GermanJews Between Freud, Marx, and Halakha

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Leo Baeck InstituteYear Book Vol. 0, No. 0,1^20 doi:10.1093/leobaeck/ybz008
GermanJews between Freud, Marx, and Halakha:

Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, Erich Fromm, and the
Psychoanalysis ofJewish Ritual in 1920s
Heidelberg1
BY PAUL LERNER
University of Southern California
ABSTRACT
This essay explores the psychoanalytic sanitarium (Therapeutikum) directed by Frieda Fromm-
Reichmann and Erich Fromm in Heidelberg from 1924 to 1928. The Therapeutikum aimed to
combine adherence to Jewish ritual with psychoanalytic practice and radical politics for a group
of GermanJews who were rethinking their Orthodox backgrounds in light of new intellectual and
political currents and modern sensibilities. Visitors to the sanitarium included many leading
German-Jewish thinkers, and Heidelberg’s proximity to Frankfurt placed the Therapeutikum in
the orbit of the Institute for Social Research and near a major hub in the renaissance of Jewish
learning then occurring. At the centre of the article is a discussion of essays by Fromm-
Reichmann and Fromm that subjected Jewish ritual (kashrut and shabbat) to psychoanalytic
investigation. Appearing in Imago in 1927, the articles marked the two writers’ public break with
Orthodox Judaism. This essay argues that the Imago articles marked a crucial moment in the
political, intellectual, and religious history of German Jewry. Even if the Fromms’ synthesis of
Freudianism, radical politics, andJudaism was conceptually shaky, their sanitarium illustrates the
centrality of psychoanalysisças a sensibility, a hermeneutic and above all a way of creating social
and communal bondsçto a generation of German Jews navigating the challenges of German and
Jewish modernity.
1
I have presented versions of this essay at USC’s Casden Institute Faculty and Graduate Student
Research Seminar, the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of
Pennsylvania, the Psychoanalysis and Hermeneutics programme at Bar Ilan University, and ‘Der
Kreis’, the graduate student-run German Studies workshop at the University of California at
Berkeley. I am grateful for these opportunities and for the feedback I received from colleagues at
these venues. I also thank my former student Ko Ricker for her research assistance. My thanks also
to Lisa Silverman and Sharon Gillerman for their extremely helpful comments and to Sheer Ganor
for sharing with me her photographs of the site. Finally, I would like to thank the two anonymous
readers and Almut Becker and Anna Kealy for their invaluable assistance in shepherding this essay
through the production and copy-editing process.
ß The Author(s) (2019). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Leo Baeck Institute. All rights reserved.
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2 P. Lerner
In a 1927 article the psychoanalyst Frieda Fromm-Reichmann recounted the case of
a young man, an apparently gifted student from an Orthodox Jewish background,
who secretly made the decision to stop keeping kosher. With his ¢rst bites of non-
kosher meat, the patient experienced a sudden rush, prompting the emergence of
ecstatic, profoundly sexual feelings. This developed to the point where he could no
longer walk by a butcher shop without pausing to gawk lustily at the meats on
display, appearing ‘like a dog snapping at sausages’.2 The student’s condition
deteriorated to the point that, as Fromm-Reichmann recorded: ‘As soon as I looked
at the meat, I got a long-lasting erection, my breathing became quick and agitated,
and I found myself given over to a state of the highest sexual arousal. This
[reaction] peaked when ordering forbidden meat dishes in a restaurant, and after
eating caused deep drowsiness as after coitus’.3 The condition persisted for several
months but gradually diminished to the point where the patient could consume
meat without experiencing sexual arousal.
Elsewhere in the article, which appeared in ImagoçSigmund Freud’s
interdisciplinary journal for applying psychoanalytic perspectives to the
humanitiesçFromm-Reichmann documented analogous behavior in a twenty-
year-old female patient. This young woman found herself eating lunch in a (non-
kosher) restaurant with a male friend for whom she had romantic feelings. She had
ordered a ‘permitted’ dish, meaning, one could infer, something vegetarian and
probably cold, but she rashly grabbed some of the meat from her companion’s plate
and consumed it. This patient recounted the ‘tantalizing’ sexual feelings she
experienced, again associating the transgressive episode to sexual arousal.
Why did these two patients experience such powerful erotic feelings when they
violated Jewish dietary laws and the strict Orthodoxy of their households? Fromm-
Reichmann recounted these cases to introduce her psychoanalytic interpretation of
the practice of kashrut or ‘Jewish food rituals’, as she labelled it in the 1927 essay.
Drawing on ideas Freud presented inTotem and Taboo (1913) and elsewhere, Fromm-
Reichmann treats neurotic behavior as a kind of struggle to balance pre-
civilizational impulses with the demands of contemporary society. She assumes
that primal drives, in this case incestuous urges, remain active in the unconscious
minds of modern subjects. Fromm-Reichmann sees Jewish eating restrictions as a
collective attempt to suppress these urges, and their transgression thus unleashes
repressed sexual energies which, although initially overwhelming, gradually
dissipate over time.
Fromm-Reichmann begins her essay with an observation about patients turning
away from Orthodox practice. Implying that she has a good many such cases in
her care, as we will see, the psychoanalyst was simultaneously making a coded
confession that she too was on such a path, that she was exchanging one kind of
piety for another, namely Orthodox Jewish faith for adherence to psychoanalysis.
The ¢rst thing to go in her patients on this path, Fromm-Reichmann claims, is
2
Frieda Fromm-Reichmann,‘Das ju«dische Speiseritual’, in Imago 13 (1927), p. 245.
3
Ibid., pp. 245^246.
GermanJews between Freud,Marx, and Halakha 3
daily davening (praying three times a day), the most private of acts, and kashrut is
generally the last practice that these post-Orthodox (to use today’s parlance) Jews
relinquish. Her explanation is not simply that eating practices are more public and
thus harder to hide for young people distancing themselves from the strictures of
Orthodox Judaism, but that kashrut has particular psychological signi¢cance for
Jews as an ethno-religious group, a signi¢cance she sets out to demonstrate
through the psychoanalytic method.
In unearthing this now obscure articleçwhich has not secured a place in either
the psychoanalytic or the halakhic canonçthis essay aims to shed light on a
broader impulse to synthesize Judaism and psychoanalysis, in this case to use
psychoanalytic categories to explain the Jewish past and religious rituals, in ways
that resonated with a generation of German Jews who were seeking to make Jewish
practices more meaningful in light of new intellectual and cultural currents.4
Fromm-Reichmann plays a central role in this process, due less to the
sophistication of her theoretical work than to her utopian investment in
psychoanalysis. The institution she created, the Heidelberg Therapeutikum,
became a magnet for German-Jewish intellectuals, attracting, as we will see, a
veritable Who’s Who of the generation of thinkers who reached adulthood around
the First World War. But the Therapeutikum, which existed from 1924 to 1928, has
received little attention from scholars of German-Jewish history.
Fromm-Reichmann is known today mostly for her clinical skills, especially her
work after emigrating to the US, at the Chestnut Lodge Sanitarium in Maryland,
and for her treatment of the young schizophrenic patient Joanne Greenberg (aka
Hannah Green), which was documented in Greenberg’s popular book and the hit
1977 ¢lm I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, in which Swedish actress Bibi Andersson
played the role of Dr Fried (Fromm-Reichmann).5 Fromm-Reichmann has not
received signi¢cant scholarly attention outside of the world of psychoanalytic
studies; her only biography, by Gail Hornstein, is helpful, if at times excessively
hagiographic, and much of what has been written about her relies on hearsay and
anecdote.6
In the Heidelberg period Fromm-Reichmann, along with Erich Fromm (whom
she married in 1926), stands out as one of a select few practitioners who turned
psychoanalysis into a lived experience and a mode of sociability, ultimately
recasting it into a language and shared culture open to Jews regardless of their
4
One of the few articles to discuss Fromm-Reichmann’s text is: Ann-Louise S. Silver, ‘Introduction to
Fromm-Reichmann’s ‘‘Female Psychosexuality’’ and ‘‘Jewish Food Rituals’’’, in Journal of the American
Academy of Psychoanalysis 23, 1 (Spring 1995), pp. 1^6. For the larger context, see Reinhard Blomert,
‘Das vergessene Sanitarium’, in Norbert Giovannini, Jo-Hannes Bauer, and Hans-Martin Mumm
(eds.), Ju«disches Leben in Heidelberg: Studien zur einer unterbrochenen Geschichte, Heidelberg 1992, pp. 249^
262; and Ursula Engel,‘Das Heidelberger ‘‘Thorapeutikum’’’, in PsA-Info 30 (March 1988), pp. 4^16.
5
Originally published as Hannah Green, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, New York 1964. On Fromm-
Reichmann, see above all Gail A. Hornstein, To Redeem One Person Is To Redeem the World: The Life of
Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, New York 2005, a thorough, if somewhat hagiographic, account of her life
and work.
6
See also Angelika Klotschke, ‘Frieda Fromm-Reichmann: Leben und Werk,’ med. diss. University of
Mainz 1979.
4 P. Lerner
background or level of practice. This investigation thus lies at the intersection of
several concerns and questions in German-Jewish history, the history of the human
sciences, and utopian thought and practice in the modern world. It also notes the
gender dynamics in German-Jewish history and historiography, whereby Fromm-
Reichmann disappeared into near obscurity, while the men who inhabited the
community she created became and remained celebrated thinkers. Through the
work of Fromm-Reichmann, ¢nally, we can gain insight into how ideas exist in
communities and lived spaces, the role played by psychoanalysis in German-
Jewish thought and acculturation, and the circumstances surrounding the peculiar
convergence of Judaism, psychoanalysis, and Marxism in one community.
I. GERMAN-SPEAKING JEWS AND PSYCHOANALYSIS REVISITED
HowJewish was psychoanalysis? This question has been asked in various forms since
Freud’s own timeçby friends and foes of Freud and the movement he started as
well as by Freud himselfçand more recently has spawned its own cottage
industry.7 Starting in the 1980s, a body of literature began to emerge on the
condemnation of psychoanalysis as a‘Jewish science’ by the National Socialists and
the subsequent persecution and emigration of analysts from German-controlled
Europe.8 The 1990s saw a surge of interest in Freud’s Jewish identity and in new
ways of understanding the Jewish dimensions of his work and the community that
formed around him.9 In his 1993 study, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi stressed Freud’s
connections to Jewish learning and Judaism with extraordinary elegance and
7
Freud made multiple references to connections between his (and his colleagues’) Jewishness and his
creation of psychoanalysis. In a passage made famous by the historian Peter Gay, Freud wrote to his
friend Oskar P¢ster,‘Quite by the way, why did none of the devout create psychoanalysis? Why did
one have to wait for a completely godless Jew?’ Quoted in Peter Gay, A Godless Jew: Freud, Atheism,
and the Making of Psychoanalysis, New Haven 1987, p. vii.
8
Above all, see: Geo¡rey Cocks, Psychotherapy in theThird Reich:The Go« ring Institute, Oxford 1985; Regine
Lockot, Erinnern und Durcharbeiten: Zur Geschichte der Psychoanalyse und Psychotherapie im
Nationalsozialismus, Frankfurt am Main 1985; and Karen Brecht, Volker Friedrich, Ludger M.
Hermanns, Isidor J. Kaminer, and Dierk H. Juelich (eds.), ‘Hier geht das Leben auf eine sehr merkwu«rdige
Weise weiter. . .’ Zur Geschichte der Psychoanalyse in Deutschland, Bremen 1985; Hans Martin Lohmann
(ed.), Psychoanalyse und Nationalsozialismus. Beitra«ge zur Bearbeitung eines unbewa«ltigten Traumas, Frankfurt
am Main 1984; and the intriguing, if ultimately perplexing, trilogy by Laurence Rickels, Nazi
Psychoanalysis, Minneapolis 2002. On the emigration of psychoanalysts to Palestine, see Eran J.
Rolnik, Freud in Zion: Psychoanalysis and the Making of Modern Jewish Identity, transl. by Haim
Watzman, London 2012.
9
See above all: Sander Gilman, Freud, Race, and Gender, Princeton 1995; idem, The Case of Sigmund Freud,
Baltimore 1993; more recently, Jay Geller, Freud’s Jewish Body: Mitigating Circumcisions, New York
2007; and Eliza Slavet, Racial Fever: Freud and the Jewish Question, New York 2009. Early works on the
topic include: David Bakan, Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition, Mineola 2004 (originally
published 1958); and Dennis B. Klein, The Jewish Origins of the Psychoanalytic Movement, Chicago 1985.
For an enlightening overview of the issue, see Anthony D. Kauders, ‘From Place to Race and Back
Again: The Jewishness of Psychoanalysis Revisited’, in Simone La«ssig and Miriam Ru«rup (eds.),
Space and Spatiality in Modern German-Jewish History, New York 2017, pp. 72^87.
nuance, suggesting that for Freud psychoanalysis represented an attempt to form a
secular Jewish religion.10 Sander Gilman has linked the Jewishness of
psychoanalysis to notions of Jewish di¡erence that pervaded European culture. In
a series of in£uential interventions, he argued that Freud had internalized
antisemitic notions of Jews as hypersexual and neurotically disposed, and used the
language of science to cast these traits as universal human characteristics.11 Yet,
while these bodies of literature helpfully sketch the context for Freud’s clinical work
and theoretical insights, and their short- and long-term reception, they leave many
key areas unexplored. For one, these works tend to concentrate predominately, if
not exclusively, on Freud himself, telling us little or nothing about the dozens of
Jewish doctors, psychologists, and thinkers who grappled with his ideas and
expanded upon their medical, psychological, and social implications.
Furthermore, when they do venture beyond Freud, these studies tend to
concentrate solely on ¢gures who remained in the o⁄cial psychoanalytic fold,
neglecting the broader resonance of psychoanalytic ideas and clinical methods
among those who eventually parted from psychoanalytic orthodoxy or who were
not clinically active at all, but drew on psychoanalytic theory in the course of other
intellectual pursuits. And ¢nally, focusing solely on practitioners risks obscuring
the role and experiences of patients, many of whom took psychoanalytic ideas
seriously and engaged actively in their own analysis, and whose struggles and
con£icts provided key material for working out psychoanalytic ideas.
Here I look for alternate frameworks to illuminate an intriguing episode in the
history of psychoanalysis, asking how Freudian ideas cemented social bonds
among German-Jewish thinkers and how psychoanalysis helped manyJews rethink
their investment in Judaism and Jewishness, both in Weimar-era Germany and in
emigration after the National Socialist assumption of power in Germany and the
Austrian Anschluss. I frame this episode in the history of psychoanalysis as the
creation of a mode of Jewish sociability or a‘Jewish subculture’ in inter-war central
Europe which, to some extent, was then reconstituted in emigration. The
Heidelberg Therapeutikum, the sanitarium created by Fromm-Reichmann and
Erich Fromm in 1924, site of the above-mentioned cases, provides a case studyç
indeed, the most long-lived and institutionally grounded example of
psychoanalysis functioning as a Weimar-era Jewish subculture. Other examples
include the Baumgarten Orphanage inVienna, which in the immediate aftermath
of the First World War was brie£y directed by Siegfried Bernfeld, another
psychoanalyst who sought to synthesize Judaism, psychoanalysis, and radical
political ideas in an institutional setting. At Baumgarten, before he was forced out
of his position by the risk-averse Viennese-Jewish community, Bernfeld developed a
therapeutic approach that combined psychoanalysis, progressive approaches to
education, and Zionism. He treated the traumatized Jewish children who came
10
Y. H. Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses: JudaismTerminable and Interminable, New Haven 1993.
11
See Sander L. Gilman,‘Review of Peter Gay,‘‘A Godless Jew’’ and ‘‘Freud: A Life for Our Time’’’, The
Jewish Quarterly Review, New Series, v. 79, no. 2/3 (Oct. 1988^Jan. 1989), pp. 251^253, and works cited
above.
6 P. Lerner
into his care by building social and communal bonds, training them in practical
skills for eventual settlement in Palestine, and creating positive associations
around Jews and Judaism to overcome the lingering e¡ects of antisemitic
persecution and violence.12
Another example may be found in the nascent psychoanalytic community in
Mandatory Palestine, which Veronika Feuchtner characterizes as a kind of
continuation of Weimar Jewish culture in emigration.13 Arnold Zweig, who
likewise sought to synthesize psychoanalysis and Judaismçor better put, to use
psychoanalytic terms to explain Jewish history and the Jewish experience, also
plays a role in this story. Lonely, unappreciated, and marginalized in his Haifa
exile, Zweig claimed that the ordeal of forced emigration, disruptive and
anguishing for anyone, was particularly traumatic for Jews, whose history of
expulsions created a deep, instinctual longing for home. The cure, Zweig noted,
could not be achieved through psychoanalysis alone. Rather, as he proclaimed to
an audience at the Palestine Psychoanalytic Society,‘to heal the Jews’ required both
psychoanalysis and political action: only revolutionary social change could spare
the Jews endless repetition of this enduring cycle, and hence the introduction of the
third term, revolutionary socialism or Marxism, into this fusion of Judaism and
psychoanalysis.14
German-Jewish historiography has recently begun to emphasize the centrality of
home and place, as both physical space and abstract community, to German-
speaking Jews both before and after emigration, asking how Jews navigated the
public sphere and found new ways of anchoring their lives amid the dizzying
changes of modern life.15 What unites the cases of Fromm-Reichmann, Bernfeld,
and Zweig is the use of psychoanalysis both as a vehicle for articulating the longing
for home and as a set of practices around which Jews created and reinforced
solidarities in new environments. Psychoanalysis could be added to the various
practices, the forms of associational life, the aesthetic choices, and daily habits
through which Jews created normality and a sense of belonging or being at home
12
On Bernfeld, see above all Peter Dudek,‘Er war halt genialer als die anderen’: Biographische Anna«herungen an
Siegfried Bernfeld, Giessen 2012. On his work at Baumgarten, see Daniel Barth, Kinderheim
Baumgarten: Siegfried Bernfelds ‘Versuch mit neuer Erziehung’ aus psychoanalytischer und soziologischer Sicht,
Giessen 2010; and Siegfried Bernfeld, Kinderheim Baumgarten: Bericht u«ber einen ernsthaften Versuch mit
neuer Erziehung, Berlin 1921.
13
See Veronika Feuchtner, Berlin Psychoanalytic: Psychoanalysis and Culture in Weimar Republic Germany and
Beyond, Berkeley 2011, especially ch. 3, ‘The Berlin Psychoanalytic in Palestine’. On psychoanalysis in
Mandatory Palestine, see Rolnik, Freud in Zion. For Zweig’s account of his relationship with Freud
and his perspective on psychoanalysis and history, see Arnold Zweig, Freundschaft mit Freud: Ein
Bericht, Berlin 1996.
14
Feuchtner, Berlin Psychoanalytic, ch. 3; Deborah Vietor-Engla«nder, ‘Arnold Zweig in Pala«stina’, E¤tudes
Germaniques vol. 63, no. 4 (2008), pp. 909^921.
15
On home, space and place in modern Jewish history, see Sarah Wobick-Segev, Homes Away from Home:
Jewish Belonging in Twentieth-Century Paris, Berlin, and St. Petersburg, Stanford 2018; La«ssig and Ru«rup,
Space and Spatiality; Lisa Silverman, ‘Jewish Memory, Jewish Geography: Vienna before 1938’, in
Arjit Sen and Lisa Silverman (eds.), Making Place: Space and Embodiment in the City, Bloomington
2014, pp. 173^198; Leora Auslander, ‘Coming Home? Jews in Postwar Paris,’ Journal of
Contemporary History 40, no. 2 (April 2005), 237^259.
through periods of dizzying historical change. And with Bernheim’s progressive
pedagogy and in Zweig’s Haifa writings, radical politics constituted a third pillar
of these itinerant Jewish identities, which together with psychoanalysis and Jewish
nationalism, formed a cluster of beliefs and a⁄rmations whose a⁄nitiesçunlikely
as they are from today’s perspectiveçseemed self-evident to a generation of
thinkers grappling with the e¡ects of both material and psychological repression.
Indeed, Fromm and Bernfeld, along with Wilhelm and Annie Reich, Otto
Fenichel, Edith Jacobsen, and a handful of others, comprised the so-called Kids
Seminar [Kinderseminar] of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute in the late 1920s
and early 1930s: the group that strove to combine Freud’s insights into the psyche
with Marx’s materialistic approach to social change, leading to a progressive
psychoanalysis aimed at enlightening the working classes and alleviating their
su¡ering.16 Fromm-Reichmann, Fromm, Bernfeld, and Zweig combined these
commitments with an a⁄rmative Jewish identity, Zionism, and in some cases
Jewish observance, in ever-shifting combinations and formations. One setting
where these ideas and practices converged was Heidelberg in the mid-1920s.
II. PSYCHOANALYSIS IN HEIDELBERG: THE THERAPEUTIKUM AND

THE RHYTHMS OF JEWISH LIFE
The Heidelberg Sanitarium (or Therapeutikum) was the brainchild of Frieda

Fromm-Reichmann. Erich Fromm was present at the founding, but it is not clear
how involved he was in the sanitarium’s creation, or indeed if his romance with
Reichmann began before or after it opened its doors in 1924, two years before their
June 1926 marriage.17 Reichmann, who was thirty-¢ve at the time, describes the
twenty-four-year-old Fromm as a kind of spoiled intellectual, remarking that he sat
around reading while she did all the work. Hailing from an Orthodox family in
Ko«nigsberg, Reichmann began her medical studies in 1908, right at the moment
when women were ¢rst permitted to matriculate at German universities.18 She
found herself drawn to psychiatry, in part from her sense of outrage at the poor
conditions and cruel treatment of psychiatric patients. Indeed, she paid attention
to the utterances and subjective states of these patients, which was very much out of
step with mainstream psychiatry at the time.19
Reichmann spent much of the First World War working with brain-injured
soldiers at a facility in Ko«nigsberg. After the war she followed her mentor, the
holistic neurologist Kurt Goldstein, to Frankfurt, where she continued working to
rehabilitate soldiers with brain injuries. In his clinical work with wounded
16
The classic account is Paul Robinson, The Freudian Left: Wilhelm Reich, Geza Roheim, Herbert Marcuse,
New York 1969.
17
Silver quotes Fromm-Reichmann as saying that the decision to open the sanitarium was hers and
Erich’s. Silver,‘Introduction’, p. 4.
18
See Patricia M. Mazo¤n, Gender and the Modern Research University: The Admission of Women to German
Higher Education, 1865^1914, Stanford 2003.
19
Hornstein, To Redeem One Person, pp. 17^21.
8 P. Lerner
veterans, Goldstein emphasized the brain’s ability to adapt to changed conditions
and the creative and generative responses of his patients, a position which clearly
resonated with and made a deep impression on the young Reichmann.20
In 1920 Frieda Reichmann moved on to the Weier Hirsch Sanitarium in
Dresden, which was under the direction of psychiatrist J. H. Schultz, later
notorious for his cooperation with the National Socialist regime (despite his Jewish
wife) and his support for the destruction of ‘lives unworthy of life’ through the
National Socialist ‘euthanasia’ programme.21 Throughout these years, as Fromm-
Reichmann later recounted, she kept the Sabbathçattending Saturday lectures
but not taking notesçand continued to observeJewish dietary laws and holidays.
Her religious observance is not a gratuitous detail, because, driven by Jewish
ethical imperatives, Reichmann understood her Jewishness and her psychological
work as closely connected.22 At Weier Hirsch, for example, she o¡ered her
therapeutic services free of charge to members of the Blau-Weiss, the Zionist youth
group, and worked out arrangements whereby wealthier sanitarium patients
subsidized the young Zionists, who in turn contributed their skills in household
management or o¡ered Hebrew lessons to earn their keep.23 She even found them
accommodations near the Weier Hirsch and created a kind of ‘sanitarium within
a sanitarium’ for the Zionist youth.24 Why there was a community of impoverished
young Zionists around Dresden who were desperate for psychotherapy is a
question worth pondering. Perhaps their ardent Zionism contributed to familial
rifts, leaving students and young adults without the emotional or ¢nancial support
of parents, as famously occurred in the household of Gershom Scholem.25
Reichmann left the Weier Hirsch in 1924 and set o¡ to Heidelbergçpossibly to
be near her mentor Kurt Goldsteinçto establish her own facility. There she was
also closer to the unorthodox psychoanalyst Georg Groddeck, who played a key
role in her and Erich Fromm’s personal and professional development. Groddeck’s
therapeutic eclecticism, his emphasis on the mind’s ability to cure the body, and his
iconoclasm certainly in£uenced both Frieda and Erich in their clinical work and
their later willingness to part from Freudian doctrine. One of a number of
charismatic mentors the two encountered in these years, Groddeck drew them
both into psychoanalytic circles in southwestern Germany.
Although Reichmann had been paid well at the Weier Hirsch, it was nearly
impossible to save during the years of in£ation. To open her own sanitarium she
thus resorted to borrowing money from relatives so that she could make a down
20
Ibid., pp. 25^29.
21
On Schultz, see especially G. Cocks, Psychotherapy in theThird Reich.
22
Hornstein, To Redeem One Person, pp. 52^73.
23
Fromm-Reichmann interview tape 1, n.d. Author’s private collection.
24
Hornstein, To Redeem One Person, p. 54.
25
See, for example, Jay Howard Geller, The Scholems: A Story of the German-Jewish Bourgeoisie from
Emancipation to Destruction, Ithaca 2019; and Mirjam Zado¡, Werner Scholem: A German Life, transl. by
Dona Geyer, Philadelphia 2018.
payment on the stately house she selected, which was located in the leafy, middle-
class neighborhood of Neunheim.26
The house, known asVilla Cornelia, had been the site of a girls’ boarding school,
a research institute, and a battalion headquarters. It was conveniently located, but
far enough o¡ the beaten path for the tranquility necessary for therapeutic practice.
At the beginning money was tight at the Therapeutikum and there was a great
deal of improvising. Fromm-Reichmann later described the early days as
possessing a kind of wild, anarchic, and erotic excitement even as she struggled to
make ends meet.
The way we built that thing up [was]: I would sit in a room with a patient and analyze
and look around and I’d see oh we need curtains for this room. As the next fee came in
from somebody, I’d go and buy those curtains. And so we got the thing gradually going.
Then we analyzed people [as compensation] for letting them work. I analyzed the
housekeeper, I analyzed the cook: You may imagine what happened if they were in a
phase of resistance! It was a wild a¡air, and I may add we later decided to cut it out.
Erich and I had an a¡air. We weren’t married and nobody was supposed to know about
that and actually nobody did know.27
This was, from the moment of its founding, designed to be a Jewish institution: in
Fromm-Reichmann’s words, it was intended to ‘do something for the Jewish
people’.28 This sentiment re£ects in part her internalization of the sense of Jewish
deviance and pathology that circulated widely in Germany at the time, giving rise
to the impression that Jews in fact needed help.29 It may have also paralleled
Zweig’s concern with the lingering psychological consequences of the expulsions
and persecution that marked Jewish history. And from the quote’s full contextç
‘We thought we would ¢rst analyze the people, and second, make them aware of
their tradition and live in this tradition, not because the Lord has said so, but
because that meant becoming aware of our past. . .’çit seems that ‘doing
something for the Jewish people’ meant reconnecting them with Jewish traditions,
overcoming their deracination and alienation from their Jewish roots through
forming social bounds and living a Jewish life, a vision akin to Siegfried Bernfeld’s
approach to healing traumatic Jewish orphans at Baumgarten.30 This was a
frankly grandiose, even utopian vision and a grand entrance into the world of
Jewish intellectuals and psychoanalysts. Reichmann and Fromm wanted to make a
splash.
26
‘My God, how I worked in those [days] because you see the money had to be given back. What did I
get? Twenty-¢ve thousand [Reichsmarks], that was all. Fifteen I had to give back and ten I got as
gifts.’ Rainer Funk, Erich Fromm: His Life and Ideas: An Illustrated Biography, transl. by Ian Portman
and Manuela Kunkel, New York 2000, p. 60.
27
Quoted in Funk, Erich Fromm, p. 60.
28
Jack Jacobs, The Frankfurt School, Jewish Lives and Antisemitism, Cambridge 2014, p. 29.
29
In addition to works cited above, see Sharon Gillerman, Germans into Jews: Remaking the Jewish Social
Body in Weimar Germany, Stanford 2009; Ce¤line Kaiser and Marie-Luise Wu«nsche (eds.), Die ‘Nervosita«t
der Juden’ und andere Leiden an der Zivilisation: Konstruktionen des Kollektiven und Konzepte individueller
Krankheit im psychiatrischen Diskurs um 1900, Paderborn 2003.
30
Jacobs, Frankfurt School, p. 28.
The site of the Heidelberg Therapeutikum as it appears today. Credit: Sheer

P. Lerner
Ganor
10
It has proven di⁄cult to piece together much about actual life and conditions at
the sanitarium, but from several accounts we know that the villa had space for
¢fteen long-term residents along with various visitors. Fromm and Fromm-
Reichmann also treated outpatients. Little is known about the kinds of patients
they saw, except for scattered references to their taking in young people from
Jewish families, and to cases that bordered on schizophrenia. Fromm-Reichmann
also noted that patients often stayed on after recovery and worked in the
sanitarium to remain in the setting and pay o¡ their debts.31
Life for the Therapeutikum’s denizens adhered to Jewish religious strictures. Its
residents celebrated shabbat and Jewish holidays, maintained a kosher kitchen and
‘bentsched’ (said prayers of thanks) after the meals, which were often the focal
point of sanitarium life. Fromm’s teacher, Salman Baruch Rabinkow, a Russian-
born scholar who had inspired Fromm with his synthesis of traditional Jewish
observance and a commitment to radical politics, and who had introduced the
young Fromm to Hasidic practice, was brought on as a Talmud teacher.32 Fromm-
Reichmann claimed that Rabinkow tried psychoanalysis with her and, she
suggested with a tinge of regret, had expressed romantic interest in her.33 Jewish
philosopher and pedagogue Ernst Simon, who spent at least several months at the
Therapeutikum in 1924, but ceased his analysis amid pressure from his ¢ance¤ Toni,
later characterized Fromm-Reichmann’s observance at that point as ‘true to the
Torah’ (torahtreu) but not dogmatically Orthodox.34
Heidelberg’s proximity to Frankfurt, site of an important Orthodox community
and of key elements of what the historian Michael Brenner has in£uentially
referred to as a ‘Jewish Renaissance’, played an enormous role in the institution’s
development.35 Although this might have been a mixed blessing in some ways, and
Fromm-Reichmann later complained that ‘the people from Frankfurt came
because we had kosher food, not because they wanted to be analyzed. The rabbis
came because they could eat kosher food. They did not want to be analyzed.’36
Indeed, before the days of the Therapeutikum, Fromm began studying with yet
another mentor, Rabbi Nehemiah Anton Nobel, an Orthodox Frankfurt rabbi with
both a ¢rm ethical and philosophical grounding and a deep interest in Hasidism.
Fromm introduced his close friends Leo Lo«wenthal, Ernst Simon, and Georg
Salzberger, a liberal Frankfurt rabbi, to Rabbi Nobel. As Fromm’s biographer
Lawrence Friedman points out, the circle that they formed, the nucleus of the
31
Ursula Engel, ‘Vom ‘‘Thorapeutikum’’ nach Chestnut Lodge: Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, 1889^1957’,
in Thomas Pla«nkers, Michael Laier, Hans-Heinrich Otto, Hans-Joachim Rothe, and Helmut Siefert
(eds.), Psychoanalyse in Frankfurt am Main: Zersto« rte Anfa«nge, Wiederanna«herungen, Entwicklungen, Tu«bingen
1996, pp. 141^152, esp. 147.
32
Daniel Boorstin,The Legacy of Erich Fromm, Cambridge, MA 1991, p. 14; Lawrence Friedman and Anke
M. Schreiber, The Lives of Erich Fromm: Love’s Prophet, New York 2013, pp. 14^18.
33
Blomert,‘Vergessene Sanitarium’, p. 254; Funk, Erich Fromm, pp. 53^55.
34
Sechzig Jahre gegen den Strom: Ernst A. Simon, Briefe von 1917^1984, Tu«bingen 1998 (Schriftenreihe
wissenschaftlicher Abhandlungen des Leo Baeck Instituts, 59), p. 171.
35
Michael Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany, New Haven 1998.
36
Engel,‘Vom ‘‘Thorapeutikum’’ nach Chestnut Lodge’, p. 148.
12 P. Lerner
Frankfurt Lehrhaus, drew in Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem, and Franz
Rosenzweig and pre¢gured the social and intellectual bonding around Jewishness
and secular ideas that occurred in theTherapeutikum.37
Fromm, then a newly minted PhD who found employment at the Frankfurt Institute
for Social Research and belonged to the Frankfurt Institute for Psychoanalysis, played
a key role in forging the synthesis of Marxism and psychoanalysis so important to
early critical theory.38 His later works, especially Escape from Freedom (1941) andThe Art
of Loving (1956), earned him a reputation as an important psychological and political
theorist and became key countercultural texts in the 1960s.39 Fromm trained as a
sociologist at the University of Frankfurt, where he wrote a dissertation with Alfred
Weber on ‘Das Ju«dische Gesetz: Ein Beitrag zur Soziologie des Diasporajudentum’
(Jewish Law: A Contribution to the Study of Diaspora Judaism), which analysed the
role of law in three disparate Jewish communities: Karaites, Reform Jews and
Hasidim.40 Fromm also hailed from an Orthodox background and an intensely
Jewish environmentçFriedman notes that Weber was his ¢rst and only non-Jewish
mentor and was the ¢rst non-Jew with whom he formed a close, though formal,
relationship.41 At the same time Fromm began psychoanalysis and participated in the
establishment of a Jewish-psychoanalytic milieu that came to include the sociologist
and Frankfurt School sociologist Leo Lo«wenthal, his wife Golde Lo«wenthal (who
had been engaged to Fromm), and Simon, all of whom were later analysed by
Fromm-Reichmann. Lo«wenthal later characterized the Therapeutikum as ‘a kind of
Jewish-psychoanalytic boarding school and hotel’.42
Simon recalled: ‘The Jewish ‘‘rhythm of life’’ was an integral part of the
intellectual atmosphere of the community, which was purelyJewish. At meals there
were prayers and readings from traditional Jewish scriptures. The Sabbath and
Jewish holidays were carefully observed.’43 And in the words of Leo Lo«wenthal:
An almost cult-like atmosphere prevailed there. . . the sanatorium adhered to Jewish

religious laws: the meals were kosher and all religious holidays were observed. The Judeo-
religious atmosphere intermingled with the interest in psychoanalysis. Somehow in my
recollection I sometimes link this syncretic coupling of the Jewish and the psychoanalytic
traditions with our later ‘marriage’ of Marxist theory and psychoanalysis at the Institute,
which was to play such a great role in my intellectual life.44
The illustrious visitors to the Therapeutikum included Gershom Scholem and

Siegfried Kracauer, who stopped by on his way through Heidelberg in July 1924.
37
Friedman and Schreiber, Lives of Erich Fromm, pp. 10^12; Rachel Heuberger, Rabbiner Nehemias Anton
Nobel: die ju«dische Renaissance in Frankfurt am Main, Frankfurt 2005. I have not seen evidence that
either Buber or Rosenzweig visited the Therapeutikum.
38
On Fromm, see above all Friedman and Schreiber, Lives of Erich Fromm.
39
That Fromm’s friends jokingly called his book ‘Escape from Frieda’ suggests the degree of immaturity,
if not downright misogyny, that Fromm-Reichmann had to endure among the men in this circle.
40
Friedman, Lives of Erich Fromm, p. 13; Boorstin, Erich Fromm, p. 13; Funk, Eric Fromm, p. 55.
41
Friedman, Lives of Erich Fromm, pp. 12^13.
42
Quoted in Jacobs, Frankfurt School, p. 28.
43
44
Kracauer intended to return, but Fromm-Reichmann discouraged this, fearing that
he already knew too much about Freud to fruitfully undergo psychoanalysis with
her.45 It seems plausible that Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer and other
Frankfurt Institute members at least visited the sanitarium, but no direct evidence
of this has surfaced.
The unique synthesis of Judaism and Freudian psychoanalysis which underlay
the Therapeutikum earned it the nickname ‘Torah-peutikum’, which Scholem
used, apparently somewhat sardonically. Fromm-Reichmann was not amused. It
was a fragile synthesis at best, and the institution that embodied it petered out
after only four years. Ernst Simon pointedly remarked that Fromm and Fromm-
Reichmann had psychoanalysed their way out of Judaism. To be sure, nearly all
the participants moved away from religious observance, with the exception of
Simon, who left for Palestine in 1928, the year the sanitarium shuttered its doors
due to both the Fromms’drifting away from Jewish practice and ongoing ¢nancial
di⁄culties.
It appears then that theTherapeutikum was a site of Jewish mobility, both in its
itinerant populationçmany of whom brie£y converged around Frankfurt and
Heidelberg as one stop in what ended up being a long series of destinationsçand
in the con£icted path both into and away from traditional Jewish observance
undertaken by patients and practitioners alike. But what about the work that
Fromm-Reichmann and Fromm produced in these years? We now turn to their
psychoanalytic interpretation of Jewish ritual in two articles that appeared in the
1927 volume of Imago. It bears pointing out that it was Theodor Reik, a key but
understudied ¢gure who taught Fromm at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute,
who deserves credit for pioneering the application of psychoanalytic
investigation to understanding Jewish ritual and a variety of forms of religious
devotion in his 1919 work on the psychology of religion. His chapters on the
psychoanalytic signi¢cance of the shofar and the Kol Nidre prayer are of
particular signi¢cance here, as is Freud’s preface to the volume, and of course
Freud’s 1913 Totem and Taboo, which clearly inspired the couple’s religious and
historical investigations.46
III. ERICH FROMM AND THE PSYCHOANALYSIS OF SHABBAT
Erich Fromm’s 1927 article ‘Der Sabbath’ characterizes shabbat in terms of a tension
with deep roots in Jewish history and ongoing echoes in Jewish observance.47 On
one side stands the punitive, severe aura around shabbat restrictions, indeed the
45
S. Kracauer to Marianne Kamnitzer, 26 October 1960, quoted in Ingrid Belke and Irina Renz (eds.),
‘Siegfried Kracauer 1889^1966’, Marbacher Magazin 47 (1988), p. 41. Also see Walter Benjamin to G.
Scholem, 7 July 1924, in Gershom Scholem and T. W. Adorno (eds.), The Correspondence of Walter
Benjamin, 1910^1940, Chicago 1994, p. 245.
46
Theodor Reik, Probleme der Religionspsychologie. 1. Das Ritual, Leipzig^Vienna 1919.
47
Erich Fromm,‘Der Sabbath’, in Imago 13 (1927), pp. 223^234.
14 P. Lerner
severity with which violations of shabbat were treatedçaround the prohibition
against work and other proscribed activitiesçand on the other we ¢nd the joyful,
restorative, and relaxing side, with its attendant pleasures and health and
psychological bene¢ts. These two dimensions of shabbat observance, Fromm notes,
often work at cross purposes. In other words, fear of violating the shabbat laws (and
the consequences of such violations) could add an element of dread and a punitive
quality to a day that is otherwise devoted to relaxation and joy. Thus, the
prohibition against work that lies at the heart of sabbath observance does not
always translate into or even permit relaxation and enjoyment.
Fromm seeks the roots of this tension in the historical development of the shabbat
laws, claiming that the ascetic side of shabbat observance was in existence during
the Maccabe period, when, for example, the prohibition against work was so
extreme that one was not permitted to defend oneself from aggression, even at the
risk of death. In 200 BCE, Fromm claims, sexual congress was forbidden on the
Sabbath. Citing the Mishnah (Shabbat 10, 6), he notes the extreme severity in
punishment against violating prohibitions against such practices as trimming
¢ngernails or applying makeup on the Sabbath. He points out, further, that the
prohibition against work is so extreme in contemporary observance that Jews are
forbidden from even touching the objects or tools (mukseh) one might use to
perform work.
The Torah itself does not resolve the ambiguity around shabbat, Fromm asserts,
because shabbat observance is given multiple explanations and foundations. For
one, shabbat is introduced as a reminder of bondage in Egypt and in
commemoration of God’s resting on the seventh day after six days of creation. And
the tension is only deepened by alternating associations of shabbat with Yom
Kippurçcalled a Sabbath of Sabbaths and certainly a day of deprivationçand
with the conditions of the messianic era (a Sabbath-like state).
After a brief comparison of the laws of the Jewish Sabbath with Christian and
Babylonian equivalents, Fromm focuses on the problem of work. Traditional Jewish
law delineates thirty-nine activities (melachot) that are forbidden on shabbat, and the
list originates in the biblical description of the construction of the mishkan, the
tabernacle that the Hebrews transported through the desert. Fromm parts from
this conception and de¢nes work in quasi-Marxist termsças operations upon
nature/earth in the sense of agricultural cultivation or deriving nourishment from
the land. This he poses in contrast to more contemporary conceptions of work that
carry psychological connotations (work is what you do not feel like doing, or work
is a taxing, exhausting activity) or an economic sense (work is an activity that
brings ¢nancial gain or sustains one economically). Thus, for Fromm, work
emerges as contact with natureçhe reminds us that these laws arose at a time
when the Jewish people were primarily engaged in agricultureçso therefore the
strictest shabbat prohibitions concern working the land.
So if work is a kind of conquest (Bezwingung) of nature, indeed of ‘mother earth,’
the prohibition, Fromm argues, can be seen as enforcing a taboo against incest.
Hence, shabbat comes originally from a negative commandment, which he claims is
supported by the observation that refraining from agricultural work, an enforced
day of not working, could have severe consequences. The Bible depicts God’s
relationship to creation in terms of father^son con£ictçfor example, in the
Garden of Eden or the Tower of Babelçand God’s relationship to the earth as one
of marriage. God’s rest after creation can also be seen as a kind of death, since rest
and death are equated in dream language and in the imagination of children:
enforced Sabbath rest, for Fromm, can be thus seen as an echo of the repressed
memory of the murder of the father-God ¢gure.
But what about the joyful side of shabbat? After all, the tradition treats shabbat as a
day for wearing ¢nery, feasting (to the point that shabbat fasts are prohibited),
kindling lights, rejoicing in song, and so forth. And indeed, rabbinic conceptions of
shabbat allow the violation of these restrictions when it is a matter of saving one’s
life or the life of another. They also encourage pleasure through conjugal relations.
For Fromm, only psychoanalysis can resolve this apparent con£ict between the
severe and the joyful, the two sides of shabbat.
Fromm goes on to re¢ne his ideas around the prohibition against work, presenting
agricultural labor as a re-creation of paradise, a state of Edenic harmony with
(mother) natureçindeed, a return to maternal love. Recasting the tension
between the two sides of shabbat in psychoanalytic terms, Fromm sees it then as a
tension between the incest taboo and the longing for harmony with earth
(maternal love). Drawing on Freud and with reference to its origins in the
Babylonian Sabattu, periodic days of praying and atonement and making up with
God, Fromm asserts that the Sabbath originally represented atonement for the
primal crime, patricide, and the incestuous wish. The prohibition on working thus
served as punishment for the Oedipal crime, and simultaneously as protection
against further incestuous impulses. Prohibition against work thus derives from
fear of God’s retributive wrath. The means of prevention or protection take on
increasingly the qualities of a ful¢lment. In other words, turning the day of
atonement into a day of ¢nding harmony with nature brings to ful¢lment what was
originally supposed to be suppressed.
The Hebrews’economic circumstances had to change, too, for this to be possible:
work had to become so e⁄cient and productive that one could take a day o¡
without consequences, to the point where not working could become pleasurable.
Also, work became so di⁄cult and intense that a day o¡ could seem restorative
and pleasurable.
Towards the conclusion of his essay, Fromm also draws on psychoanalytic
perspectives to explain the prohibitions of Yom Kippur. Among the Yom Kippur
restrictions: eating and drinking emerge as symbols of the oral assimilation of
father; sexual acts as a restaging of incest; wearing leather as an identi¢cation with
father. The sacri¢ce of the korban is a symbolic reenactment of the death of father
and tshuva (a return to the proper path from a life of sin) can be seen as a return
into maternal love, the repetition of the crime at the pre-genital level. That Yom
Kippur begins solemnly and ends with joy and elation parallels the transformation
of Shabbat and telescopes it into one day. This essay, which purports to ¢nd
16 P. Lerner
Freudian drivesçand the tension between themçat the heart of Jewish observance,
exhibits also Fromm’s materialist grounding, his interest in Marxist analytical
categories, and his iconoclasm. While the essay holds these disparate tendencies
together in a kind of dynamic balance, Fromm’s syncretism, his tense synthesis,
soon gave way as ¢rst his Judaism and then his Freudianism grew less and less
orthodox.
IV. FRIEDA FROMM-REICHMANN AND THE PSYCHOANALYSIS OF

KASHRUT
As noted above, in her Imago essay Frieda Fromm-Reichmann refers to patients in

her treatment who are on the path towards giving up Orthodox practice. In
addition to the two cases already discussed, she implies that many other patients in
a similar predicament are in treatment with her. Most of these patients seem to be
young, because she writes about their secrecy towards their parents and their
experiences of what seems to be young love. This suggests that the Therapeutikum
became a place for Jews to seek psychoanalytic help when they were breaking free
of parental strictures and strict Jewish observance, which is exactly what was
happening in the lives of Fromm-Reichmann and Fromm at this point, despite the
institution’s founding goals. Indeed, Fromm-Reichmann depicts the movement
away from Jewish ritual observance as akin to the healing of a neurotic patient,
implicitly pathologizing religious practice and turning on its head the idea that the
purpose of theTherapeutikum was to bring Jews closer to their traditions.
In her essay, Fromm-Reichmann follows the methods pioneered by Freud,
Abraham and Reik, by which the analyst elucidates seemingly curious cultural
practices in the same way that he or she explains dreams in the psyche; by
following chains of associations and deciphering the coded symbolic language of
the unconscious. But in this case she unravels these symbols by digging into Jewish
history, suggesting that each Jew bears the residue, the traces, of the historical
development of the Jewish people’s practices. Fromm-Reichmann begins by
breaking down the laws of kashrut into four areas: ritual slaughter; the delineation
of which animals may be eaten; the separation of milk products and meat in space
and time (i.e. the time interval between consumption of meat and of dairy); and
the prohibition against non-Jews handling food and wine to be consumed byJews.
It is clear, Fromm-Reichmann asserts, that Jewish eating practices are based on
the same principles as those of totemic religions in which the totem animal may not
be eatença point that Karl Abraham and Reik also make.48 The animals that the
biblical text allows Hebrews to consume are those that can grow horns and antlers.
Among sea creatures, she points out, it is those with ¢ns and scales. Horns and
antlers, she writes, symbolize the phallus, thus they function as a father image. The
leather straps of the te¢lin (phylacteries worn around the head and strapped to the
48
Karl Abraham,‘Der Verso«hnungstag’, in Imago 5 (1917^19), pp. 80^90; Reik, Probleme, pp. 178^311.
left arm), furthermore, represent the animal skin, and the ‘boxes’ worn on the upper
arm and head are further evidence that the animals with horns are the original
totemic animals of the Hebrews. (Archaeologists, she notes, have been ¢nding
horned totems in Babylonian digs.)
Removal of blood in kosher slaughtering, Fromm-Reichmann argues, has to do
with making the identi¢cation of slaughtered animal and father ¢gure less direct,
since among ancient Hebrews, blood was considered the carrier of the nefesh
(spirit). For the Hebrews, in contrast to most totemic religions, the sacri¢cial
animal can in fact be eaten. The conscientiousness of a kosher-eaterçmastering all
the rules, maintaining separate dishes for dairy and meat, checking ingredients for
prohibited items and so forthçis parallel to a compulsive neurotic’s behavior. She
then endeavours to claim, just as we saw in Erich Fromm’s essay, that at the basis of
all neuroses and all religious ideas stands the Oedipus complex.
Eating the totemic animal emerges thus as a kind of identi¢cation with the father
¢gure, in which the consumer unconsciously takes on his characteristics. Eating
milk and meat together is akin to the Urverbrechen (primary/originary sin) of
incest; hence the separation of milk and meat functions as incest prevention. The
same logic explains the waiting period after eating meat before consuming dairy. It
allows time for the psychological e¡ects of the father identi¢cation to wear o¡
before turning to the maternal, placing a chronological fence between the two
consumptive acts.
Fromm-Reichmann notes in passing that the biblical prohibition against taking a
mother bird out of her nest with her o¡spring comes not from humanitarian
impulse but from the same incest taboo, preventing consuming a mother with her
babies. As Sa¤ndor Ra¤do observed, the ¢fth commandment, the biblical injunction
to honour one’s father and mother, also serves as a means of incest prevention. He
translates it as: ‘Heed the precedence of your father by keeping away from your
mother. Otherwise your father will smite you’.49 Fromm-Reichmann renders the
commandment not to cook a kid in the milk of its mother, the basis of much of
kashrut, including the separation of meat and dairy, as essentially ‘do not eat your
child’. By this logic, circumcision can be understood as father’s preemptive strike
against his son/rival, as emasculation: the ritual, she argues, defuses a father’s
sadism towards his sons into a harmless set of practices.
Fromm-Reichmann traces the prohibition on Gentiles handing kosher food back
to the importance of common mealtimes in antiquity and the constant state of war.
This was a way of keeping enemies away. Wine, in particular, is surrounded by the
strictest regulations since it symbolizes blood and in this case would represent the
symbolic presence of the enemy’s nefesh, as if the enemy were there.
The point of Fromm-Reichmann’s exercise is to elucidate the psychological
consequences of adhering to or violating Jewish food strictures. The two patients
mentioned above hid these transgressive acts from their parents, feeling a sense of
49
Sa¤ndor Rado, ‘Das fu«nfte Gebot’, in Imago 9 (1923), pp. 129^130, 129: ‘Achte das Vorrecht des Vaters,
indem Du die Mutter meidest, ansonsten der Vater dich to«tet’.
18 P. Lerner
shame and guilt, which she traces to the unconscious guilt of eating the meat of the
dead father in the sacri¢cial animal. Like Fromm’s analysis of the Sabbath and
Freud’s in Totem and Taboo, Fromm-Reichmann then comes to the conclusion that
religious rituals and restrictions act to suppress incestuous desires, and that their
transgression thus £oods the subject with a rush of undammed sexual energies.
V. THE DEMISE OF THE THERAPEUTIKUM
The appearance of these two articles marked a signi¢cant turning point in the lives
of Fromm-Reichmann and Fromm and the group clustered around them in
Heidelberg. This was Fromm’s ¢rst psychoanalytic article, and it is hard to avoid
the impression that the two were desperate for Freud’s attention and approval.50
When they sent o¡ the essays for publication, Fromm-Reichmann recalled that the
two proclaimed, with perhaps a trace of irony, ‘Look at us, two real Jewish
intellectuals!’51 Being a Jewish intellectual for them meant publishing a
psychoanalytic study, an assumption fully consistent with Sander Gilman’s
argument that the Jewishness of psychoanalysis lay in its scienti¢c rigour and the
move to universalize particular Jewish characteristics. Indeed, by adopting
Freudian concepts and extending them into Jewish ritual practice, the pair sought
to secure Freud’s favour and their position among Germany’s psychoanalytic
luminaries.52
On another level, Fromm-Reichmann also saw the articles as a public statement of
their break with Orthodoxy. Traditional Jewish practice in a psychoanalytic
institution seemed sustainable to Fromm-Reichmann and Fromm at least for the
¢rst year or two, but subjecting Judaism to psychoanalytic scrutiny suggested that
Freud’s dogma had a higher epistemological status than religious ideas. And thus
the fragile synthesis could not hold; the balance tipped to the Freudian side.
Indeed, as we have seen, even as Fromm-Reichmann was analysing Jewish patients
adrift from Orthodox practice, she herself was on a similar journey. While
Gershom Scholem maintained that psychoanalysis led the two out of Judaism,
others such as Leo Lo«wenthal and Fromm-Reichmann herself stated that the move
away from Orthodoxy had less to do with psychoanalysis than with their
politicization and ‘social engagement’.53 It may then have been Marx and not
Freud, or at least the tug of the nascent Freudian left, which led the Heidelbergers
50
Fromm-Reichmann later noted that that issue of Imago was a special issue, perhaps for Freud’s
(seventieth) birthday. See Silver,‘Introduction’, p. 5.
51
Fromm-Reichmann interview tapes (author’s private collection).
52
Interestingly, Fromm-Reichmann never referred to this study in her subsequent psychoanalytic work;
Lo«wenthal suggests that it got a lot of attention among analysts but that she did not recover from
Karen Horney’s critique, which pointed out the notion of a speci¢c female form of the Oedipus
complex that she had overlooked. See Lo«wenthal, An Unmastered Past: The Autobiographical Re£ections
of Leo Lowenthal, ed. and intro. by Martin Jay, Berkeley 1987, p. xx.
53
Engel,‘Das Heidelberger ‘‘Thorapeutikum’’’, p. 14.
down this path away from strict religious observance.54 Scholem later noted that
when he met Fromm several years later in Berlin, the latter had become a
convinced Trotskyite who patronizingly pitied Scholem’s ‘petty-bourgeois’
attitude.55 Tellingly, as the anecdote suggests, Fromm judged Scholem’s continued
interest inJudaism from a Marxist and not a psychoanalytic perspective.
Historians should be wary of psychoanalysing their subjects, but a measure of
speculation in that direction with Fromm-Reichmann and Fromm is hard to avoid.
As noted, the publication of these studies coincided with the authors’ break with
Jewish dietary lawsçon Passover, no less, when the couple ceremoniously ate
bread in a parkça transgressive and possibly erotic experience that evokes the
Fromm-Reichmann cases at the beginning of this essay. Declared Fromm-
Reichmann:‘We decided we couldn’t [do] it any longer because our conscience and
hearts were no longer in it. So at Passover, Erich and I went into [the] park in
Heidelberg and ate leavened bread. We couldn’t do it at home because there were
these people who all relied on us.’56 This furtive, private renunciation of
Orthodoxy only slightly preceded their more public declaration in the publication
of the two articles. Realizing that they had not been struck by lightning after
breaking the Passover restrictions, Fromm and Fromm-Reichmann then ventured
into the world of non-kosher food; Fromm-Reichmann started with ham and eggs,
eventually discovering her taste for oysters, lobster, and other once-forbidden
delicacies.57
It also bears recalling that Fromm-Reichmann was eleven years older than
Fromm and later characterized their relationship in maternal terms, noting that
Erich needed someone to take care of him.58 Fromm-Reichmann was already a
mother at this time, having adopted a child while in Ko«nigsberg, and this may
have furthered her maternal associations. Indeed, maternal love and Oedipal
dynamics play a central and decisive role in these studies, both of which orient
Jewish ritual law around anger at father ¢gures and desire for maternal love (or its
suppression). And a marriage which began as a clandestine a¡air between analyst
and patient must surely have had been accompanied by profound feelings of guilt,
shame, and thrilling eroticism in both partners.
Both Fromm-Reichmann and Fromm portray the observant Jew as in a dynamic
state, oscillating between the need for maternal love and reassurance and a drive
to destroy and take the place of the awesome, godlike paternal ¢gure. This echoes
the dilemma of the ancient Hebrews, who, they imply, approached the deity with
fear and envy and sought relief in harmony with the earth. It also speaks to the
authors’ situation, their delicate balance of tradition and iconoclasm, their longing
54
On Fromm’s synthesis of Freud and Marx, see Stuart Je¡ries, Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the
Frankfurt School, London 2016, pp. 148^158.
55
Blomert,‘Vergessense Sanitarium’, p. 258.
56
Quoted in Funk, Erich Fromm, p. 61.
57
Silver,‘Introduction’, p. 5.
58
See Hornstein, To Redeem One Person, p. 59; Fromm-Reichmann interview tapes (author’s private
collection).
20 P. Lerner
for a cosy home, a sense of belonging, and a deeper connection to Jewish tradition,
and their utopian investment in radical social change. The gender binaries that
operate throughout these analyses and in the institution itself surely deserve
further scrutiny, especially in light of the gender dynamics within the
Therapeutikum and the speculation by contemporaries and later chroniclers about
the a¡airs and extramarital dalliances that occurred there.59 And more research
needs to be done to unearth further details about who frequented the
Therapeutikum and what went on there. Still, it seems clear that the institution
simultaneously o¡ered its share of titillating experiences and solid communal
bonds; it was exciting, yet somehow cosy at the same time, mapping the
intellectual horizons and social solidarities of its residents. A site of serious clinical
interventions, if not fully realized intellectual ambitions, it o¡ered a brief glimpse
of an intriguing but ultimately untenable fusion of psychoanalysis, radical politics,
and Judaism. Certainly not as a stable or fully coherent hermeneutic, but as a
sensibility, a mode of sociability and a lived experience, the Therapeutikum
re£ected the unique needs and longings of young German-Jewish intellectuals on
the precipice.
59
Friedman notes that Fromm-Reichmann had several a¡airs, possibly including one with Rabinkow,
and that Fromm became romantically interested in Karen Horney. Friedman and Schreiber, Lives of
Erich Fromm, p. 22.

GermanJews Between Freud, Marx, and Halakha

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GermanJews Between Freud, Marx, and Halakha

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GermanJews between Freud, Marx, and Halakha:

I. GERMAN-SPEAKING JEWS AND PSYCHOANALYSIS REVISITED

II. PSYCHOANALYSIS IN HEIDELBERG: THE THERAPEUTIKUM AND

The Heidelberg Sanitarium (or Therapeutikum) was the brainchild of Frieda

The site of the Heidelberg Therapeutikum as it appears today. Credit: Sheer

An almost cult-like atmosphere prevailed there. . . the sanatorium adhered to Jewish

The illustrious visitors to the Therapeutikum included Gershom Scholem and

III. ERICH FROMM AND THE PSYCHOANALYSIS OF SHABBAT

IV. FRIEDA FROMM-REICHMANN AND THE PSYCHOANALYSIS OF

As noted above, in her Imago essay Frieda Fromm-Reichmann refers to patients in

V. THE DEMISE OF THE THERAPEUTIKUM

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