Raise your hand if this sounds familiar: In a group of leftie social justice therapists, someone says that therapy is a profession founded by white men. Everyone else in the room nods along and acknowledges the white male hegemonic roots of the profession, then moves on to discuss other things.
The problem with saying that white men founded therapy and is part of a white hegemonic legacy is that it just isn’t true.
If you go down a list of the founders and early theorists of therapy as theory, discipline, and practice, you’ll find that many of them were Jews. Even now, many of our theory heroes and celebrity therapists are Jewish.
And that’s not incidental or coincidental; it is consequential. Therapy is foundationally and elementally Jewish.
To dig into therapy’s Jewish roots, I invited writer and therapist hannah baer to join me. We also talk about therapy’s relationship to Jewish mysticism and esotericism and delve into the ways in which therapy follows the Jewish tradition of marking and understanding the past.
hannah baer is a writer and therapist based in New York. She is the author of the memoir trans girl suicide museum.
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