Birth—From Metaphor to Reality in Jewish Literature and Psychoanalysis: Discussion of Lewis Aron’s Paper “With you I’m Born Again”

Abstract

In his innovative paper, Lewis Aron discusses narratives of his own “metaphorical birth” as a psychoanalyst, through the years of working with his first analysand and by way of his encounters with four different supervisors. Aron suggests varied psychoanalytic perspectives and dialogical readings of the essence of birth in mutual relations and of its presence in the analytic dyad.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I have briefly sketched here some remarks taken from my larger work, Human Ropes—Birth in Kabbalah and Psychoanalysis (forthcoming). I am grateful to Yehuda Liebes, Moshe Idel, Iris Felix, Esther Sperber, Lewis Aron, Mike Eigen, Ira Dashevsky and Michael Kara-Ivanov, Dorit Ashur, Hagit Aharoni, Mati Ben Zur, Biti Roi, Hanni Biran, Malka Hirsch-Napchan, Patricia Donofrio, and Elizabeth Michel for all their help.

Notes

1. ¹See Job 14,1; 15, 14; 25, 4. Zohar II 116a; Zohar Haddash 82b.

2. ²For example, see Mishna Arachin 1, 4; BT Arachin 7a. Literally – lashevet `al ha-masbe`r, means sitting on the “birthing stool,” yet in the Modern Hebrew the word “mashbe’r” implies the crisis involved in the birth following the biblical meaning of mashbe’r as “breaking of the waves” and “surf” (see Jonah 2,4; Psalms 42, 8).

3. ³As we learn from Plato in this dialogue, thoughts are born and re-born forever, since the soul is immortal: “the soul is immortal and has been born many times, and has beheld all things both in this world and in the nether realms, she has acquired knowledge of all and everything; so that it is no wonder that she should be able to recollect all that she knew before about virtue and other things” (Meno 81b).

4. ⁴See Liebes (2000, pp. 109–110); compare to the psychoanalytic perspective of Spezzano (2007). More about the myth of Athena and its influence on Philo’s writings, see Niehoff (2004, pp. 438–443).

5. ⁵Gilbert and Gubar (1979) suggested a feminist critique of this theme. For a discussion of female symbolic writing, “with milk,” instead of the male and phallic “ink,” see Cixous (1991). Cixous, an Algerian-French-Jewish feminist writer, herself a daughter of a midwife who witnessed many real births, testifies to the influence of this physical and emotional experience on her development as writer (Cixous & Clement, 1986). In this context we might add to the myth of the “birth of the hero” (explored by Freud, Rank, Campbell, Dandes, and others), the description of the mother as a midwife and the imprint of this skill on the character of her child, the hero/heroine, as well known about Socrates, Moses, and so on.

6. ⁶I am grateful to Esther Sperber for this observation. See also Meltzer (1988).

7. ⁷For a polemical reading of the virginal conception in the Talmud and Sefer Toldot Yeshu, see Schäfer (2002) and Biale (1999). In addition to this position, I suggest that the sages were also influenced by this narrative. An example of such influence can be found in the statement adduced by the Rabbis concerning Lot’s daughters, in Genesis Rabbah 51, 8: “It is not written that we may preserve a child of our father, but ‘that we may preserve offspring, (Zera) through our father’: viz. the seed that comes from another place [from heaven] – and this is the Messiah.” According to this midrash, the messiah is a “seed that comes from another place.” Thus, the name “Moab,” though implying incest (meaning literally “from my father”) is also evidence of the bold justification of Lot’s daughters for their seductive act. God himself is the supreme father who impregnated the older daughter of Lot. Consequently, the Jewish Messiah symbolizes the “Divi Filius” (son of God); see Idel (2007); Knohl (2007); Schneider (2010). For a discussion of the uniqueness of Genesis Rabbah in the Judo-Christian discourse, see Hirshman (1996). For further exploration of the myth of Sodom and the story of Lot’s daughters, see Kara-Ivanov Kaniel (2011).

8. ⁸See Freud (1919) and Leviticus Rabbah 14, 2–3. Kessler presents the fetus and the womb as central sites for the construction of Jewish identity in Rabbinic literature. She claims that the sages, though turning to Greco-Roman writings on embryology, emphasizes the primacy of God’s role in procreation, at the expense of the biological parents, and in particular the mother. For a further discussion of Kessler’s ideas, in the context of Rabbinic discourse of sexuality and the “evil inclination,” see Rosen-Zvi (2011).

9. ⁹Leviticus Rabbah 27, 7. According to the sages, the baby also crosses the line between “non-being” to “being,” as we learn from the statement: “the closed organ opens and the open one closes” in BT Nidda 30b, discussed at the end of the paper. In addition, the baby is defined according to Jewish law as a “rodef” (a persecutor), wish means he is a potential killer of his mother, and thus in some critical situations, the Halacha sacrifices his life in order to save the life of his mother. See Mishna Ohalot 7, 6; BT Sanhedrin 72b. Consequently, both the mother and the fetus are described as rescued from death during birth. Nevertheless, according to Levinas, this complicated situation reflects also the ultimate responsibility for the “other” displayed in Jewish thought and law. While the mother is obligated to the baby even before he is “a subject,” but a fetus in her womb, she represents the ethical position of total morality. As Levinas (1998) says, “Maternity, which is bearing par excellence, bears even the responsibility for the persecuting by the persecutor” (p. 75); see Ben Pazi (2003).

10. ¹⁰See Aharoni and Bergshtein (2001, pp. 12–20).

11. ¹¹BT Nidda 30-31; Seder Etzirat ha’Valad, Beit haMidrash, ed. Aaron Yellinek, Jerusalem 1967, Vol. I, pp. 153–158.

12. ¹²Mishna Hagigga 2, 1; Tosefta Hagigga 1; BT kiddushin 40a; BT Hagigga 11b, 17a.

13. ¹³For a discussion of Rank’s idea of “psychological birth” and the implication of separation from the mother, as appears in clinical work and transference, see Aron (1966, Chapter 6). For more on the concept of birth trauma according to Rank, compared to the mythical understanding of Campbell, see Segal (1990).

14. ¹⁴R. Moshe Cordovero, Or Yaqar, Tiqqunei Zohar, Vol. 4, p. 154. Translated and discussed in Idel (2012, pp. 37–39).

15. ¹⁵Genesis Rabbah 14, 9; for appearances of this structure in the Zohar, see Tishby (1949–1961/1989, Vol. II, pp. 16–26). Discussion of these five stages according to Lacanian reading, see Burstein (2014, pp. 55–57). For other explorations, see Eigen (2012–2014)

16. ¹⁶Palestinian Talmud, Shabbat 7b; Leviticus Rabbah 35, 7. I’m grateful to Moshe Halbertal for this reference.

17. ¹⁷Mishna Hagiga 2, 1.

18. ¹⁸See Gamlieli (2006) and Starr (2008). This idea resonates with the kabbalistic myth of the “dead kings of Edom,” a theme that is discussed in the forthcoming book by Melila Hellner Eshed on the spiritual language of the Zoharic “Idra Rabbah.” I’m grateful to her for sharing with me chapters from this work. See also Liebes (1982, 1984).

19. ¹⁹In the Kabbalistic literature we can find an expression of the fear “of not being born” in the ambivalent desire attributed to the lower Sefirot to return back to Ein Sof, a kind of being “swallowed up” by the upper parents, and particularly by the upper mother, Bina. Haviva Pedaya (2011) claimed that the holy chaos and the wish to return to the Big Mother that was emphasized in the Geronese Kabbalah and Nahmanides circle, collapses and disappears in the Zohar and Castilian Kabbalah. While on the one hand this description hints at Bina’s destructive power and ability to annihilate the divine sefirot, it also raises the theme of birth, death, and rebirth in an endless cyclical repetition.

20. ²⁰The divine Sefirotic world is imagined as a family, with a father and a mother, a son and a daughter, who unites in pairs in order to reproduce worlds and human souls (Idel, 1989, 2007), thus applies to the function of the primal scene and the ability to recover “the combined object” in the creative process (Meltzer, 1988, ch. 4–6, 8–10). The usual understanding of gilu’i ara’yot, incest, means illegal paring, but as the Zohar creatively proposes, the separation of the divine parents, means “exposure of sexual organs” and is equal to cutting of the shoots, and therefore, incest. See Zohar III 74a; TZ 2b, 5a, Wolfson (1995), Idel (2004), and Hellner Eshed (2009). For more on the mystical meaning of “cutting of the shoots,” see Tishby (1949–1961/1989, Vol. I, pp. 221–223).

21. ²¹The prophetic revelation implied by the Sages’ image of the fetus, who “looks and sees from one end of the world to the other,” refers to human beings in general. The same phrase is used by the Sages regarding Adam, as a symbol of the mystic, or as a function of our collective human memory (BT Hagiga 12a; Sanhedrin 38b; Zohar I 31b). In this context it is might be fruitful to mention Rank’s statement about the comparison between myth and the collective dream: “The manifestation of the intimate relationship between dream and myth – not only in regard to the content but also to the form and motor forces of this and many other, more particularly pathological, psychical structures—entirely justifies the interpretation of the myth as a dream of the masses of the people” (Rank, 1959, p. 9; see also Eigen, 2004, 2011).

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Ruth Kara-Ivanov Kaniel

Ruth Kara-Ivanov Kaniel, Ph.D., is a Kreitman Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Jewish Thought at Ben-Gurion University, Interdisciplinary Fellow at the Tel Aviv Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis (TAICP), and a Research Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem.