Ep 3.1 - Between Mysticism and Modernity: Reclaiming the Jewishness of Therapy with hannah baer

Raise your hand if this sounds familiar: In a group of leftie social justice therapists, someone says that therapy is a profession founded by white men. Everyone else in the room nods along and acknowledges the white male hegemonic roots of the profession, then moves on to discuss other things. 

The problem with saying that white men founded therapy and is part of a white hegemonic legacy is that it just isn’t true.

If you go down a list of the founders and early theorists of therapy as theory, discipline, and practice, you’ll find that many of them were Jews. Even now, many of our theory heroes and celebrity therapists are Jewish.

And that’s not incidental or coincidental; it is consequential. Therapy is foundationally and elementally Jewish.

To dig into therapy’s Jewish roots, I invited writer and therapist hannah baer to join me. We also talk about therapy’s relationship to Jewish mysticism and esotericism and delve into the ways in which therapy follows the Jewish tradition of marking and understanding the past.

hannah baer is a writer and therapist based in New York. She is the author of the memoir trans girl suicide museum. 

Listen to the full episode to hear:

• The conflation of survival and accumulation of privilege that has happened in many Jewish families as they have been assimilated into whiteness
• How the rejection of psychoanalytic therapy is tied to the drive for assimilation into white culture and the rejection of mysticism
• Why it should be okay for therapists to accept that the magic that happens in the room can’t always be explained by science or reduced to an insurance note
• The Jewishness of verbalizing and analyzing trauma, and reinterpreting historic theory
• The radical promise of therapy to help people metabolize and contextualize their trauma so they don’t repeat it on others
• The American insistence on focusing on the now or the future at the expense of grappling with and understanding the past
• The impact of consumerism on how patients approach mental health treatment

Learn more about hannah baer:

• trans girl suicide museum
• Instagram: @malefragility

Learn more about Riva Stoudt:

• Into the Woods Counseling
• The Kiln School
• Instagram: @atherapistcantsaythat

Resources:

• Wikipedia: Who Is a Jew?
• Therapy Was Never Secular
• The Gift of Therapy: An Open Letter to a New Generation of Therapists and Their Patients, Irvin Yalom
• The Case for God, Karen Armstrong
• Hannah Arendt
• Building a Life Worth Living, Marsha M. Linehan
• Standing Together