A Secular Alchemy of Social Science

The Denial of Jewish Messianism in

Freud and Durkheim
Philip Wexler

Abstract: This essay presents a reading of the work of two central

figures of modern social theory that locates their work within not
simply mainstream Jewish thought, but a particular Hasidic tradition.
Further, I argue that lying behind this, in a repressed form, is an even
older tradition of Jewish alchemy. I make no claim to have evidence
that either Freud or Durkheim were directly influenced by Hasidism
or alchemy, but I examine the parallels between the structure of their
thoughts and those of the two traditions. Both Freud and Durkheim
display a social psychology that is analytically similar to the dualism
of Hasidisms Tanya and the general transformational models of
alchemy. This formal model is in opposition to the messianic tradition in Jewish thought and analyzes Freud and Durkheim as antimessianic social psychologists. Hasidism offers a template for
modern theories of social psychology, social interaction and the relation between the social and the individual, that is, collective identity.
This essay also considers more generally how modern social theory
might make sense of contemporary social phenomena by opening
itself to the messianic and mystical traditions in Jewish thought. I
suggest that the social and structural transformation associated with
the information or network society requires new analytic tools that
allow us to explain social energy differently to the way Freud and
Durkheim have guided social theory. Contemporary analyses of individualization, social movements and sacralization as forms of and
reactions to alienation are inadequate. Instead, I ask whether we
should not restore a messianic, truly utopian lost unity, which the
alchemical, secular gnosis of modern social science displaced, and so
renew social theory?
Keywords: Freud; Durkheim; Hasidism; Judaism; archaeology;
religion; postmodernism.

Theoria, August 2008

doi:10.3167/th.2008.5511602

Philip Wexler

Intellectual Force Field

I read Freuds religious studies from the vantage point of a late postmodern social theory, as a social psychologist, and with an interest
in a redemptive Jewish archaeology of knowledge. To Freuds universal, evolutionary theory of religion, I suggest a particular Jewish
counter-narrative, although one no less causally speculative, while
embracingagainst later readers of Moses and Monotheismhis
faith in unconscious historical transmission, in the historical centrality of the return of the repressed, and in the role of sublimation
and transmutation as defining core processes of social interaction, or
social/mass psychology.
I want to retain the postmodern impulse that eschews one-dimensional discursive hierarchies in favor of a more egalitarian relation
among discourses. The relation between social science and religion is
not seen here as a one-way imperialism of the triumph of scientific
explanation over vestigial religious belief, but a two-way street, where
it is no longer taboo to understand social explanations as secularized
representations, or even, re-codings, of earlier constellations of religious belief. Or, as Buc, following Millbank, in his study of the relation
between anthropological theory and medieval thought and practice of
ritual puts it, to grasp the concealed affinitiesthe twisted continuities and half-ruptures between theology and social science.1
In Mystical Society,2 I read Durkheim that way, although Strenski3
provided a more nuanced contextual, historical analysis of the relation
between Durkheims religious particularism, his Jewishness, and his
universal social theory of religion. Without abandoning a Jewish reading of Durkheim, the interest here is to show how Durkheims analysis of religion, like Freuds, is an important medium for the expression
of his social psychology, and how this social psychologyin itself,
like Freudsis a key to an archaeology of Jewish knowledge in
social psychologyas a theory of social interactionand even in
social theory more generally.
I want to supplement my earlier, new age analysis of Durkheims
canonical work, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, as a theory
of social energy, with a reading that draws more upon his later short
essay on The Dualism of Human Nature and Its Social Conditions,
in which he complained about the reception of Forms: Since the critics who have discussed the book up to the present have notto our
great surpriseperceived the principle upon which this explanation
rests, it seemed to us that a brief outline of it would be of some inter-

A Secular Alchemy of Social Science

est .4 He then goes on to assert the constitutional duality of human

nature, in a way, I suggest, that brings the avatar of social facts,
whose strong social determinism has even been labelled as sociologism, not only remarkably close to Freuds apparently more individual social psychology, but also displays a less evident similarity that I
think he shares with Freud: a secular representation of one ancient
Jewish theory and a determined denial and repression of still another.
In a recent attempt to simultaneously show that classical social
theory which is ordinarily seen primarily as structural and comparative and historical is also social psychological, and that there are at
least analogies if not identities between social scientific analyses
and religious ones, I explored the relation between Webers social
psychology, within his sociology of religion, and Hasidisms social
international theory of devequt.5 Hasidism, about which so much has
been written (and much less known), now seems to me a salient
bridge between ancient Jewish thought and modern social science.6 I
do not know and cannot here examine whether a case can be made for
any direct influence of Hasidic theory and culture on modern social
theory generally, or in the specific instances of Freud and Durkheim,
although parallel attempts have been made with regard to Kabbalah
and Halacha7 and there are enticing genealogies that might be developed between rationalist and mystical traditions and intra-ethnic Jewish divisions between Litvak and Galizianer cultures.
Rather, I suggest simply that there is a recognizable analytical
resemblance and affinity between Freud and Durkheims social psychologies and that they both also resemble, as a third term, the social
psychology of the Hasidic theory of the soul; particularly as represented in the so-called Tanya, or Liqquei Amarim of the foundational Lubbovitch theorist, R. Shneur Zalman of Liadi. Both the
structural and dynamic, teleological assumptions of Tanya may, I suggest further, be related to a broader model of social interaction that
Patai described as Jewish Alchemy.8 Hasidism may be seen as a
bridge taken as a bridge in two senses: first, as a model that illustrates
a parallel between ancient Jewish theory and modern social theory;
and second, it can be analogized as a humanistic version of a still
older tradition of theories of transmutation, including Jewish alchemy.
I want to be clear that this second viewusing alchemy as a templatedespite the intriguing suggestions of Patai, is an analytical,
formal and not an historical assertion. Scholem argued against the
importance of alchemy in Jewish thought generally, and its lack of
any but cursory and negative mention in Jewish culture.

Philip Wexler

While historians may wish to compare the counter-assertions of

Scholem and Patai regarding the dating and influence of Jewish
alchemy, my interest is not to suggest an historical line between Jewish alchemy and Hasidism, or even between Hasidism and social science. Rather, my point is this: both Freud and Durkheim, particularly
in their analyses of religion, display a social psychology that is analytically similar to the dualism of Tanya and the general transformational models of alchemy. This formal model is one that I consider as
opposed to a messianic tradition. Freud and Durkheim are analyzed as
anti-messianic social psychologists, whose theories may fruitfully be
described as a spiritual, secular alchemy.
At the same time, I follow (with qualifications added by Idel) the
paradigmatic analysis of Gershom Scholem who saw in Hasidism a
neutralization of Jewish messianism, and the transformation of the
messianic tradition into a more interpersonal, or anthropological
doctrine.9 This view of the humanization of Hasidism could be said
to articulate, or even, to sublimate a general alchemical model into
a more modern discourse, while it defers, neutralizes or represses
messianism (though it was obviously not Scholems intent to assert
any such historical relation; on the contrary, alchemy is important
only for Christian cabala). In this analytical way, Hasidism offers a
template for modern theories of social psychology, social interaction,
the relation between the social and the individual, or, as we now say,
collective identity. Not only in general terms of advancing an
alchemical model and repressing a messianic one; the specific terms
of Hasidisms transmutational teleology of social interaction, anticipate the social psychologies of Freud and Durkheim.
Yet, Hasidism, in one of its Habad variants, now plays an additional and historically contrary role; and that is in its contemporary,
practical de-sublimation of repressed messianism. I argued in Mystical Society that current macro-social structural changes as analyzed
by Castells,10 Harvey,11 Melucci12 and others in terms of an informational society encouraged resacralization, revitalization movements
and mysticism. Similarly, messianic social movements can lead us to
reexamine academic, theoretical, as well as popular cultural assumptions, and so shed light both on the historic theoretical repression of
messianism and on the question of what its social reappearance can
mean for social theory.
In this analytical dynamicbetween alchemy and messianism
we can offer a re-reading of Freud and Durkheim as social psychologists and theorists of religion; and offer hints for an archaeology of

A Secular Alchemy of Social Science

Jewish knowledge that is denied in one case and displaced in the

other, in favor of an abstract universalism so characteristic of the
modern temper and of its social science.

Social Psychology as Spiritual Alchemy

Like Weber, both Durkheim and Freud assert that religion is central to
any cultural analysis. Durkheims assertions may be more wellknown. In the later Annee Sociologique programmatic statements, he
insisted that religion be put analytically front and center, since it was,
after all the germ from which all other social phenomena are
derived. Early in the argument of Forms, he wrote:
Today we agree to recognize that law, morals, and scientific thought itself
were born in religion, and were long confounded with it, and have
remained imbued with its spirit.13

Freuds critical analysis of religion and his scientific faith hardly contradict, and indeed confirm, religions cultural importance the most
important part of the psychical inventory of a culture are ascribed to
religious ideas.14
In their respective analyses of religion, with an only apparent difference between Durkheims emphasis on ritual and Freuds on belief,
they display social psychologies that are remarkably resonant with
each other. Any reader of Durkheims Rules of Sociological Method or
Suicide accustomed to the view of causation as due to the exteriority
and constraint of social facts, and then later to the power of ritual
deeds in sacralization, might have been surprised to find in Forms the
observation that religion gains its efficacy by working through individual consciousness, through mind, that the idea creates the reality,15 and that the representations of the totem that are more
efficacious than the totem itself.16
The later essay on dualism leaves little doubt that a structuralist,
sociologistic interpretation misses Durkheims social psychological
interest in what he calls our psychic life, our inner life, psychic
constitution of the individual who is the basic element.17 Anticipating our comparison with Freud, rightly emphasizing Durkheims studies of collective processes nevertheless neglects his observation that
the supreme product of this activity is what we call civilization,
and that sociology is the science of civilization.

Philip Wexler

Freud too saw civilization as the result of collective activity, though

he locates the energy drive of the process in the individual, in apparent contradiction to Durkheims location of energy in sociality.
Indeed, I am going to claim that it is the third, religious term that
undergirds and obviates this difference, since they both ascribe the
energy sourcewhether in instinct or interactionultimately to
divinity, which, as Freud put it, is the primo motore. But even
short of that, Freuds instinct, which we read within his interest in
civilization, is a social, combinatory process, and Durkheims collective effervescence is actually the non-civilizational, the residue of
our individual bodily constitution at the moment of the creation of its
antinomous sacred social. So, Freuds civilization is a process in the
service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one
great unity, the unity of mankind.18 It is aim-inhibited love that
continues to carry on its function of binding together considerable
numbers of people 19 The civilizational process is the same social
combinatory, aggregating integration that creates solidarity as
described by Durkheim, though it is more consistently subject to dissolution by the opposing instinct of death and destruction, rather than
atrophy in the banality of the profane that is described by Durkheim.
If Freuds individual instinct is deeply social, in an eros that strives
toward social aggregationthe very point of Durkheims theory of
social energy that replenishes the sacredDurkheims energetic ritualism is deeply ideational, in his view of collective ideals as the
source of vitality. But religion, he writes is first and foremost a system of ideas by means of which individuals imagine the society of
which they are members such is its paramount role.20 Its ideals are
the soul of collectivity.
Beyond the shared emphasis on the analytical centrality of religion
for a science of culture, or civilization, there is also a social psychology which they share, despite the polar points of embarkation in the
collective and the individual. It is a social psychology based on a theory of energy transmutation, from the individual, bodily to the social
sacred or spiritual. The transmutational process is a teleological, progressive movement from the sensory to the conceptual, a sublimatory
and symbolizing activity that marks a truly human development.
According to Durkheim; the more emancipated we are from the
senses, and the more capable we are of thinking and acting conceptually, the more we are persons.21 For him, the growth of civilization
is the result of a struggle of two beings, an angel and a beast he tells

A Secular Alchemy of Social Science

us, attributing this initiatory duality to Pascal. The bodily beast of

individualized sensations is opposed by, and subject to, conceptual
thought and moral activity,22 by what Durkheims modern translator,
Karen Fields,23 refers to as a true metamorphosis. Individual, bodily sensational experience is elevated; the inferior can become the
superior24 if we are willing to sacrifice, for there is no moral act
that does not imply a sacrifice. Our concepts can, though never
completely, succeed in mastering our sensations by partially
renouncing a feeling for life. The product of collective activity is
civilization, the contested result of the incomplete mastery of sensation by concept and the representation of the social energy of communion by the collective representations which are a higher life25
that acts on the elements from which it is made, thereby raising
them to a higher form of life and transforming them.
This elevation, this growth of civilization, that characterizes the
renunciation or sacrifice of sensation for concept and representation
is the realm of the sacred, that begins in the frenetic energy of a desocialized Australian totemic corroborree, but endures beyond such
temporary ritual replenishments only through the socially binding
force of its shared moral or ethical representations: there truly is
a parcel of divinity in us because there is in us a parcel of the grand
ideals that are the soul of collectivity.26
If we can already see Freuds anticipated shadow in his own moral
elevation of thought against the senses, his own evolutionary story of
totemisms metamorphosis, let me adumbrate further the debate of
Moses and Monotheisms hermeneutic historical commentators with
Freud, on the question of what they call tradition, or simply the
transmission of culture.
In this too, a resemblance between Durkheims social psychology
of a teleological, civilizational transmutation that aims toward an
incomplete sacred, rational victory over experienced, individualized
sensations of the body by symbolization, and Freuds, is intriguing.
So how does the collective symbol of the totem, which, after all, is
more efficacious than the totem itself, and which enables the perpetuity of group life, the shared spirituality which is the enduring
moral force or energy of collective life, survive individual death to
create social continuity?
Thus, there is, writes the founder of modern, scientific sociology,
a mystical sort of germinative plasma that is transmitted from generation to generation and that creates, or at least is held to create, the
spiritual unity of the clan over time. And despite its symbolic nature,

Philip Wexler

this belief is not without objective truth, for although the group is not
immortal in the absolute sense of the work, yet it is true that the group
lasts above and beyond the individuals and that it is reborn and reincarnated in each new generation.
Freuds theory of cultural transmission, which has been criticized
by both Yerushalmi27 and Bernstein28 for its anachronistic Lamarckianism and its excessive reliance on the dynamics of repression of historical events into an unconscious memory which then returns in
altered form is no less positivistic than Durkheims and adds rather
than detracts from the hermeneutical analyses of his texts. What
Yerushalmi objects to in Moses and Monotheism is the role of the
unconscious in cultural transmission, since it diminishes the importance of intentional, conscious religious tradition as constitutive of
collective memory. One cannot, he asserts explain the transmission
of a tradition at any time as a totally unconscious process.29 As the
general statement shows, he wants to remain balanced and inclusive,
not ruling out unconsciousness, but looking for the interplay with
precept and example, narrative, gesture, ritual Bernstein takes the
same inclusive line. Of Freud, he writes: He tends to underestimate
the creative importance of ritual, ceremonies, narratives, customs,
and cultural practices .30
What they want to forget is repression as a creative force in the
unconscious and the causal centrality of the return of the repressed
for Freuds theory of collective and individual history, and for social
psychology, as enacted both in the universal evolution of religion
and in the particular history of Judaism. Marcuse,31 on the contrary,
in the typically condensed and cryptic style of the Frankfurt School,
makes such analytical repressions into a predictive principle of history: The return of the repressed makes up the tabooed and subterranean history of civilization.32 Diminishing the role of the
unconscious enables omission of the trauma that is repressed, the
violence, the murder, the cannibalism and the incest. The primordial
parricidal murder that explains totemism and the incest taboo, and
later, the historical transformation of a dualistic Moses into abstract
principles of thought, spirituality and ethics, is only a specific
instance of cultural theories of meaning that reduce the importance
of disruptive violence, deep forgetting and denial, and unwanted historically distorted and disguised reappearances of earlier events. For
Freud, it is the fathers will that returns as monological conscience,
overcoming maternity and polytheism. But what is really overcome,
in the long march toward modern ethics and science is that very

A Secular Alchemy of Social Science

same realm of the senses that Durkheim placed on the superceded

side of an historical dualism of human nature. This turning, Freud
writes in Moses and Monotheism, from the mother to the father,
however, signifies above all a victory of spirituality over the
sensesthat is to say, a step forward in culture, since maternity is
proved by the senses whereas paternity is a surmise based on a
deduction and a premise.
The hermeneutical restoration called for by these critics of Freud
misses the point of the core psychological, sociological and historical
universal transformation that is concretized in Jewish history and
through its great man and founder, Moses. Ritual and ceremony
belong to pre-history. From the starting point of Amenhotep, the sensory is replaced by the symbolic, the concrete by the abstract, the
instinctual by the spiritual.
Durkheims dualism is repeated, in a related but somewhat different tone. His constitutional duality is instead a union of two constituents,33 represented by the duality embedded within the great
murdered man, the duality of the later prophetic, Mosaic abstract,
invisible, dematerialized mindagainst the man of the volcano-god,
who represents a lower level of culture than what the higher cultural
level Levites would transmit into the evolution of a spirituality that
would finally become ethics and science. It is this Mosaic religion
that signified subordinating sense perception to an abstract idea;
it was a triumph of spirituality over the senses: more precisely, an
instinctual renunciation accompanied by its psychologically necessary consequences.34 Leaving no doubt about his view, he reiterates:
The progress in spirituality consists in deciding against the direct
sense perception in favour of the so-called higher intellectual
processesthat is to say, in favour of memories, reflection, and
deduction.35 Like Durkheims beast and angel, religions display the
core dynamics of social psychology, which are those of the transmutation from the lower instinctual to the higher mind, which, here too,
is ultimately a divine teleology.
For if Durkheim replaced god with societys collective conscience,
Freud replaced religion with science, which is no illusion. But, the
movement from the lower animal to the higher truly human is nevertheless driven, as Durkheim put it, by that parcel of divinity within
us. Or, as Loewald36 quotes Freuds essay on Leonardo da Vinci: by
the divine spark which is directly or indirectly the driving force
il primo motore behind all human activity.37 Though Freud may
have disdained ceremonial more than did Durkheim, they both

10

Philip Wexler

dismissed magic and mysticism (There is no church of magic,

Durkheim declared), in favor of a unitary symbolic process of representation, or sublimation. As Freud observed of the effects of
monotheistic religion on the Jewish people: it formed their character
for good through the disdaining of magic and mysticism and encouraging them to progress in spirituality and sublimations.38
What is it that the reincarnated great man and founder, Moses
Freud himself sublimates? Is it simply the identification with his own
paternal Jewishness, fully expressed? His own ambition, as
Yerushalmi would have it, to incarnate Judaism within psychoanalysis? All this would be the return of the fathers will, but not of his
world, or, more precisely, perhaps of his conscious, articulated, but not
of his repressed, unconscious, world. What Freud understood, as the
other side of his idealist transmutation of bodily materialism, was that
it is the unconscious ideational world as well as both the will and
expressed ideas of the father which is the return of the repressed. This
archaic heritage, which later hermeneuts would like to forget as a
superstition that modern science has passed by, Freud acknowledges
as memory residues (which) are then unconscious and operate from
the Id a new complication arises, however, when we become aware
that there probably exists in the mental life of the individual not only
what he has experienced himself, but also what he brought with him
at birth, fragments of phylogenetic origin, an archaic heritage.39 He
continues: the archaic heritage of mankind includes not only dispositions, but also ideational contents, memory traces of the experiences of former generations.40
Repressed ideational contents can be more generationally, historically, recent and not only those of the extreme, primordial, archaic
heritage. If the contents of the unconscious include historical as well
as archaic contents, it might, however, have been more difficult to
assimilate the particular Jewish narrative of religious evolution to the
universal model of the parricidal dynamic of all religious development: the modern story.
I want to suggest a different ground, otherwise than the
hermeneutical return to ceremonial that Freud wanted to sublimate
(and contemporary hermeneutics and ritual theory want to resuscitate) and the deep, originary human memory that he courageously
wanted to bring to the conscious surface. The repressed memory that
Freud sublimates theoreticallyTheory, too, Loewald observed,
is a work and product of sublimation41can be a more recent historical, and less traumatic memory of ideational contents that, like

A Secular Alchemy of Social Science

11

nineteenth century East European Jewishness itself, are embarrassing

and inadmissible (and in that sense, traumatic) to a modern, assimilated, scientific consciousness, but, perhaps, no less influential.
I want to offer a reconstruction of the Freudian narrative, while
accepting its dynamic principles. This too is a speculative reconstruction, based in ideas about repression, sublimation, and finally derepression and de-sublimation. The transmutational teleology of
social psychology that Durkheim and Freud share (despite intermediate differences of emphasis, on ritual and repression, respectively)
parallels the same transmutational theory of the soul that is articulated
within Hasidism, notably in the Tanya of Schneur Zalman of Liadi. In
the same way that Hasidism has been seen as a humanistic repression
of messianism, the secular social psychologies of Freud and
Durkheim can be interpreted as repression of the messianic drive in
Jewish history. The forms in which this repression is expressed, which
is to say, not expressed or disguised, are different, but the theories
occlude the exploration of a more radical, alternative messianic theory of history, of social interaction, and of social science.
I want to suggest, finally, that the articulation of these alternative,
radical repressed approaches has now been made relevant again,
not by force of intellectual archaeology,nor by psychoanalytical
hermeneutics, in individual or collective forms, but by events in social
history itselfwhich more than the individual analyst, acts as the
therapeutic agent. Recent historical events uncover the repression of
messianism and enable us to ask the constructive theoretical question
of what analytical forms the new sublimation may now take.
Both in Mystical Society and in the most recent work on Webers
social psychology within his sociology of religion,42 I have explored
the extensive Hasidic opus, from a social theoretic perspective. There
is also the recent work of Yitzchak Kraus,43 which offers a theoretical
history of Lubbavitch Hasidism, in particular. Here, I want only to indicate the basic outline of a model that organizes a divinely teleological
movement of the souls dualitythe animal and the divineas the
core interactive process. The elevation, refinement or purification
of the soul occurs by practices which metamorphose or transmute the
animal to the divine elements, which is particularly one of intellectual,
contemplative effort directed toward the attainment of spirituality. Of
course, the language is not exactly the same as the secular psychological and sociological modern secular one of Durkheim and Freud, but
the social psychological contents of the transmutational process are
remarkably similar. A few excerpts from Liqquei Amarim:

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Philip Wexler

The abode of the animal soul (nefesh ha-behemit) derived from the kelipat nogah in every Jew, is in the heart, in the left ventricle that is filled
with blood. It is written, For the blood is the nefesh. Hence, all lusts
and boasting and anger and similar passion are in the heart, and from the
heart they spread throughout the whole body, rising also to the brain in
the head, so as to think and meditate about them and become cunning
in them
But the abode of the divine soul is in the brains that are in the head, and
from there it extends to all the limbs; and also in the heart .
It is written, however, One nation shall prevail over the other nation. The
body is called a small city. Just as two kings wage war over a town,
which each wishes to capture and rule, that is to say, to dominate its inhabitants according to his will, so that they obey him in all that he decrees for
them, so do the two soulsthe Divine and the vitalizing animal soul that
comes from the kelipahwage war against each other over the body and
all its limbs. It is the desire and will of the Divine soul that she alone rule
over the person and direct him, and that all his limbs should obey her and
surrender themselves completely to her .44

Idel45 has recently revised the conventional wisdom in Hasidic historiography to underline the magical, astrological elements of its historic, theurgical theory of interaction. Patais46 controversial inquiry
invites further analysis of the deep transmutational, social psychologies of Hasidism, Durkheim and Freud. Patai observed:
The prevailing attitude of Jewish scholars to the role Jews played in the
history of alchemy is reminiscent of the scholarly position on Jewish mysticism a hundred years ago . My shock was the greater since my father,
who was the dominant influence in my young life, was a great admirer of
both the Kabbalah and Hasidism, and I simply could not understand how
a Jewish historian could denigrate this wonderful manifestation of lofty
spiritualism in Judaism. Fortunately, the Zohar and the Kabbalah in general have been fully rehabilitated in the last half century, due primarily to
the work of Gershom Scholem and his followers. Martin Buber and his
disciples have done the same for Hasidism, which is recognized today as
a powerful religious movement that has played such a crucial role in Jewish history since the eighteenth century. No such redemption has as yet
come to alchemy.47

Perhaps this was due, as Patai puts it, to the occupational specialization of alchemy, which was a healing transmutation practiced by the Jewish medical elite, compared to more broad-based
intellectual, social movements. Patai distinguished between the more

A Secular Alchemy of Social Science

13

well-known alchemy of transmuting matter, which he sees as a forerunner of chemistry, and the transmutation, as he puts it, of the
imperfect human soul into a more perfect spiritual entity.48 This
transmutational, interactive process of spiritual regeneration complements the material alchemy of the transmutation of base metals
to gold with a mysterious process that we might call a spiritual alchemyanalogously to chemistry in material alchemy,
the spiritual template of an interpersonal, healing transmutation of
later secularized social and psychological scientific healing, or
social progress.
It is this very sort of transformative process that psychoanalysis
recapitulates, under the term sublimation, which Loewald49 selfconsciously relates to the ancient process (associated with Libra,
sublimation is the name of one of the basic alchemical processes,
along with projection, in one eighteenth century alchemical formulation). Sublimation, he writes, is passion transformed. But, then
more generally, he locates the Freudian sublimation of the sexual to
the divine in a more general model as the transmutation into something higher.50 Further: Sublimation, in both the chemical and psychoanalytic sense, denotes some sort of conversion or transmutation
from a lower to a higher, and presumably purer state or plane of existencebe it the transmutation of a material substance or of an instinct
and its objects and aims.
In his own view of sublimation, Loewald wants to assert not only
a transmutational process, but to suggest a restorative one. In this
view, sublimation overcomes alienating differentiation to provide a
fresh unity (of sexuality and spirituality). It is not only a transformation, but a kind of union, a reconciliation of polarities, of
separateness.51 The process of sublimation itself is a healing reintegration: Could sublimation, he asks, be both a mourning of a lost
original oneness and a celebration of oneness regained?52 Can this
restorative integration of psychological sublimation itself, we add,
represent an individualized displacement of restoration of oneness
that is the aim of an historical, external, social process? If Hasidism
anthropologized and neutralized messianism, the effect of secular
social psychologyin both its general logic of transmutation and in
the particular process of sublimationis to anthropologize, or individualize, historical social, mystical messianism. If Durkheim and
Freud can be seen as secularized analogues to the templates of
Hasidic soul teleology, or more hypothetically, spiritual alchemy, do

14

Philip Wexler

they also participate in those denials of a collective transmutation,

which is repressed Jewish messianism?

Social Psychology as Mystical Messianism

Messianism embodies those utopian, restorative and revolutionary
social tendencies which are much less important in alchemy,
Hasidism and in modern social psychological theory. The Jewish
tradition of cataclysmic, apocalyptic messianism has undergone a
long history of suppression and denial. According to Scholem: For
this denial of apocalytpicism set out to suppress exceedingly vital
elements in the realm of Judaism, elements filled with historical
dynamism even if they combined destructive with constructive
forces.53 It is the view of a purified and rational Judaism which
has offered modern conceptions of development as secularized
messianism in the form of a progressive and continuous view of
history. Rather:
The Bible and the apocalytpic writers know of no progress in history leading to the redemption. The redemption is not the product of immanent
developments such as we find it in modern Western reinterpretations of
Messianism since the Enlightenment where, secularized as the belief in
progress, Messianism still displayed unbroken and immense vigor. It is
rather transcendence breaking in upon history, an intrusion in which history itself perishes.

In the catastrophic, spontaneous idea of messianic redemption, the

coming of the Messiah is not a matter of moralism, or even,
Scholem writes, of a rational and sensible utopianism. He comes
suddenly, unannounced, and precisely when he is least expected or
when hope has long been abandoned.54
Hasidism, which in our particularistic counter-narrative of the
religious, and Jewish, archaeology of modern social psychological
theory, is the gate to modernity, does not only show how a humanized alchemy transmutes the soul, but, according to Scholem how it
does so at the sacrifice of a messianic social view of redemption: It
conquered in the realm of inwardness, but it abdicated in the realm
of Messianism.55
The Messianic impulse to restore and renew a lost historical and
cosmic unity, to transcendentally disrupt profane history and so to end
a multileveled exile, is displaced to the personal, intimate realm of

A Secular Alchemy of Social Science

15

devekut, or uplifting intimacy. Now it is the individual soul which is

purified. The great cosmic vision of the Messianic mission of the
Jew in performing the task of tiqqun has receded into the background
and a vision of a different character has taken the stage.56 The transmutation of the individual soul, its refinement or elevation, that can
draw initiating energy from both instinct and interaction, an individual rather than social teleology, becomes, in Scholems view of early
Hasidism, a substitute for a collective redemption.
The goal of spirituality is here not the triumph of the Egyptian
Moses over the volcano-god of the desert, of ethical abstraction or
ideals over the senses, but of individualism over collectivity, both historical and cosmic. The goal, writes Scholem, as formulated in the
works of the Rabbi of Polnoye is the mystical redemption of the individual here and now, i.e., redemption not from exile, but in exile,
or in other words, the destruction of exile by its spiritualization.57
This individualized spiritualization is part of the historic repression of
messianism, which, as Scholem explains, is a revolutionary theory:
Jewish Messianism is in its origins and by its naturethis cannot be
sufficiently emphasizeda theory of catastrophe. This theory
stresses the revolutionary, cataclysmic element in the transition from
every historical present to the Messianic future.58
Idel59 continues the counter-modern, or now postmodern, project
of restoring mysticism and messianism to the scene of Jewish historiography. Indeed, to the centrality of a collective messianism, Idel adds
its simultaneously mystical, experiential component, which is not an
antithesis to collective messianism, but a crucial constitutive element.
My main concern here, he states early on, is to focus on a number
of related cases where the mystical experience is at the very heart of
a messianic self-awareness. This revision of Scholem supplements
Idels earlier correction of the tendency to spiritualize Hasidism, by
recollecting the role of magic, as well as mysticism.
Our suggestion then has been that messianism, but also mysticism
and magic are the repressed ideational contents in modern, secular
social psychology. Also, that Freuds daring reflexivity to replace
Judaism, and modern consciousness more generally, within religious
history, displays a social psychology in which he shares much with
another great Jewish modern, David, Emile Durkheimand that,
despite the apparent differences of emphasis on society and individual,
their theoretical consciousness too can be replaced within a religious
history. But it is a particularistic rather than universal history of the evolution of the religious unconscious into secular, scientific knowledge.

16

Philip Wexler

The return of this repressed may also be particular, historically

specific. While, it, like the transmutational teleology of spiritualization and collective ideals, may be retrieved from earlier Jewish knowledge and represented as a scientific theory of social interaction or
collective identity, we should, I think, first ask about the sources of
its de-repression, of a de-sublimation that may require more than the
hermeneutical insight of the historian or psychoanalyst.
Theory is not only a work of sublimation, as Loewald60 observed,
but also a work of social practice, and a symbolization of social practice, in history. The suggestion that a speculative reconstruction of the
archaeology of Jewish knowledge that social psychology, which
belongs to the family tree of Hasidism and arguably, alchemy, and less
so to a messianic, mystical tradition, can be simply rethought messianically would deny the very power of collective social action for revolutionary transformation which is at the heart of Jewish messianism.
In Mystical Society, I tried to show how the historical structural
transformations of the information society are mediated by new
social movements of sociocultural and social psychological revitalization. From this social transformational base, I aimed to draw implications for the rethinking of prevailing social scientific concepts.
Those were general concepts, and the driving social revitalization
movements were considered generally, and outside our specific
counter-narrative of the selective secularization of Jewish thought.
Yet, the historic repression of messianism and mysticism that
Scholem and Idel have signally brought to scholarly consciousness
has a history in social consciousnesshowever much forgotten by
the modernsand it is being challenged in social, collective consciousness and in the practice of everyday, Jewish life. The most
extreme example is within that very Hasidism that Scholem
described as neutralized, or repressed, in its early stages. Now, in
the Chabad example,61 there is a return of the repressed messianic.
Against the mass practice of Hasidic messianism within the Lubbavitcher religious movement, modern Jewish orthodoxy62 aims to suppress its appearance as contemporary Jewish heresy. Instead, I want
to suggest that this aspect of the Chabad movement offers an example of an embodied social prophecy, of an emergence from the subterranean tradition, that is an actualized instance of a strongly coded
postmodern redefinition of the sacred, which is performed in its practical social psychology .
Against the prevailing view in social movement theory63 that
sacralized social movements are defensive communal reactions of

A Secular Alchemy of Social Science

17

identity reconstruction against the effects of globalizing informationalism, I want to suggest that such movements go beyond defensive strategies. Instead of reverse flow, imagine that societal change
sets new arenas of collective problem-solving. From modern alienation to postmodern self-saturation,64 the problem of self-diminution
is intensified as individualization continues to replace collective
identity. Simultaneously, boundary-smashing of all but the most protectively coded meanings65 implies that culture needs to become
increasingly cosmic.
In these conditions, the sacred is no longer about the unified tribes
collective representations, or human wish-fulfillment. Rather, it is
composed of the combined and conflicting practices of re-personalization and re-narrativization. Re-personalization returns needed
vitality to the hyper-individualized self by re-auratizing that which the
mechanical reproduction of the commodity destroyed.66 Re-narrativization goes beyond a social story to effect an integration of meaning by countering chaos with a re-cosmicized narrative.67 Following
Rappaports68 informational approach to the discursive (sacred) and
numinous (experiential) constitution of then holy, unverifiability is
reinforced by informational minimalism as a method for creating
meaningful order.
Acquisition of personal aura is obtained by the production of
exemplary individual auras who can be identified with, from whom
auratic power can be transferred, to work at the self level. Religious
re-auratization, as a method of mass re-personalization means that
stars, gurus and rebbes are not, as Critical Theory taught, mere iconic
forms of self-alienation. By investing the super-person with more
vital power, there is, as Idel69 described the shamanistic aspect of
Hasidism, more shefa (abundant energy) to be redistributed. The
reinvestment of selfhood by identification and transfer (devequt) from
auratic rebbe to vital self, threatens, as Mitnagdim and their descendants have historically understood, the integrative power of meaning,
of Torah and text.
Messianism overcodes and reinforces these social psychological
processes. The auratic power of a de-temporalized guru is multiplied
by making him the dramatic repository of a transferable selfhood
that is securely anchored in the end of time. The ego-ideal of the
guru replenishes the globally assaulted boundary and energy of the
individual self and becomes even more idealized with a messianic
mantle. The narrative resource for an ordering reintegration of
meaning that replaces the story of historical society with transcen-

18

Philip Wexler

dent cosmos is expanded and fortified by the dramatic emphasis of

imminent redemption.
In Kraus70 analysis of the writings of the seventh Lubbavitcher
Rebbe, the Ramam, re-personalization is made explicit. Not only is
salvation individualizedgeulah praitbut even more directly, auratized guru-energy, reinforced by messianic boundlessness, is expressly
mass distributed for collective purposes of re-vitalized selfhood. Shebechol yehudi yeshno niu shel meshia. Indeed, there is now a revelation of a niu hameshii ha-praipersonalized revitalization
through messianism. An efficient recosmic integration of meaning is
accomplished by what Kraus describes as Chabads acosmism. Ein
od milvado. The process of providing orienting integrative meaning
where the social narrative is digitally dissolved, is best accomplished
with the least informationan acosmic, cosmic narrative.
There are contemporary examples of messianic movements, outside of Judaism, which offer additional examples of embodied postmodern social psychological practices.71 Exactly how premodern
cultural resources are adapted to postmodern conditions, and how
these practices serve as inspiration for social scientific conceptualization needs to be shown in each case.
Here, I want to suggest that the repressed which returns is not only
the will of a primordial, but an ideational, historic, Jewish, father
one aspect of whose pre-modern world was constitutive of Durkheim
and Freuds contemplative elevation in social psychological theory,
though it was marked largely by its absence. If we work to restore this
mystical, magical, messianic tendency theoretically to social science,
while it returns in social practice, do we only vicariously countenance
still another form of regression, in pseudo-messianic fusion? Or, do
we, instead, restore a messianic, truly utopian lost unity, which the
alchemical, secular gnosis of modern social science displaced, and so
renew social theory? Do we then shift from a secular alchemy of antimessianic social psychology to asking what the shape of a secular,
messianic social psychology would look like?
PHILIP WEXLER is Professor of Education and Director of the School
of Education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the author
of many publications, including Social Analysis of Education (1987),
Becoming Somebody: Toward a Social Psychology of School (1992),
Holy Sparks: Social Theory, Education and Religion (1996), Mystical
Society (2000) and Symbolic Movement: Critique and Spirituality in
Sociology of Education (2007).

A Secular Alchemy of Social Science

19

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: This article was originally published in Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts, 12, 2004, pp.
7-26, and is reprinted here with permission of Cherub Press,
www.cherub-press.com.

Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.

7.
8.

9.

Phillippe Buc, The Dangers of Ritual, Princeton, 2001, p. 238.

Philip Wexler, Mystical Society, Boulder, 2000.
Ivan Strenski, Durkheim and the Jews of France, Chicago, 1997.
Robert Bellah (ed.) Emile Durkheim on Morality and Society, Chicago, 1973,
pp.149-163.
Philip Wexler, Social Psychology, the Hasidic Ethos and the Spirit of New Age,
Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts, 7, 2002, pp.11-36.
See, for example, Moshe Idel, Hasidism: Between Ecstasy and Magic, Albany,
1995; and Moshe Idel, The Origin of Alchemy according to Zosimos and a
Hebrew Parallel, Revue des tudes juives, 145, 1986, pp.117-124.
David Bakan, Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition, Princeton,
1958; Ivan Strenski, Durkheim and the Jews of France, Chicago, 1997.
Uri Kaploun (ed.) Lessons in Tanya: the Tanya of R. Shneur Zalman of Liadi (elucidated by Yosef Wineberg, translated by Levy Wineberg), Brooklyn, 1996. See
Raphael Patai, Esh Mtzaref: A Kabbalistic-Alchemical Treatise, Occident and
Orient, 1988, pp. 299-313; Raphael Patai, Sephardic Alchemists From Iberia to
Diaspora, Frankfurt, 1994, pp. 235-244; and Raphael Patai, The Jewish
Alchemists, Princeton, 1994. While Patai identifies the work of Jewish
alchemists in the fourteenth century, Scholem sees no alchemical influence on
Jewish kabbalah before the beginning of the sixteenth century, and Idel notes
alchemical Greek texts as representing earlier Jewish myths, at the end of the
third century. While all these positions may not necessarily be contradictory,
among these historians of Jewish mysticism and esotericism, only Patai assigns
real importance to the alchemical influence in Jewish thought. Scholem, for
example, observes in Alchemie und Kabbala, Frankfurt am Main, 1994, p. 21
(citing from the translation prepared by Dirk Michel, Claudia Schertges and
Philip Wexler): In no Hebrew, kabbalistic book or manuscript before 1500 have
I found alchemical formulae referring to the famous work. Insofar as such formulae are to be found in the older manuscripts of the 14th or 15th century, they
have nothing to do with kabbalah and come from non Jewish kabbalist sources.
Idel indicates how a Jewish myth was represented in alchemy, but the alchemical expression is Greek rather than Jewish.
Gershom Scholem, The Neutralization of the Messianic element in early
Hasidism, The Messianic Idea in Judaism, New York, 1971; Moshe Idel,
Hasidism: Between Ecstasy and Magic, Albany, 1993, pp. 170-202; Gershom

20

10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.

44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
49.
50.
51.

Philip Wexler
Scholem, Alchemie und Kabbala: Ein Kapitel aus der Gerschichte der Mystik,
Frankfurt am Main, 1994.
Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, Cambridge, Mass., 1996.
David Harvey, The Condition of Post-Modernity, Cambridge, Mass., 1989.
Alberto Melucci, The Playing Self: Person and Meaning in the Planetary Society, New York, 1996.
Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (trans. by Karen E.
Fields), New York, 1995, p. 66.
Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, New York, 1957, p. 20.
Durkheim, Elementary Forms, p. 229.
Ibid. p.133.
Robert Bellah (ed.) Emile Durkheim on Morality and Society, Chicago, p. 152.
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, London, 1961, p. 81.
Ibid. p. 57.
Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, p. 227.
Ibid. p. 275.
Ibid. p. 151.
Karen Fields, translator of Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, p.37.
Bellah, Emile Durkheim on Morality and Society, p. 155.
Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, p. 447.
Ibid. p. 267.
Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freuds Moses, New Haven, 1991.
Richard J. Bernstein, Freud and the Legacy of Moses, Cambridge, 1998.
Yerushalmi, Freuds Moses, p. 89.
Bernstein, Freud and the Legacy of Moses, p. xi.
Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, Boston, 1955.
Ibid. p.16.
Bellah, Emile Durkheim on Morality and Society, pp. 149-163.
Ibid. p. 144.
Ibid. p. 150.
Hans Loewald, Sublimation: Inquiries into Theoretical Psychoanalysis, New
Haven, 1988.
Ibid.
Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, New York, 1967, p. 109.
Ibid. p. 125.
Ibid. p. 127.
Loewald, Sublimation, p. 15.
Wexler, Social Psychology, the Hasidic Ethos and the Spirit of New Age.
Yitchak Kraus, Living with the Times: Reflection and Leadership, Theory and
Practice in the World of the Rebbe of Lubavitch, Rabbi Menachem Mendel
Schneersoon, Ph.D thesis, Bar Ilan University, 2001.
Kaploun (ed.) Lessons in Tanya, pp. 35-37.
Idel, Hasidism: Between Ecstasy and Magic, pp. 170-202.
Patai, The Jewish Alchemists.
Ibid. p. 7.
Ibid. p.3.
Loewald, Sublimation.
Ibid. p. 12.
Ibid. p. 23.

A Secular Alchemy of Social Science

21

52. Ibid. p. 80.

53. Gershom Scholem, Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in
Judaism, The Messianic Idea in Judaism, New York, 1973, p. 9.
54. Ibid. p. 10
55. Ibid. p.202.
56. Ibid. p. 191.
57. Ibid. p. 195.
58. Ibid. p. 7.
59. Moshe Idel, Messianic Mystics, New Haven, 1998.
60. Loewald, Sublimation: Inquiries into Theoretical Psychoanalysis.
61. Wexler, Social Psychology, the Hasidic Ethos and the Spirit of New Age.
62. David Berger, The Rebbe, The Messiah and the Scandal of Orthodox Indifference, London, 2001.
63. Castells, The Rise of the Network Society.
64. Kenneth J. Gergen, The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary
Life, New York, 1991.
65. Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, p. 66: God, nation, family and community will provide unbreakable, eternal codes, around which a counter-offensive will be mounted against the culture of real virtuality.
66. Walter Benjamin, Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Illuminations
(edited and with an introduction by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn),
New York, 1968, pp. 217-251; and see The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility: Third Version, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings,
Volume 4, 1938-1940 (translated by Edmund Jephcott and others, edited by
Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings), London, 2003, pp. 251-283.
67. Stephen Toulmin, The Return to Cosmology, Berkeley, 1985.
68. Roy A. Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity, Cambridge,
1999.
69. Idel, Hasidism: Between Ecstasy and Magic.
70. Kraus, Living with the Times.
71. See, for example, Thomas Robbins and Susan J. Palmer, Millennium, Messiahs
and Mayhem: Contemporary Apocalyptic Movements, New York, 1997.