The first psychotherapist. The phrase Jewish thinker may mean two very different things.

It may mean a thinker who just happens to be Jewish by birth or descend, a Jewish physicist,

for example. Or it may refer to somebody who's contributed specifically to Jewish thought,

like Yudah Al Ali or Maimonides.

But the interesting question is, is there a third kind of Jewish thinker, one who contributes to

the universe of knowledge, but does so in a recognizably Jewish way?

The answer to this is never straightforward, yet we instinctively feel there is such a thing. To give an analogy,

there's often something recognizably Jewish about a certain kind of humour. Ruth Weiss has

interesting things to say about it in her book, No Joke. So does Peter Berger in his redeeming

laughter. Humour is universal, but it speaks in different accents,

in different cultures. I believe that something similar applies to psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.

So many of the early practitioners of psychoanalysis, with the marked exception of Jung, were Jewish,

that it became known in Nazi Germany as the Jewish science.

I have argued, though my views on this have been challenged, that to the contrary, by taking the

Greek myth of Oedipus, as one of his key models, Freud developed a tragic view of the human

condition that's more Hellenistic than Jewish. By contrast, three of the

most significant post-war psychotherapists were not merely Jewish by birth, but profoundly Jewish,

in their approach to the human soul. Victor Frankel, a survivor of Auschwitz, developed on the

basis of his experiences there an approach he called logotherapy

based on man search for meaning. Though the Nazis took away almost every vestige of humanity

from those they consigned to the death factories, Frankel argued that there was one thing they

could never take away from their prisoners, the freedom to decide how to respond.

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