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 religious patient who submitted himself to the highly experimental treatment of psychoanalysis 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.Footnote ¹ Stekel's most recent biographers, however, credit him as the “unsung populariser of psychoanalysis,” and claim that he is due for reconsideration.Footnote 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 incorporated 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 biographical accounts of the rabbi, focusing on variant perspectives on sexual trauma, illness, and rehabilitation. I end with a discussion of how this intense experience in Vienna had an impact on the rabbi's leadership within his own community and in his homiletic writings.

The case history: The 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.Footnote 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 complained 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, grandfather, 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).Footnote ⁴ The rabbi bitterly regretted his declaration, 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 memories that these interpretations evoked in the patient.Footnote 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 relationship with reality. The restoration of these latent memories, desires, and associations 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 “morally insane,” the psychoanalytic community widely regarded Stekel as a master of dream interpretation.Footnote 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.”Footnote 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 demonstration 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 deliriously. 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 remembered 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.Footnote 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 minutiae. 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 have the heart to be severe with him and much less to give him notice.”Footnote 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 incorporate 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.Footnote 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 justification in the rabbi's own words: “They were all children in those days …”Footnote 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 triumphantly 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 fantasies: 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.”Footnote ¹²

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 compartment 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.”Footnote 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 unconscious, “masked by various more tenable desires, such as consultations with professors, 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. 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.”Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.”Footnote 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 psychoanalytic 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 moral epistle. We might also profitably ask, how did the rabbi's analysis influence the ideas that he expounded in his rabbinical post?

The 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.Footnote 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.”Footnote ¹⁹ Although RaSHaB failed to describe the primary nature of his treatment and to identify the “professor” by name in this correspondence or in subsequent communications regarding his travels of 1903, his son, R. Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn (1880–1950), and his grandson-in-law, R. Menachem Mendel Schneerson (Chabad's seventh dynastic leader; 1902–94), revealed that the “professor” was the “famous professor Freud.”Footnote 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 “consulted” Freud on several occasions during his three months in Vienna for symptoms related to “depression.”Footnote ²¹ The identification of “the professor” by the last 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 available work could have been properly mined.Footnote 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.Footnote ²³ It is my contention that this rabbi was the famous Chabad rebbe RaSHaB.

RaSHaB's biography intrigues historians because it was he who first introduced 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.Footnote 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.Footnote ²⁵ From the perspective of critical biography, RaSHaB has always been something of a mystery. Unlike his predecessors, 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 ancestors' 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 (gatherings 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.Footnote 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 circumstances. Ancillary materials to RaSHaB's medical records and international travel experiences are complicated by several factors. Because of Stekel's inauspicious position in the Viennese psychoanalytic community and the political circumstances of his evacuation from Vienna in 1938, Stekel's original medical records have not survived.Footnote ²⁷ Chabad historical material is likewise complicated by the fact that the movement's leadership both self-censored and edited their predecessor'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.Footnote ²⁸ We are left with a highly selective Chabad historiography, a body of literature that historian Ada Rapoport-Albert dubs “hagiography with footnotes.”Footnote 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.Footnote 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.”Footnote 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,Footnote ³² R. Yosef Yitzchak casts it as an ideological action predicated by the doctrine of “dispersing the springs” of Hasidism.Footnote ³³ Although we can confirm many lacunae of fact between texts, the full, actual event ultimately remains elusive. Rather, a comparative reading of these two accounts elucidates how each characterizes religion, illness, and the cure against the backdrop of their own literary 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 formative 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.Footnote 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 “alternative” 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.

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.Footnote 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: “Sometimes 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 everything must be exactly thus and not otherwise. And G-d helps him.”Footnote 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 accomplishments of his father and grandfather.Footnote ³⁷ R. Yosef Yitzchak records his father incomprehensibly yelling out, “How can I apply myself to Hasidim when Hasidim don't recognize me?”Footnote ³⁸ RaSHaB himself characterized his psychological challenge as a conflict between the “heart” and the “head.”Footnote 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 diagnoses his patient.Footnote 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 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 pronouncement without malice; he simply wants to augment his own analytic expertise 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.”Footnote 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 “Hasidism” 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:

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.”Footnote 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 and the hasidic reader.Footnote 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,

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 triggered his first dream in Stekel's case history.Footnote ⁴⁶ In the case history, the dream triggered 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.^”Footnote 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 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 “officers.” 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.

Accounting for symptoms of illness in the hasidic biography

Stekel's patient is an anonymous and generic rabbi whose universal biological 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 revelation 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 forthrightly without offending his modesty, and thereby offers an object lesson on character. 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 never laughs at the distress of a hasid.”Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.”Footnote 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.”Footnote 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 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 liturgical 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 legitimization of leadership within the movement. R. Yosef Yitzchak records a memory of his father crying and his mother explaining,

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.”Footnote 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 relationship 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 domestic whose access to children shifts the blame to the father.Footnote 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 oppression, 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).Footnote 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 associated 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.”Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 his father accepted the post as rebbe in Lyubavitchi (1866).Footnote ⁶² Although psychoanalysis already singled out “fathers” as objects of fear and defiance, Freud's Oedipal conflict would not become a “cornerstone” of psychoanalysis until the 1920s.Footnote 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 mentions 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 palpable 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 biography. The complete sublimation of the father by the son drives the narrative, much of which is predicated on dreams, free associations, and childhood memories. In almost every public address (ma'amar), R. Yosef Yitzchak names in reverse consecutive order all five preceding generations of leaders. In every generation 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. ShmuelFootnote ⁶⁴ and RaSHaB; these writings claim that while they searched for cures, they never went to vacation resorts.Footnote 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 me stories about the Alter Rebbe when he was in Mezritch with the Maggid.”Footnote 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.”Footnote ⁶⁷ While Stekel interprets the rabbi's walks and train trips as a traveling neurosis derivative of sexual fantasy, R. Yosef Yitzchak, here and elsewhere, 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.Footnote ⁶⁸

RaSHaB's first major illness is directly connected to his father's death, signaling 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.Footnote 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.”Footnote 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.Footnote 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 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 “complaints against his wife increased in tone until they developed into accusations.”Footnote 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 dissipated 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.”Footnote ⁷³ The narrative ends unceremoniously 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 communicated 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).

The 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, much less decipher. An old Jewish servant does emerge in R. Yosef Yitzchak's literature 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 Dibburim, this figure is listed as “Yosef Mordekhai ha-mesharet,” a term usually connoting 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.Footnote 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.”Footnote 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,” referring to the children with whom his son might come in contact with if left unsupervised.Footnote 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 intensely painful time of isolation from his father: “My lifestyle during the course of 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 Mordekhai 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 goodnight. In the course of these two years I forgot the bitter conditions of the earlier life.”Footnote ⁷⁷

Freud considered hysterical amnesia a symptom of repression connected with childhood sexuality and the Oedipus complex, and R. Yosef Yitzchak's narrative 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 bitterness subsided.”Footnote 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:

Reading R. Yosef Yitzchak's description of Yosef Mordekhai through the lens of Stekel complicates the narrative of the servant–child relationship. Medical literature in the last years of the nineteenth century tried to approach sexuality in childhood 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.Footnote 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 abandoning and revising his earlier hypothesis of an adult “seduction” to address instead the sexualized fantasies of the “normal” child.Footnote 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 construction of “healthy” sexuality, the bourgeois class was only vigilant over its own sexuality (and the purity of its own blood lines).Footnote ⁸² Taking up Foucault's model and his suggestive line of reasoning, subsequent scholars have demonstrated 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 “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 corruption of the progeny comes as an additional incentive.”Footnote 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 descriptions 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.”Footnote 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 wealthier 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 physicality 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.Footnote ⁸⁵

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 complain: “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.”Footnote 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 [synagogue 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 different—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 episodes 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 children 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 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 evaluation 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 establishment than to the patient.Footnote 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 outsider 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 psychoanalysis 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 constitutions 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 psychoanalytic 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 critical dimensions. Rereading along the Stekel–Schneersohn axis might also make omissions and resounding silences within psychoanalytic and hasidic literature more readable.

The 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 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 communicates 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 protested, “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.”Footnote 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 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 philosophy as an alternative religious approach within a somewhat critical religious tradition. Reading Stekel's Nervöse Angstzustände with R. Yosef Yitzchak as commentary, if the rabbi got caught up in the hierarchies of sexual sin and fantasized 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 systematic 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 psychoanalysis 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 nineteenth century to a more emotionally charged movement in the twentieth. Writing in the genre of moral discourse, RaSHaB engages his own autobiography 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 personal 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 Tetragrammaton 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 intellectual justifications in navigating the poles of temptation and prohibition, but displaces the conflict on “adulterous women”:

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.”Footnote ⁹⁵ RaSHaB undermines the hierarchies of sexual sin with an ascetic attitude toward even permissible pleasures, which condition the body to pursue sensual pleasure.Footnote ⁹⁶

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 nomenclature. 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.Footnote 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 “traveling neurosis,” he did articulate a long-standing concept in Chabad Hasidism of “dispersing the sparks” of Hasidism in practical terms only after he returned from Vienna.