Abraham Unbound: The Prefiguration of the Unconscious in the First Generation of the Musar and Hasidic Movements

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 334-354
Author(s):  
Clémence Boulouque
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Emotional Attachment ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
Ethical Approach ◽  
Torah Study ◽  
The Way

Abstract This study examines the respective theological assumptions of two major forces in nineteenth-century Judaism—the Musar and the early Hasidic movements, and the way in which the budding concept of the unconscious illuminates both. Often translated as an ethical approach, the Musar movement originated from Lithuania and focused on Torah study as it deemed Talmud insufficient to create a deep, emotional attachment to Judaism; yet, despite their shared emphasis on emotions and their criticism of talmudic studies, the Musar movement was at odds with Hasidism, the mystical Jewish current that swept Eastern Europe from the eighteenth century onward. Through an examination of the biblical motif of the binding of Isaac, and the reaction of Abraham, this article will probe both movements’ analysis of the patriarch’s psychological make up. Such a comparison of their understanding of the pre-conscious psychic states will illustrate the nature of their theological opposition.

G. C. Lichtenberg: Dreams, Jokes, and the Unconscious in Eighteenth-Century Germany

1992 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 761-799 ◽  
Author(s):  
Craig Tomlinson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Clinical Practice ◽  
Cultural Background ◽  
Practical Application ◽  
Functional Link ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
Dream Analysis ◽  
German Physicist

The German physicist and writer Lichtenberg (1742–1799) was well known during the nineteenth century as a humorist, thinker, and psychologist. He was also a favorite author of Freud, who read him beginning in his teens, quoted him frequently, and called him a “remarkable psychologist.” Despite this, he has been ignored by psychoanalysts and historians of psychiatry alike, and most of his writing is still unavailable in English. An introduction to Lichtenberg as a psychologist is provided, stressing material dealing with dream analysis, association theory, and drives. Relevant excerpts are translated into English. Lichtenberg is shown to have insisted upon the need for a systematic and rationalistic study of dreams, to have analyzed individual dreams (describing them as dramatized representations of thoughts, associations, and even conflicts from his own waking life), and to have emphasized the functional link between dreams and daydreams. His remarks on drives and commentary on eighteenth-century association theory represent a significant practical application, and thus refinement, of Enlightenment rationalistic psychology. These achievements are assessed in light of Freud's early fascination with him; it is argued that Lichtenberg is an example of the relevance of the historical and cultural background of psychoanalysis to clinical practice.

Scottish Gothic Drama

2017 ◽  
pp. 59-74
Author(s):  
Barbara A. E. Bell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Visual Effects ◽  
Gothic Revival ◽  
Performance Culture ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Music Hall ◽  
The Way

Scottish theatre, from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, has been characterised by a distinctive performance culture that values anti-illusionist techniques, breaking the fourth wall, music and song, strongly physical acting styles and striking visual effects. These were accepted traits of the Georgian theatre as a whole; however, they endured in Scotland through the music hall and pantomime traditions, when late nineteenth-century Western theatre was focused on realism/naturalism. Their importance to the search for a distinctive Scottish Gothic Drama lies in the way that the conditions of the Scottish theatre during the Gothic Revival valued these skills and effects. That theatre was heavily constricted in what it could play by censorship from London and writers were cautious in their approach to ‘national’ topics. At the same time a good deal of work portraying Scotland as an inherently Gothic setting was imported onto Scottish stages.

Introduction

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. C. Smout
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
The People ◽  
Short Run ◽  
Political Scene ◽  
The Way

This book presents an overview of the first six decades of the Union of the Crowns. It also provides a picture of the uses to which judicial torture was put after 1660 and a summary of the straits in which Scotland found itself in the opening years of the eighteenth century. It then explores the problems which union posed to maritime lawyers of both nations, the dark reception that the Scots received in eighteenth-century England, and the way Enlightenment Scotland viewed the British unions. It examines the ambitions of Scottish élites in India, the frame for radical cooperation in the age of the Friends of the People and later, and the background for the sojourn of Thomas and Jane Carlyle in London. It finally outlined the Anglo-Scottish relations on the political scene in the nineteenth century. The parliamentary union did little in the short run for Anglo-Scottish relations. It is shown that Scots are indeed worried and worry a lot about Anglo-Scottish relations, but the English worried and worry about them hardly at all, except in times of exceptional crisis, as in 1638–54, 1703–7, 1745–7 and perhaps much later in the 1970s after oil had been discovered.

Introduction

2012 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Shaul Stampfer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Jewish Settlement ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Separate Identity ◽  
First World

This introductory chapter describes the unique aspects of the yeshivas of nineteenth-century Lithuania. These yeshivas represented a major attempt on the part of traditional Jewry to cope with the challenges of modernity. The Jews of nineteenth-century Lithuania thus defined had several distinguishing characteristics. In religious terms, most were traditional, in the sense that they had withstood the innovations of hasidism; in fact, the strength of the opposition to that movement in Lithuania was such that they came collectively to be known as mitnagedim (opponents) — that is, opponents of hasidism. Economically, they were mostly poorer than Jews in other major areas of Jewish settlement, such as Poland or Bukovina, and lived in more crowded conditions. Until 1764, they benefited from self-government under the Va'ad Medinat Lita (Council of the Land of Lithuania). By the beginning of the eighteenth century this body had ceased to function, but the distinction between the Jews of Lithuania and those of the neighbouring regions continued to exist — not least because the Lithuanian Jews spoke a distinctive dialect of Yiddish. These and other factors ensured that they continued to maintain a separate identity among the Jews of eastern Europe until the First World War.

The Missing Rabbis of Eastern Europe

2010 ◽  
pp. 277-301
Author(s):  
Shaul Stampfer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Ashkenazi Jewish ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
East European ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
Selection Of

This chapter examines the east European rabbinate. The rabbinate in modern eastern Europe was not significantly different from the rabbinate in other Ashkenazi Jewish communities up to the eighteenth century. In the following years, many aspects of rabbinical authority changed in almost every country of Europe. During the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a number of developments altered the conditions of rabbinic authority in eastern Europe in unique ways, and also made the selection of communal rabbis more complex than previously. Many of these changes contributed to a weakening of the power and status of the rabbinate — a power and status that were not exceptionally strong to start with. By the end of the nineteenth century, the patterns of the east European rabbinate were far from the traditional Ashkenazi model because the community, as a body that collected taxes and had internal authority, had ceased to exist.

The Ballad Revival and the Rise of Literary History

2020 ◽  
pp. 83-97
Author(s):  
David Matthews
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Nineteenth Century Literature ◽  
Century Literature ◽  
The Middle Ages ◽  
The Way

This chapter describes the rediscovery and reinvention of the ballad in the 1760s and 1770s, tracing the later impact of the resultant conception of the Middle Ages on nineteenth-century literature and scholarship. The chapter traces the way in which a notion of the ‘Gothic’ was differentiated, in the early nineteenth century, from the ‘medieval’ (a word newly coined around 1817) and goes on to look at the way in which the early beginnings of English literary history resulted from the antiquarian researches of the eighteenth century. It concludes with reflections on the extent to which it can be said there was truly a revival of the ballad, and posits that there was instead a revaluation something already there, with a new conferral of prestige.

Introduction

Mind Cure ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Wakoh Shannon Hickey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Stress Reduction ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Religious Movement ◽  
Academic Disciplines ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
American Women ◽  
The Past ◽  
Western Esotericism

The introduction traces the astonishing growth of the Mindfulness movement over the past four decades and sketches the usual narrative about how it began in the 1970s, when Jon Kabat-Zinn developed the eight-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) protocol. This book seeks to change that narrative. It traces the origins of efforts to promote meditation and yoga therapeutically back to nineteenth-century teachers of Mind Cure, a religious movement led largely by American women who had learned these methods from Buddhist and Hindu missionaries; and further back, to eighteenth-century research on magnetism, the unconscious, and psychic phenomena. The introduction offers an overview of the book: four chapters of history, two chapters offering critical analysis of the modern Mindfulness movement, an epilogue, and an appendix describing the theoretical and historical challenges of piecing this complex story together. This account draws upon multiple academic disciplines, including the histories of science, medicine, psychology, Buddhism, Hinduism, Western esotericism, and American religions.

Of Goose in Gascony: The Making of Confit in Centuries Past

2002 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 49-58
Author(s):  
Edward Schneider
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Way

From this translation of a French treatise on the Gascon way to preserve geese, ducks, other poultry and their fat, we learn how to house, fatten and butcher these birds, how to render their fat, how to prepare confit, how to store it and how to use it. To anyone familiar with the way confit is made today, few of the instructions will seem surprising; setting aside the technology to which it refers, this text provides a perfectly valid guide to confit-making in the twenty-first century. What is surprising, though, is that (in the view of the curator of the museum that owns the manuscript) this is a nineteenth-century copy of an eighteenth-century text, reflecting an if-it-ain't-broke attitude that may be instructive in these fix-it-anyway times.

Das Bild eines „europäischen Goethe“ in Nietzsches Götzen-Dämmerung. Einige Bemerkungen

2021 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 102-120
Author(s):  
Aldo Venturelli
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Careful Consideration ◽  
Close Connection ◽  
Final Version ◽  
Intellectual Heritage ◽  
European Culture ◽  
The Way

Abstract This article analyses the origin of TI 49–51 on the basis of several posthumous fragments from the autumn of 1887, which had been reworked in 1888. This analysis highlights significant connections that got lost along the way to the final version of these aphorisms, such as Nietzsche’s comparison between Goethe and Spinoza which, in 1887, was the beginning of his updated reflections on Goethe. The origin and context of these aphorisms allow for a better understanding of the long-established image of Goethe expressed in the aphorisms of Twilight of the Idols and their close connection to the new reflections on Goethe as they had already come to the fore in Human, All Too Human when Nietzsche distanced himself from Wagner’s ideas. This also presents the opportunity for a more careful consideration of Nietzsche’s conception of European culture and its intellectual heritage and his relation to Napoleon as well as his characterization of the eighteenth-century and the need for self-overcoming during the nineteenth-century. Nietzsche considered this self-overcoming to be an important aspect of his thinking, and Goethe was an important precursor for Nietzsche’s conception of self-overcoming.

Land and Politics in England in the Nineteenth Century

1965 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 23-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
F. M. L. Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Conservative Measure ◽  
Previous Generation ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The People ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Way

In every generation since the pace of economic and social change began to accelerate in the late-eighteenth century the wildest hopes, aspirations and fears of the previous generation have been realized. The revolutionary prospect of heeding the will of the people in the 1790's became the conservative measure of 1832. The terrifying demands of the Chartists were well on the way to enactment by 1885, and with the payment of M.P.s in 1911 were substantially achieved, apart from the silliest of all the demands, that for annual parliaments.

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