The Hidden Freud: His Hassidic Roots by Joseph H. Berke Review by Elie Jesner Joseph Berke’s new work The Hidden Freud: His Hassidic Roots is a study of the ways in which Sigmund Freud’s contribution to our understanding of the human psyche - psychoanalysis - stems from Freud’s own history and heritage. On one level this is a question about Freud’s relationship to Judaism and Jewishness broadly. More specifically, it is about his relationship to Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition, and to Hassidut (the noun from which the adjective Hassidic derives), a movement born in the 18th Century which created communities of practice and learning based on those mystical teachings. As Berke is quick to acknowledge, these are areas which have been researched and explored by others, and he discusses their contributions appreciatively. He himself has already written a book on the subject, 2008’s Centres of Power: The Convergence of Psychoanalysis and Kabbalah. We may then want to ask: what is the unique contribution that this new book might offer? In order to answer this question, it will be helpful to map out some of the different ways in which Freud, Psychoanalysis, and Kabbalah could be conceptually interlinked. There are historical questions to consider, or, more precisely, matters of “intellectual history”, concerned with mapping the historical development of ideas. In those terms, I believe one could claim one of the following positions: 1. Freud was deeply steeped in Kabbalistic knowledge and ideas, and psychoanalysis was simply a secular repackaging of these. Freud certainly never made this explicit, so any such claim brings with it a suggestion that Freud decided to keep this aspect of his project hidden, for one reason or another. 2. Freud had a passing familiarity with Kabbalistic and Chassidic ideas, and these seeped into his thinking about psychoanalysis, perhaps unconsciously. Page of 1 10