Fishl Schneersohn’s MENTSH-VISNSHAFT: Science or Literature?

• In Event: VISNSHAFT AF YIDDISH: Science in Translation

Abstract

Fishl Schneersohn (1888-1958) was a writer and a psychologist who wrote in Yiddish—not only literary works, but also scientific studies. His Hasidic background and his deep interest in Eastern European Jewish thought and culture explain in part why he wrote novels in Yiddish; but why did he write science in Yiddish? Yiddish was not the language of universities, clinics or research; moreover, any psychologist who knew Yiddish would also have known at least one of the major European languages of science. But many of Schneersohn’s scientific works were composed and published only in Yiddish. Why?

In short, because while Yiddish may not have been a language of science, it was a language of literature. For Schneersohn the two categories were enmeshed, and his two corpuses – literary and scientific – are two halves of a single project. I will explore this project by focusing on Schneersohn’s concept of MENTSCH-VISNSHAFT (science of man) and his innovative therapeutic method of PSIKHOLOGISHE EKSPEDITSIYE (psycho-expedition), both elaborated in his book DER VEG TSUM MENTSH: DI YESOYDES FUN MENTSH VISENSHAFT UN DI LERE FUN NERVEZISHKEYT (Vilna, 1927), and implicitly, I argue, in his novels. Schneersohn’s psychology draws on case studies from his clinical practice but also from literary classics; his particular approach is enabled by literature and best articulated in literature. In fact, his own novels demonstrate his theories: drawing on the tradition of the psychological novel, they present cases of psychological crisis and resolution. The picture that emerges from a comparison of his psychological scientific works and his psychological literary works is a view of human psychology that defiantly rejects the scientism of experimental psychology and clinical psychiatry which he dismisses as “alien to life.” Schneersohn likewise abjures the universal claims of psychoanalysis, whose dogma is incapable of grasping “concrete human life.” Schneersohn argues, I will show, that only the novel is capable of representing and explaining the complexity of human experience and thus offering a basis for effective therapy.

Author

• Samuel Spinner, Johns Hopkins University