Press. Paperback reprint, New York:Other Press, 2002.

_______ (2002) The Quest for Voice in Contemporary Psychoanalysis. Madison, CT:International Universities Press.

Sulloway, F. (1979), Freud, the Biologist of the Mind. London: Fontana.Yalom, I. (1980), Existential Psychotherapy. New York: Basic Books._______ (1989), Love’s Executioner. New York: Basic Books.

Department of PsychologyTel Aviv UniversityRamat Aviv 69978Israel

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From Yeshiva to Critical Pluralism: Autobiographical Reflections

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