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Understanding
Jewish Identity for
Psychological and Educational Counselors
This page is directed at two types of professional counselors:
1. Professionals who
"counsel" in the broadest sense of the word.
These are professionals to whom people turn to for help, through
talk and through the relationship with the counselor, in order
to understand themselves better or in order to deal with existential,
professional, emotional, sexual or inter-personal difficulties.
The counseling process is not just a matter of understanding
and resolving problems; it also involves the evolution of a
person's identity. This category also includes psychologists
who work in Jewish institutions
and who counsel people who specifically wish to relate to their
Jewish identity.
2. This page is also directed at rabbis
who, in their capacity as spiritual
guides and leaders, are constantly consulted on personal matters
but who have no specific psychological training.
Psychological
counseling
When counselors try to understand the background and language
of those who come to seek their help, they usually find themselves
confronted with a world that is totally different to theirs.
Words themselves have a different content. Moreover, the inner
psychological structures which form the self are based on different
cultures. This is not only due to the fact that people have
different cultural and sociological affiliations. It is due
to the ethnopsychology on which self-development is based.
Thus,
- an individual's relationship with his family,
his mother, father, brothers and sisters has a different intrapsychic
representation depending if the person is Jewish or non-Jewish.
- the same applies to the way an individual represents
himself in terms of time, history, and national identity.
- and the same applies to everything that shapes
and influences the development of a particular personality:
happiness, inter-personal relationships, marriage, the family,
faults, guilt, recompense, pleasure, future, life itself, death,
the afterworld, violence, human coexistence, etc.
Every professional
counselor knows that understanding, analysis and evolution is
achieved through psychological work based on such representations:
herein are the events, relationships, identifications and images
which form the material a counselor works with. Nothing in this
domain is objective reality, for everything is viewed through
intrapsychic representation. Moreover, in a therapeutic, counseling
or analytical situation, this material emerges in a relationship
between two people who are different, both culturally and personally.
The need for a Jewish ethnopsychology
In view of the above, a professional
who wishes to give help should possess:
- knowledge of the psychology of the development of personality
and how it functions, knowledge of counseling or psychotherapy;
- knowledge of the world of intrapsychic representations,
which are expressed in a common language but which have different
inner meanings for a Jew and a non-Jew.
(This is the case for every person and his individual world.
My doctoral thesis focused on the influence of cultural imagination
in dreams and I analyzed this subject in relation to several
cultures, taking into consideration the role of different languages.)
In the case of Judaism, certain
facts should be known by all professionals working in the field
of psychology:
- Judaism possesses an ancient corpus of knowledge
on the development of cognitive processes in individuals: these
processes are expressed in inter-personal relationships, group
relations, discussions, conflicts and arbitration. My book,
Lev Gompers, is entirely devoted to this corpus of knowledge
and teaches how to study it.
- Judaism possesses an ancient corpus of knowledge for
perfecting middot - the human and spiritual qualities which
characterize men in their relationships with others. A Jew is
thus given, through education, a number of parameters which
guide his relationships with others, and he is also given a
strict set of laws for the development and rectification of
these middot. These are, for example, modesty, humility, sense
of propriety, love, respect for others, joy, marital relations,
relations with one's parents, children, and neighbors. Jewish
tradition transmits guidelines for reflection, self-awareness,
acknowledgment of errors, and self-improvement.
- Judaism possesses an ancient corpus of knowledge and
laws for mastering sexual and aggressive urges (towards others
or towards oneself).
- Judaism possesses an ancient corpus of knowledge on the
processes of self-awareness and projection. This is particularly
strong in relation to the validity of judicial testimony.
- Judaism possesses an ancient corpus of tradition of inter-personal
support, which is developed through study, prayer, meditation,
daily, weekly and annual rituals.
- Judaism possesses an ancient corpus of knowledge on the
different psychological processes of those who develop
these qualities by sustaining family traditions, returning to
tradition or through integrative study.
I would like to stress that, in a similar way, these dimensions
concern everyone (non-Jews as well) who seek help.
Ethnopsychiatry and ethnopsychology take all these dimensions
into account. Judaism presents a special problem because
its educational and therapeutic systems of thought were formulated,
put into practice and transmitted more than 3000 years ago and
are practiced today in the same written and oral language.
These dimensions nearly always play a conscious or unconscious
role, because of the fact that non-Jews also view Jews specifically
as Jews.
Psychological counselors and the
need for a basic knowledge of Jewish ethnopsychology.
The reason why this corpus of knowledge is inaccessible today
is because:
- it is not taught in modern institutions in this double
context;
- it requires extensive knowledge of Judaism, rather than
psychology, in order to understand it in depth and put it into
practice.
Thus, the majority of counselors and psychologists (or associated
professions) have no possibility of studying the subject in
depth.
Certain rare psychologists or other professional counselors
have some knowledge of this domain but they rarely study it
systematically, nor do they apply it in practice.
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