ABSTRACT 

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN IDENTITY FORMATION AND ANXIETY IN RELATIONSHIP TO THE JEWS

 By

Samuel H. Schwimmer, Ph.D.

Can you separate the Jew from Judaism? This study speaks to the issue of identity and its constructs to the ego. Long before the word became fashionable among psychoanalysts, Jews were obsessed with the subject of identity. Since Jews were stateless until the last half century, absent of national prominence in the political sense; not rooted to a country they called their own; their religious faith represented their identity.

Anna Freud has contributed a great deal to our understanding of feelings and senses; she termed them defenses, resulting in an enlarged and systemized understanding of various mechanisms of defense. Subsequently the studies of these defenses were related to the resistances that emerge in psychotherapy. The resistances that emerge are not only obstacles to treatment but also important sources of information about a person’s identity and ego functions. The constructs of this study builds the relationship between identity formation and anxiety in relationship to the Jews.

The frame of Jewishness was a compound of religion and ethnicity. This study explains the operation and effect of the forces that I believe have shaped modern Jewish identity and companying anxiety, with greater values: an ongoing process of continued enlightenment, anti-Semitism and the significance of Jewish peoplehood represented by the religion, and by the experience of its atrocities, the Holocaust. The meanings created by the themes introduced into human history by the Holocaust influence many Jewish individuals’ psychic structure and shape the content of their character. Many survivors engaged in the struggle between finding meaning and the experience of numbing. In many cases their trauma has been transmitted across generational lines to their children. The author examines the concept of object loss and the concept of abandonment. The application of this study examines the psychodynamic concept of loss as it overlays history and its effect on Jews and Judaism.    

This study will identity and link the relationship between an absent or distant caretaker and companioned cause for anxiety. Furthermore, it connects a diminishing identification with spirituality and its convergence with feeling of anxiety.