Mourner’s Kaddish and Its Connections: Psychoanalytic Thoughts on Mourning in the Jewish Religious Context

Abstract:Psychoanalysis teaches that the goal of mourning is for the bereaved eventually to be able to accept the death of a loved one. It may therefore come as a surprise that what religious Jews call Mourner’s Kaddish makes no reference whatsoever to death, the deceased, or the bereaved. Instead of having anything to do with the mourning process, this ancient prayer requires the bereaved to utter nothing but words of exaggerated praise for the “great name” of the “Holy One.” Psychoanalytically speaking, mourning is displaced because Yahweh needs narcissistic supplies. An “inability to mourn” plagues the history of the Jews–down to the present day. Well into the twentieth century this sort of thinking was maintained in American Reform Judaism’s editions of the Union Prayerbook, which encourages congregants to believe in an afterlife of the spiritual soul, which is, again a denial of the finality of death.