Neurotic Children, Nervous Chasidim: Fishl Schneersohn’s Psychology and the Novel

• In Event: The Pathologies of Jewish Literature

Abstract

Fishl Schneersohn was a psychologist, novelist, and scion of a prominent Hasidic dynasty. Born and raised in a Hasidic family in eastern Europe, Schneersohn studied in Berlin and maintained an active research and publishing agenda spanning Poland, Germany, and even America. In addition to his student years in Berlin from 1908-1914, his professional career was punctuated by a lengthy spell in Berlin in the mid-20s. His psychological work – written in Yiddish and in part translated into German and English – encompasses studies of childhood neurosis, the psychological function of play and dreaming, and his idiosyncratic theory of “psycho-expedition.” All bear the mark of Hasidism and Jewish mysticism, which Schneersohn sought to translate into the idiom of modern psychology. His literary works – four novels and other scattered short prose pieces – are largely focused on the world of Hasidic Jewry. These works, all written in Yiddish, include a BILDUNGSROMAN describing a Hasidic youth caught between tradition and modernity and an evocation of Berlin’s SCHEUNENVIERTEL, a locus of Jewish tradition in the midst of urban modernity. A recurring motif in these novels is the psychological toll of the struggle between tradition and modernity and the role of traditional belief in mediating between psychological pathology and health.

Seen in this way, the ostensible gulf between his backward and eastward looking belles-lettres and his innovative psychological work vanishes. His literary project, I argue, is in many ways a testing ground for his psychological theories, which in turn were derived from elements of Hasidic mysticism and praxis. This imbrication of literature and psychology, case history and literary narrative, contributes to a project that is at once theoretically experimental and formally traditional. Nevertheless, Schneersohn’s generic conservatism (in his focus on the novel, especially the BILDUNGSROMAN) is, I argue, an essential component of his instrumentalization of literature as a therapeutic technique, indeed a tool of living. In this respect Schneersohn’s works can be considered reflective of the historical avant-garde.

Author

• Samuel Spinner, Johns Hopkins University