Sigmund Freud—whose psychological theories continue to form part of our cultural bedrock—never overcame a sense of alienation from the civilization that was home to him, even when its public eventually embraced his ideas. Gershom Scholem—the scholar of Kabbalah whose understanding of European Jewry’s doomed fantasy of assimilation led him to emigrate to Mandate Palestine in the 1920s—never found himself at home in the Zionist political project.
In this talk, George Prochnik will discuss the ways that Freud’s and Scholem’s own experiences informed their theories of how the dream of belonging shapes personal-psychological and national history, often to disastrous effect. Today, when illusions of restoring or creating the “true homeland” carry dangerous political reverberations, reexamining the struggles of these two profound thinkers attempting to reckon with the problem of belonging has never been more important or timely. In different ways and sometimes against their will, both men ultimately discovered a philosophical dignity and humanist poetry in the shared condition of exile. “History has focused its fire on us,” Scholem declared in a poem entitled “Encounter with Zion and the World” written in Jerusalem in 1930. “What was within is now without,/the dream twists into violence.” It’s far from a comforting vision; but in exploring the thoughts of two great minds confronting historical impossibilities we may yet find solace in their prophetic clarity.
George Prochnik’s most recent book, I Dream with Open Eyes: A Memoir about Reimagining Home, was published by Counterpoint in 2022. Among his earlier publications, Stranger in a Strange Land: Searching for Gershom Scholem and Jerusalem was a New York Times Editor’s Choice and was short-listed for the Wingate Prize in the UK. The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World received the National Jewish Book Award for Biography/Memoir in 2014 and was translated into more than a dozen languages. Putnam Camp: Sigmund Freud, James Jackson Putnam, and the Purpose of American Psychology was a New York Times Editor’s Choice and won the Gradiva Award. Prochnik was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2021. He has written for Granta, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The New Yorker, The Literary Review, the Times Literary Review, the New Left Review, The Lancet, the Jewish Review of Books, and the LA Review of Books. He is editor-at-large for the magazine Cabinet.
