Rashab and The Psychoanalyst

AJS Review 34:1 (April 2010), 1–31
© Association for Jewish Studies 2010

doi:10.1017/S0364009410000280
A N O CCUPATIONAL N EUROSIS : A P SYCHOANALYTIC

C ASE H ISTORY OF A R ABBI
by
Maya Balakirsky Katz
In consultation with Sigmund Freud, the Viennese psychoanalyst Wilhelm

Stekel (1868–1940) treated the first Jewish cleric known to undergo analysis, in
1903. According to the case history, published in 1908, a forty-two-year-old
rabbi suffered from a Berufsneurose, an occupational neurosis associated with
the pressures of his career. Stekel’s case history forms an indelible portrait of a reli-
gious patient who submitted himself to the highly experimental treatment of psy-
choanalysis in the early years of the discipline. However, scholars never integrated
the rabbi’s case into the social history of psychoanalysis, more as a consequence of
Freud’s professional disparagement of Stekel than of the case history’s original
reception. Psychoanalytic historiography has largely dismissed Stekel’s legacy,
resulting in a lack of serious scholarly consideration of his prodigious publications
compared to the attention paid to the work of some of Freud’s other disciples.1
Stekel’s most recent biographers, however, credit him as the “unsung populariser
of psychoanalysis,” and claim that he is due for reconsideration.2 But in his
published case history of the rabbi, Stekel also warrants introduction to the field
of Jewish studies, not only because of the literary treatment of the rabbinical
profession by a secular Jewish psychoanalyst, but also because the rabbi incor-
porated aspects of that experience into his own intellectual framework after
treatment.
This article first provides an overview of the case history as it appears in
Stekel’s medical tome, identifying some of the relevant flourishes within the
genre of the psychoanalytic case history. I then identify the anonymous rabbi
and provide an intertextual reading of Stekel’s case history and familial biographi-
cal accounts of the rabbi, focusing on variant perspectives on sexual trauma,
illness, and rehabilitation. I end with a discussion of how this intense experience
1. For a study of the conditions that led to Stekel’s marginalization within the field, see Jaap Bos
and Leendert Groenendijk, The Self-Marginalization of Wilhelm Stekel: Freudian Circles Inside and
Out (New York: Springer, 2007).
2. Bos and Groenendijk, The Self-Marginalization of Wilhelm Stekel, 6.
1
in Vienna had an impact on the rabbi’s leadership within his own community and
in his homiletic writings.
T HE CASE HISTORY: T HE RABBI IN EARLY PSYCHOANALYTIC LITERATURE
Stekel published his case history of the rabbi in Nervöse Angstzustände und
deren Behandlung in 1908, a text in which he highlighted what he considered his
successful treatment of nearly 100 cases.3 Stekel’s primary goal in analysis was
to ferret out the patient’s “basic trauma” in an attempt to curb the conversion of
psychological conflict into physical symptoms. In the rabbi’s case, the patient com-
plained of various organic indicators that Stekel believed could be alleviated with a
“psychic cure”: stuttering and stammering, anxiety “that he would get stuck” in the
middle of his sermon, loss of sensation in his left hand and arm, and debilitating
public fright. Following Stekel’s initiative in attempting to identify the “core
trauma,” the rabbi offered a trauma narrative of a violent sibling quarrel: the
rabbi revealed that while his older brother inherited money upon the death of
their father, he received a collection of manuscripts handwritten by his father, grand-
father, and great-grandfather. After the brother spent his material inheritance, he
came to the rabbi to demand a share of the beloved books as well. In response,
the rabbi stepped before his bookcase and, caught up in his passion, pronounced,
“I will not allow the books to part from my hands, rather would I be taken from
the books myself” (emphasis in original).4 The rabbi bitterly regretted his declara-
tion, fearing that God would indeed remove him from his books. Although the
rabbi endeavored to narrate the grave nature of his psychic conflict over his holy
books and suggested that the debilitation of his hand was a divine consequence
of his words, Stekel surmised that the incident masked a more fundamental conflict.
After this initial autobiographical attempt by the rabbi to account for his core
trauma, Stekel organized the rest of the case history around three dreams that the
rabbi brought to analysis, Stekel’s subsequent dream interpretations, and the mem-
ories that these interpretations evoked in the patient.5 In The Interpretation of
Dreams (1900), Freud identified dreams as a form of wishful thinking, through
which the dreamer can entertain repressed thoughts that bear a traceable relation-
ship with reality. The restoration of these latent memories, desires, and associ-
ations illuminates the logic of the unconscious mind and thereby brings the
anxiety effects of the “core trauma” to the forefront of conscious thought. Even
after Freud officially distanced himself from Stekel and publicly called him
3. Wilhelm Stekel, Nervöse Angstzustände und deren Behandlung (Berlin and Vienna: Urban
and Schwarzenberg, 1908). The 1908 case history was titled “An Occupational Neurosis (Berufsneur-
ose)” and subtitled “Anxiety and Conversion Hysteria.” Stekel disagreed with Freud’s labeling this
phenomenon as hysteria and dropped the subtitle altogether in 1921. All translations from the
German are my own.
4. Quotations in this paragraph appear in Stekel, Nervöse Angstzustände, 162.
5. Stekel acknowledges his sincere debt to Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, but he gives dream
interpretation an overhaul in several volumes. For his last work on the topic, see Wilhelm Stekel, The
Interpretation of Dreams: New Developments and Technique, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul (New York:
Grosset and Dunlap, 1943).
2
An Occupational Neurosis: A Psychoanalytic Case History of a Rabbi
“morally insane,” the psychoanalytic community widely regarded Stekel as a

master of dream interpretation.6 “Stekel’s was a peculiarly magic nature,” wrote
his younger colleague, Fritz Wittels, after submitting himself to one of Stekel’s
active analyses. “He could read the dreams of his patients as easily and readily
as other people read books. Much of our knowledge of dream symbols came
from him.… As easily as he saw through dreams, Stekel was aware of hidden
aims and unconscious fears in listening to his patients’ communications.”7 But
unlike Freud, who mapped the vicissitudes of his own dreams to demonstrate
the process of interpretation, Stekel left out the vast majority of the rabbi’s
dream material to demonstrate how the analyst’s interpretation could trigger self-
discovery in the patient. Ultimately, Stekel’s Nervöse Angstzustände was a dem-
onstration of psychoanalysis at work, not through process, but primarily
through clinical success. Where the rabbi initially demurred from any discussions
of sex and desire—claiming complete innocence until the day of his marriage at
the age of eighteen—Stekel’s skillful dream interpretations opened the channels
of communication, and thereby secured the “cure.”
The rabbi’s first dream took the form of a vivid military scene with soldiers in
awkward poses, stretching their bayonets to mark their enemy and laughing delir-
iously. The leader of these soldiers seized the rabbi by his beard and demanded,
“Why have you become so proud and will not have anything to do with me?”
The dream was instigated by a “pornographic photograph” that the rabbi remem-
bered in which a bayonet was pressed against a soldier’s penis. Stekel opined that
the military leader in the dream formed a “condensation” figure—a single dream
symbol that expressed the emotional content of several memories. The delirious
military leader evoked both traumatic and repressed memories of a male servant,
the rabbi’s brother, and a friend. The memories that followed the first dream thus
were structured around the roles these three figures played in triggering the
rabbi’s revelations about his early sexual experiences. Finally losing what appeared
to be epic patience, the rabbi lashed out against “the cure,” a term of art that Stekel
uses interchangeably with “psychoanalysis,” which the rabbi claimed was not
helping in the least, but only making things worse.8
The next day, the rabbi revealed that a “man-servant,” whose tasks included
watching over the rabbi in his boyhood, sexually molested him from the time he
was “five or six” until his marriage, when “such things” became impossible. After
retrieving the sexual trauma of his childhood, the rabbi divulged the details of the
encounter, showing visible signs of emotional turmoil, and Stekel, in turn,
recorded the sordid details of the encounter with clinical distance and graphic min-
utiae. Stekel noted that the servant still lived in the rabbi’s house and that the rabbi
still showed him great affection despite the fact that the man was frequently “rude
and impertinent.” Despite their confusing sexual encounters, the rabbi “did not
6. Bos and Groenendijk, The Self-Marginalization of Wilhelm Stekel, 18.

7. Fritz Wittels, Freud and the Child Woman: The Memoirs of Fritz Wittels (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1995), 112.
8. Quoted material in this paragraph appears in Stekel, Nervöse Angstzustände, 164.
3
have the heart to be severe with him and much less to give him notice.”9 In line
with psychoanalytic thought of the time, Stekel glides over the emotional conflict
of traumatic memory under the premise that its discovery suffices for the patient’s
recovery. Indeed, this memory of childhood sexual trauma unblocks “such a rich
supply of source material that there was not enough time to discuss and incorpor-
ate it all.” The rabbi admitted to masturbating since childhood, both alone and with
his brother, a point that in 1903 signaled a possible cause of neurosis.10
These confessions led to the second character within the “condensation
figure” represented by the tormenting soldier in the rabbi’s dream—the rabbi’s
brother. The rabbi revealed that his brother, “a man-about-town and a ladies’
man—paid court to his [the rabbi’s] wife in a shocking manner.” The rabbi
could not accuse them of anything definite and trusted his wife, but nevertheless,
the rabbi chastised his brother for compromising his wife’s reputation. Further
analysis uncovered that the real motivation for the rabbi’s jealousy toward his
brother concerned not his own wife, but his brother’s wife. The brother, who
married before the rabbi, habitually took the rabbi into his wife’s bedroom,
“where he [the brother] displayed her in scant attire, with the idea of arousing
him, and to hold his wife’s beauty before his eyes.” In his brother’s absence,
the rabbi stayed with his sister-in-law, playing with her and “having fun”
without getting carried away. In his characteristic dubious tone, Stekel offers a jus-
tification in the rabbi’s own words: “They were all children in those days …”11
Stekel’s inflammatory ellipses lead into the rabbi’s identification of the third
character within the dream’s “condensation” figure—a male friend. The rabbi
reminisced about a seaside resort where he and his young wife once spent a
summer. The rabbi occasionally wrestled with the friend in the wife’s presence,
and, after successfully pinning his friend on the floor with his knee, the rabbi tri-
umphantly took his wife to bed. Stekel’s bold interpretation of the rabbi’s first
dream is offered as “proof” of Stekel’s success as an analyst, as the interpretation
led to the rabbi’s identification of the “core trauma” and the confession of a vivid
sexual life. The rabbi was tormented day and night by the most unbridled fanta-
sies: everything he saw, heard, read, and touched assumed sexual images.
Stekel determined that this man, “who led such a pious and sequestered existence
in real life, was in his fantasy life, the greatest Don Juan,” whose fantasies “would
put even those of a Marquis de Sade in the shade.”12
9. Stekel, Nervöse Angstzustände, 164. I think the following sentence leaves room for interpret-
ation, so I replicate it here in the original: “Der Diener lebt noch in seinem Hause und erfreut sich noch
heute seiner grossen Liebe, obwohl von ‘diesen Dingen,’ seit er verheiratet ist, selbstverständlich nicht
mehr die Rede sein kann.”
10. Stekel publicly disagreed with Freud that masturbation was a major cause of illness only in
1908, but at the time of the rabbi’s analysis, Stekel had not yet formulated his thinking on the subject.
On the debate over masturbation in the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, see Annie Reich, “The Discus-
sion of 1912 on Masturbation and Our Present-Day Views,” The Psychoanalytic View of the Child 6
(1951): 80–94.
11. Quotations in this paragraph appear in Stekel, Nervöse Angstzustände, 164.
12. Stekel, Nervöse Angstzustände, 165. In the psychoanalytic terminology of the time, a “mas-
culine” Don Juan mentally constructs the scene of seduction and possession.
4
The second dream’s setting was a sleeping compartment on a traveling train,

which led to the admission that the rabbi harbored fantasies of being forced into a
sexual liaison in a way that would exonerate him from the sin of adultery because
it would be “an act performed against his will.” The rabbi explained that he knew
of two possibilities by which he could remain true to the tenets of his religion
while experiencing intercourse. In the first, a woman lying in the sleeping com-
partment above him falls upon him in a way that might resemble coitus, a situation
in which he could be an “unwilling” subject. In the second, he is attacked by
robbers in a forest and the captain of the thieves holds a pistol to his breast,
saying, “either you have intercourse with this woman who lies here before you,
or I will shoot you.” In both cases, the rabbi could not be held accountable for
his passive transgressions and thereby could achieve a measure of “pleasure
without sin.”13
Stekel’s endeavors to account for two of the rabbi’s pathological behaviors
through his interpretation of the second dream revealed that the rabbi suffered
from a “traveling neurosis” (Reiseneurose), in which he was seized by a desire
to travel at night by train and to walk in forests by day. “After three months an
oppressive restlessness seizes him [the rabbi]; he cannot work any longer, and
decides to go somewhere to consult some professor or visit some famous
seaside health-resort … . urged by the secret hope that a luscious lady would fall
down on him from above.” Hence, Stekel interprets the dreamer’s anticipation
of meeting a woman with whom he could have unwilling and unwitting—and
hence free of sin—sex as the reason behind the rabbi’s real-life wanderings
through forests and train travel. The rabbi harbored an obsessive desire for an
illicit sexual experience, but he repressed this untenable desire into the uncon-
scious, “masked by various more tenable desires, such as consultations with pro-
fessors, visits to friends, trips to resorts, etc.” However, in Stekel’s estimation, the
“primary motive, in fact, the only motive to these wishes, is the journey.” The
rabbi “could not tolerate the spas for long, losing patience, and traveling further
and as far as possible, always at night, and always in a sleeping-compartment.”
Likewise, the second part of the fantasy with the sin-compelling robbers inspired
the rabbi “to circle the forests for days while staying at a health-resort, always in
the hope that circumstances might induce a sublime end to his innocence.”
Consequent analysis revealed that the woman in the rabbi’s train dreams
triggered the memory of a “young, strikingly beautiful, and finely built
woman,” resembling the housekeeper in the rabbi’s summer residence, who
once extended her hand in greeting. The experience with a “foreign” woman
left “a burning fire” in his left hand, and shortly afterward, he lost all sensation
in that hand. Stekel records the rabbi’s fascination with travel in the rabbi’s own
words: “Every time I get into a train, I think of this woman, and always hope
that, by chance, she may one day share a compartment with me.” After this
piecing together of details about the adult sexual fixation on the “foreign”
servant and his pathological traveling, the rabbi’s left-hand numbness disappeared.
13. Stekel, Nervöse Angstzustände, 165.
5
As Stekel described it, the analysis progressed rapidly, and the patient found
boundless relief in being able at last to communicate unabashed, for the rabbi
“did not have a single person whom he could speak about these things.”14
The third and final dream ties up the loose ends presented at the start of the
case history, a performance so eloquent that it invites skepticism. Stekel assesses
the value of the handwritten books that the brother demanded, to address the
“deeper emotional regions.” The key to the rabbi’s obsession with the holy books
lie in passages within them of a graphic sexual nature. Even when he was a
child, scripture dealing with erotic life excited him, and “he pursued these portions
of scripture in earnest.” The old manuscript contained significant details about the
erotic symbolism found within the four letters of the divine name (YHWH), a
staple of kabbalistic literature since the thirteenth century.15 Stekel concluded that
the book symbolized the sexual rivalry between the rabbi and his brother, who
taunted him both with the beauty of his sister-in-law and the unabashed courting
of the rabbi’s wife.16 In Stekel’s interpretation, the rabbi’s real attachment to the
book stemmed from his hermeneutical analysis of the sexual symbolism of the
divine name. Stekel discovered that the rabbi always lost his train of thought and
always halted at the name of God because “it brought the sexual symbolism of
the four letters out of the unconscious and to the surface.” Stekel concludes, “His
religious acts were imbued with a secret sexual symbolism. He halted—not
without a deeper determination—in the middle of his speech. He [the rabbi]
always halted at the word ‘YHWH’ because this word reminded him not only of
his illicit thoughts, but of his inhibitions.”17
With these revelations of repressed thoughts and traumatic memory, Stekel
confidently pronounces his patient cured. Stekel attests to his success by reporting
that five years after his own treatment, the rabbi sent his daughter to Stekel for psy-
choanalytic treatment. If this is a case of “occupational neurosis,” referring to the
psychopathological product of the patient’s sacerdotal vocation, then the student
of Jewish history might wonder what type of rabbinical post this rabbi held.
After all, early twentieth-century rabbis ran the ideological and geographic
gamut. We might wonder how this rabbi dealt with his “anxiety effects” in his own
community and whether he agreed with Stekel’s characterization of his illness in
relation to his hermeneutical interpretations of sacred literature and his commitment
to a set of religious boundaries for sexuality.
In this case, Stekel’s patient can actually be identified and these questions
broached. Once this identification is made, we might consider the ways in
which illness and recuperation figured in the rabbinical memoir, biography, and
14. Quoted material in this paragraph appears in Stekel, Nervöse Angstzustände, 164–67.
15. See Moshe Idel, Kabbalah and Eros (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005).
16. This passage in Rosalie Gabler’s English translation suggests adultery, as it uses the phrase
“On the other hand, the brother had made love to his [the rabbi’s] own wife” (Stekel, Conditions of
Nervous Anxiety, 219). This translation does not accurately reflect the original German: “der Bruder
seiner eigenen Frau den Hof gemacht” (paid court) (Stekel, Nervöse Angstzustände, 168).
17. Quoted material in this paragraph appears in Stekel, Nervöse Angstzustände, 168, 169.
6
moral epistle. We might also profitably ask, how did the rabbi’s analysis influence
the ideas that he expounded in his rabbinical post?
T HE PSYCHOANALYST IN HASIDIC LITERATURE
In the company of his only son, the fifth rebbe of the Belorussian hasidic
Chabad movement, Rabbi Sholom Dov Ber Schneersohn (1860–1920), left his
hometown of Lyubavitchi to seek “a cure” in Vienna at the height of psychoanalytic
passion in that city. Father and son remained in Vienna from January 6 to April 5,
1903, during which time R. Sholom Dov Ber Schneersohn (known as RaSHaB)
entrusted himself to the care of a “great professor.” On March 15, 1903, RaSHaB
(at the age of forty-two) wrote to one of his colleagues from Vienna: “I am here
for my health … I have suffered with my left hand for approximately five months.
It has no feeling on its outer skin; I don’t feel hot or cold, not even a prick from a
needle.18 I have been here more than three weeks. I took my son, may he live. The
professor here suggested that I do electric [treatment] on my hand and it helped me
a little with regaining sensation, although it is far from healed. There is, however,
a little improvement. God-willing I will stay another two or three weeks. And God
should send me a complete recovery soon.”19 Although RaSHaB failed to describe
the primary nature of his treatment and to identify the “professor” by name in this cor-
respondence or in subsequent communications regarding his travels of 1903, his son,
R. Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn (1880–1950), and his grandson-in-law, R. Mena-
chem Mendel Schneerson (Chabad’s seventh dynastic leader; 1902–94), revealed
that the “professor” was the “famous professor Freud.”20
The idea of a connection between RaSHaB and Freud has circulated in
Chabad circles since the early 1990s, when the diaries of R. Menachem Mendel
Schneerson revealed that R. Yosef Yitzchak privately reported that his father “con-
sulted” Freud on several occasions during his three months in Vienna for symp-
toms related to “depression.”21 The identification of “the professor” by the last
18. Stekel reports that he submitted his patient to a full physical examination and that “needles
could be stuck deeply into it [left arm] without the slightest feeling in the patient … the sensation of the
thermal stimuli in the left limb was completely null” (Nervöse Angstzustände, 161). Stekel reports three
years of anesthesia to the left hand and arm, not five months.
19. Sholom Dov Ber Schneersohn to Shneur Zalman, handwritten letter signed with the Hebrew
date 16 Adar 5663 (March 15, 1903). Facsimile of letter reprinted in Kfar Chabad 911 (July 3, 2000):
47. Transcribed from handwritten Hebrew and Yiddish to Hebrew typeset by Yehoshua Mondshine,
46–49.
20. Stanley Schneider and Joseph Berke, “Sigmund Freud and the Lubavitcher Rebbe,” Psycho-
analytic Review 87, no. 1 (February 2000), 39–61. They quote from Menachem Mendel Schneerson,
R’Shimos, vol. 94 (Brooklyn, NY: Kehot Publication Society, 1997). Unlike Freud, who preferred a
slow, passive form of analysis, RaSHaB received a course of Stekel’s “active analysis,” which consisted
of regular, daily appointments over a duration of several weeks. Stekel tags his case history with clinical
information, such as that the rabbi “appeared the next day at the appointed hour” and one dream analy-
sis took “two hours,” which we are led to believe happened over the duration of a single sitting.
21. For R. Yosef Yitzchak’s account of RaSHaB’s “professor,” see Avraham Chanoch Glitzen-
stein, Sefer ha-toledot (Brooklyn, NY: Kehot Publication Society, 1947; republished periodically with
same pagination), 53. All translations from the Hebrew and Yiddish are my own.
7
dynastic leader of the movement (R. Schneerson) as “the famous professor Freud”
appeared posthumously in print only in 1997, after Freud’s published and/or avail-
able work could have been properly mined.22 Freud, in all of his letters or case
histories, makes no mention of a figure remotely resembling the rebbe, and the
analysis has been treated with much ambivalence and conjecture by both the
hasidic and the psychoanalytic communities. However, in an autobiography
written on the eve of his suicide, Stekel writes that Freud referred a “rabbi” to
him in his first year of psychoanalytic specialization and that Freud did consult
on the case with both Stekel and the rabbi on a bimonthly basis.23 It is my conten-
tion that this rabbi was the famous Chabad rebbe RaSHaB.
RaSHaB’s biography intrigues historians because it was he who first intro-
duced the hallmarks of what would become contemporary Chabad ideology as
developed during the reign of his son and grandson-in-law, which in its late
twentieth-century stage embraced a controversial messianism.24 RaSHaB initiated
the Jewish revival campaigns that transformed Chabad hasidim into itinerant
rabbis, building Jewish life from the ground up and spreading their teachings
across geographic and ideological divides.25 From the perspective of critical bio-
graphy, RaSHaB has always been something of a mystery. Unlike his predeces-
sors, who fathered many competing sons, RaSHaB produced only one child,
and he began grooming his son for his future role as rebbe at a precocious age.
An eleven-year gap separated the death of RaSHaB’s father and his ascension
to leadership, during which time RaSHaB devoted himself to learning his ances-
tors’ literary corpus and traveling abroad on “account of his health.” What little we
do know about RaSHaB comes mainly from his son’s prodigious record keeping
and the stories shared orally in the congenial atmosphere of farbrengens (gather-
ings at which hasidim exchange scholarship, song, and drink). Stekel’s case
history offers one psychoanalyst’s perspective on many of the mysterious
aspects of RaSHaB’s biography and inadvertently reconstitutes proto-messianist
accounts of RaSHaB’s revivalism to a far more personal constellation of factors.26
Within their respective ideologies, the medical case history and the hasidic
historical tract present two different versions of a person, his interior life, his
understanding of that life, and his coping mechanisms in dealing with his personal
22. Schneider and Berke, “Sigmund Freud and the Lubavitcher Rebbe,” 39–40.
23. Wilhelm Stekel, The Autobiography of Wilhelm Stekel (New York: Liverright Publishing,
1950), 116. [Originally written in 1940].
24. For the book that brought Chabad messianism into the public debate, see David Berger, The
Rebbe, the Messiah, and the Scandal of Orthodox Indifference (London: Littman Library of Jewish
Civilization, 2001). For the first serious academic study of Chabad philosophy as it was creatively
transmitted from RaSHaB to the seventh and last rebbe of Chabad, see Elliot R. Wolfson, Open
Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Menahem Mendel Schneerson
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).
25. RaSHaB’s Chabad revivalism began in Sephardic communities to Bukhara and Georgia the
year after his analysis with Stekel. For collected biographical accounts and anecdotes, see Glitzenstein,
Sefer ha-toledot.
26. I make this critique vis-à-vis Chabad’s public menorahs in “Trademarks of Faith: Chabad
and Chanukah in America,” Modern Judaism 29, no. 2 (May 2009): 239–67.
8
circumstances. Ancillary materials to RaSHaB’s medical records and international

travel experiences are complicated by several factors. Because of Stekel’s inaus-
picious position in the Viennese psychoanalytic community and the political cir-
cumstances of his evacuation from Vienna in 1938, Stekel’s original medical
records have not survived.27 Chabad historical material is likewise complicated
by the fact that the movement’s leadership both self-censored and edited their pre-
decessor’s work. Chabad’s last leader made editorial decisions regarding the
diaries and letters of the two previous rebbes; the notation “released until this
point” appears occasionally just as the narrative turns intensely personal.28 We
are left with a highly selective Chabad historiography, a body of literature that his-
torian Ada Rapoport-Albert dubs “hagiography with footnotes.”29 RaSHaB’s
elder brother, Rabbi Zalman Aharon, a significant figure in Stekel’s presentation,
burned all of his own “handwritten manuscripts as well as a bundle of papers and
notes” a few days before his death in 1908. He gathered the ash in a white purse
and persuaded two of his colleagues to bury him together with his manuscripts
written over the course of thirty years.30 When R. Yosef Yitzchak told a famous
hasid what had happened to his uncle’s “historical jottings,” the hasid answered,
“Nu, very well. If it wasn’t wanted, then it wasn’t needed.”31
That hasidim narrate their history within the context of their own interests is
a truism applicable to every community and literary genre, but the historian’s
desire to reconstruct the original scene is of less interest here than how differently
the “same” events are related from different points of view and toward different
conclusions. For example, where Stekel flags RaSHaB’s traveling as a compulsive
neurosis,32 R. Yosef Yitzchak casts it as an ideological action predicated by the
doctrine of “dispersing the springs” of Hasidism.33 Although we can confirm
many lacunae of fact between texts, the full, actual event ultimately remains
27. Stekel’s wife wrote in the introduction to his autobiography that all of his books and manu-
scripts were destroyed in Vienna in 1938 (17). The majority of Freud’s papers and files were spirited
away and preserved by loyal students.
28. Although Chabad is far more open with their archival material than most hasidic groups,
Chabad’s central archive, currently housed in its main headquarters in Crown Heights, Brooklyn,
remains largely inaccessible to outside scholars.
29. Ada Rapaport-Albert convincingly argues that Yosef Yitzchak understood the Wissenschaft
scholars’ desire for the archaeological document and thus forged documents that he claimed belonged
to the so-called Kherson Genizah to create source material for what he believed was true concerning the
early history of Hasidism. See Ada Rapoport-Albert, “Hagiography with Footnotes: Edifying Tales and
the Writing of History in Hasidism,” History and Theory 27 (1987): 119–59.
30. Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, Likkutei dibburim, vols. 1–2 (Brooklyn, NY: Kehot Publi-
cation Society, 1988), 29.
31. Ibid., vols. 1–2, 29, 30.
32. In light of Stekel’s diagnosis of his patient’s wanderings as a “traveling neurosis,” the
thesis behind the famous story of RaSHaB’s late-night travel to the “two orphans” during his Vienna
stay benefits from revision. See Joseph H. Berke and Stanley Schneider, “A Tale of Two Orphans:
The Limits of Categorization,” Mental Health, Religion, and Culture 4, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 81–93.
The authors claim that a story in which RaSHaB instructs his son to board a train with him to travel
to a seemingly dubious destination defies diagnostic “categorization,” whereas Stekel writes, “The
most important, in fact, the only important point about these wishes, is the journey.”
9
elusive. Rather, a comparative reading of these two accounts elucidates how each
characterizes religion, illness, and the cure against the backdrop of their own lit-
erary traditions. A comparative study of the content of hasidic and psychoanalytic
texts may not reveal an indisputable biographical narrative of “the rabbi” or his
Berufsneurose; yet, in the most idiosyncratic spaces, a multivocal presentation
reveals the encryption of biography, by which I emphasize encryption along
with biography. The encryptors of biography become the keys to literary analysis,
or, to put it another way, the illuminators of suppressed history. The identification
of Stekel’s Rabbiner as RaSHaB provides an exquisitely rare historiographical
opportunity to witness the art of the psychoanalytic case history, a relatively
new genre in which Stekel played a formative role, as well as the art of hasidic
historiography, a relatively new genre in which R. Yosef Yitzchak played a forma-
tive role. Taken together, we might be able to broach certain aspects of early
twentieth-century Chabad Hasidism in their own context during the leadership
of RaSHaB, rather than through its post-Holocaust incarnation in Brooklyn
under the leadership of Menachem Mendel Schneerson.
In comparing the two accounts of RaSHaB’s course of treatment, the reader
is struck by the mutual posturing of epistemologies in accounting for the mind–
body relationship.34 Both Stekel and R. Yosef Yitzchak identify themselves as
working against the mainstream versions of human behavior and human potential,
not only in the way in which they construct the analyst–analysand encounter, but
also within the larger realm of their own fields. Stekel is trying to forge an “alterna-
tive” explanation/treatment for symptoms of illness within the established medical
community, and R. Yosef Yitzchak is trying to forge a single dynastic bloodline,
not only for Chabad history, but for Hasidism as a whole. An intertextual reading
strategy between discourses illuminates how each organizes illness within the
larger corpus of its own genre. In psychoanalysis, pathology is a point of entry
into the mechanics of the human brain. In hasidic biography, illness instigates
the revelation of the soul. Post-Holocaust Chabad literature characterizes
RaSHaB’s fin-de-siècle malaise as “depression” over tsarist oppression, the
work of the maskilim (Enlighteners), and the birth of Zionism.
33. For a discussion on the missionary principle of Chabad Hasidism, see Menachem Friedman,
“Habad as Messianic Fundamentalism: From Local Particularism to Universal Jewish Mission,” in
Accounting for Fundamentalism: The Dynamic Character of Movements, ed. Martin E. Marty and
R. Scott Appleby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 328–60.
34. Michel Foucault observed how psychoanalysis asserted its authority over sexuality at the
expense of religious institutions. See Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol. 1
(New York: Vintage Books, 1990). Once every act of sexual indiscretion, and even the mere temptation
of sin, was brought to confession for the soul’s restitution, the analyst presented himself as a nonjudg-
mental expert on sexuality. Though Stekel does not explicitly engage in the debate of the role of religion
in sexuality, the report on the rabbi was written with an eye toward publication and forms a part of
Stekel’s contribution to psychoanalysis and sexology and his recognition within the field specifically
as a disciple of Freud. The case of the rabbi, followed in Nervöse Angstzustände by an equally
fraught case of a patient who was an Orthodox priest, converts the locus of knowledge on human sexu-
ality from the cleric to the medical specialist.
10
Illness is one of the organizing principles in R. Yosef Yitzchak’s historical

writings on the Chabad movement. Throughout his literary corpus, the first six
generations of rebbes consistently suffer from physical and mental ailments and
go through processes of healing.35 During his grandmother’s “final illness,”
R. Yosef Yitzchak describes how she (RaSHaB’s mother) attributed her son’s
spent energies to his unbridled devotion to the well-being of his hasidim: “Some-
times we try to persuade him not to do something because it would injure his
health. He remains silent, and we mistakenly think that we have persuaded him.
But it is not so at all. It is all fixed within him and he continues to insist that every-
thing must be exactly thus and not otherwise. And G-d helps him.”36 In the hasidic
text, illness is a test from God, an ordeal to endure for the sake of one’s Torah and
one’s hasidim. R. Yosef Yitzchak described his father’s illness as one of anguish
over his self-perceived failure in comparison to the historical and spiritual accom-
plishments of his father and grandfather.37 R. Yosef Yitzchak records his father
incomprehensibly yelling out, “How can I apply myself to Hasidim when
Hasidim don’t recognize me?”38 RaSHaB himself characterized his psychological
challenge as a conflict between the “heart” and the “head.”39 R. Schneerson
touched on Stekel’s interpretation of events when he said that RaSHaB suffered
from a state in which “the mind understands something which the heart cannot
bear.” Linking RaSHaB’s depression with a bout of illness experienced by the
movement’s founder, Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi (1745–1813), R. Schneerson
concludes by stating that they both suffered from “love sick[ness].” But R.
Schneerson’s historicization of “love sickness” suggests a far more mystical and
spiritual “love” than the mundane, worldly lovesickness with which Stekel diag-
noses his patient.40
In Stekel’s and R. Yosef Yitzchak’s accounts of RaSHaB’s biography, the
authors present competing ontologies of illness and health. Within Stekel’s and
R. Yosef Yitzchak’s divergent accounts of the meetings between “the rabbi” and
“the professor,” we have what appears to be the same conversation—presumably
the initial consultation in which RaSHaB’s system of Hasidism and Stekel’s
system of psychoanalysis are introduced as a way of establishing an intellectual
ground for analyst–patient communication. It is significant that each account
35. It was only during the seventh rebbe’s leadership (Menachem Mendel Schneerson) in the
second half of the twentieth century that the centrality of illness and healing stories ebbed. Chabad
hasidim take pride in their last rebbe’s attachment to Crown Heights and his rejection of travel abroad.
36. Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, “Her Final Illness,” trans. Shimon Neubort, in Sefer ha-toledot
Admur MaHaRaSH (Brooklyn, NY: Kehot Publication Society, 2001), chap. 10.
37. Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, Sefer ha-sihot, 1920–1927 (Brooklyn, NY: Kehot Publication
Society, 1992), 42 (Hebrew and Yiddish). All translations are my own.
38. Ibid., 23.
39. Berke and Schneider, “A Tale of Two Orphans,” 81–93.
40. See Paths of Providence (Brooklyn, NY: Sichos in English, n.d.), 39; sourced as Menachem
Mendel Schneerson’s notes from Lag B’Omer 5692. For a discussion by the third rebbe of Chabad,
Zemach Zedek (1789–1866), on lovesickness as a state of physical and spiritual illness caused by
the Exile, see Menachem Mendel Schneerson, Sefer ha-hakira: derekh emuna (Brooklyn, NY:
Kehot Publication Society, 1955) (Hebrew).
11
tells the story of the initial encounter as a polemic and that each makes the case for
its own epistemology. Stekel emphasizes the psychic cure in the face not only of
traditional religious views of well-being, but also of other treatment approaches
within the medical establishment. In this vein, Stekel enumerates his patient’s
failed attempts for a cure in the most exclusive centers of healing in Europe. In
initially evaluating the case, Stekel writes that “the patient was to give me the
history of his entire life; there was little of interest in it.” Stekel makes this pro-
nouncement without malice; he simply wants to augment his own analytic exper-
tise where other doctors have failed. He then presents psychoanalytic theory and
methodology to the rabbi, who incredulously asks, “How can thoughts produce a
severe bodily disease? How can mental things be transformed into physical ones?”
Ironically, Stekel responds with a statement more typical of a theologian: “We do
not yet know how this is brought about. But the facts are indisputable.”41
R. Yosef Yitzchak makes the case for Chabad’s branch of Hasidism vis-à-vis
the rabbinical profession and well-being in general not only in relation to science,
but also with respect to other Jewish religious movements. In R. Yosef Yitzchak’s
description of the initial consultation, RaSHaB provides a clear sense of “Hasid-
ism” so that “the professor” could arrive at a proper diagnosis. When R. Yosef
Yitzchak describes the substantive exchange of information, wisdom flows in
quite the opposite direction, namely from rebbe to doctor:
The professor tarried on the question “what is Hasidism?” My father

responded, “the substance of Hasidism is the incumbency on the head to
notify the heart what it ought to desire and on the heart to bring to life what
the mind understands.” The professor asked, “How does one do this? Are
not the heart and mind two distinct parts of the world with a great sea dividing
them.” My father responded, “The work is to build a bridge between these two
parts of the world or at the least to stretch between them electric wires and a
telephone so that the light in the mind will reach the heart.” Given the empiri-
cal evidence, I must say that the essential mind and heart of Hasidim are psy-
chologically disposed to this scholarship and this work.42
In both texts, incredulity rests with the other party. Yet both Stekel and RaSHaB
posit the direct relationship between the “head” and the “heart” under the aegis of
their own respective fields.
When R. Yosef Yitzchak describes the initial consultation between his father
and “one of the great professors” in Vienna, R. Yosef Yitzchak says “the professor
required a precise account of my father’s schedule, how many hours he worked
and how he divided up his tasks.”43 In the case history, Stekel finds no pertinent
information in his patient’s medical history or life story, whereas R. Yosef
Yitzchak clearly thinks this information should impress both the medical specialist

42. Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, Likkutei dibburim, vols. 1–2, 110.
43. Ibid.
12
and the hasidic reader.44 In the Chabad sources, as expressed by RaSHaB’s

mother, RaSHaB’s grueling schedule is partially the cause of his ordeal. At the
same time, RaSHaB’s physical symptoms partially account for the impediment
in his rabbinical duties. In a letter to a director of one of Chabad’s satellite
schools (who left for the Dead Sea for his own cure), RaSHaB writes from Vienna,
[T]ime is valuable to me all the way down to the quarter of the hour. I don’t
allow myself to be free for a quarter hour without a project (unless it is required
for my health to stop several times a day and not do anything as I was ordered
regarding this on numerous occasions by the professor of Paris more than two
years ago as well as in other places). But time and matters don’t permit me this,
and with great effort I get to take a walk for about half an hour two or three days
in the garden near my house. And even during this time, when I’m walking I’m
thinking about some topic. Most nights I go to sleep around 1:30 or 2:00 and
because of my health I can’t sleep afterwards.45
The exhausting schedules that rebbes maintain, along with the intellectual strain of
keeping their hasidim constantly in mind, lead to mental and physical breakdown.
Whatever R. Yosef Yitzchak knew about his father’s psychological state of
mind and Stekel’s analysis, R. Yosef Yitzchak presents a wholly different narrative
of Vienna than that offered in Stekel’s case history. R. Yosef Yitzchak tags his
recollections of his trip to Vienna with stories that often reverberate within
Stekel’s text. In a brief narrative of his 1903 trip to Vienna, R. Yosef Yitzchak
lapses into a distant memory of his father’s interpretation of three paintings in
1890. Whether R. Yosef Yitzchak purposely drew a parallel between Stekel’s
analysis of the three dreams and his father’s interpretations of the three paintings
is a matter of interpretation; however, it is interesting that the first painting seems
resoundingly similar to the “pornographic photograph” that the rabbi claimed trig-
gered his first dream in Stekel’s case history.46 In the case history, the dream trig-
gered by the “pornographic photograph” depicted a bloody combat scene; in R.
Yosef Yitzchak’s memory, the painting showed officers observing a bloody
combat scene through a telescope in which the bloodied and dismembered soldiers
crowd their line of vision. RaSHaB interprets the content of the painting as “the
internal spiritual battle that each person wages with his evil inclination.”47
While Stekel regarded the scene of male violence as a homosexual image,
RaSHaB interpreted a similar scene as the interminable battle of the soul.
Although painters, art historians, and psychoanalysts may get caught up in the
subject detail, R. Yosef Yitzchak is demonstrating his father’s ability to abstract
44. R. Yosef Yitzchak reproduces the schedules of the rebbes, including his own, in minute
detail in their biographies.
45. Sholom Dov Ber Schneersohn to Shneur Zalman, Kfar Chabad 911 (July 3, 2000): 47.
46. The image was probably not a photograph, but a photographic reproduction of a painting, as
homosexual tableaus were not yet the domain of photography in the 1890.
47. Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, Sefer ha-sihot 5696-Khoref 5700 (Brooklyn, NY: Kehot Pub-
lication Society, 1989), 46–47 (Hebrew and Yiddish). Yosef Yitzchak dates this story to 1890.
13
and sympathize with the challenges of mortal men. Where Stekel’s rabbi gets lost
in the sexual contours of the evil inclination, R. Yosef Yitzchak’s father leads the
battle against it. Where Stekel singles out the image’s detail of the bayonet on the
penis, allegedly transposed by his patient into a self-portrait, R. Yosef Yitzchak’s
description of the painting removes the scene of battle far away from the “offi-
cers.” Stekel puts the rabbi into the battlefield, where Stekel observes him in
turmoil through the lens of psychoanalysis. R. Yosef Yitzchak puts his father on
the observation deck, looking at the battlefield through a general’s telescope.
A CCOUNTING FOR SYMPTOMS OF ILLNESS IN THE HASIDIC BIOGRAPHY
Stekel’s patient is an anonymous and generic rabbi whose universal biologi-

cal sexuality drives his neurotic and pathological behaviors. In R. Yosef Yitzchak’s
text, RaSHaB is always the rightful dynastic rebbe, and the relationship between
the brothers is not a matter of women and books, but of the “rebbedom.” After
their father died in 1882, RaSHaB and his brother did not resolve the succession
of leadership until 1893, when R. Zalman Aharon finally left Lyubavitchi and
RaSHaB moved his chair into the sanctuary (bet hamidrash) where his father
used to pray.48 Historians and devotees offer variant explanations for this eleven-
year gap in leadership. Historian Avrum Ehrlich claims that in the intervening
years between R. Shmuel’s death and RaSHaB’s official leadership, hasidim
divided their support between RaSHaB and his eldest brother, R. Zalman
Aharon, but that Chabad literature “censored any intimations” that the brothers
divided the responsibilities of leadership.49 Stekel’s case history certainly offers
some texture to these “intimations.”
For Stekel, the line that the brother delivered—“Look at all my property,
while you have nothing”—was primarily a statement of sexual rivalry, while
similar stories within Chabad narratives demonstrate dynastic rivalry and the rev-
elation of leadership qualities. Directed by R. Yosef Yitzchak’s literary example,
the conflict between the two brothers is displaced onto their childhood, when
child narrators describe a future reality but do not yet recognize the truth of
their own prophecies. A useful narrative tool, the child rebbe is able to speak forth-
rightly without offending his modesty, and thereby offers an object lesson on char-
acter. In one story of sibling rivalry in which the two brothers “play” the game of
“rebbe and Hasid,” RaSHaB takes the part of the hasid and “gird[s] his loins with a
prayer sash.” RaSHaB asks his brother the “rebbe” for a tiqun (restitution) for his
soul. “What have you done?” the older brother demands. “I have stolen a pickle
from mother.” R. Zalman Aharon laughs at so innocent a transgression, and in
his frustration, RaSHaB addresses his brother: “You are not a rebbe. A rebbe
48. Menachem Mendel Schneersohn, Sicha from 20 Marheshvan 5743 (1982).

49. A good summary of this contention can be found in Avrum M. Ehrlich, Leadership in the
HaBaD Movement: A Critical Evaluation of the HaBaD Leadership, History, and Succession (North-
vale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 2000), 236–48. The comment here appears on p. 240. Incidentally, both wives
went by the name of Sterna Sara, which might have accounted for some confusion on Stekel’s part.
14
never laughs at the distress of a hasid.”50 The sentiment behind these and many
similar stories is a deep-seated sibling rivalry that bears a psychological affinity
to Stekel’s patient history, but in the Chabad versions, the rivalry is always for
rebbe, not for material and/or sexual pursuits.
Writing about his own grooming process, R. Yosef Yitzchak reflects on his
maturing appreciation of the “great difference” between his father and his uncles,
“between his [father’s] aspirations and theirs.” Written from the perspective of the
rebbe child, R. Yosef Yitzchak sizes up the two brothers by accounting for one of
his father’s symptoms of “illness”: stuttering at prayer. Running to the synagogue
to listen to his father pray, R. Yosef Yitzchak fills with dread as he overhears his
father stumble over the heavenly prayers.51 “Why doesn’t father pray briskly,”
wonders R. Yosef Yitzchak in alarm, “like the rest of the congregation prays
and as my uncles do?” R. Yosef Yitzchak recalls that his father’s older brother
R. Zalman Aharon once confirmed that his father “could not say all the letters
so fast,” a fact that causes R. Yosef Yitzchak great consternation. Another time,
R. Yosef Yitzchak hears his father beseeching God for mercy.52 His father sobs
mid-sentence and the child’s heart sinks upon hearing his father reduced to tears
and anguish. “I bent an ear and I heard him say, ‘Shema Yisrael’ and he
sobbed, ‘Hashem Elokeinu’ and he sobs. Afterwards he falls silent and then
again in a powerful voice emerging from the depths of his heart, ‘Hashem
ehad’ [YHWH] in a flood of tears and a terrifying voice.”53
The story converges with Stekel’s “discovery” that his patient’s stuttering is
connected specifically to the recitation of the divine name “YHWH,” but in R.
Yosef Yitzchak’s version, the explanation of stuttering as a defect says more
about the diagnostician then the stutterer. R. Yosef Yitzchak runs to his mother,
complaining, “Why is father praying slower than all other worshipers? My
uncle RaZa [Zalman Aharon] says that father cannot pronounce the words, but
why can father not recite the Hebrew words properly?” The beleaguered
woman answers, “What can I do? Can I have him sent to a teacher?” Turning
in desperation to his grandmother, R. Yosef Yitzchak finds resolution in the
knowledge that in “every single word that leaves his [RaSHaB’s] mouth, he
first thinks of the meaning of the word that he is saying.”54 These stories do not
falsify each other; in fact, they confirm each other. While both versions attribute
RaSHaB’s stuttering to his sincere meditation on the divine name, Stekel attributes
50. Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Spiritual Intimacy: A Study of Counseling in Hasidism (North-

vale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1991), 95. For similar stories, see http://chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/
132416/jewish/Superiority.htm [accessed February 10, 2010].
51. Yosef Yitzchak makes a point of dating this story to when he was a very little boy still learn-
ing under his tutor R. Yekusiel, which would predate Stekel’s dating of the symptom of stuttering at the
divine name by fifteen years.
52. Yosef Yitzchak emphasizes that his father is alone, while Stekel assigns the stammering to
public fright.
53. Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, Likkutei dibburim, vols. 3–4 (Brooklyn, NY: Kehot Publi-
cation Society, 1988), 909 (Hebrew and Yiddish).
54. Ibid., vols. 3–4, 909.
15
the guilt associated with the sexual symbolism within the name to his patient’s
stuttering and stammering. In R. Yosef Yitzchak’s narrative, the same meditation
on the divine name restructures the narrative along characterological attributes
misinterpreted by lesser men as a deficiency. R. Yosef Yitzchak also suggests
that RaSHaB’s measured recitation reveals a spiritually uplifting approach to litur-
gical prayer in which the supplicant of God reveals his destiny for leadership over
his quick-tempered brother.
In R. Yosef Yitzchak’s account, even the rivalry on behalf of the sacred
book, which Stekel describes as the rabbi’s “first lover,” is driven by the legitimi-
zation of leadership within the movement. R. Yosef Yitzchak records a memory of
his father crying and his mother explaining,
[Your grandfather] commanded his children—your uncle RaZa (Zalman

Aharon) and your uncle RaMaM (Menachem Mendel) that they should not
conduct any business and that they should just sit and learn. They did this for
two years, but now they began to do business. Last week a letter came to your
father from your grandmother and your uncles saying that they wanted to buy
a large forest, and that they did buy the forest. Your father, when he received
the letter was pained that they violated the commandment of their father, the
great rebbe, who commanded them that they should not do any business.
From great pain, he cried. And I, when I saw the pain of your father, I feared
that he shouldn’t harm his health. So, I cried on account of your father’s pain.55
This episode precipitated a letter from RaSHaB to “Rabbi Willensky,” a hasid who
sometimes mediated between the brothers. RaSHaB claimed that his father’s
books belonged to him and him alone on account of his brother’s transgression
of his father’s will, which explicitly instructed his children to exclusively learn
the holy books. The letter argues that just as R. Shmuel’s father inherited the
manuscripts from his father at the age of twenty-two despite being the youngest
brother, RaSHaB was likewise entitled to the manuscripts because, in his own
words, “I am no different from my father.”56
A comparative reading provokes questions about RaSHaB’s biography and
R. Yosef Yitzchak’s narratives of illness and healing, especially regarding the
relationship between the rabbi and his father, R. Shmuel. In his autobiography,
written while Stekel was in exile in England in 1940 without his notes or extensive
library, Stekel refers to the so-called man-servant who initiated a sexual relation-
ship during the rabbi’s childhood as “the sexton in his father’s house.” This revised
appellation connects RaSHaB’s childhood sexual experiences to a Jewish
55. Ibid., vols. 3–4, 929.

56. Incidentally, this letter was produced as evidence in a court trial over the ownership of the
same library in 1987 between Agudas Chasidei Chabad (the institution representing the seventh rebbe’s
interests) and the only grandson of the sixth rebbe, Barry Gourary. Agudas Chasidei Chabad of United
States v. Barry S. Gourary and Hanna Gourary, No. CV-85-2908, p. 2567. Ehrlich quotes from this
letter; for his discussion on the book as symbol of leadership, see Avrum Ehrlich, Leadership in the
HaBaD Movement, 79 n. 25.
16
domestic whose access to children shifts the blame to the father.57 Reading across
the texts, the role that illness plays in RaSHaB’s relationship with his father (as
well as in the rebbe–hasid relationship) converges with RaSHaB’s sexual abuse.
RaSHaB was born the year his father (Rebbe Shmuel) was put under house
arrest by the tsarist government on account of his activism against Jewish oppres-
sion, a campaign that endured three years and took him across the Russian empire
(as well as to Italy and Germany on account of his health).58
In mid-1866, when RaSHaB was five and a half years old, R. Shmuel
ascended to a leadership position as the fourth Chabad rebbe, in which capacity
he worked to heal many souls through private audience (yehidut) with people
seeking blessings. “Grandfather [R. Shmuel] said that the main difficulty associ-
ated with yehidut was the need to clothe himself and divest himself … one must
clothe himself so that he temporarily becomes that person. Then, he must divest
himself so that he no longer is that person … this constant dressing and undressing
is hard labor for the soul.”59 In RaSHaB’s seventh and eighth years of life,
his father again traveled extensively to France, the Czech lands, and Odessa,
and shortly afterward spent the greater part of a decade traveling around Eastern
and Central Europe, both on account of his health and “on behalf of the Jewish
people.” Throughout this period, R. Shmuel returned only occasionally to
his family and court in Lyubavitchi.60 Thus, in R. Yosef Yitzchak’s accounts,
the discourse on illness provides a canvas for the father–son relationship and
the rebbe–hasid relationship to evolve even though the rebbe was physically
absent.61
From Stekel’s report of his patient’s sexual trauma (initiated when RaSHaB
was “five or six years old”), “the sexton in his father’s house” began to enter
RaSHaB’s bedroom around the time his grandfather (the third rebbe) died and
57. Stekel, Autobiography, 214. Stekel’s library was burned by the Austrians in 1938.
58. Chabad rebbes had been immersed in Russian politics since their founder Rabbi Schneur
Zalman of Liadi opposed Napoleon’s entry into Russia. Often these trips on behalf of world Jewry
took on mythic qualities. See Hillel Levine, “‘Should Napoleon Be Victorious … ’: Politics and Spiri-
tuality in Early Modern Jewish Messianism,” in The Sabbatian Movement and Its Aftermath: Messian-
ism, Sabbatianism, and Frankism, ed. Rachel Elior (Jerusalem: Institute of Jewish Studies, 2001),
2:65–83. On the political activism of the third rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneersohn (1789–1866),
see Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, The Zemach Zedek and the Haskalah Movement, trans. Zalman I.
Posner (Brooklyn, NY: Kehot Publication Society, 1962); and Michael Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas I
and the Jews: Transformation of Jewish Society in Russia 1825–1855 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication
Society, 1983), 78–81.
59. Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, Sefer ha-toledot Admur MaHaRaSH, chap. 7.
60. See the letter sent from Marienbad on Rosh Chodesh Menachem Av 5628 (reprinted in
Ha-Tamim, vol. 5, 8); on the decade of travel on behalf of the Jewish people, see Ha-Tamim, vol. 2,
77; vol. 3, 92.
61. For the ways in which R. Yosef Yitzchak used photography to facilitate the rebbe–hasid
relationship in both illness and physical separation, see Maya Balakirsky Katz, “On the Master–
Disciple Relationship in Hasidic Visual Culture: The Life and Afterlife of Rebbe Portraits in Habad,
1798–2006,” Images: A Journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture 1 (Winter 2007): 55–79; and
idem, “Rebbishe Space: Pre-War Polish Photography of Hasidic Leaders,” in Conferences of the
Polish Society of Oriental Art (Warsaw: DiG Press), forthcoming.
17
his father accepted the post as rebbe in Lyubavitchi (1866).62 Although psycho-
analysis already singled out “fathers” as objects of fear and defiance, Freud’s
Oedipal conflict would not become a “cornerstone” of psychoanalysis until the
1920s.63 Yet the absence of the father is striking; Stekel writes nothing about
his patient’s father or the drama of the father–son relationship. Reading Stekel
and R. Yosef Yitzchak side by side renders the psychoanalytic absence of the
father even more acutely. In Stekel’s case history, other familial relationships
besides that with the elder brother make a debut. These are revealed in the
rabbi’s attraction to his brother’s wife, his confusion regarding his own wife, his
incestuous thoughts about his sister, and even his incestuous feelings toward his
mother. These appear to illustrate a complex interior life. Stekel never even men-
tions the rabbi’s own role as a father, whose child is presumably susceptible to the
“sexton in his father’s house” during his own extensive traveling. The most palp-
able silence within the case history concerns the rabbi’s anger toward a father who
left his child in the care of this “man-servant” on account of personal health and on
behalf of the Jewish people.
While Stekel circumscribes the role of the father in his patient’s life, in R.
Yosef Yitzchak’s narrative, the father–son drama is the only machination of bio-
graphy. The complete sublimation of the father by the son drives the narrative,
much of which is predicated on dreams, free associations, and childhood mem-
ories. In almost every public address (ma’amar), R. Yosef Yitzchak names in
reverse consecutive order all five preceding generations of leaders. In every gen-
eration of leadership, there is only one father and one essential son, and upon
the death of the father, the new son embodies all previous generations of
“fathers.” Illness plays an essential role in R. Yosef Yitzchak’s biographical
sketches of both R. Shmuel64 and RaSHaB; these writings claim that while they
searched for cures, they never went to vacation resorts.65 R. Yosef Yitzchak
describes illness as a time of cleaving to the previous generation’s leader and a
period of unparalleled and unbridled transmission of family history. Written in
first person, R. Shmuel remembers one such illness when he was nineteen years
old: “Each day, my father would come to visit me and sit by my side for two
hours, and sometimes three and even four hours. Most of the time he told me
about the years he spent in his grandfather’s [the Alter Rebbe’s] house. He told
62. R. Shmuel’s brothers moved to other towns where they became rebbes in their own right, but
hasidic historiography acknowledges only one direct line of leadership.
63. Bennett Simon and Rachel B. Blass, “The Development and Vicissitudes of Freud’s Ideas
on the Oedipus Complex,” in The Cambridge Companion to Freud, ed. Jerome Neu (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1992), 161–74.
64. Chabad tradition deals with R. Shmuel’s sickly appearance by ascribing to him the qualities
of a hidden zaddik; his “ugliness” acquires the contours of the romantic sublime. R. Shmuel’s “special
talents” include that he was “knowledgeable in the science of medicine” and capable of “the most won-
drous craftsmanship” fashioned “for reasons of his health” (Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, Sefer
ha-toledot Admur MaHaRaSH, chap. 7).
65. See Balakirsky Katz, “Leaders at Leisure.” In this context, R. Yosef Yitzchak’s critique on
“vacation resorts” would include Marienbad, which R. Shmuel visited in 1868.
18
me stories about the Alter Rebbe when he was in Mezritch with the Maggid.”66
This pattern recurs between RaSHaB and his son (R. Yosef Yitzchak) during
RaSHaB’s course of treatment in Vienna in 1903, which R. Yosef Yitzchak
describes as a journey his father “considered equivalent to exile for the purpose
of self-purification.”67 While Stekel interprets the rabbi’s walks and train trips as
a traveling neurosis derivative of sexual fantasy, R. Yosef Yitzchak, here and else-
where, characterizes physical illness as a form of spiritual elevation and an
occasion for the transmission of dynastic history. R. Yosef Yitzchak writes that
he always wished that his father had spent more time recounting his family
history and the stories of other pious men, but it was not until RaSHaB was
infirm in Vienna that RaSHaB began to experience vivid dreams in which
the deceased R. Shmuel revealed family history. During the long walks through
the forest “as per doctor’s orders,” RaSHaB, in turn, related these stories to his
son.68
RaSHaB’s first major illness is directly connected to his father’s death, sig-
naling his connection to his father’s soul through the body’s deterioration. Chabad
histories mark the beginning of RaSHaB’s health problems at the age of
twenty-one, claiming that his situation resulted from the passing (histalkut) of
his father on September 26, 1882. The attribution of RaSHaB’s illness to his
father’s death suggests psychological symptoms, such as the effects produced
by an intense and unresolved mourning (melancholia), demonstrating RaSHaB’s
strong spiritual connection to his father.69 R. Yosef Yitzchak relates that his
father remained in R. Shmuel’s bedroom for one year, immersed in mourning,
prayer, and learning, and surrounded by bookcases filled in part with manuscripts
written by the rebbes in their own hand. In the winter of 1883, RaSHaB went
abroad for treatment in “healing waters” in Paris, France, and Italy. Like his
father before him, RaSHaB took the opportunity during trips abroad “to meet
with important people and serve the cause of his downtrodden brethren.”70
Both Stekel’s and R. Yosef Yitzchak’s narratives account for RaSHaB’s bout
of illness at the age of twenty-one; however, where Stekel reports that his
patient suffered from testicular tuberculosis (which may explain RaSHaB’s
subsequent childlessness, as this condition can result in infertility), R. Yosef
Yitzchak connects his father’s illness with mourning.71 Furthermore, in R.
Yosef Yitzchak’s account, his father’s search for medical treatments coincides
with his political activism on behalf of his brethren. Ironically, the hasidic
66. Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, Sefer ha-toledot Admur MaHaRaSH, 35.

67. Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, Sefer ha-sihot, 1920–1927, 23.
68. Ibid., 89.
69. See Freud’s article on “Mourning and Melancholia,” Standard Edition, 14:243–58.
70. Nissan Mindel, “Biography of Rabbi Sholom Dovber Schneerson (Gallery of Our Great),
http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/112054/jewish/Rabbi-Sholom-Dovber-Schneerson.htm
[accessed February 10, 2010].
71. On the manifestation of infertility in patients with testicular tuberculosis, see Rajeev Kumar,
“Reproductive Tract Tuberculosis and Male Infertility,” Indian Journal of Urology 24, no. 3 (July–
September 2008): 392–95.
19
account describes a psychic illness associated with intense mourning of the

father, while the psychoanalytic report describes a purely physical lesion in the
testicle. We would not expect to hear about infertility in hasidic hagiography,
but what we do get is an account of RaSHaB’s illness in relation to hasidic
history as a whole. Illness becomes a time to deal with the physical and material
suffering of the hasidim in his charge. Stekel’s rabbi suffers an individual fate as
a sexual being, but in the hasidic version, the rebbe suffers as a dynastic rebbe
with universal reach.
The two accounts briefly mention the subject of RaSHaB’s marriage, but an
intertextual reading colors the otherwise scant and often impenetrable material. In
Stekel’s text, the rabbi’s marriage was wholly unsatisfying, and the rabbi’s “com-
plaints against his wife increased in tone until they developed into accusations.”72
R. Yosef Yitzchak does account for some tension between his mother and father
over his father’s “head” and “heart,” which is how RaSHaB characterized his
psychological ordeal. In his diary, R. Yosef Yitzchak narrates finding his
mother in her bedroom in tears. She tells him that he is only a child and does
not need to know everything. Amid a room of dancing hasidim, RaSHaB whispers
in R. Yosef Yitzchak’s ear, “Go tell mother that I feel well. My headache has dis-
sipated and my heart no longer hurts. She can be at peace because I feel well.”
After R. Yosef Yitzchak relays the message, she smiles ambiguously and responds,
“That’s good. Now you can return to the other room.”73 The narrative ends uncer-
emoniously with the line, “only this much [of the manuscript] has been found.”
Like R. Yosef Yitzchak, the reader is the innocent bearer of whispered messages
from the rebbe, whose powers of interpretation are those of a bewildered child.
However, Stekel’s text reshapes the traditional reading of this story. Whereas R.
Yosef Yitzchak’s diary leads us to believe that something important is being com-
municated about the fate of Hasidism, Stekel, by contrast, gives a prosaic narrative
of a wife who endures her husband’s deteriorating psychological condition and
sexual turmoil, suggested by the conflict between his “head” (intellect) and his
“heart” (passion).
T HE SERVANT IN THE REBBE ’ S HOUSE
The most difficult part of Stekel’s story for the modern reader is, of course,
the traumatic sexual experience that the analysand remembers from his youth and
about which he remains confused and ambivalent into adulthood. Just as we would
not expect to hear about infertility in the illness narratives of rebbes, so we would
not expect accounts of child molestation in hasidic hagiography. But in reading
across these two distinct accounts, both offered as “truth,” what is present or
absent in each becomes revealing in ways that would not be possible with each
text on its own. While we cannot identify with perfect certainty the “sexton in
his father’s house,” Stekel’s text renders a new literacy to certain spaces within
the well-trodden texts of R. Yosef Yitzchak that we would not otherwise detect,

73. Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, Likkutei Dibburim, vols. 3–4, 932.
20
much less decipher. An old Jewish servant does emerge in R. Yosef Yitzchak’s lit-
erature who would seem to fit every description that Stekel provides both in the
1908 case history and in Stekel’s 1940 autobiography. RaSHaB and his father
(as well as RaSHaB’s son) had more than one elderly attendant and possibly
more than one who exhibited rude manners and was a source of irritation to
their masters and the children of their masters. Possibly more than one servant
lived to old age in the home of the rebbes, but only one such character emerges
in Chabad literature. In the index to R. Yosef Yitzchak’s five-volume Likkutei Dib-
burim, this figure is listed as “Yosef Mordekhai ha-mesharet,” a term usually con-
noting a man who serves a person and not a domestic who works in the kitchen or
garden. I am not insensitive to the idea that this description could be an example of
literary displacement and that RaSHaB referred to an entirely different male
servant in analysis, yet R. Yosef Yitzchak does provide us with a narrative line
about the domestic servant within the dynastic household.
The data of Stekel’s case history suggest that the sexton was affiliated with
the Schneersohn family at least during the leadership of the fourth rebbe (and the
childhood of the fifth) and remained in Lyubavitchi during the leadership of the
fifth rebbe (and the childhood of the sixth). Both fathers left Lyubavitchi (on
behalf of the Jewish people) on excursions that sometimes continued for years
during the lifetime of their very young children. RaSHaB did not leave an
account of his sentiments regarding his father’s traveling during the years of his
youth, but R. Yosef Yitzchak records his own bitter loneliness and despair in
the absence of RaSHaB. R. Yosef Yitzchak describes his parents’ trip to the
health resort, which Stekel’s rabbi considers “the happiest time of his life,” as
the darkest period of his childhood.74 R. Yosef Yitzchak writes in his diary,
“From the year 1887 until 1889, I did not see my parents because they traveled
out of the country to various springs and they remained there the entire time for
various reasons, partly for health reasons and more for domestic reasons. Only
occasionally they returned for a few days.”75 RaSHaB and his wife went to
France, Germany, Bohemia, and Italy, during which time RaSHaB composed an
“ethical will” addressed to his wife concerning the discipline and education of
their only son, then age nine: “Nowadays especially, one must be very vigilant…
Due to the rampant sinfulness nowadays, children also have a share in this,” refer-
ring to the children with whom his son might come in contact with if left unsuper-
vised.76 The conclusion of RaSHaB’s will also has not yet been “released,” and
published versions end with the epithet that “permission was granted to publish
up to this point of the manuscript.”
R. Yosef Yitzchak writes about his father’s two-year absence as an inten-
sely painful time of isolation from his father: “My lifestyle during the course of
74. Stekel, Nervöse Angstzustände, 164. On the motif of the summer resort in memoir writing,
see A. Lichtblau, “Die Chiffre Sommerfrische als Erinnerungstopos,” in Erinnerung als Gegenwart.
Jüdische Gedenkkulteren, ed. S. Hödl and Z. Lappin (Berlin: Philo Verlag, 2000).
76. Sholom Dov Ber Schneersohn, Chanoch Lenaar, trans. Eliezer Danziger (Brooklyn, NY:
Kehot Publication Society, 1999), 15.
21
those two years made me forget my earlier memories of my father” and “during
my two bitter years I suffered greatly from this man [the servant Yosef Morde-
khai in his grandmother’s house].” R. Yosef Yitzchak describes the time as years
spent alone in his room crying without even the memory of his father to sustain
him. The amnesia that he experienced during his father’s absence ended with his
father’s return. The years of absence induce a selective amnesia and, in his
“recollections,” R. Yosef Yitzchak’s narrative moves back and forth between
R. Yosef Yitzchak’s “remembering” and “forgetting” over the two years, but
“in the summer of 1889, in the space of one month, I became a different
child. My father drew closer to me with a great intimacy so that I felt all
the warmth of a father, all the love of a merciful father, and I would go to
sleep with the thought that I too have a father and mother to which to say good-
night. In the course of these two years I forgot the bitter conditions of the earlier
life.”77
Freud considered hysterical amnesia a symptom of repression connected
with childhood sexuality and the Oedipus complex, and R. Yosef Yitzchak’s nar-
rative of father absence is sprinkled with accounts of the elderly servant. With his
father and memory restored, however, R. Yosef Yitzchak finds himself eighteen
months later paralyzed with fear when his father again falls severely ill. R.
Yosef Yitzchak describes his pain and desperate intercession with God on his
father’s behalf, so that when RaSHaB rises from the sick bed, R. Yosef Yitzchak
writes, “With God’s mercy and with the positive turn of the situation, my father’s
[return to] health became recognizable before all and not only for our family but
also for our helpers and all the people who came to our courtyard … Even Yosef
Mordekhai, the old servant, had a different countenance and his perpetual bitter-
ness subsided.”78 R. Yosef Yitzchak immediately follows this episode of his
father’s illness and revival with an ambivalent description of “Yosef Mordekhai
the old servant.” In this description, the servant resounds with the elderly figure
described by Stekel:
It’s worth devoting a special chapter to the personality of this simple and
upright (kasher) man who lived for an entire epoch in Lyubavitchi. He
came to serve his holiness my great-grandfather, the Zemach Zedek, before
the birth of the Rebbe MaHaRaSH until the winter of 1898. As far as the
number of years, it can be calculated that Yosef Mordekhai lived in the
house of the rebbeim for 67 years. He was a simple man and afflicted with
many deficiencies; however, what he saw with his eyes and heard with his
ears is so great a treasure that is impossible to describe in writing.
One good character trait that he possessed was that he would relate stories
as they actually occurred. He had a wondrous memory; in every word, action,
or story he would remember the name of the place, the time, the names of the
people exactly precisely as if it happened on that day.

78. Ibid., 914.
22
His work was simple service, such as heating ovens and cleaning the rooms,
giving him free access without restrictions. He saw what he saw and heard
what they [the dynastic family] were saying. I suffered greatly from this
Yosef Mordekhai for two bitter years, but because of this I heard a great
deal from him. The stories are implanted in my mind, recorded in my
blood, and I know that they are reliable, because they ring true and are very
precise. But, space and time do not let me write them down, but certainly
the time will come, God willing.79
Reading R. Yosef Yitzchak’s description of Yosef Mordekhai through the lens of

Stekel complicates the narrative of the servant–child relationship. Medical litera-
ture in the last years of the nineteenth century tried to approach sexuality in child-
hood from a myriad of conceptual models. In a growing body of literature led by
Richard Krafft-Ebing, Stekel contributed a paper on “Coitus in Children” that
Freud, in turn, cited in his own study “Etiology of Hysteria” in 1896.80
Between 1885 and 1897, Freud articulated his model for childhood sexuality as
the “seduction theory,” which hypothesized that an adult “seduction” of the
child occurred in the adult–child relationships of neurotics, inevitably leading to
theories of widespread childhood incest abuse. By 1897, Freud was already aban-
doning and revising his earlier hypothesis of an adult “seduction” to address
instead the sexualized fantasies of the “normal” child.81 These fantasies,
brought about by what Freud called the “repressive hypothesis,” turned the
inquiry from parents’ sexuality to children’s and eventually developed into
Freud’s Oedipus complex. The new scientific discourse on children’s sexuality
justified the intimate control and external adult supervision of the child’s body,
a throwback to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fears of the spiritual dangers
of masturbation. Michel Foucault observed that in the nineteenth-century con-
struction of “healthy” sexuality, the bourgeois class was only vigilant over its
own sexuality (and the purity of its own blood lines).82 Taking up Foucault’s
model and his suggestive line of reasoning, subsequent scholars have demon-
strated that it was not so uncommon for the nineteenth-century middle class to
allow the broader “household” to negotiate children’s sexualities through the
more permissive lens of the lower classes. Freud’s seduction theory was thus
acknowledged in the child–servant space, where power relations were more
79. Ibid., 914–15. This servant’s biographical details as provided by Yosef Yitzchak’s narrative
overlap with Stekel’s timetable, but also widen the servant’s term in the house of the rebbes to the lea-
dership of the third rebbe (and to the childhood of the fourth rebbe). Yosef Yitzchak dates Yosef Mor-
dekhai’s service in the household to 1898, not 1903. However, he may have retired in the vicinity, as he
lived to age 103.
80. Freud, Etiology of Hysteria, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1943–74), vol. 3 (1896),
186–221.
81. For a discussion of Freud’s seduction theory coming out of the discourse on servant–child
sexuality, see Ann Laura Stoler, Race and Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the
Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 147–48.
82. Foucault, History of Sexuality.
23
“dynamic” than in the parent–child space, performed while they were still “only
children” and “those things” were not “out of the question,” as the rabbi put it.
Writing with some awareness of the race and class structuring in the “rather
obscure subject” of interclass sexuality in the domestic sphere, Stekel described
how nursemaids and other domestics were thought to perform intimate functions
for employers and employers’ children under their control: “In the lower social
strata, sexual freedom is much greater than we care to admit,” reported Stekel.
“Servants, especially, tend to compensate for the lack of social freedom by an
abundance of sexual license. The moment of revenge on the employer through cor-
ruption of the progeny comes as an additional incentive.”83
A staff of servants in the rebbe’s house was a marker of privilege and part of
the construction of a class system in which the rebbe’s household was in the center.
Other male servants are also named in Likkutei Dibburim, but receive relatively
little narrative attention. Rather, R. Yosef Yitzchak occasionally includes descrip-
tions of nonfamily members within the household of the dynastic family, but on
the periphery of both narrative and court. In R. Yosef Yitzchak’s public talks
and published papers, often delivered as “personal memories,” the lines
between “family” and “household” prove dynamic, complicated, oppositional,
and problematized. In one story reprinted in Likkutei Dibburim, Yosef Mordekhai
ha-mesharet passively mediates the hierarchical positioning of family members.
As children, one of R. Yosef Yitzchak’s cousins threatens to turn R. Yosef Yitzchak’s
father against him by announcing that R. Yosef Yitzchak did not say a blessing
over a candy. Before R. Yosef Yitzchak even finishes his rejoinder, he has already
run to “old Yosef Mordekhai for refuge.” Coming back triumphantly to his
cousin, R. Yosef Yitzchak says, “I am no longer afraid of you. My father is a
Hasid and a zaddik; and I am also a zaddik, a zaddik who is the son of a zaddik.
And you? Are you not older than me by two years and you ate without a
blessing like a goy, but I blessed, I blessed out loud, and even Yosef Mordekhai
answered amen.”84
In another anecdote, R. Yosef Yitzchak rehearses lessons of the pure spirit
through the example set by Yosef Mordechai, who acts as R. Yosef Yitzchak’s
example of the spiritual Jew, even if he is physically marked by vast class and
cultural differences. In a farbrengen in 1949, R. Yosef Yitzchak describes
Yosef Mordekhai as large and cumbersome, but with the ambiguous phrase
gadol be-gashmiyut, which could mean “materialistic” when spoken of a weal-
thier man but also had the literal meaning of “carnal.” This epithet is meant by
way of a compliment; Yosef Mordekhai is a servant whose salt-of-the-earth phy-
sicality belies his attachment to life and to God. Yosef Mordekhai prays with
sincere tears in his eyes, even though R. Yosef Yitzchak doubts that this
“kasha-and-kugel Jew” can read or understand most of what he so passionately
utters.85
83. Wilhelm Stekel, Patterns of Psychosexual Infantilism (New York: Grove Press, 1959), 61.
84. Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, Likkutei dibburim, vols. 3–4, 910.
85. Ibid., 757.
24
When R. Yosef Yitzchak deals with the servant’s crude “rudeness,” which
Stekel addresses in his text as a source of irritation to his patient, R. Yosef Yitzchak
illustrates the rebbes’ supernal control over their own speech. One episode narrates
Yosef Mordekhai’s rudeness to RaSHaB, who entered the rebbe’s sukkah in a
temper over a domestic trifle. “The Rebbe said to him: ‘Yosef Mordekhai, it’s
true you are pedigreed (meyukhas), but you must have consideration (derekh
eretz) for the ceiling of the hut (skhakh). The skhakh doesn’t like anger.’” R.
Yosef Yitzchak explains that the rebbe called him “pedigreed” on account of an
event that occurred during the lifetime of the third rebbe (Zemach Zedek), who
turned the servant outdoors to sleep alone in the sukkah in the yard rather than
the one adjacent to the house. The bitter weather forced Yosef Mordekhai to com-
plain: “Rebbe, it’s so cold.” Zemach Zedek answered: “Amalek [enemy of the
Jewish people] is cold. A Jew has warmth. Go sleep in the sukkah and you will
merit long life.” R. Yosef Yitzchak explains, “that’s why the Rebbe MaHaRaSH
said he [Yosef Mordekhai] was a meyuhas.”86 We do not know why the third
rebbe turned his servant outdoors one night and why he made so severe an allusion
to Amalek, but R. Yosef Yitzchak’s narrative shifts to the confirmation of Zemach
Zedek’s blessing, informing us that “Yosef Mordekhai lived till the age of 103.
When he was 98 he danced like a young man on the ‘roof’ of the large zal [syna-
gogue hall].”
Regardless of whether R. Yosef Yitzchak knew about Stekel’s published
case history and wrote the counternarrative in his “memoirs,” or whether he is
truly a limited-omniscient narrator, we are nonetheless witness to two very differ-
ent—and polemical—accounts of the same man, his illness, and his cure. I have
tried to illuminate the different textual and historical conditions in which both
Stekel and R. Yosef Yitzchak approached RaSHaB’s illness and to facilitate the
readability of their narratives without consistently questioning their reliability.
However, several concrete discrepancies between the medical “facts” (rather
than inclusion–exclusion decisions or purely interpretive issues) presented by
Stekel and RaSHaB’s actual biography deserve attention. RaSHaB did not
marry “at the age of eighteen,” but at fourteen. This age adjustment puts the epi-
sodes of “practicing masturbation” with his brother and “playing” with his
sister-in-law in the developmental stage of adolescence. Although Stekel is
quick to defend his patients against religious definitions of sexual norms and
moral deviance, the fact that RaSHaB was barely thirteen when his brother
brought him into his wife’s bedchamber certainly influences the twenty-first-
century reader’s interpretation of the incident. While there is no denying that chil-
dren can be very sexually aware and respondent, the rabbi’s words that they were
“just children in those days …” do not necessarily need to wander down Stekel’s
suggestible ellipses. The second incompatible biographical detail concerns
Stekel’s report about the rabbi’s daughter, whom the rabbi purportedly sent to
Stekel five years after his own successful treatment. In fact, RaSHaB did not
have a daughter. This discrepancy, as well as the fact that RaSHaB’s left hand
86. Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, Sefer ha-toledot Admur MaHaRaSH, 70, 76.
25
caused him problems throughout his life, throws into question Stekel’s self-
confident report that he secured a cure for his patient and provokes a critical evalu-
ation of Stekel’s art of the case history. The question of why Stekel misrepresented
these facts requires independent treatment, but the answer points more to Stekel’s
self-conscious presentation of “Jewishness” to the Viennese medical establish-
ment than to the patient.87
What remains so fascinating about both Stekel’s and R. Yosef Yitzchak’s
accounting of RaSHaB’s life is that at the very moments they elicit skepticism,
the competing narratives seem to confirm each other. In fact, rather than lapsing
into hyperbole and providing an exaggerated version of events, which is how out-
sider readers often interpret R. Yosef Yitzchak’s memoirs, R. Yosef Yitzhak is at
times underwhelmingly literal. Stekel’s text may provoke a more literal reading of
R. Yosef Yitzchak’s text, such as when R. Yosef Yitzchak writes that as a child, he
“suffered a great deal” from the servant Yosef Mordekhai, that his parents traveled
abroad “more for domestic reasons,” and that his father’s aching “head” and
“heart” impelled his mother to bitter tears.
The intertextual approach I have suggested in this study prompts new ways
of thinking about the nexus between the predominately Jewish field of psychoana-
lysis and its relationship to religion, and vice versa, at the turn of the twentieth
century. Rather than reading these two distinct genres—both offered as the one
true narrative to their readers—as incompatible, they can be read as variant con-
stitutions of the same events. But while the rhetoric of both texts appears to
engage each other, they are each driven by foundational assumptions about
what each is and is not as an epistemology. The comparative reading between psy-
choanalytic case history and hasidic historiography, especially in those areas
where Stekel and R. Yosef Yitzchak edit and editorialize, reveals how and to
what ends they construct their narratives of truth. While Stekel’s and R. Yosef
Yitzchak’s empirical data have proven more reliable than what readers often
assume of either text, it is their configuration of detail that offers multilayered criti-
cal dimensions. Rereading along the Stekel–Schneersohn axis might also make
omissions and resounding silences within psychoanalytic and hasidic literature
more readable.
T HE RABBI ’ S BOOK
I will conclude with a series of concerns that my readings of Stekel’s and R.

Yosef Yitzchak’s texts provoke with regard to RaSHaB’s own literary endeavors
and his leadership of Chabad hasidim in Belorussia. These comparative exercises
87. I deal with this specific question in my forthcoming essay, “Religion in the Early Psycho-
analytic Case History.” For others who have turned to Freud’s biography to reconstruct the early Freu-
dian posture toward ethnic and religious Judaism, see Peter Gay, A Godless Jew: Freud, Atheism, and
the Making of Psychoanalysis (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1987); Jay Geller, On Freud’s Jewish
Body: Mitigating Circumcisions (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007); and Yosef Yerushalmi,
Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991).
26
prompt new readings of the “rabbi’s book,” and, given Stekel’s description of the
subject matter and provenance, the sacred book refers to a handwritten copy of
Shneur Zalman of Liadi’s (1745–1812) Tanya, the fundamental tome of Chabad
Hasidism.88 In Stekel’s text, the “rabbi’s book”—which Stekel refers to as the
rabbi’s “first lover” and casts as a proto-bible of sexology—is the object of the
rabbi’s anxious stuttering, neurosis, and erotic excitations.89 At least in effect,
the book triggers illness. In one of R. Yosef Yitzchak’s accounts of the Vienna
trip, the same book provides a cure for the desire to intellectually rationalize.90
In a discourse shortly after his father died in 1920, R. Yosef Yitzchak recalled
how local Viennese Jews assumed that father and son were businessmen and
“not a single man knew our ‘identity.’” Pretending to be mere travelers, father
and son spent many hours in a local beis hamidrash studying the fourteenth-
century halakhic work Tur along with the exacting commentary of the “Beis
Yosef.” R. Yosef Yitzchak’s accounting of their Viennese reading material com-
municates a mastery over the talmudic legal principles, which, while generally
embraced by Chabad, nonetheless reflects the traditional syllabus of the opponents
of Hasidism (mitnagdim). An elderly man chastised the pair for what appeared to
him a purely intellectual exercise. Addressing RaSHaB in Yiddish, the elder pro-
tested, “Yungerman, yungerman, what will be? It’s all in the head, it’s all in the
head,” and then prescribed, “You also have to have a little in the heart.”
RaSHaB asked him, “Nu, what should we learn then?” The elder replied, “We
have, thank God, a sacred book called Likkutei Amarim [Tanya].” The story
ends with RaSHaB taking his great great-grandfather’s sacred book in hand and
conceding, “Ay, it is indeed a good book.”91
If RaSHaB went to Vienna because “the mind understands something which
the heart cannot bear,” according to R. Yosef Yitzchak, he found the cure in a
Viennese copy of his great-great-grandfather’s literary masterpiece. It is this
mutual promotion of alternative fields of study within critiques of the broader
88. The “book” is actually RaSHaB’s great-great-grandfather’s manuscript. The manuscript’s

subsequent chain of custody within Chabad remained the source of much bitterness after the lifetime
of the RaSHaB as well. On the court trial over some of the handwritten manuscripts of the rebbes,
see Barry Gourary, Agudas Chasidei Chabad of United States v. Barry S. Gourary and Hanna
Gourary, No. CV-85-2908. See Balakirsky Katz, “On the Master–Disciple Relationship in Hasidic
Visual Culture,” 68.
89. In Stekel’s case history, the erotic formula refers to the symbolism of the Tetragrammaton. In
his Maamar ve-Yadaata (1897), RaSHaB analyzes the seemingly paradoxical expressions of the divine
name in sexual metaphor drawn from the kabbalistic system of the Tanya. As Stekel summarizes in his
case history, RaSHaB argues in ve-Yadaata that the very letters of the divine name reveal the phases of
“creation” and the male and female characteristics of a unisexual God.
90. There are many anecdotal stories of Tanya cures in Chabad tradition, most of which promote
health through engaged reading. See, e.g., the story reprinted in Shaul Shimon Deutsch, Larger than
Life: The Life and Times of the Lubavitcher Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson (New York: Chasidic
Historical Productions, 1997), 1:23; and Simon Dein, “The Power of Words: Healing Narratives among
Lubavitcher Hasidim,” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 16, no. 1 (March 2002): 41–63.
91. Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, Sefer ha-sichot: 1920–1927, 23.
27
intellectual fields (psychoanalysis and religious Judaism) that tie Stekel and R.
Yosef Yitzchak together as authors and ideologues. While Stekel presents his
case of the rabbi as an alternative scientific approach to a somewhat critical
medical establishment, R. Yosef Yitzchak consistently constructs Chabad philos-
ophy as an alternative religious approach within a somewhat critical religious tra-
dition. Reading Stekel’s Nervöse Angstzustände with R. Yosef Yitzchak as
commentary, if the rabbi got caught up in the hierarchies of sexual sin and fanta-
sized for gratification through upending the legal code, then this was the inherent
limitation of Jewish legal thought, which solely engages the “head,” rather than the
“erotic formula” of Tanya. In fact, Tanya redresses the abandoned and ailing
“heart” and promotes a salve for a purely cerebral halakhic tradition that raises
conflicts that are “all in the head.”
Soon after RaSHaB left Vienna, RaSHaB reformulated his great-great-
grandfather’s metaphysical concepts of the divine name in Tanya into modern
psychoanalytic models in a new treatise titled Kuntres u-ma’ayan mi-beit
HaShem (1904). While neither Stekel’s psychoanalytic characterization nor
RaSHaB’s early twentieth-century commentary inform the particular historical
moment in which Tanya was written, we can profitably ask whether RaSHaB’s
Stekelian analysis inspired a different presentation of “the erotic formula” in his
literary discourses after Vienna. While I cannot possibly undertake RaSHaB’s sys-
tematic rereading of Tanya in the present essay, I want to suggest a reading strategy
by singling out several key passages in which the author’s course of psychoana-
lysis may have informed RaSHaB’s reading of Tanya and his writing of Kuntres
u-ma’ayan.
From the outset, there is a great deal of resonance between Stekel’s and
RaSHaB’s conceptualization of the relationship between the body and the soul.
In Kuntres Umaayan, RaSHaB characterizes the body as the “clothes” of the
soul, which “vivify the body” in every gesture.92 Likewise, Stekel refers to
himself as a “soul-doctor,” and his writing is so saturated with this line of thinking
that one finds similar passages by simply opening Nervöse Angstzustände to a
random page.93 RaSHaB’s acceptance of the libido as a perpetual lure and his
teleological recomposition of potentially dangerous epistemologies to confront
the “heart” signals a turning point from Chabad’s intellectual roots in the nine-
teenth century to a more emotionally charged movement in the twentieth.
Writing in the genre of moral discourse, RaSHaB engages his own autobiography
92. Sholom Dov Ber Schneersohn, Kuntres u-ma’ayan, 92. RaSHaB also writes that “the soul is
clothed in the organs of the body, and the physical organs are subservient to the soul, obedient to its
every command. This is because the light and vitality of the soul radiate in a revealed manner and
are palpable within the body’s organs” (Sholom Dov Ber Schneersohn, Kuntres Umaayan, 62).
93. In the preface to the 1923 English edition of Nervöse Angstzustände (Conditions of Nervous
Anxiety and Their Treatment), Stekel writes, “I could with perfect propriety, change the title of this book
to ‘The Organic Language of the Soul.’ Indeed, this is a true language with all the variations of idiom,
dialect, slang, argot, stuttering, stammering, lisping, and the rest” (Stekel, Conditions of Nervous
Anxiety, vi).
28
without disrupting the traditional expectations of the writer–reader experience of

the rabbinical Kuntres. Thus, the Kuntres Umaayan offers a unique resource for
establishing a link between RaSHaB’s self-discovery and the development of
the Chabad movement in the early twentieth century under his leadership.
Although RaSHaB’s editors ascribe the author’s impetus for Kuntres Umaayan
to the establishment of Makhazikei Hadas (the Society to Fortify the Faith)
against the entreaties of the “West,” Stekel’s case history may provoke a more per-
sonal reading of the text, as well as one more informed by the new disciplines of
the “West.”
We can read RaSHaB’s work as deeply autobiographical, the work of a man
struggling to deal with the great divide between the logic of the head and the
passion of the heart. RaSHaB’s central theme behind his analysis of the Tetragram-
maton is the illogical concept of “pleasure without sin” in the guise of logic, which
Stekel identifies as the rabbi’s own rationalization. RaSHaB disables his own intel-
lectual justifications in navigating the poles of temptation and prohibition, but dis-
places the conflict on “adulterous women”:
Even an adulterous woman, with her frivolous nature, could control her pas-
sions, were it not for the spirit of folly that covers, obscures and conceals the
hidden love within the G-dly soul that would impel her to cleave to faith in
G-d and in His Unity and Oneness and not be separated from G-d, even at
the cost of her life, enduring martyrdom rather than submitting to apostasy… .
The fact that she differentiates between the sin of adultery and the sin of ido-
latry is also a foolishness of the kelipah [shell; in this case the body] that
clothes the G-dly soul.94
RaSHaB exposes the distinction between adultery and idolatry as a halakhic

fiction, converging with Stekel’s narrative of his patient’s own “sin-against-will”
fantasies. In this text, RaSHaB pulls the rug out from under the possibility of
passive pleasure, such as from women falling out of train beds and robbers in
forests, by arguing that the act of adultery necessitates martyrdom, not the creation
of intellectual halakhic loopholes. RaSHaB addresses the hierarchies of sexual
sin, reordering them in a way that equalizes them under the common
denominator that they all distance the sinner from God. The adulteress “is
deluded that she is not separated from G-d and that she retains her Jewishness.
The truth is though that whoever violates even a minor commandment violates G-
d’s will, and is completely and utterly apart from G-d’s Unity and Oneness.”95
RaSHaB undermines the hierarchies of sexual sin with an ascetic attitude
toward even permissible pleasures, which condition the body to pursue sensual
pleasure.96
94. Sholom Dov Ber Schneersohn, Kuntres u-ma’ayan, 72.

95. Ibid., 72.
96. Thus, RaSHaB reintegrates Tanya’s hierarchical ordering of “masturbation” within a broad
range of “forbidden coitions” (chap. 7) in an equalizing rubric in which all transgressions of the body
are cosmically and pedagogically unhealthy for the soul.
29
This discourse, aimed at hasidic readers for whom the beckoning of

“Jewish science” was a familiar and potentially dangerous experience, addresses
the Chabad psyche with psychoanalytic models, albeit under mystical nomencla-
ture. RaSHaB essentially writes a step-by-step, self-help manual to deal with
psychological “follies,” ferreting out the subtexts and pretexts of what one tells
oneself on the threshold of sin in order to ingrain automatic and immediate
“acts of piety.” The Kuntres identifies and attends to the little voice in one’s
head with its psychological shifts, reversals of direction, gaps, inconsistencies,
and areas of indeterminacy. Specifically addressing the irrational drive toward
sin and the construction of defenses in the wake of desire, RaSHaB proposes
to counter these effects with an equal measure of the “folly of holiness.” That
is, RaSHaB proposes that men “irrationally” chase holiness a priori to rational
explanation, even in spite of themselves. If the “evil inclination” or the “other
side” makes fools of men and sends them on incomprehensible campaigns of
unbridled libido, then man could counter with suprarational acts of godliness,
which he soon corralled into the hasidic doctrine of “dispersing the sparks” to
remote populations and intellectual fields. While Chabad’s motto of “acts of
goodness and kindness” attracts attention for its fraught messianism, it was
RaSHaB who advocated decontextualized acts of piety as personally redemptive
and cosmically valuable.
Reading Kuntres u-ma’ayan as a personal confession rather than a public
chastisement provides insight into the autobiographical voice of Stekel’s
patient and R. Yosef Yitzchak’s father on the field fighting the interminable
battle of the soul.97 RaSHaB continued to travel abroad after his return from
Vienna, and he encouraged some of his hasidim to do the same. Soon after his
return from Vienna and the distribution of his Kuntres among his hasidim,
RaSHaB established a proto-model of the modern shaliach (traveling emissary)
when he established a Chabad presence in a predominately Sephardic community
in Georgia. In 1912, he sent an envoy to Hebron to establish a satellite Chabad
community in the Land of Israel. With the coming of Communism, he then called
for the establishment of branches of Chabad yeshivot in as many communities
as possible. Regardless of whether RaSHaB’s move to expand the Chabad
enterprise geographically was an act of personal sublimation (when sexual
impulse is directed toward socially or culturally useful purposes) for his
97. After pages of explanation of various ways in which the body clothes the soul, organ for
organ, RaSHaB pens a passage that I read as intensely personal: “The yetzer hara [evil inclination]
entices man—that no one will see or ever know of his misdeeds. But it just isn’t so. People do see,
do know and do recognize him for what he is. Without fail he will do something to make people
suspicious. In truth, due to the many desires of the yetzer hara’s persuasions he will do numerous
stupid things that no rational person would agree with at all. It is only his yetzer hara that makes
him go against his own reason and his Creator’s reason, impelling him to stupidity…. We see evi-
dently that a word, a movement, can betray a person, revealing what lies deep within, that it is not
good. We are not discussing actual sinful speech, like lying, malicious gossip, slander, or vulgarity.
We refer to an innocent story told casually—nothing more, it would seem, than idle chatter. But actu-
ally, this conversation could reveal the inner evil” (Sholom Dov Ber Schneersohn, Kuntres u-
ma’ayan, 184).
30
“traveling neurosis,” he did articulate a long-standing concept in Chabad Hasid-

ism of “dispersing the sparks” of Hasidism in practical terms only after he
returned from Vienna.

Touro College
New York, New York
31

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AJS Review 34:1 (April 2010), 1–31

© Association for Jewish Studies 2010

A N O CCUPATIONAL N EUROSIS : A P SYCHOANALYTIC

Maya Balakirsky Katz

In consultation with Sigmund Freud, the Viennese psychoanalyst Wilhelm

T HE CASE HISTORY: T HE RABBI IN EARLY PSYCHOANALYTIC LITERATURE

“morally insane,” the psychoanalytic community widely regarded Stekel as a

6. Bos and Groenendijk, The Self-Marginalization of Wilhelm Stekel, 18.

The second dream’s setting was a sleeping compartment on a traveling train,

13. Stekel, Nervöse Angstzustände, 165.

T HE PSYCHOANALYST IN HASIDIC LITERATURE

circumstances. Ancillary materials to RaSHaB’s medical records and international

Illness is one of the organizing principles in R. Yosef Yitzchak’s historical

The professor tarried on the question “what is Hasidism?” My father

41. Stekel, Nervöse Angstzustände, 161.

and the hasidic reader.44 In the Chabad sources, as expressed by RaSHaB’s

A CCOUNTING FOR SYMPTOMS OF ILLNESS IN THE HASIDIC BIOGRAPHY

Stekel’s patient is an anonymous and generic rabbi whose universal biologi-

48. Menachem Mendel Schneersohn, Sicha from 20 Marheshvan 5743 (1982).

50. Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Spiritual Intimacy: A Study of Counseling in Hasidism (North-

[Your grandfather] commanded his children—your uncle RaZa (Zalman

55. Ibid., vols. 3–4, 929.

66. Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, Sefer ha-toledot Admur MaHaRaSH, 35.

account describes a psychic illness associated with intense mourning of the

T HE SERVANT IN THE REBBE ’ S HOUSE

72. Stekel, Nervöse Angstzustände, 167.

77. Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, Likkutei Dibburim, vols. 3–4, 911.

Reading R. Yosef Yitzchak’s description of Yosef Mordekhai through the lens of

I will conclude with a series of concerns that my readings of Stekel’s and R.

88. The “book” is actually RaSHaB’s great-great-grandfather’s manuscript. The manuscript’s

without disrupting the traditional expectations of the writer–reader experience of

RaSHaB exposes the distinction between adultery and idolatry as a halakhic

94. Sholom Dov Ber Schneersohn, Kuntres u-ma’ayan, 72.

This discourse, aimed at hasidic readers for whom the beckoning of

“traveling neurosis,” he did articulate a long-standing concept in Chabad Hasid-

Maya Balakirsky Katz

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