May 9, 2022|ח' אייר ה' אלפים תשפ"ב Mental Health Awareness Drasha Parshat Kedoshim: Freud and Frankl By Admin

This past week, for the first time, Yom Haatzmaut celebrations across Israel took place without fireworks. Why? Loud bangs triggered former soldiers to suffer PTSD by reminding them of gunfire and bombing. It’s amazing to see more and more how society is make us more and more aware of mental health challenges that we all face. And I wonder if the Torah has a view about this or is the Torah neutral about mental health awareness? I think that the Torah cares a lot about psychology and mental health awareness. After all, the word “psychology” itself comes from two words. The first half of the word is derived from the Greek word “psyche,” meaning the “soul” or “personality.” Psyche shares a linguistic link with the Greek word “pneuma,” which translates as breath, or “neshama,” which also means “soul,” The second half is derived from the word “logos,” meaning “reason,” or “thought”. Psychology is the study of the personality or the study of the soul. The Torah very much believes in the study of psychology. As an example, when we learn about how the “yetzer hara,” our evil inclination, operates and how to overcome it, the Torah is telling us to be aware of the fact that we have desires and instincts and drives and the Torah very clearly tells us in Parshat Noach, “ki yetzer lev ha’adam ra minurav,” that we have base desires from our youth. We are born with these drives, instincts and biological urges. It’s part of our personality. It is something that is completely natural, and part of actual Torah study is how we deal with this part of ourselves.

However, I think that psychology sometimes get a bad rap in the eyes of some Torah Jews and here’s why. With the dawn of the enlightenment, there was a move to separate study of the mind, of the personality, from religion. In the 17th century, the French philosopher Descartes came to what was a radical conclusion at that time that the body is a complex device that is capable of moving without the soul. This perspective eventually opened up the possibility of viewing man simply as an animal with biological drives that shape his behavior. This approach reached its height with Sigmund Freud who developed an approach called psychoanalysis. He believed that man fundamentally is an animal. Like animals, we experience pain and pleasure and our needs and conflicts come from a primate nature that informs our powers and dispositions. In Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of personality, the pleasure principle is the driving force of the id that seeks immediate gratification of all needs, wants, and urges. The pleasure principle strives to fulfill our most basic and primitive urges, including hunger, thirst, anger and sex. When those needs are not met, the result is a state of anxiety or tension. According to Freud, there is another part of our personality called the ego to keep the id’s demands in check. The ego develops to help control the urges of the id.

And Sigmud Freud took a position on a mitzvah from this week’s parsha, the mitzva of “v’ahavta l’rei’acha kamocha,” the mitzvah to love your neighbor as yourself. In his work, “Civilization and its Discontents,” he writes that the commandment is impossible to fulfill. He asks, “Why should we do this? What good is it to us? Above all, how can we do such a thing? How could it possibly be done? My love seems to me a valuable thing that I have no right to throw away without reflection.” He writes, “I must love him if he is the son of my friend, since the pain my friend would feel if anything untoward happened to him would be my pain – I should have to share it. But if he is a stranger to me and cannot attract me by any value he has in himself or any significance he may have already acquired in my emotional life, it will be hard for me to love him. I shall even be doing wrong if I do, for my love is valued as a privilege by all those belonging to me; it is an injustice to them if I put a stranger on a level with them.” Freud basically takes the view that this mitzvah is impossible to fulfill for at least two reasons. First, what benefit can I get out of loving him? Second, since I am entitled to love myself on a very high level, how can I possibly apply the very same love standard to others? If you believe that man is essentially an animal and we are driven by our biological urges and the pleasure principle, how is it position to love our neighbor as ourselves? Therefore, the premise underlying the study of psychology was an anti-Torah premise.

But Viktor Frankl changed all that. In 1960, Dr. Viktor Frankl was ready to uproot his whole life, pack his bags and leave for Australia. He had survived the Holocaust, but now his theory of human psychology was been attacked, derided and ridiculed by his colleagues. He couldn’t take it anymore and he decided that he would leave Vienna and move to Australia.

Shortly beforehand, a well-known opera singer named Marguerite Kozenn-Chajes visited the Lubavitcher Rebbe and told him that she was going to Vienna. The Rebbe told her to go to Viktor Frankl and deliver a message to him. She tried reaching him at his university, but he wasn’t there. She didn’t know about his plans to leave the country. She went to his house and upon meeting Dr. Frankl, she told him that she had a message from Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson from Brooklyn, New York. Dr. Frankl invited her in, and she said to him, “The Rebbe asked me to tell you that you must not give up. You must be strong. Do not be disturbed by those who ridicule you. You will succeed and your work will achieve a major breakthrough.” Upon hearing this message, Dr. Frankl broke into tears and the Rebbe’s encouragement brought Dr. Frankl back to life. He redoubled his efforts to spread his unique insights and therapeutic approaches to healing the human psyche. Soon afterwards, his monumental work, “Man’s Search for Meaning,” was translated into English and this work jumpstarted an entire genre of self-help literature in the field of logotherapy. What is logotherapy and why was the Lubavitcher Rebbe so interested in ensuring its continuation through the work of Victor Frankl?

Logotherapy means “healing through meaning.” The key difference is that in Freudian thought, the human self is defined by, and is entangled in, a perpetual struggle to balance competing drives and desires, both conscious and unconscious. Frankl, by contrast, emphasized the soul’s potential to transcend the limitations of the self through a search for deeper meaning and acts of loving kindness. He developed this theory in the concentration camps in the Holocaust when he encountered the human capacity for self-transcendence. He encountered starving inmates who comforted others and who gave away their last piece of bread to others. He concluded that these heroic acts meant that man is not simply an animal because animals don’t behave like that, giving away their last piece of bread to others. Frankl concluded that we do have drives, desires and urges, but underneath those drives, desires and urges, there is an inner essence, a soul that transcends our basic biological instincts, what he refers to as “a religious sense deeply rooted in each and every man’s unconscious depths.” Ultimately, according to Frankl, we are not motivated by the pleasure principle, and if we dig deep enough, we realize that we are driven by a striving to find meaning in our lives, hence the title of his book, “Man’s Search for Meaning.” According to Frankl, then, the Torah could command us to love even a stranger like ourselves if we see ourselves tapping into our psyche, our neshama, and living a life on a mission, a life of giving, of selfless acts, like the concentration camp survivor who gave away his last piece of bread to a stranger.

As such, the only issue that Torah-committed Jews may have had with psychology and mental health is the premise of some psychological theories like Freud but Frankl widened the lens of psychological theory and made the premise more compatible with Torah values. Regardless of the premise, it is clear that the Torah recognizes that everyone needs tools to help function in this world. Feelings of anxiety and depression and obsession and trauma are all part of the human condition. It’s normal to struggle with difficult feelings, the Torah recognizes that it’s normal and there are tools to deal with these normal feelings. I’ll give you an example from this week’s parsha. The Torah tells us, “lo tisna et achicha bilvavecha. Hochai’ach tochiach et amitecha,” or “don’t hate your friend in your heart. Rather rebuke him.” The Torah here describes a situation when someone did something mean to you. Now maybe your response to this mean act is be the better person and ignore it. However, the Torah understood that we have feelings and we should not deny our feelings, and if someone was mean to you, the Torah is telling you that it’s okay to be angry and upset, but don’t keep the feelings to yourself. “Lo tisna et achicha bilvavecha.” Don’t hate the person in your heart. “Hochai’ach tochiach et amitecha.” Confront your friend.

It is part of the human condition to struggle with life. It is part of the human condition to be triggered by everyday situations. The Torah sometimes provides us with some tools as to how to respond in certain situations and God has provided the world with experts who can also provide us with some tools to respond in other situations. Learning about ourselves and learning different techniques doesn’t mean that there is anything wrong with us. Learning about ourselves and learning different techniques are opportunities to help us tap into our neshama, our very essence, and lead lives of meaning as Dr. Viktor Frankl imagined.