David Bakan’s “Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition” noted that Freud’s work developed in the context of Jewish culture and resonated with themes from that culture and from its mystical book the Kabbalah. Bakan did not notice, however, that the symptoms and syndromes Freud dealt with could be correlated with the Sephiroth, the basic elements of being, or alternatively, elements of human character, laid out in the Kabbalah’s symbolic glyph The Tree of Life. In this video I explain that correlation, which can facilitate insight both for those interested in psychology and those interested in Kabbalah.

My own introduction to Kabbalistic lore was through Dion Fortune’s “The Mystical Qabalah.” For an excellent and humanistic (read: non-reductionistic) introduction to the classic syndromes of clinical psychology, I recommend Nancy McWilliams’s “Psychoanalytic Diagnosis.”