CHAPTER ELEVEN


Reparation

 

 

 

 

1896 was the year that Freud’s father died, an event which he said was “the most decisive loss of a man’s life” (Gay, op. cit., p. 88).¹ One might think that Freud’s reaction to the passing of Jacob would be an increased use, a heightened dependence on “magical substances” like cocaine to get over his grief. Yet this was not the case. For Freud it was also a moment of liberation from his father’s expectations. Not long afterwards he began his epic study, The Interpretation of Dreams and he formulated the Oedipus complex. Both constructions led directly to the development of psychoanalysis. This became the “healing potion” which excited and sustained him for the rest of his life.

Five years earlier Jacob Freud had given his son a handsome present for his thirty-fifth birthday. It was a copy of the family’s Philippson Bible, rebound in leather, and inscribed in Hebrew with a warm message from Jacob to Shlomo (Sigmund).² It reads (in translation from Hebrew):

My precious son Shlomo

In the seventh of the years of your life the spirit of the Lord

first moved you

And spoke to you: Go, read in My book which I have written

And fountains of knowledge, discernment, and wisdom

will burst open before you.

Behold. It is the Book of Books, the well unearthed by sages,

From which our rulers drew knowledge and justice.

A vision of the Almighty have you beheld; many things have you

heard and accomplished,

Gliding on the wings of the wind [spirit?].

Since that time has the Book been sealed up with me like the

broken tablets in the Ark.

For the day on which your years amount to thirty five

Have I covered it with new leather.

Calling it: “Spring up, O well; greet it with song!”

And offering it to you as a remembrance,

A reminder of love

From your father

Who loves you with love eternal.

Jacob, son of Reb. Shlomo Freud³

This is the original Hebrew version in Jacob’s handwriting:

Taken as a whole the inscription is a dedication and blessing for the son whom Jacob especially loved, like his biblical namesake who embraced Joseph, the interpreter of dreams, a man who rose from misfortune to become the de facto ruler of Egypt. He was a hero with whom Sigmund closely identified. In a letter to his good friend and benefactor, Josef Paneth, he stated, “My own ego finds it very easy to hide behind people of that name, since Joseph was the name of a man famous in the Bible as an interpreter of dreams” (Rice, op. cit., p. 67).⁴

Jacob Freud’s message is like a dream with each line loaded with biblical allusions (ibid., pp. 73–84). For example, his paragraph begins: “In the seventh of the years of your life.” This refers to a passage in Genesis 47:28 whereby “Jacob lived seventeen years in the land of Egypt, so that the span of Jacob’s life came to one hundred and forty-seven years” (The Living Torah, 1981, p. 241). The psychoanalyst, Emanuel Rice, who has elaborated every hidden nuance of the text, suggests that by utilizing the number seven here, Jacob is alluding to the age when his son first started to read the Old Testament (op. cit., pp. 75–76).

Sigmund would have realized the reference. He knew his Bible very well, having studied it closely with his father over many years. For him these verses carried a multitude of meanings. They were a “coat of many colors” hugging a brilliant son, but also pleading with him to return to his roots and forgiving him for his rebellious ways. The words were not threatening. They did not carry the hostility that the legendary Laius manifested to his newborn son. But they do invite Sigmund to renew the love for his father which he never really relinquished. Maybe this was the part of his self-analysis which Sigmund did not want to see. Far from wanting to kill his father and marry his mother, Oedipus fled Corinth, the city of his childhood and the domain of the only parents he knew, in order to protect them. The extreme moods and somatic symptoms that bedeviled Freud were hints that demons from whom he tried to flee still lay within himself. It is intriguing to think that Freud developed psychoanalysis as an ingenious way of meeting these beasties head on.

Similarly, Jacob’s benediction was his way of trying to address the underlying tensions that existed between himself and his son. In Kabbalistic terms he intended to effect a tikkun, a renewal and repair of their kinship. Concomitantly, he aimed to reconcile himself with his own father (Sigmund’s grandfather), also named Shlomo, and to restore the “Book” (the Torah, the Book of Life), and, indeed, his own life, that may have been broken (like “the tablets of the ark”) by his straying from the path of rigorous observance.

Tikkun has to do with correction, restoration, and rejuvenation. It is the core concept, the raison d’etre of Kabbalah, and it coincides with the impetus for reparation, perhaps the most significant psychoanalytic formulation of Melanie Klein and her colleagues.

As in Kabbalah, Klein set out to describe how to overcome fragmentation and loss, evil and exile. But her terms of reference were different. Klein was concerned with the self in relation to “internal objects,” internalized representations of significant persons, and to a lesser extent, “external objects,” actual life important people. For her, exile meant separation from mother, while evil equaled death. For Kabbalists, however, evil means fragmentation of the soul and separation from God.

Reparation is the will, means, and action of repairing an inner world shattered under the pressure of destructive impulses and an outer world of damaged relationships, people, and things. Reparation, like tikkun, is both a goal and the movement toward this goal. According to Kleinian psychology, reparation is never complete, rather it is an active process of striving toward completeness, whether of the head or heart or entire being. It is intimately related to its Kabbalistic counterpart, which also is a constant ongoing process, but with a larger purpose, to unify the universe.

Essentially tikkun has to do with healing—physical, emotional, and spiritual. For man this has to do with healing the rifts within himself and between himself and others, in order to gain and regain Shalame—wholeness, and Shalom—peace of mind.

Concurrently, the Kabbalah teaches that when a person restores his self-balance, that is, restores the proper weight of his thoughts, feelings, and actions on a personal scale, he will simultaneously perform a tikkun ha-olam, a transformation of the cosmos. Therefore, what happens internally will happen externally, what happens on a micro scale will also happen on a macro scale. From this we learn that there is a continual interplay between the ultimate goal of creation, which is to bring completeness to the world (tikkun ha-olam), and the action or personal praxis that has to be taken to bring this about.

There is a striking complementarity between the concept of repairing the world (tikkun ha-olam), and psychoanalytic aims and actions. The analytic focus is on the internal object world of the patient. Melanie Klein used the words, Wiederherstellung, meaning restoration, and Wiedergutmachung, meaning restitution, to describe this process of correction. However, these translations were soon superseded by “reparation,” which is a refinement of the previous versions and includes the idea of repairing something as well as making reparation to someone.

According to Klein, the basic need, indeed the ongoing project of every person is to overcome early infantile sadism. She insisted that such savagery usually took the form of intense phantasies of tearing, devouring, and fragmenting mother’s body. Subsequently, these impulses extend to father, and to siblings, as well as to all the relationships that occur among them, externally and internally. Even more terrifying, by “the laws of revenge,” this sadism soon rebounds on the child, and his or her own body, mind, and relations. Hence the nightmares of early childhood are replete with the same monsters and demons, ghouls and goblins, who inhabit horror films.

In consequence Klein’s concepts encompass not just the need and fact of repair, putting things back together again, but of “re-pair,” reestablishing torn and broken relationships, especially the one between the parental couple. By implication this leads to the idea of repairing social as well as personal and interpersonal reality, the macro-social as well as the micro-personal.

But both the Jewish and psychoanalytic traditions agree that an important first step has to occur before a correction or repair can take place. We refer to the recognition of a wrong, whether between man and God or between man and man. In Judaism this step is called teshuvah, and is a formal process of taking responsibility for wrongdoing or sin. Teshuvah means repentance, but it also signifies return, a turning back toward one’s primary source.

Neither the fact nor process of repentance is formalized in psychoanalysis. Rather this step appears to be noted as regret, remorse, sorrow, or, in general, a concern for a lost or damaged other or “object.” This concern arises during the “depressive position” when a person, the subject, sees another as “a whole object,” that is, as though he (or she) exists in his own right, with his own needs, problems, and desires. But I think that a basic aspect of the Kleinian view, and indeed, the whole idea of repentance can also be accommodated under Sigmund Freud’s formulation of the “reality principle,” and related “reality-testing” and “reality adaptation.” Here “reality” denotes the point where a person is no longer under the sway of instinctual, narcissistic, and subjective desires or perceptions.

It is a major accomplishment when a child or adult is able and willing to perceive people or things as they are as well as see the connections between them. This denotes a state of mind which can acknowledge loss, injury or absence. Moreover, it can embrace ideas and processes such as beauty, nature, and cognition. This is the maturational moment when a person perceives a misfortune and accepts responsibility for his or her contribution to a damaged world.

Repentance (teshuvah) is the conscious, and, more important, the heartfelt acceptance of the dark side of oneself. Or, as the noted Talmudist, Rabbi Adin Even Yisroel (Steinsaltz) observes, it is the reaching into “the nadir of the abyss” (2002, p. 2). Only then, when a person has dug down to the very bottom of his soul, can the descent into badness and madness stop, and the ascent toward redemption begin.⁵

The possibility of return means that all who are fallen can be raised up and that all sins can be erased. This is the second and very important theme of repentance (teshuvah). A “bad man” can become a “good man” by realigning his spiritual as well as material energies. Indeed, in Judaism, the repentant sinner is known as the “Master of Return” and has a higher status than a righteous person who has never strayed.

The psychotherapist, Estelle Frankel, has adopted the analogy of the incense (ketoret) once used in the temple service in Jerusalem to point out that “sin” is not only an evil aspect of life, but also a necessary contributor toward the course of emotional realignment and growth (1994, pp. 5, 23–24, 104–105). The incense was made up from eleven basic ingredients. One of the most crucial of these was galbanum, a bitter, foul-smelling gum resin.⁶ In itself galbanum is disgusting. But as part of the incense mixture, it adds passion and pungency. Sin is also repugnant. But like galbanum, when integrated into the totality of our personality, it can add strength and vigor.

Furthermore, Frankel points out that repentance occasioned by love gives people a second chance, another opportunity to rectify their existence. This follows the dictum described in the Zohar that it is possible to approach the shadow side of the soul in order to unblock and reclaim the light hidden within it. Similarly the essential tasks of psychoanalysis are to dis-cover, un-cover, and ultimately re-cover a love of life which lies hidden amid a morass of suffering and symptoms. I would not suggest, however, that the overt expression of teshuvah (repentance), as happens on the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, was part of Freud’s therapeutic agenda. Even more so, because we know that he despised (or feared) formalized religious practices. Nonetheless it is important to consider the underlying influences that contributed to his psychic formulations.

I have already reviewed Freud’s Hassidic background. The physicist, Tom Keve, documents in his study, Triad: the Physicists, the Analysts, the Kabbalists, the extent to which many of the founding fathers of psychoanalysis, including Joseph Breuer, Robert Breuer, Abraham Brill, Sandor Ferenczi (originally Fraenkel), Heinz Hartmann, and Lajos Levy were direct descendants of rabbis, Kabbalists, or purveyors of mystical texts (op. cit., pp. i–ix).

Phyllis Grosskurth, in her biography of Melanie Klein, notes that Klein had a formidable Jewish pedigree (op. cit., p. 13). Similarly, Frieda Fromm-Reichman was strongly influenced by an Orthodox Jewish upbringing and a Lurianic worldview, as expressed by the title of her biography, To Redeem One Person is to Redeem the World (Hornstein, op. cit.).

While psychoanalytic practice may explore penitence, contrition, remorse, or sorrow—different ways of recognizing and responding to wrongdoing, it seems to do so without a specific set of procedures or steps for finalizing repentance, such as described by Maimonides or as elaborated by later scholars. Psychoanalysis is more concerned with the mental anguish, the self-reproach, the self-blame, and especially, the sense of guilt that arises from internal conflict. According to Freud’s structural model of the mind, the central conflict occurs between the id, the ego, and the superego. This has to do with sexuality and socialization: the internalization of parental injunctions, infringement of moral imperatives, and doubts about the worth or value of the self. The result may be a vague inner dread often synonymous with “neurotic anxiety,” or a life dominated by endless rounds of “cops and robbers,” pursuit and punishment.

In contrast to the structural theory, the psychological model of Melanie Klein emphasized the conflict between Thanatos and Eros, the forces of death and disintegration versus love and life. This parallels the Jewish mystical tradition which emphasizes a psychology of conflict featuring tohu (chaos, the without form, void) versus bohu (emptiness, but literally the “it is in it,” reconciliation, integration) (Kaplan, 1990, op. cit., pp. 78–83). In conjunction with the creation of the sephirot (the divine characteristics), tohu has to do with the world of one-dimensional points which is roughly comparable to a state of part object relations.

Bohu pertains to a developmentally later world of multidimensional, interrelated streaks and is roughly comparable to a state of whole object relations. But the inability of the divine containers or sephirot (the word refers both to spiritual energies and the vessels which hold them) to integrate leads directly to the “Breaking of the Vessels,” (Shevirat Ha-Kelim), and the disintegration of the universe. When these vessels reconstitute themselves, and they are able to engage with each other, then the universe can be recreated and life can be reestablished.

The Kabbalah constantly describes the dialectical clash between opposing thoughts, emotions, mental states, and personal values as well as the process of integrating and reintegrating them on “higher,” more complex levels of being. In psychoanalysis or psychoanalytic psychotherapy the transference relationship is the way of accomplishing this task, of working though the carnage of an ambivalently lived life. The cut and thrust of projection and introjection, transference and countertransference between the patient and analyst, enable both parties to transcend all boundaries of time, space, and person. In such a relationship, the patient does not represent an angry child, but he is that child. The analyst does not represent an injured parent, he is that parent. Similarly, the present is the past, while the consultation room becomes the place, the space where everything has happened, but where every “thing” can be overcome.

The beauty of an analytic relationship is that it provides a second chance to put things right. Klein captured this possibility by her original choice of the term Wiedergutmachung which signifies restitution or reparation. In German the word can be subdivided into wieder + gut + machung. Literally this means second chance (again) + good + making or “the making good for a second time.” One might say that such second, third, and more chances are backup mechanisms for getting through the depressive position, and becoming “human.”

The nineteenth-century Hassidic master and prolific writer and thinker, Reb Tzadok Ha’Cohen of Lublin (1823–1900), emphasized the temporal aspects of the extra chance. When repentance takes place out of love (for family, for friends, for society), an individual can travel in time in order to reverse a wrongdoing, so that it appears that the event, and its effects, never happened. This view coincides with what the Alter Rebbe meant when he declared that a heartfelt repentance can reverse time and overturn a bad decree. It is also consistent with positive developments during the course of therapy or analysis. When the positive transference is activated, we can see that love in the present can obliterate pain of the past. These time flows are transferential and transactional. They move backwards and forwards like the intricate counterpoint of a Bach partita, and show that the process of repentance is only complete when past turmoil and hardships are mitigated by present warmth and affection.

Although I have been discussing the changes that repentance can bring about in and of itself, it is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for effecting a correction or tikkun in a person, or in the world as a whole. For a man and woman, the first steps are a willingness to perceive reality and acknowledge the hurts that have happened. The second move involves a mellowing of the heart and feelings of remorse. But the third change involves specific actions designed to redress and elevate a fragmented self and chaotic world. I now wish to address this third element, from both the perspective of what needs to be corrected and the actions that have to be taken to bring forth and complete the realms of reparation.

Initially I considered the conundrum that Heinz Kohut repeatedly posed: how can man “cure his crumbling self?” Therefore, the first focus of the discussion of reparation/tikkun will be the individual in relation to himself. This is the world of self. Then I shall explore the individual in relation to others. This is the world of relationships. Finally I shall review everything else, animate and inanimate, the totality of existence which comprise “the world.” In truth all of these areas as well as their creation, destruction, and recreation are interconnected.

The world of self begins inside the womb when the child-to-be exists as an undifferentiated being complete with potential for thoughts to be thought, feelings to be felt, and relationships to be lived. For a brief moment he or she is akin to a perfect cosmic egg, albeit waiting to be shattered under the impact of existence. Beset by bits and pieces of rudimentary experiences, hunger and frustration, tension and rage, the nascent self and infantile ego soon succumb to dissolution and chaos (tohu). Then the newborn baby reverts to a crumbled state where its mind and bodily sensations become broken and fragmented. Moreover, full of indigestible internal events, the infant evacuates these bits and pieces, what Bion called “beta elements,” into his environment through cries, vomit, wind, feces, urine, and kindred products and activities. These remnants lodge (actually and symbolically) in everyone and everything around him which, in turn, appear dangerous and life-threatening.

Significantly, the Kabbalah describes a similar intermediate stage during the creation of reality. This is the “Universe of Tohu,” when the vessels which reflect and contain the divine condition emerge as separate entities. But these vessels cannot interact with each other or hold the intense light or energies which flow into them. So the lower seven ones (lower in a spiritual sense) shatter and explode outwards, imbuing everything around them with shards or fragments of themselves. As I have shown, this shattering event is the harbinger of evil in existence, because both the vessels and their contents become separated from their source.

But even at this maturational moment, however, there exist certain primitive reparative capacities. These are physical and cognitive skills which help to overcome fragmentation and promote psychic and emotional integration. One of the most important of these has to do with language, because a baby creates reality through sounds and words. And if he can create reality, then he can change it and make it better. This explains the Kabbalistic maxim, “Redemption comes with the birth of the word.” Why? Because words nourish “meaning.” They contain projective outbursts and allow fragments of self which have been embedded in others “to come home.”

The containing child or adult enters the world of relationships. Then he can become a giver as well as a taker. So the containing/contained function becomes more flexible and stronger. Feelings do not have to well up until bursting point, or be explosively discharged. They can be held, processed, digested, modulated, and otherwise transformed from bad to good.

There is a striking resemblance between the Lurianic account of creation, tikkun ha-olam, which can be roughly translated as “repairs to the tears in the universe,” and the Kleinian concept of reparation, which can also be seen as making good the “tears” of separation.⁷ For it conveys the possibility of overcoming the shock of separateness, aloneness, loss, and jealousy, but especially guilt for the damage one has inflicted on beloved relatives and friends, as well as oneself.

A damaged self denotes not just a part of the body, but a whole range of ruptured thoughts and feelings. It describes an inner world which lies bleeding, shattered and in ruins. Hassidism, in particular, has tried to address this problem through prayer, meditation, and introspection. In his book on traditional Jewish healing, The Wings of the Sun (1995), the Breslov (hassid) lecturer and writer Avraham Greenbaum goes into great detail about how to overcome a broken body and mind. Ultimately (p. 24) he quotes Rabbi Nachman of Breslov (1772–1810) in his Likutey Moharan II: “The basic cause of illness is unhappiness, and the great healer is joy” (pp. 5, 113, 123). It is noteworthy that in English “Freud” means “joy.”

Similarly, the late Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, emphasized the power of faith and reflection to overcome inner confusion and chaos. He explained, “Everything has its limits, even darkness,” and “When the world was made, a limit was set how long it will function in confusion” (2002, p. 286).

Tikkun-actions initially focus on the self, hence, repair of the self (tikkun ha-nefesh). They include a variety of internal and external activities: prayer, meditation, introspection, dream processing, symbol formation, speech, artistry, sublimation, gnosis, and the search for meaning. Collectively all of these activities allow the individual to contain previously uncontainable experiences and to heal wounds to the psychic fabric and personal identity.

These wounds or divisions must reach beyond self-structure to the next stage of repair, to healing or reunifying human relationships. This is the action-time for the formation of “whole objects,” and whole object relationships. For Kabbalists the comparable occasion is bohu, the “World of Repair.” It is the occasion for reconciliation and rectification, when the divine characteristics (sephirot) “dance” together and when the male and female expressions of the Divine presence on earth establish and reestablish relations with each other.

Bohu (reconciliation) denotes an interplay of reciprocal relationships which leads to the creation of the spiritual and physical universe. It is the point where the devastation caused by the “breaking of the vessels” (shvirat ha-kelim), begins to be rectified. The original difficulty occurred because of the lack of reciprocity. The lower sephirot (characteristics) were only able to take in divine energies, but not give them out. So the vessels shattered. But once reciprocity was established, then the sephirot and their cosmic structure the Etz Chaim (the Tree of Life, the sephirotic tree) could be constituted and reconstituted.

Rabbi Chaim Vital elaborated the view of the Ari (Isaac Luria) that an exchange, seen as sexual intercourse, has to take place between the male principle as God, and the female principle (the shekinah) as humankind. Then humanity can be impregnated by God’s qualities or characteristics, so that they permeate “her” existence and allow humankind to perceive things through “his” eyes, that is, to see and respond to the world as God does.⁸

Therefore, the whole process of rectifying human relationships as well as correcting the cosmos is dependent on a cosmic drama (or should we say dream) about the erotic coupling of the divine personas. Sanford Drob explains:

These unifications symbolize the dialectical union of such “opposites” as male and female, good and evil, being and nothingness, creation and destruction, self and other, past and present, mind and world, material and spiritual, and so on. (Symbols of Kabbalah, 2000b, p. 365)

The Kabbalists realized that the sexual union between a man and a woman was itself the symbolic fulfillment of the relationship between God and the shekinah (the female principle, the divine presence in its receptive mode). And since the Old Testament uses the same word (daat) to denote both knowledge and sexual relations, knowledge (of all kinds) can be seen as having a deeply erotic nature.⁹ As Bakan emphasizes, Freud’s use of the idiom of sexuality is a fundamental instrument for expressing the deepest and most profound problems of mankind. And it is entirely in the spirit of the Kabbalah (op. cit., p. 272).¹⁰ He continues:

The basic paradigm of knowledge is union or penetration. Sexual union in the Zohar is spoken of as “uncovering of nakedness.” [The divine quality or sephirah of] binah [means] understanding and [also means] mother. Thus, when a man sins sexually he “uncovers the nakedness of [his] Mother. Kabbalistically speaking, Freud came to binah in his discovery of the unconscious forces in man. He had, in the idea of the Oedipus complex, an image of the “mother lying in her nakedness.” (ibid., p. 289)¹¹

By grasping the importance of sexuality in human relationships, Freud was not just concerned with the physical act of copulation. Nor did he limit his understanding of the Oedipus complex to a longing for incestuous union with the mother. Rather he saw that it was a complex metaphor that addressed universal mysteries: Who am I? How was I created? Where do I come from? And, Where am I going?

The first questions concern the self. How can I cure a shattered self? How can I become whole? And, in so doing, how can I establish “I-ness” and “Me-ness,” that is, a strong personal identity. The second issue has to do with relationships, and the wish of the child to have been present when the parental intercourse took place. Moreover, this wish is not just to have been present, but to have seen that he was created deliberately and lovingly. If this were not the case, then, by his own dream thoughts and actions, he longed to renew their union, so that it was really warm and caring.

The renewal of relationships leads to the third and most important level of reparation—rectification of the world (tikkun ha-olam). This is a very big project, so what does it mean in practice? The Zohar hints at an answer when it describes divers paths to wisdom:

Another … way is to know the secrets of souls. What is the soul within me? Where does it come from? Why did it come into this body made of a stinking drop? [How can I …] know and contemplate the world one is in? What is its purpose? And then to seek to know the supernal mysteries of the higher worlds … (Drob, 2000b, p. 373)

Essentially the Zohar is calling for self-perfection or self-completion through the process of soul-discovery, not unlike a long and deep psychoanalysis, which as Bruno Bettelheim has pointed out, really means “soul-analysis.” This is a path that avoids personal enhancement or narcissistic satisfaction. Rather it has to do with raising the sparks or elements of one’s existence, an event which is simultaneously psychological, spiritual, ethical, and political. Each of these goals and actions is dependent on and identical with the other, and not only leads to the redemption of the individual, but to the whole of existence.

Rectification of the world (tikkun ha-olam) is a collective task. For “… in everyone there is something of his fellow man” (Elior, 1993, p. 50).¹² We rely on every act of kindness, every bit of self-sacrifice, every prayer to bring this about. Then every time a therapist helps to restore a person to sanity, he thereby becomes a helper to restore another person to sanity, and so on and on, where to reconstruct one person is to redeem the world.

This view is consistent with what Freud said, or is said to have said, when asked what should a normal person be able to do: “To love and to work” (“Lieben und arbeiten”).¹³ The formulation is deceptively simple, but is quite profound. To love is to treat another individual with respect, mutuality, and kindness. It is the most healing of balms. Concomitantly, to work is to give added value back to the world, to repay it for the blessings that one has received.

Love, work, charity, contemplation, self-sacrifice, and kindred deeds all comprise the active component of repairing the world (tikkun ha-olam). But as I explained at the beginning of this chapter, and have been trying to demonstrate through subsequent examples, tikkun ha-olam is both a means to an end, and the end itself. The ultimate purpose of the rectification of physical and spiritual realms is peace and wholeness, the total transformation of chaos and fragmentation (toho) into reconciliation and integration (boho). In human terms the equivalent achievement is a state of self-actualization. Then we should be able to heal, through an act of will, whatever wounds someone has suffered, whether intrapersonally, interpersonally, or transpersonally.

Recent research shows that adults carry within themselves stem or precursor cells that can differentiate and repair damaged tissues when activated.¹⁴ Essentially, people are plastic and restorable. Therefore we can recognize that we are all part of a multidimensional hologram like the Tree of Life (Etz Chaim), instead of clinging to the narcissistic idea that we are the center of the universe and everything has to revolve around us.

This is all very well, however, the question remains, what about individuals who abuse this process? What about those who use love and work for self-aggrandizement? Many observers, including Freud, have asserted that ritual practices are obsessive-compulsive neurotic mannerisms or worse, offensive stratagems designed to insulate the self and project superiority over others.

Obviously, actions which appear to be expressions of reparation are often perversions of it. Far from repairing broken hearts and helping others, work and worship, self-sacrifice and charity may simply serve as vehicles of control, contempt, and ways of triumphing over relatives and friends. This very common situation arises when arrogance replaces repentance. Then people refuse to face reality, acknowledge damage, feel regret, make amends, or ask for forgiveness.

Yet, expressly in these situations, the potential for tikkun remains present. I am impressed by the way that both psychoanalysis and Kabbalah can utilize the power of language to ameliorate pain, and transform bad into good. We have seen this process in Chapter Nine, “On Opposites,” where a small change to a single letter, or vowel, can radically alter the meaning of a thought or word, from bad breast to good breast, from withholder to the source of life. In Hebrew, the words for evil (“rahh,” ) and friend (“ray,” ) demonstrate similar possibilities. They carry the same consonants, resh and ayin . The only difference is in the vowels, a tiny line (“ahhh”) or two dots (“aye”) under the resh , which separate pain from pleasure.¹⁵

A certain breath or intense silence can also bring about profound changes in mood or demeanor. Thus, the Bible’s Book of Ezekiel (which is a basic text for the Kabbalah) deploys the word chashmal to convey the prophet’s vision when he met the Almighty. This word is usually translated as intense energies, or “luminescence.” But the Ari (Isaac Luria) asserted that chashmal can also be interpreted as the “colour of the speaking silence,” or the silence from which transformative insights emerge (Kaplan, 1990, op. cit., pp. 140, 147, 153–154, 165–166).

Chashmal is the “something from nothing.” This explains why mystics, like Wilfred Bion, conclude that healing words are connected to the sound of silence. He saw that the greatest light can come from the deepest darkness. Such views are consistent with a successful therapy or analysis. The effort may be long and difficult and painfully silent. As John Thompson’s patient declared, the loudest truths may remain unspoken, yet they can yield remarkable repairs of the self and of the soul.