- Vestigia Journal

‘Between Darkness and Light’ by Marc Chagall, 1943

Volume 4, Issue 2, 2025

Guest Editor Ayelet Schafir-Hirshfeld

Cover Page

ISSN 2732-5849

EDITORIAL: Ayelet Schafir-Hirshfeld

ARTICLES

On brothers and segregation

Victor Mazin

Victor Mazin, Ph.D., practicing psychoanalyst, born in Murmansk, Soviet Union, in 1958. Graduated from Smolensk Pedagogical Institute, Department of Natural Sciences (1981), and East-European Institute of Psychoanalysis (1999). As associate professor and head of the Department of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the State University of Sankt Petersburg, Victor Mazin focuses his research and teaching on theory of cinema and history of avant-garde cinema.

Vestigia Volume 4, Issue 2, 2025, Pages 8-18

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There is no abstract for this article.

The anti-Semitic imaginary

Sergio Benvenuto

Sergio Benvenuto is a psychoanalyst and philosopher, and lives in Rome. He is researcher at the National Council for Scientific Research (CNR) in Rome, at the former Institute of Psychology. He is the president of Institute for Advanced Studies in Psychoanalysis (ISAP). From 1995 until 2020 he was the editor of the European Journal of Psychoanalysis (EJP) and he is member of the Editorial Board of American Imago. He is a contributor to journals such as Telos, Lettre Internationale (Berlin), Journal for Lacanian Studies, L’évolution psychiatrique, Division/Review, Psychoanalytic Discourse, Journal of American Psychoanalytic Association. He has worked on Freud and Lacan, Wittgenstein and ethics, Plato’s philosophy of Eros, theory of fashion, theory of populism, monotheisms (with J.-L. Nancy). His publications, in many different languages, include ‘Perversion and charity: an ethical approach’ in Perversion. Psychoanalytic Perspectives / Perspectives on Psychoanalysis (eds. D. Nobus & L. Downing, Karnac, 2006); with A. Molino In Freud’s Tracks (New York: Aronson, 2008); ‘Ethics, Wonder and Real in Wittgenstein’ in Ethics and the Philosophy of Culture: Wittgensteinian Approaches, (eds. Y. Gustafsson, C. Kronqvist & H. Nykänen, Cambridge Scholar Publishing, 2013); What Are Perversions? (Karnac, 2016); and Conversations with Lacan (Routledge, 2020). Personal site and Bibliography: http://www.sergiobenvenuto.it./

Vestigia, Volume 4, Issue 2, 2025, Pages 19-26

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The author draws on a series of rumours and fake news stories that have emerged in different parts of the world, all of which depict ‘evil Jews’. He shows that those who repeat these rumours, and thereby further their spread, need not necessarily be consciously anti-Semitic, or even aware of the anti-Semitic implications of the ‘fact’ they are reporting: there is a pervasive form of objective anti-Semitism. He also highlights the ambivalence of those who claim to be not only anti-Semitic but also admirers of Jews—hatred and idealisation of Judaism often coexist in the same individual. Finally, he takes ‘Jew’ to be a signifier in both a logical and psychoanalytical sense, that is, as something without a definitive meaning, sustained by a pure difference. In what he calls the typicalleft-wing narrative, anti-Zionism, which does not originate as anti-Semitism, becomes part of an oppositional framework in which only the oppressor/oppressed dichotomy functions.

Antisemitism in the twenty-first century: can psychoanalytic theories offer any answers?

Rony Alfandary

Rony Alfandary Ph.D. is a clinical social worker. He is a senior lecturer at the School of Social Work at the University of Haifa. As well as practising psychoanalytic psychotherapy, Rony writes poetry, prose and non-fiction and has published eleven books in English and Hebrew.His research areas include photography, cultural studies, clinical social work, and the impact of the Holocaust upon second and third generations.

Vestigia, Volume 4, Issue 2, 2025, Pages 27-37

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Antisemitism is as old as recorded history. Many attempts have been made by philosophers and historians to pinpoint its origins and supply with a comprehensive explanation to its persistence and prevalence. In this essay, I shall offer some psychoanalytical ideas to try and illuminate some aspects of antisemitism in recent times. I will also discuss its resurgence since October 7^th 2023, following the murderous attack of Hamas on Israel and the ensuing regional war.

Isidor Sadger: a Viennese psychoanalyst killed by the Nazis

Robert M. Kaplan

Robert M. Kaplan: Clinical Associate Professor Robert M Kaplan is a forensic psychiatrist, historian and writer. He has positions at the University of NSW, Western Sydney University, Wollongong University and Stellenbosch University. He writes on history of psychiatry and medicine, crime, genocide and biography. His latest book is The King who Strangled his Psychiatrist and Other Dark Tales (in press). He is currently writing on the history of psychedelics and assassination.

Vestigia, Volume 4, Issue 2, 2025, Pages 38-42

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Isidor Sadger, one of the earliest members of the Freudian circle, was the only one of the Viennese psychoanalysts to die in a Nazi concentration camp. His analytic career was not without its difficulties and he was closely involved with the tragic Hermione Hug-Hellmuth, the first child analyst. This paper is an outline of his career, writings and interactions with Freud and other members of the early analytic group.

Affetti da segregazione

Barbara Aramini

Barbara Aramini is a psychologist and a psychotherapist with a Freudian and Lacanian training and is a participant of the SLP (Scuola Lacaniana di Psicoanalisi); along with her private practice she has been working for several years in social work, in projects aimed at sheltering women and minors in difficulty and minors withdrawn from their families. She also works in schools with projects dedicated to children with disabilities and school dropout.

Vestigia, Volume 4, Issue 2, 2025, Pages 43-53

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There is no abstract for this article.

Freud, psychoanalysis and anti-Semitism

Stephen Frosh

Stephen Frosh is Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Birkbeck, University of London and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. He is the author of many books and papers on psychosocial studies and on psychoanalysis. His latest book is Antisemitism and Racism: Ethical Challenges for Psychoanalysis (Bloomsbury, 2023).

Vestigia, Volume 4, Issue 2, 2025, Pages 54-67

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Freud’s Jewish identity was a significant factor in his life and had a major impact on the development of psychoanalysis. This identity was forged in part in relation to anti-Semitism, which also contributed to the predominantly Jewish make-up of the early psychoanalytic movement. There is also evidence that psychoanalytic theories, especially that of the castration complex, arose as an intentional response to anti-Semitic ideas. Freud often commented on anti-Semitism, but his most extensive treatment of the subject is in his late work, Moses and Monotheism. The current article explores both the shadow of anti-Semitism as it fell on the early psychoanalysts (paying attention to Jung and Jones) and the arguments put forward by Freud to explain it.

Freud, Jews, and identity politics: reading Moses and Monotheism in 2024

Robert Samuels

Robert Samuels holds doctorates in psychoanalysis and English literature. He teaches advanced writing at University of California, Santa Barbara, and he is the author of twenty-five books, including The Psychopathology of Political Ideologies (Routledge, 2022). His Substack is Media, Psychoanalysis, and Politics.

Vestigia, Volume 4, Issue 2, 2025, Pages 68-84

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Written during the time of the rise of the National Socialists in Germany, Freud’s Moses and Monotheism can be read today as an effective critique of both conservative ideology and contemporary identity politics. Even though Freud knew that his ‘race’ was under attack, and he was forced to go into exile, he still insisted in producing a text that de-idealizes his own identity group. Ultimately, what this book demonstrates is the need to affirm ambivalence and ambiguity as the foundations of our cultural relationships; instead of trying to idealize the history and leaders of the Jewish people, Freud locates a primary doubling in relation to Moses. In an act of intellectual bravery, he splits Moses into two different people: An Egyptian Moses and a Jewish one. This splitting places at the heart of the Jewish tradition a divided subject, and this division reflects how every identity is ambivalent and ambiguous.

Antisemitism and the desire of the structuralist

Yehuda Israely

Yehuda Israely is a clinical psychologist, psychoanalyst and author based in Israel. He is the director of Moebius Institute in Tel-Aviv, member of Forum Lacan Tel-Aviv, and his previous publications includeLacanian Treatment. Psychoanalysis for Clinicians (Routledge, 2018); Paradoxes in Lacanian Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2021); and The Ethics of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2023).

Vestigia, Volume 4, Issue 2, 2025, Pages 85-90

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This paper explores the intellectual intersection between antisemitism, exile, and the emergence of structuralism as a transformative theory in linguistics, anthropology, and psychoanalysis. Focusing on the experiences of Roman Jakobson and Claude Lévi-Strauss—two Jewish intellectuals who sought refuge in New York during World War II—the article argues that their exile shaped their theoretical contributions, embedding anti-hierarchical, anti-essentialist principles within their work. Jakobson’s structural linguistics and Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology critiqued Western intellectual traditions that perpetuated ethnocentrism and cultural superiority, promoting a vision of universal structures underlying human language and culture. Through a comparative analysis, the paper draws connections between structuralist theory and Freud’s psychoanalytic work, particularly in understanding the unconscious and cultural systems as relational structures. By examining the ethical dimensions of structuralism, the paper asserts that this intellectual movement—while deeply rooted in the trauma of antisemitism and the Holocaust—offered a progressive framework that sought to dismantle hierarchical distinctions between cultures and races, providing a model for a more inclusive, egalitarian view of human subjectivity. In this context, structuralism emerges not only as a theoretical breakthrough but as a direct response to the intellectual and cultural oppression experienced by Jewish thinkers in the twentieth century.

TEXTS & STUDIES

The one or the other? Anxiety from Heidegger to Lacan

Richard Boothby

Richard Boothby is Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University Maryland, USA. His research focuses on contemporary continental philosophy, with special attention to psychoanalytic theory, phenomenology, and existentialism. He is author of Death and Desire: Psychoanalytic Theory in Lacan’s Return to Freud, Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan, Sex On The Couch: What Freud Still Has To Teach Us About Sex and Gender, a memoir entitled Blown Away: Refinding Life After My Son’s Suicide, and, most recently, Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred.

Vestigia, Volume 4, Issue 2, 2025, Pages 91-99

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There is no abstract for this article.

The trouble with Ptolemy – reconsidering Jean Laplanche’s critique of the death drive

Jens De Vleminck

Jens De Vleminck, PhD, is a philosopher, sexologist and psychoanalyst. He is a titular member of the Belgian School for Psychoanalysis (EBP-BSP) and is currently working at the University Psychiatric Centre KU Leuven (Belgium). He is an associated senior researcher at the Institute of Philosophy and a guest professor at Odisee University College (KU Leuven).

Vestigia, Volume 4, Issue 2, 2025, Pages 100-113

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There is no abstract for this article.

La barbarie du monde moderne et son impact destructeur sur toute subjectivité

Georges J. Akl

Georges J. Akl is a clinical psychologist and a psychoanalytical psychotherapist. He is a member of the Lebanese Order of Psychologists. He has a Master’s degree in philosophy. His Master’s thesis was entitled: La barbarie du monde moderne et son dépassement dans la philosophie de Robert Misrahi, and will be published soon.

Vestigia, Volume 4, Issue 2, 2025, Page 114-136

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In the modern world, few humans escape objectification and alienation. According to philosopher Michel Henry, this phenomenon finds its source in the advent of the technological world that has facilitated, amongst other things, the development of wild capitalism which is at the root of widening inequalities and the impoverishment of the majority. Ultimately, it leads to the destruction of social bonds through the organization of widespread competition at all levels.

Furthermore, the new technical means of communication, or mass media, disseminate a superficial mass pseudo-culture. Hence individuals find it increasingly hard to develop their inner lives. They lack creativity and become alienated by their obsession with economic performance, developing a false self and losing their capacity of caring for others. Even modern psychotherapies are dismissing humanistic approach becoming pseudo-scientific techniques ignoring the intersubjective bond between the therapist and the patient.

Is it possible to analyse analytic writings? The much-discussed case of the brain eater

Sergio Benvenuto

Vestigia, Volume 4, Issue 2, 2025, Pages 137-142

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There is no abstract for this study.

A psychoanalytical look at the myth of Medea

Şengül Yaşar Erverdi

Şengül Yaşar Erverdi is a violin and piano teacher as well as a psychological counsellor and guidance teacher. She began her individual analysis with a training analyst affiliated with the Istanbul Psychoanalytical Association in 2017 and completed it in 2023. Since 2010 she has taught Kindermusik to preschool children and later pursued a master’s degree in psychological counselling and guidance. She works with children aged two to six, conducting observations and deepening them through psychoanalytic literature. By integrating the act of thinking, as emphasized by psychoanalysis, with other disciplines, she seeks to understand humanity, evolution and the world.

Vestigia, Volume 4, Issue 2, 2025, Pages 143-157

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Understanding Medea, one of the female protagonists in mythology for thousands of years, could be the beginning of delving into the roots of the problems women face. Is Medea merely a mythological heroine or does she carry traces from the past regarding what a woman is in her existential journey? Myths extending from ancient societies to the present are perfect data for looking into the future. The similarities between Medea and the golden fleece legend show that Medea was not turned into a child murderer by the patriarchal social order but rather that she sought to fulfill her ambition for power through her male children. The actions of Queen Ino for her own son on the path to the golden fleece contain the reasons for what Medea would do to her family and children. The real-life counterparts of the castration complex that began with Ino and transformed into Maenads, the horrific ends of Pentheus and Orpheus, and the never-ending competition…The new world order has softened the reason for Medea becoming a child murderer, altering the chemistry of her intent. Humanity, unable to bear the consequences, over time changes the intention, turning the crime into an acceptable reality.

Freud and the exegesis of Exodus ii, 3.

John Gale

John Gale is the president of the International Network of Psychoanalytic Practices (INPP) and an editor of the online journal Vestigia. A former Benedictine monk, he taught philosophy and patristics before leaving the priesthood. He was the director of a number of organisations in the field of therapeutic communities specializing in the treatment of psychosis, and of traumatized ex-soldiers who had become homeless. He was a board member of ISPS (UK). He has edited several books and is the author of many scholarly articles at the interface of philosophy, psychoanalysis, and spirituality.

Vestigia, Volume 4, Issue 2, 2025, Pages 158-178

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Freud’s 1939 interpretation of the basket (Kästchen) as a symbol of the womb and of the woman, in the parallel accounts of Moses’ infancy and in the Babylonian legend of Sargon of Akkad is here reviewed. Some of the background is given. The lexical association of the Hebrew tēbāh (used both for Moses’ basket and Noah’s ark) is also discussed, and the lack of an equivalent parallel in the Sargon legend with the Akkadian flood story. The salvific motif of the biblical account of the flood and its parallels, including the Epic of Gilgamesh is outlined. Various patristic (allegorical) interpretations of it are presented to demonstrate the way exegesis responded to the changing circumstances of the early Church, particularly during the Decian persecution. The symbolism adopted by Rank, Karl Abraham and Stekel and on which Freud drew (1909 and 1914) is also discussed, and Freud’s earlier philological analysis of the English word ‘box’ from 1900. It is argued that while the biblical text signifies salvation (being ‘rescued from’ something), Freud’s interpretation discloses an autobiographical focus on a desire not for flight but for safety, for a refuge (the ‘containment’ of the womb); one that between writing the first part and 1939 he was destined to find in England. His declared foundation for the interpretation reveals a concern not with the basket but with the false biblical etymology of the name Moses taken up by Josephus and Philo which he had already correctly dismissed with the help of Herlitz and Kirchner’s Jüdisches Lexicon IV (1), 303. In contrast to ‘the meaning of the father’ which Lacan rightly identified as the overall focus of Moses and Monotheism, the premise of the first, earliest part of the book, drawn from the shared story of the infancy of Moses and Sargon, is shown to be the meaning of the woman.

POEMS

Two Poems

Stephen Mosblech

Vestigia, Volume 4, Issue 2, 2025, Page 179-181

BOOK REVIEWS & SHORT NOTICES

Befriending the Beloved Disciple. A Jewish Reading of the Gospel of John. By Adele Reinhartz

James Akpan

Vestigia, Volume 4, Issue 2, 2025, Page 182-185

The Routledge International Handbook of Psychoanalysis and Jewish Studies. By Stephen Frosh and Devorah Baum

Vestigia, Volume 4, Issue 2, 2025, Page 186