Significant Moments: Part 11

Wagner . . .
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust (Part II).
. . . could not deny there were other thoughts too, of things permissible and impermissible, which would not be stilled.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elective Affinities.
“ . . . What will she do when she has lost me? Will she . . .
Paul Roazen, Freud and His Followers quoting Sigmund Freud.
. . . she was, to be sure, still very young—
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elective Affinities.
. . . Will she lead a life of ascetic austerity?”
Paul Roazen, Freud and His Followers quoting Sigmund Freud.
And then, working on these thoughts, his imagination would evoke one possibility after another. If he was not to . . .
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elective Affinities.
. . . survive her . . .
W.H. Hudson, Green Mansions.
. . . then he would make over to her the possession of his estate. There she would live as an independent person, there she should be happy, even—when his self-tormenting imagination took him that far—happy with somebody else.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elective Affinities.
On going to bed, very dismal thoughts . . .
Cosima Wagner's Diaries (Thursday, September 30, 1869).
. . . an alien state of mind, anxious and disturbing . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson and Terri C. Masson, Buried Memories on the Acropolis: Freud's Response to Mysticism and Anti-Semitism.
For a moment . . .
William Faulkner, Light in August (Chapter 18).
. . . as fate would have it, . . .
Anthony Hecht, The Darkness and the Light: Poems.
. . . we find ourselves . . .
Leonard Garment, Crazy Rhythm.
. . . staring out the window . . .
Woodie Allen and Marshall Brickman, Annie Hall.
. . . towards the lake.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elective Affinities.
We are reminded of the words of the poet:

All that is to live in endless song
Must in life-time first be drown'd.
Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism quoting Friedrich Schiller, The Gods of Greece.
_____________________________________________________________

There is a place where time stands still.
Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams.
It is old, untouched and unchanged by modern life. It is . . .
The Diary of Anais Nin: Volume 1 – 1931-1934.
. . . Bayreuth, . . .
Hermann Levi, Letter to His Father (Rabbi Levi of Giessen).
. . . a place where . . .
Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams.
. . . Space and Time are one.
Richard Wagner, Parsifal.
One would think that I . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, Letter to Karl von Gersdorff.
. . . I of all people, . . .
Hermann Levi, Letter to His Father (Rabbi Levi of Giessen).
. . . would not go there of my own free will; and yet in the past year I have been there twice, and twice in the year before that.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Letter to Karl von Gersdorff.
How curious—
Cosima Wagner’s Diaries (Monday, July 1, 1878).
I remember here, in passing, that . . .
Primo Levi, The Periodic Table.
. . . the King of Bavaria . . .
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams.
. . . early in his reign (1866) had visited . . .
Robert W. Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, and His Music.
. . . the beautiful synagogue, . . .
Gottfried Wagner, The Twilight of the Wagners: The Unveiling of a Family’s Legacy.
. . . the Altneuschul synagogue,
Aharon Appelfeld, The Kafka Connection: A Displaced Writer Revisits A Haunted City of His Youth.
. . . in Bayreuth, . . .
Hermann Levi, Letter to His Father (Rabbi Levi of Giessen).
. . . and pledged . . .
Robert Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, and His Music.
. . . before the assembled spectators . . .
Franz Kafka, An Imperial Message.
. . . to follow his father’s example in working toward Jewish emancipation.
Robert W. Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, and His Music.
The Altneuschul, which was built around 1270, is the oldest functioning synagogue in Europe.
Aharon Appelfeld, The Kafka Connection: A Displaced Writer Revisits A Haunted City of His Youth.
No building ever came into being as easily as did this temple—or rather, this temple came into being the way a temple should.
Franz Kafka, The Building of the Temple.
Jewish legend has it that, after the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, angels brought a stone from the rubble; it was placed in the Altneuschul’s foundation on the condition that, when the Messiah arrived, the stone would be returned to the Holy City.
Aharon Appelfeld, The Kafka Connection: A Displaced Writer Revisits A Haunted City of His Youth.
There had been . . .
Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow.
. . . Jews . . .
Primo Levi, The Periodic Table.
. . . in Bayreuth since the beginning of the thirteenth century . . .
Gottfried Wagner, The Twilight of the Wagners: The Unveiling of a Family’s Legacy.
. . . though without ever getting beyond, even in their most flourishing periods, the status of an extremely tiny minority. They were never much loved or much hated; stories of unusual persecutions have not been handed down. Nevertheless, . . .
Primo Levi, The Periodic Table.
—the fact remained—Wagner was an anti-Semite and . . .
Peter Gay, Freud, Jews, and Other Germans.
. . . I was a Jew:
Primo Levi, The Periodic Table.
. . . and the son of a rabbi.
Peter Gay, Freud, Jews, and Other Germans.
(Nietzsche had described . . .
Robert W. Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, and His Music.
. . . the Grand Old Man . . .
Republican National Committee, The Origins of ‘GOP’.
. . . as “an old, unchanging man.”)
Robert W. Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, and His Music.
Regardless of the depth of his character flaw—and I had no doubt that it was a trench of considerable magnitude—I was sure . . .
Irvin D. Yalom, Love’s Executioner.
. . .we could . . .
Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
. . . do business together.
Victor Hugo, Toilers of the Sea.
‘You are much more likely to be able to do business with someone else’, . . .
Hugo Young, The Iron Lady: A Biography of Margaret Thatcher.
. . . I thought, . . .
Irvin D. Yalom, Love’s Executioner.
. . . if you have a realistic assessment of their approach, their strengths, their fears, and you do not go starry-eyed thinking that one day . . .
Hugo Young, The Iron Lady: A Biography of Margaret Thatcher.
. . . anti-Semitism . . .
Peter Gay, Freud, Jews, and Other Germans.
. . . will collapse like a pack of cards, because it will not.’
Hugo Young, The Iron Lady: A Biography of Margaret Thatcher.
In the midst of . . .
Herman Gollob, Me and Shakespeare: Adventures with the Bard.
. . . a sojourn . . .
Henry James, The Ambassadors.
. . . in Bayreuth . . .
Peter Gay, Freud, Jews, and Other Germans.
. . . then already prolonged to six months . . .
Henry James, The Ambassadors.
I recall that on several occasions I went . . .
Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery.
. . . to the synagogue, . . .
Dan Levin, Spinoza.
. . . where once again . . .
Herman Melville, Moby Dick.
. . . my hazy childhood memory of . . .
Aharon Appelfeld, The Kafka Connection: A Displaced Writer Revisits A Haunted City of His Youth.
. . . the peculiar music of the shul . . .
Daniel J. Boorstin, Cleopatra’s Nose: Essays on the Unexpected.
. . . grew into something tangible.
Aharon Appelfeld, The Kafka Connection: A Displaced Writer Revisits A Haunted City of His Youth.
He was remembering—memories within memories.
Robert Ludlum, The Parsifal Mosaic.
There came . . .
Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native.
. . . a Shabbat during which we read chapters XXI, 10-XXV of Deuteronomy, and as the cantor was chanting the Torah portion, . . .
Herman Gollob, Me and Shakespeare: Adventures with the Bard.
. . . I was struck by . . .
Irvin D. Yalom, Love’s Executioner.
. . . the following lines:—
Charles W. Chesnutt, The House Behind the Cedars.
When a man has a son who is disobedient and out of control, and will not obey his father or his mother, or pay attention when they punish him, then his father and mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of . . .
Deuteronomy 21:18-21.
. . . the Holy Community, . . .
Dan Levin, Spinoza.
. . . at the town gate. They shall say to the elders of the town, ‘This son of ours is disobedient and out of control; he will not obey us, he is a wastrel and a drunkard.’ Then all the men of the town shall stone him to death, and you will thereby rid yourselves of this wickedness. All Israel will hear of it and be afraid.
Deuteronomy, 21:18-21.
I sighed and settled back into my chair. I knew that . . .
Irvin D. Yalom, Love’s Executioner.
. . . it had always been . . .
Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native.
. . . the goal of parents and pedagogues to divert a child's attention from the motives for their own behavior to the supposedly bad and sinful motives behind the child's desires and to convince the child to be grateful for the way he or she has been raised.
Alice Miller, Thou Shalt Not Be Aware.
I believe that it was at this moment that I first began to consider seriously whether . . .
Irvin D. Yalom, Love’s Executioner.
. . . Freud's unconscious dependence on this tradition . . .
Alice Miller, Thou Shalt Not Be Aware.
. . . may have . . .
Irvin D. Yalom, Love’s Executioner.
. . . caused him to formulate the Oedipus complex, a theory that, in a new form, once again assigned all guilt to the child; this freed Freud from the painful isolation in which he found himself as a result of the discoveries he made in 1896 concerning parents' sexual abuse of their children. Shocking as people of that day found the idea of a child with sexual desires, this was still far more acceptable to the contemporary power structure, whose motives were disguised and buttressed by established methods of child-rearing, than was the whole truth about what adults do with their children, also in the area of sexuality.
Alice Miller, Thou Shalt Not Be Aware.
The week after the High Holy Days, as if in answer to penitential prayers, arrived the three books dealing with . . .
Herman Gollob, Me and Shakespeare: Adventures with the Bard.
. . . the problem of guilt . . .
Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena.
. . . I’d ordered with some trepidation. I tore open the cartons immediately, dreading that I’d find evidence that what I thought was an original approach to . . .
Herman Gollob, Me and Shakespeare: Adventures with the Bard.
. . . Wagner’s Parsifal . . .
Lucy Beckett, Richard Wagner: Parsifal.
. . . had been explored by savants past and present. But the out-of-print volumes from the past blessedly yielded no long-buried mines of interpretation that would explode in my face.
Herman Gollob, Me and Shakespeare: Adventures with the Bard.
There is a very clever essay in one of the books . . .
Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey.
. . . I read, . . .
Herman Gollob, Me and Shakespeare: Adventures with the Bard.
"Parsifal: A Betrayed Childhood: Variations on a Leitmotif by Alice Miller"
Isolde Vetter, Wagner in the History of Psychology.
. . . in which the author . . .
Thomas Hardy, Two on a Tower.
. . . Martin Buber, . . .
Aharon Appelfeld, The Kafka Connection: A Displaced Writer Revisits A Haunted City of His Youth.
. . . attempts a radical reinterpretation of Parsifal using the unconventional views of the psychoanalyst Alice Miller.
Isolde Vetter, Wagner in the History of Psychology.
Buber, who was a teacher at Hebrew University in those years, often lectured on Jewish guilt, in the course of which he was fond of quoting Kafka.
Aharon Appelfeld, The Kafka Connection: A Displaced Writer Revisits A Haunted City of His Youth.
Whereas the drama, in keeping with Freud's Oedipus theory . . .
Isolde Vetter, Wagner in the History of Psychology.
. . . has been seen over and over again, . . .
Franz Kafka, The Animal in the Synagogue.
. . . as the symbolic enactment of a necessary process of development by which the individual learns to conform, . . .
Isolde Vetter, Wagner in the History of Psychology.
. . . the author . . .
Thomas Hardy, Two on a Tower.
. . . seeks to turn this positive interpretation right side up. The process of development depicted here is not in the least necessary for Parsifal either as a boy or as adolescent. Rather it is necessary for the patriarchal society of the Grail brotherhood, which seizes the opportunity offered by the "pure fool," mistreating him as a sacrificial lamb and expecting him to solve the problems which their society has brought on itself.
Isolde Vetter, Wagner in the History of Psychology.
Oddly enough, the easiest route toward grasping the nature of these . . .
Robert W. Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, and His Music.
. . . ultimate realities . . .
Bryan Magee, Aspects of Wagner.
. . . lies through a consideration of Wagner's . . .
Robert W. Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, and His Music.
. . . own words.
Bryan Magee, Aspects of Wagner.
On this point it is best to let him speak through . . .
Robert W. Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, and His Music.
. . . his wife, Cosima
Arthur Rubinstein, My Young Years.
Note here.
Rudyard Kipling, Something of Myself.
Wednesday, April 14
Cosima Wagner’s Diaries (1870).
Cosima tells us . . .
Conrad Susa, Music of Unseen Worlds.
In the evening finished Oedipus [at Colonus by Sophocles]; tremendous impression, and R. remarks: "A special feature of the Greeks, which I believe is not to be found among us, is the sanctity and divinity of the curse-laden individual who is being punished in behalf of a whole generation. . . ."—
Cosima Wagner's Diaries (Wednesday, April 14, 1870).
It is a critique that all should consider seriously.
Leonard Shengold, Soul Murder.
To be sure, the . . .
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
. . . allegedly radical revision of . . .
Dana F. Sutton, Introduction to Laelia (1595).
. . . Wagner's Parsifal . . .
Lucy Beckett, Richard Wagner: Parsifal.
. . . turns out to be not so impressive after all.
Dana F. Sutton, Introduction to Laelia (1595).
What came to puzzle him, then, as it puzzled others was . . .
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
. . . the serious treatment of the problem of guilt, at least so it seems to me.
Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena.
In Parsifal . . .
Robert W. Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, and His Music.
. . . the elders . . .
Deuteronomy 21:18-21.
. . . unload their own sense of guilt onto the shoulders of the next generation in the person of Parsifal, . . .
Isolde Vetter, Wagner in the History of Psychology.
. . . the curse-laden individual . . .
Cosima Wagner's Diaries (Wednesday, April 14, 1870).
. . . thereby breaking that generation on the wheel of their demands and rendering its members sufficiently submissive as to rid them of their guilt, while in actual fact forcing them to accept the same obligation to atone for that guilt, an obligation which passes ineluctably from one generation to the next in a never-ending spiral.
Isolde Vetter, Wagner in the History of Psychology.
And so, at the place where time stands still, one sees . . .
Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams.
. . . one generation . . .
Franz Kafka, The Animal in the Synagogue.
. . . clutching . . .
Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams.
. . . the next, . . .
Franz Kafka, The Animal in the Synagogue.
. . . in a frozen embrace that will never let go.
Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams.
Among the dreams which have been reported to me by . . .
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams.
. . . Frau Wagner . . .
Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams.
. . . there is one which has special claims upon our attention at this point.
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams.
In a dream . . .
Hermann Hesse, Klein and Wagner.
—I saw a tongue of land surrounded by water. The waves were being driven forward and then back by the breakers.
Sigmund Freud, Dreams and Telepathy.
Now I realized that . . .
Franz Kafka, The Vulture (Der Geier)
. . . someone was singing on the water, . . .
Cosima Wagner's Diaries (Wednesday, January 16, 1878).
. . . which was filling every depth, flooding every shore.
Franz Kafka, The Vulture (Der Geier).
I said I did not care for it, then when we got nearer, . . .
Cosima Wagner's Diaries (Wednesday, January 16, 1878).
. . . it was the figure of a . . .
Wilkie Collins, The Evil Genius.
. . . half-grown lad, . . .
Thomas Mann, Death in Venice.
. . . vulnerable and alone . . .
Matthew Gurewitsch, Bayreuth, Like Wagner, Survives the Critics.
. . . who, still singing, sank . . .
Cosima Wagner's Diaries (Wednesday, January 16, 1878).
. . . into the watery abyss, . . .
Erica Jong, Fear of Flying.
. . . saying, "Adieu, Papa, adieu, Mama"!—
Cosima Wagner's Diaries (Wednesday, January 16, 1878).
A few moments later . . .
Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons.
. . . the child is . . .
Leonard Shengold, Soul Murder.
. . . cast ashore by the fury of the billows . . .
Lucretius, De Natura Rerum.
. . . but his eyes are closed and he has ceased to breathe.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elective Affinities.
Yes, . . . that was the end. An end of horror, a fatal . . .
Thomas Mann, Mario and the Magician.
. . . end: for after . . .
Stephen Leacock, My Discovery of England.
. . . the rescuer . . .
Edgar Rice Boroughs, The Monster Men.
. . . has gone through all the procedures for reviving the drowned, the good man shakes his head and to . . .
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elective Affinities.
. . . the mother’s . . .
Wilkie Collins, The Legacy of Cain.
. . . hopeful questions replies at first with silence and then a gentle No . . .
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elective Affinities.
And then?
Irvin D. Yalom, Love’s Executioner.
Woe, alas!
William Shakespeare, Macbeth.
I saw . . .
Richard Wagner, Parsifal.
. . . the mother . . .
Leonard Shengold, Soul Murder.
. . . and imagined her gazing down on all the monstrous misery and saying to herself coldly: 'Well, it will all pass, and soon at that. Then it will be as if it never was, and we shall . . .
The Diary of Richard Wagner: The Brown Book 1865-1882.
. . . forget it all.'
Leonard Shengold, Soul Murder quoting The Clinical Diary of Sandor Ferenczi.
Her own child, the wretch!
Sophocles, Oedipus Rex.
Did you ever hear of such a thing?
Joseph Conrad, The Secret Sharer.
Wagner's Dream . . .
Cosima Wagner's Diaries (Tuesday-Monday, February 10-16, 1874).
. . . a fearful dream—if dream be the right word for a mental . . .
Thomas Mann, Death in Venice.
. . . happening . . .
Primo Levi, The Periodic Table.
. . . whose theater . . .
Barbara Crossette, Study Warns of Stagnation in Arab Societies.
. . . seemed to be his own soul, . . .
Thomas Mann, Death in Venice.
—that dream . . .
Thomas Hardy, Desperate Remedies.
. . . is something that calls for explanation.
Bryan Magee, Aspects of Wagner.
We are back, in fact, with psychology.
Lucy Beckett, Richard Wagner: Parsifal.
The incredibly rich and compact Oedipus myth draws two paradoxical strands together in what is stated and what is only implied. The child, feared and cursed by his parents as the harbinger of mortality, curses them for his mortality—for life limited by death, and the consciousness thereof. The family both protects and exposes the child. To have needs met affirms one's vulnerability at the same time that it proves love. The price of love—consciousness of vulnerability—like the price of life—consciousness of death—is high but need not be prohibitive.
E. James Lieberman, Acts of Will.
Freud designated a part of the oedipal drama to represent a universal and fateful experience in human life. I am not the first who noticed Freud's partial and discriminate use of the Oedipus myth. That part of the myth which Freud ignored is the crime of infanticide which the father committed when his son was born. The Oedipus tragedy was set into motion by a father who was afraid of his son with whom he became prematurely rivalrous.
Peter Blos, Freud and the Father Complex.
Freud's Oedipal theme—the son's hostility toward father and his lust toward mother—
E. James Lieberman, Acts of Will.
. . . made it possible to continue to treat the child, now seen as having sexual desires, as the object of adults' didactic (or therapeutic) efforts.
Alice Miller, Thou Shalt Not Be Aware.
His theory justifies the father's fear as a response to the son's rage; there is no paternal guilt.
E. James Lieberman, Acts of Will.
And so, in the end, . . .
Jack London, The Enemy of All the World.
An analysis aimed at working through the Oedipus complex like raising a child to be unaware, serves to mask the abuse and mistreatment of children on the part of the adults who have control over them.
Alice Miller, Thou Shalt Not Be Aware.
It cannot be otherwise!—
The Diary of Richard Wagner: The Brown Book 1865-1882.
But yet . . .
Lucretius, De Natura Rerum.
—a question for psychiatrists—
Friedrich Nietzsche, Attempt at Self-Criticism.
Where can a traumatized small child find . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson and Terri C. Masson, Buried Memories on the Acropolis: Freud's Response to Mysticism and Anti-Semitism.
. . . protection . . .
Constitution of the United States, Article XIV.
. . . except in the arms of the one powerful enough to have originally inflicted the haunting pain?
J. Moussaieff Masson and Terri C. Masson, Buried Memories on the Acropolis: Freud's Response to Mysticism and Anti-Semitism.
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I had been searching for an illustration for the jacket of the British edition of Thou Shalt Not Be Aware; I didn't want to leave the selection to chance but thought it important that I myself find an appropriate visual representation of the work's underlying theme. Two Rembrandt depictions of the sacrifice of Isaac—one in Leningrad, the other in Munich—came to mind. In both . . .
Alice Miller, The Untouched Key.
. . . the motifs of his dream-like vision are fixed; the same fragments of outward reality occur again and again in the stream of his fantasy; and . . .
Isaac Deutscher, Marc Chagall and the Jewish Imagination.
. . . the colors, as if prepared from bitumen, are generally dense and dark and only fitfully luminous—creating an unceasing viscous movement . . .
Robert W. Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, and His Music.
. . . a single stream of fantasy that runs through all his pictures—a single dream dreamt and painted in an immense multitude of variations.
Isaac Deutscher, Marc Chagall and the Jewish Imagination.
The theme . . .
Maynard Solomon, Beethoven.
. . . Rembrandt’s . . .
Simon Schama, Rembrandt’s Eyes.
. . . theme remains throughout as an anchor to prevent fantasy from losing contact with the outer world, but it too dissolves into the memories, images, and feelings which underlie its simple reality. In this the theme is like the manifest dream—a simple, condensed sequence of images masking an infinity of latent dream thoughts.
Maynard Solomon, Beethoven.
The Artist . . .
Otto Rank, The Artist.
. . . described how he carried his thoughts with him for a long time before setting to work: “Then the working-out in breadth, length, and height and depth begins in my head, and since I am conscious of what I want, the basic idea never leaves me. It rises, grows upward, and I hear and see the picture as a whole take shape and stand forth before me . . .
Maynard Solomon, Beethoven quoting Beethoven.
. . . like a human form, . . .
Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho.
. . . as though cast in a single piece. . . . ”
Maynard Solomon, Beethoven quoting Beethoven.
The creation of . . .
Kim A. Woodbridge, Literary Sources of Frankenstein.
. . . the artist’s vision—
Henry James, The Ambassadors.
. . . is the ‘child’. It must, like human children, resemble the parents; and yet it must also be different, an individual in its own right.
Anthony Storr, The Dynamics of Creation.
There is no way of knowing what Rembrandt wanted to convey . . .
Dan Levin, Spinoza.
. . . with his . . .
Otto Rank, Art and Artist.
. . . creations which sent me out into dangerous realms.
The Diary of Anais Nin: Volume 1 – 1931-1934.
The main thing about them is not that they wish to go "back," but that they wish to get—away. A little more strength, flight, courage, and artistic power, and they would want to rise—
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.
He refused to idealize the figures in his Biblical paintings; he suspected that those Old Testament Hebrews looked pretty much like the Jews of . . .
Will and Ariel Durant, The Age of Reason Begins: From Rubens to Rembrandt.
. . . seventeenth-century . . .
Dan Levin, Spinoza.
. . . Amsterdam; he pictured them so, and in consequence they rise from myth or history into life.
Will and Ariel Durant, The Age of Reason Begins: From Rubens to Rembrandt.
I had been struck by the fact that in both of the Rembrandt versions . . .
Alice Miller, The Untouched Key.
. . . of the binding of Isaac . . .
Bill Moyers, Genesis: A Living Conversation.
. . . I already knew, Abraham is grasping his son's head with his left hand and raising a knife with his right; his eyes, however, are not resting on his son but are turned upward, as though he is asking God if he is carrying out His will correctly. At first I thought that this was Rembrandt's own interpretation and that there must be others, but I was unable to find any. In all the portrayals of this scene that I found, Abraham's face or entire torso is turned away from his son and directed upward. Only his hands are occupied with the sacrifice.
Alice Miller, The Untouched Key.
God asks him to prove his obedience by agreeing to give as a blood sacrifice his son Isaac. As soon as Abraham agrees, he is, of course, permitted to sacrifice, instead, an animal.
Margaret Brenman-Gibson, Clifford Odets: American Playwright.
An evocative scene.
Dan Levin, Spinoza.
If we could only invite Isaac into our group and hear his voice! How would he recall the events on Moriah?
Bill Moyers, Genesis: A Living Conversation.
Who can say?
Arthur Miller, The Ride Down Mt. Morgan.
The main problem is that this is one of those stories that is meant to be used not religiously, but mystically. Mystics have a tendency to use outrageous symbols.
Bill Moyers, Genesis: A Living Conversation.
I remember that when as a child I read the Midrash, I came across a story and a description of a scene which gripped my imagination.
Isaac Deutscher, The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays.
It reminded me of . . .
Jack London, The Sea Wolf.
. . . the problem of . . .
Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena.
. . . . the Creator and His Creations;
Cynthia Ozick, The Impious Impatience of Job.
. . . the problem of . . .
Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena.
. . . visioning and revisioning, . . .
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, The Anatomy of Prejudices.
—and finally, . . .
Mark Twain, Roughing It.
. . . of all things! . . .
Zane Grey, The Spirit of the Border.
. . . the sacrifice of Isaac—
Alice Miller, The Untouched Key.
It was the story of Rabbi Meir, the great saint and sage, the pillar of Mosaic orthodoxy, and co-author of the Mishnah, who took lessons in theology from a heretic, Elisha ben Abiyuh, called Akher (The Stranger).
Isaac Deutscher, The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays.
One day while . . .
Alma Mahler, Gustav Mahler: Memories and Letters.
. . . Rabbi Meir . . .
Isaac Deutscher, The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays.
. . . was working . . .
Alma Mahler, Gustav Mahler: Memories and Letters.
. . . Akher . . .
Isaac Deutscher, The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays.
. . . The Stranger . . .
Albert Camus, The Stranger.
. . . stood beside him, watching with engrossment. He was scratching out one . . .
Alma Mahler, Gustav Mahler: Memories and Letters.
. . . Word . . .
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust.
. . .after another . . .
Alma Mahler, Gustav Mahler: Memories and Letters.
. . . as the new formulations were sketched, trimmed, contoured, synthesized.
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, The Anatomy of Prejudices.
The stranger said tranquilly:—
Victor Hugo, Les Miserables.
. . . Rabbi Meir, . . .
Isaac Deutscher, The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays.
. . . ‘I would not like to be a . . .
Alma Mahler, Gustav Mahler: Memories and Letters.
. . . word.’
Anthony Trollope, The Last Chronicle of Barset.
‘Why not?’ he asked. ‘Because then you might scratch me out . . .
Alma Mahler, Gustav Mahler: Memories and Letters.
. . . as a sacrifice . . .
Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage.
. . . and blow me away.’
Alma Mahler, Gustav Mahler: Memories and Letters.
That’s a curious association of ideas, is it not . . . ?
Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby.
But how complex and dreamlike a tale!
Margaret Brenman-Gibson, Clifford Odets: American Playwright.
When, at what point in his life, did Isaac abandon religion for good and all? This was, of course, a gradual process. But there is no doubt that . . .
Tamara Deutscher, Introduction to Isaac Deutscher, The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays.
. . . this one . . .
Primo Levi, The Periodic Table.
. . . particular episode, highly dramatic, which appealed to Isaac's sense of the theatrical, sealed the final break. Here again, though only remotely, the personality of Isaac's father contributed something to his son's development.
Tamara Deutscher, Introduction to Isaac Deutscher, The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays.
As I looked at the pictures, I thought to myself, "The son, an adult at the peak of his manhood, is simply lying there, quietly . . .
Alice Miller, The Untouched Key.
. . . waiting for what would happen next.
Edward Crankshaw, The Shadow of the Winter Palace: Russia’s Drift to Revolution, 1825-1917.
In some of the versions he is . . .
Alice Miller, The Untouched Key.
. . . as . . .
Leo Tolstoy, Resurrection.
. . . calm and obedient . . .
Alice Miller, The Untouched Key.
. . . as an artist’s model;
Leo Tolstoy, Resurrection.
. . . in only one is he in tears, but not in a single one is he rebellious."
Alice Miller, The Untouched Key.
There was enough in this scene to puzzle an orthodox Jewish child. Why, I wondered, did . . .
Isaac Deutscher, The non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays.
. . . none of the paintings
Alice Miller, The Untouched Key.
. . . depict . . .
Joseph Conrad, The Rescue.
. . . any questioning in Isaac's eyes, questions such as "Father, why do you want to kill me, why is my life worth nothing to you? Why won't you look at me, why won't you explain what is happening? How can you do this to me? I love you, I trusted you. Why won't you speak to me? What crime have I committed? What have I done to deserve this?"
Alice Miller, The Untouched Key.
From such a situation, one would think, a troubled and complex personality would be likely to emerge.
Dan Levin, Spinoza.
My heart, it seems, was with the heretic . . .
Isaac Deutscher, The non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays.
. . . the rebel . . .
Hermann Hesse, Magister Ludi: The Glass Bead Game quoted in K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius.
When I was thirteen, or perhaps fourteen, I began to write a play about . . .
Isaac Deutscher, The non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays.
. . . what would happen if Isaac, instead of reaching for the knife, were to use every ounce of his strength to free his hands so that he could remove Abraham's hand from his face?
Alice Miller, The Untouched Key.
I could not find the answers, and did not get beyond the first act.
Isaac Deutscher, The non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays.
One word more:
H. Rider Haggard, Child of Storm.
When you think of me, think of Rembrandt—a little light and a great deal of darkness.
Sigmund Freud, as attributed by Martin S. Bergmann.
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One of Freud's basic psychoanalytic strategies is to hide his face and act as a blank screen. This self-effacing performance encourages the patient to . . .
Ken Frieden, Freud's Dream of Interpretation.
. . . initiate and dominate the stage . . .
Rosemary H. Balsam, Neutrality and Loewald's Metaphor of Theater.
. . . to transfer his or her emotional attachments onto Freud in a first step toward working through childhood complexes.
Ken Frieden, Freud's Dream of Interpretation.
The analyst . . .
Rosemary H. Balsam, Neutrality and Loewald's Metaphor of Theater.
. . . sits quietly, . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy.
. . . watches the play, while being in his mind also a co-actor.
Rosemary H. Balsam, Neutrality and Loewald's Metaphor of Theater.
The analytic psychodrama leaves Freud's image an enigma, because within the walls of his office he surrenders his identity to the phantoms that haunt his patients . . .
Ken Frieden, Freud's Dream of Interpretation.
. . . continually . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy.
. . . attending to the form of the moment of communication while bearing in mind the whole session as it echoes and repeats the form of the patient's life drama—
Rosemary H. Balsam, Neutrality and Loewald's Metaphor of Theater.
Transference to a shaman is an ancient, worldwide technique of healing, widely studied by anthropologists and scholars of the history of religion. Shamanism preceded psychoanalysis and will survive it; it is the purest form of dynamic psychiatry.
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages.
Freud might have founded psychoanalysis, but he did so, consciously or not, on much older foundations laid by practicing shamans throughout the world and over the millenia.
Michael Ripinsky-Naxon, The Nature of Shamanism.
We are concerned here, in particular, . . .
Richard Day and Ronald H. Davidson, Magic and Healing: An Ethnopsychoanalytic Examination.
. . . at this moment in our journey. . .
Radio Interview of President William Jefferson Clinton by CBS News (December 11, 1999).
. . .with the individuals . . .
Richard Day and Ronald H. Davidson, Magic and Healing: An Ethnopsychoanalytic Examination.
. . . who have been . . .
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius.
. . . referred to as “lightening conductors of common anxiety”—medicine men, sorcerers, shamans—who articulate a personal reformulation through the role of healer and who seek, by the alleviation of group anxiety, their own sense of identity and security.
Richard Day and Ronald H. Davidson, Magic and Healing: An Ethnopsychoanalytic Examination.
To both . . .
Isaac Deutscher, Marc Chagall and the Jewish Imagination.
. . . the analyst and . . .
Leonard Shengold, Soul Murder (“Insight as Metaphor”).
. . . the Shaman . . .
Jack London, The Son of the Wolf.
. . . metaphor is essential.
Isaac Deutscher, Marc Chagall and the Jewish Imagination.
The shaman conveys metaphors addressed to the spirit world through drumming, chants, dance, myths, drama, or more appropriately, psychodrama . . .
Michael Ripinsky-Naxon, The Nature of Shamanism.
. . . and by means of this . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy.
. . . fills the void wrought in the texture of existence by the incomprehensible experience of suffering. He serves as the link . . .
Charles Ducey, The Life History and Creative Psychopathology of the Shaman.
. . . that connects mystery to mystery, the known with the unknown . . .
Leonard Shengold, Soul Murder.
. . . and straight away, that is to say, out of himself, . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals.
. . . the shaman . . .
Jack London, The Law of Life.
. . . creates . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals.
. . . a metaphorical bridge . . .
Leonard Shengold, Soul Murder.
. . . between the everyday human world and the realm of the ineffable, the unconscious, or, in his subjective belief, the supernatural, and like Persephone he inhabits both worlds. He must experience the alien within himself as a prerequisite for interpreting and conferring significance upon the suffering of those who consult him for help against illness or misfortune. The personal experience of the alien, which resembles a mental disorder, is a major source of the apparent effectiveness of his form of psychotherapy, as it encourages the development of a greater than normal psychological sensitivity for his ever-renewed attempts to heal himself and his culture mates.
Charles Ducey, The Life History and Creative Psychopathology of the Shaman.
To put it in a nutshell:
Pawel Dybel, The Dilemmas of Psychoanalytic Interpretation.
The shaman, . . .
Charles Ducey, The Life History and Creative Psychopathology of the Shaman.
. . . the man of magic . . .
Richard Day and Ronald H. Davidson, Magic and Healing: An Ethnopsychoanalytic Examination.
. . . so singularly capable of suffering, . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy.
. . . is ill for conventional reasons and in a conventional way; his conflicts are simply unusually intense; he is like everyone else, only more so.
George Devereux, Normal and Abnormal.
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