The Street and the Home, Part III

Vienna, the Ostjude, and the Jewish Shadow

Kurt Lewin. (public domain)

5: Kurt Lewin and the Question of a Name

Before I go further into Jung, I need to pause over a term that hovers over this entire discussion, because the term itself has become a site of dispute rather than a settled diagnosis.

Kurt Lewin’s 1941 essay “Self-Hatred Among Jews” is the foundational text. (16) Writing as a social psychologist and as a Jew who had fled Nazi Germany, Lewin described a specific pattern: members of a stigmatized minority internalizing the dominant culture’s negative evaluation of the group, and then directing hostility not at the source of the stigma but at fellow members of the minority who seemed, to the anxious eye, to confirm it. For Lewin this was not primarily a moral failing but a predictable psychological consequence of what he called negative group belonging — membership in a group one cannot easily leave and cannot make fully safe.

The term has traveled a difficult road since 1941. As a historical overview from the Jewish Book Council traces, “self-hatred” migrated over the following decades from a clinical description of an internal psychological dynamic into, especially in the postwar and post-1967 period, a polemical weapon — a way of delegitimizing any Jew who voiced criticism, of communal norms or of Israeli policy, by suggesting the criticism itself was pathological rather than substantive.(17) William Finlay’s 2005 critique in the British Journal of Social Psychology is precisely about this drift, arguing that “self-hating Jew” has often functioned less as a diagnosis and more as a rhetorical device for pathologizing dissent, foreclosing argument rather than opening inquiry.(18) A synthesis from My Jewish Learning makes a similar point in more accessible terms: the phrase is now almost impossible to deploy neutrally.(19)

I raise this not to excuse what I felt on that Viennese street, nor to dress it in more forgiving language than it deserves, but because precision matters to honest self-examination. I am not interested in asking whether I am, categorically, a “self-hating Jew” — a term I have come to think is too blunt and too weaponized to be analytically useful, and one that, in any case, does not describe an Orthodox Jew who has built his life around Torah and Talmud. What I am interested in is something narrower and, I think, more tractable: a specific, momentary, involuntary reaction, inherited through family and culture and history, that surprised me by its persistence in a person and a life that had, by every conscious measure, already chosen differently. Lewin gives me the mechanism. Finlay gives me the caution against turning that mechanism into an accusation, whether against myself or against my father’s generation. Between them there is room for the kind of inquiry this essay wants to conduct.

The Jungian model of the psyche. (after C.G. Jung)

6: The Shadow, the Camouflage, and What the Hasid Refuses

This is where Jung becomes indispensable, because Jung supplies exactly the structure I need without requiring either confession or condemnation.

In Aion, Jung describes the Shadow as the sum of those personal and collective qualities the ego has disowned — not necessarily because they are evil, but because they are unassimilated, incompatible with the self-image the ego has constructed and needs, for its own stability, to maintain. (10) Crucially, the Shadow is not banished because of what it is. It is banished because of what it reminds us of. It provokes discomfort precisely to the degree that it is recognizable — to the degree that some part of us knows, beneath articulate thought, that the figure standing before us is not wholly other.

This reframes the question I need to be asking, and it reframes it in a specific way I owe to a distinction that only became clear to me in writing this essay. The Hasid was never, himself, my Shadow. That formulation would make him into a container for my pathology, which is neither accurate nor fair to him as a person living his own religious life, indifferent to my psychology entirely. Rather — and I think this distinction matters — he carries the Shadow. The Shadow belongs to me; he merely carries, involuntarily and without any obligation to do so, the part of my own inheritance that I had forgotten. The difference is not merely semantic. It is the difference between treating a stranger as a screen for my own unresolved history and recognizing that my reaction is entirely mine to examine, regardless of what he does or does not represent to himself. I have argued elsewhere, working the Jungian and Kabbalistic materials together, that the sacred and the shadowed are not sequential stages but simultaneous conditions, and that the integration of the disowned is the precondition rather than the reward of healing. (20) What I did not anticipate is how directly that clinical claim would be turned back on its author by a stranger on a foreign street.

Seen this way, the psychologically dangerous element in the encounter is not the Hasid’s theology at all. It is that he refuses the persona my father’s Vienna had perfected. He insists that Judaism remain public rather than private, visible rather than folded away for the home. He embodies, in Jungian terms, the rejected image — not rejected because it is false, but rejected because Vienna’s bargain with its Jews required, as its price of admission, exactly the concealment he declines to perform.

I want to stay with Jung’s own language a moment longer, because the precision of his formulation matters more than a paraphrase can convey. In Aion, Jung writes of the Shadow as a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality and insists that becoming conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. (10) The crucial word is real. Jung is explicit that the Shadow cannot be dealt with by an act of will alone, by simply resolving to think better of the disowned material; it must first be recognized as belonging to oneself, which is precisely the labor this essay has been attempting. He is equally explicit, and this matters for how I want to treat the Hasid himself, that the Shadow is not the whole of the unconscious personality but only its most accessible layer — the part nearest the surface, the part most easily projected outward onto a convenient carrier. (10) This is why I keep insisting, against the easier formulation, that the man in the kapote was not my Shadow but merely its carrier: Jung’s own model requires that distinction. The Shadow is mine. What I do with the person who happens to evoke it is a separate, and more consequential, ethical question — one Jung’s clinical framework raises but does not, on its own, answer.

Jung’s concept of projection sharpens this further. Projection, for Jung, is the unconscious transfer of a subjective psychic content onto an external object or person, who then appears to the projecting subject to actually possess the quality in question.(21) What makes projection so difficult to detect from the inside is exactly what I experienced on that street: the reaction presents itself as a perception — this man’s visibility is somehow inappropriate here — rather than as what it actually is, a disturbance originating in my own unintegrated history and merely triggered, not caused, by his presence. The work of withdrawing a projection, in Jung’s account, begins with the uncomfortable admission that the disturbance says more about the one disturbed than about the object of disturbance. That admission is the spine of this entire essay.

A caution is required here, and I want to enter it before going further, because the apparatus I have just deployed is dangerously general. Projection, Shadow, scapegoat — these are universal categories, and they describe, in principle, any group’s disowned material landing on any convenient carrier. I am using them deliberately and exclusively to analyze an internal Jewish dynamic: what acculturated Viennese Jews did with the image of the Ostjude, and what a descendant of that world found still operating in himself on a street corner a century later. I am not offering them as an explanation of European antisemitism, and I want to say plainly why. Antisemitism in Europe was not one instance of scapegoating among others. It was made metaphysical — “the Jew” installed not merely as a disliked minority but as an explanatory key, held responsible simultaneously for capital and for Bolshevism, for rootless cosmopolitanism and for clannish tribalism, for being at once too visible and too hidden, too assimilated and too alien. (9) A hatred that can indict its object for opposite qualities at the same time is not a projection in the clinical sense. It is a structure of thought that has made itself immune to disconfirmation, and reducing it to a psychological mechanism would be a category error that flatters the perpetrators by rendering their conduct intelligible as ordinary human failing. Given Jung’s own conduct in the years when this was being done, borrowing his instruments for that second task would be worse than an error of method. (2) His vocabulary is the right instrument for examining what I felt. It is the wrong instrument for explaining what was done to my father’s city, and I do not want the one use mistaken for the other.

Erich Neumann is indispensable at this point for a reason beyond his general stature as a Jungian thinker: he was himself a Jew who had to reckon, personally and theoretically, with what it meant to be rooted in a besieged minority identity while committed to a psychology of individuation that Jung’s own conduct in the 1930s had failed to keep clean of the era’s antisemitism.(2) In The Origins and History of Consciousness, Neumann describes psychological development as proceeding through differentiation — the ego separating itself from an undifferentiated wholeness, which he calls the uroboric state, in order to become conscious and distinct — followed, ideally, by a later stage of integration, in which the differentiated elements are reunited into a richer whole.(22) Differentiation is necessary; it is how consciousness is built at all, and Neumann is careful to insist that the mythic hero’s separation from the maternal origin, the pattern he traces across world mythology, is not a betrayal but a developmental achievement, without which no individual consciousness could exist. But Neumann is equally clear, especially in Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, that differentiation can harden into what he calls, pointedly, a “scapegoat psychology” — the permanent rejection and expulsion of the very material from which the self-differentiated itself, rather than its eventual re-integration.(3) Neumann’s central ethical claim in that book, written in the direct aftermath of the Nazi catastrophe he had himself fled, is that the old ethic — which locates evil entirely outside the self and seeks only to expel or destroy it — is precisely the psychological structure that made mass complicity possible, because it never required the individual to recognize the disowned material as his own. The new ethic he proposes instead demands exactly the opposite: that each person take responsibility for integrating what has been split off, rather than projecting it outward onto a scapegoat who can then be safely despised, avoided, or worse. Read this way, Neumann’s book is not a general theory of psychological health; it is a direct response to what made the Shoah possible, and applying it to my own far smaller, far less consequential discomfort on a Viennese street is not a trivialization of his argument but, I think, exactly the kind of everyday vigilance he was asking of his readers. Neumann’s “new ethic” locates the danger not in differentiation itself, which is unavoidable, but in the refusal, afterward, to bring the disowned material back into relationship with the self. That, I think, is an almost exact structural description of what happened between Vienna’s assimilated Jewish community and the Ostjuden: a necessary act of cultural self-fashioning that hardened into something considerably less generous, and less complete, than it needed to be.

James Hillman changes the register of the inquiry again, and in a direction I find genuinely clarifying. Hillman’s archetypal psychology resists the diagnostic impulse almost entirely. (23) His characteristic move is to refuse the question “What is wrong with this reaction?” in favor of “What image has seized us?” — and, more pointedly for this essay, “Why has this image appeared now? Why in Vienna? Why not Chicago? Why not Jerusalem? Why only after finding your father’s grave?” That last question stopped me. It was not an abstract encounter with visible Jewishness — I have, in fact, spent much of my professional and religious life in the company of Orthodox and Hasidic Jews without this reaction arising. It happened in Vienna, on the specific streets my father’s generation had walked while performing invisibility, immediately after I had knelt at a grave that predated the catastrophe that made invisibility a fatal illusion. The image did not seize me in general. It seized me there, at that convergence of place and grief, which is precisely the kind of specificity Hillman’s method insists we attend to rather than explain away with a general theory of prejudice. I have made this argument before in a clinical register — that the therapeutic failure of theodicy is best met not by explanation but by attention to the image the sufferer actually presents. (24) It is a discipline easier to prescribe than to practice on oneself.

Part III of a five-part series. Notes and references appear at the end of Part V.