Our Gemara on Amud Beis relates the famous story of the Men of the Great Assembly who prayed for the elimination of the desire for sinful sexual behavior. Upon capturing and disabling this agent, they noticed the following unwanted side effect:
Instead of killing the evil inclination they imprisoned it for three days. At that time, people searched for a fresh egg throughout all of Eretz Yisrael and could not find one. (Since the inclination to reproduce was quashed, the chickens stopped laying eggs.)
A similar teaching is found in Bereishis Rabbah (9):
Rabbi Nahman said in Rabbi Samuel's name: 'Behold, it was good' refers to the Good Desire; 'And behold, it was very good' refers to the Evil Desire. (It only says 'very good' after man was created with both the good and bad inclinations, in all other cases it only says 'and God saw that it was good') Can then the Evil Desire be very good? That would be extraordinary! But without the Evil Desire, however, no man would build a house, take a wife and beget children; and thus said Solomon: 'Again, I considered all labour and all excelling in work, that it is a man's rivalry with his neighbor.' (Ecclesiastes 4:4).
We take for granted the insight and emotional honesty and awareness of Chazal. From A modern perspective, the idea that man is a conflicted being, and organized by unconscious libidinal or destructive drives whereby his constructive actions in this world come out of a sublimation and compromise between inner needs and outer dictates is relatively new. Sigmund Freud, originally a neurologist and the father of modern psychology, was the first one to be “mechadesh” that pathological symptoms that people experienced might be about a poor relationship between inner and outer dictates. For example, in one of his famous cases, a woman who had paralysis in her arm came for treatment. When no known medical cause could be discerned, he began to uncover through his special process of psychoanalysis (originally Hypnosis, and then later free Association), that in fact this woman’s paralysis was the expression of a basic internal conflict. She had homicidal rage toward her child and was tormented in her dreams about strangling him. Therefore, in what he called an ego defense, she developed a paralysis of her arm to prevent her from doing so symbolically. Once Dr. Freud was able to interpret the conflict, her symptoms vanished.
Since Freud lived in a Time of terrible anti-semitism and he wanted to psychoanalysis To be treated as a serious science, he worked hard to hide and deny any Jewish roots. In point of fact, we know many things about Freud‘s Jewishness and it is almost impossible to imagine that he was not influenced through his childhood studies with various rabbinic sentiments towards drives in the unconscious. Here are some of the things we do know:
- We have the contents of Freud’s personal library, which included the Talmud ( https://www.freud.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/FREUDS-LIBRARY-A-COMPREHENSIVE-CATALOGUE.pdf )
- We also have a Tanakh that Freud’s father gave to him as a gift. Notably, it was inscribed in Hebrew, giving us good reason to assume that Freud could at least read Hebrew. https://www.encyclopedia.com/psychology/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/philippson-bible
Image of the Tanakh inscription:
This is one example of the many enduring and powerful influences that Torah thought, and truly the Sinai revelation, has had on the very formation and advancement of Western civilization.
Translations Courtesy of Sefaria, except when, sometimes, I disagree with the translation 
Do you like what you see? Please subscribe and also forward any articles you enjoy to your friends, (enemies too, why not?)