Abstract
Lovecraft’s Supernatural Horror in Literature mentions Ansky’s supernatural drama, The Dybbuk, and proceeds to succinctly trace the origins of the Jewish mystical imagination. In 1927, Freud published The Future of an Illusion, denouncing religion and linking supernaturalism to an infantile need for an all-nurturing, omnipresent mother, among other things. This chapter traces the history of The Dybbuk and examines why it endures and appeals long after Lovecraft’s dubious praise of it, while Freud’s psychoanalysis has come to seem closer to superstition than science.
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Notes
- 1.
Freud wrote his 1919 essay on The Uncanny (USA: Penguin Classics, 2003) in German and used the term “unhemlich,” which literally means, “un-homey.” This term was loosely translated into English as “uncanny.”
- 2.
Although he was a Nobel Laureate who made several important scientific contributions to biological psychiatry, Wagner-Jauregg was not an unequivocally admirable character. He was one of several psychiatrists tried for brutal treatments of hysterical soldiers during the Great War. He became the namesake of a military inquisition known as “The Wagner-Jauregg Trial.” He was also known as a Nazi sympathizer who supported eugenics to promote a purer population.
- 3.
Lovecraft’s interest in Watson’s work makes us wonder if he attributed his personal intrigue with fear to the events that occurred later in his own life—such as the institutionalization of his parents or perhaps the bizarre behavior that prompted their admission to an asylum.
- 4.
My thanks to Sean Moreland for supplying quotes from Lovecraft’s letters, excerpted from H.P. Lovecraft, Selected Letters Volume III (Sauk City: Arkham House, 1971). The following quotes confirm Lovecraft’s awareness of both Freud and Watson, and suggest that he considered Watson’s contribution to psychology to be as significant as Freud’s psychoanalytic theories: SL 3, 134, “Since the pioneering work of Freud & the still more analytical work of his successors—Pavlov, Jung , Adler , Watson &c […] we have come to see that there is no such thing as ‘love’ in any unified, permanent, or important sense. SL 3, 146: “This ‘love’ business is pretty well disposed of by the psycho-analysts—Freud, Jung , Adler ,—& the behaviourists of Dr. John B. Watson’s school.” SL 3, 223: “Thus with the conclusions of Jeans—which we must correlate with Millikan, Compton, Eddington, Shapley, Freud, Watson, Russell, Frazer, Einstein, Eddington, Santayana, Keith, and dozens of others before they can have even the least definitive evidential value.” SL 3, 241: “Such things as ‘wonder,’ ‘glory’, &c. are merely subjective reactions of the nervous system of a particular kind of organisation, & the newer psychology of Freud, Adler , Watson, Pavlov &c has caused these reactions to be very well understood. It is merely a vestige of primitive ignorance to supply the idea of conscious personality & purpose to the eternal & impersonal congeries of regular forces & motion patterns which forms the totality of entity.”
- 5.
Geoffrey Cock’s historical book, Psychotherapy in the Third Reich: The Goering Institute (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press Chicago, 1985) remains the leading source on Jung’s role in displacing Jewish psychoanalysts and the Jewish committee chair from the Nazi-run German Committee for Medical Psychology. Jung subsequently rationalized his acceptance of this dubious honor but never fully explained why he, as a Swiss citizen, felt compelled to participate in this German-led endeavor.
- 6.
Jungian “depth psychology” was eliminated from most medical school curricula and psychiatric residency training programs long before the reigning Freudian ideology fell into disrepute in the mid-1980s, although Jung retained strong adherents in circumscribed circles and Jung’s books about psychology remained the best-selling psychology books among the public.
- 7.
Richard Noll, The Jung Cult. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997) offers a detailed and dispassionate exploration of the historical as well as philosophical underpinnings of Jung’s supposedly “unique” ideas.
- 8.
H.P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature, http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/essays/shil.aspx. Accessed August 7, 2018.
- 9.
Many scholars have focused on Freud’s complicated relationship with Judaism and Jewish culture. For starters, see Emmanuel Rice, Freud and Moses: The Long Journey Home. (Albany: State University of New York, 1990); Peter Kramer, Freud: Inventor of the Modern Mind. (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006); Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for our Times (New York: W.W. Norton, 1988).
- 10.
Cynthia Ozick, The Heretic: The Mythic Passions of Gershom Scholem. (The New Yorker August 25, 2002).
- 11.
Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. (Jerusalem: Schocken Publishing House, 1941).
- 12.
Gershom Scholem, On Kabbalah and its Symbolism (Jerusalem: Schocken Books, 1965).
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Packer, S. (2018). Ansky’s The Dybbuk, Freud’s Future of an Illusion, Watson’s “Little Albert,” and Supernatural Horror in Literature. In: Moreland, S. (eds) New Directions in Supernatural Horror Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95477-6_4
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