| This comparative analysis of Freudian psychoanalysis and Jewish mystical writing examines the thematic preoccupations, hermeneutic strategies, and discursive structures that link these two bodies of thought. It maintains that early Kabbalist writing and Freudian psychoanalysis share an inherently Jewish episteme, with a fundamental consistency and common ethos. The analysis argues that Jewish mystical writing and psychoanalysis are linked by their shared recognition of exile as a primary metaphysical condition of human subjectivity. Because their understanding of the Subject is rooted in an exilic configuration, in which the Subject is constituted by an internal barrier or limitation, Kabbalist writing and psychoanalysis share similar understandings of materiality and embodiment. Specifically, both the mystical symbol and the Freudian symptom function as analogues for the conceptualization of language and of consciousness, and are each structured by a paradoxical process of veiling and revealing. From a strategic historic standpoint, the analysis shows how Freudian psychoanalysis and Kabbalism intervened in the rigid epistemological and religious structures from which they emerged by introducing uncertainty, indeterminability, and radical contingency into what were increasingly narrow and inflexible positivist worldviews. Drawing on the work of Daniel Boyarin, Eric Santner, and Jacques Lacan, the dissertation maintains that by placing Jewish mystical writing and psychoanalysis into dialogue, we can define a specific philosophy of ethical social relations. Through close reading and examination of the concept of idolatry, as well as pertinent literary instances drawn from Eco, Borges, and Pynchon, the analysis argues that both psychoanalysis and Kabbalism are concerned with the movement away from closed or self-aggrandizing discourse towards something more authentic, which for both involves the Subject's experience of self-truth through the Other. Finally, the dissertation performs a literary analysis of narrative techniques and motif within the Bahir and Zohar as well as Freud's most pertinent writings on culture, particularly Beyond the Pleasure Principle and "The Uncanny," in order to examine how these polyphonic bodies of thought each construct discursive strategies that subvert fundamentalist modes of discourse, and how the human encounter with suffering and unknowability informs their common devotion to the therapeutic bonds of community. |
