‘The creation of a space’: How sitting shiva mirrors a therapeutic relationship
What lies behind the healing power of shiva?
Mirrors are covered during the ritual Jewish mourning period of shiva. Photo by Barbara Alper/Getty Images
At first glance, shiva and psychoanalysis might not seem to have a whole lot in common. One is an ancient Jewish mourning ritual lasting seven days; the other is a secular, talk-based method to improve mental health, one which lasts — well, a little longer than a week.
Professor Joyce Slochower might beg to differ. A professor at New York University and a practicing psychologist-psychoanalyst, she sees a parallel between a community’s relationship to the mourner during shiva, and a therapist’s relationship to their client.
Just as a client is allowed to express whatever they are feeling to their therapist without worrying that they’re sucking all the oxygen out of the room, the shiva setting allows “the mourner to use people within the community without regard for the community’s needs,” Slochower wrote in her 1993 paper, “The Therapeutic Function of Shiva,” published in Tikkun.
Both relationships occur outside the normal boundaries of ordinary social situations, and are instead governed by their own artificial constraints. The shiva community must perform their obligations for only seven days (but not on Shabbat) before the mourner returns to everyday life. The shrink, likewise, can utter those magic words: “I’m afraid our time is up today.”
Professor Slochower argues that the therapist and the Jewish mourner’s community both serve a “holding function,” creating an environment in which emotions can be expressed without the ordinary social expectation that the exchange will be reciprocal.
Over the course of her career, Slochower has published over 100 articles on psychoanalytic theory and technique. Her forthcoming book, Psychoanalysis and the Unspoken, will examine therapists’ personal, social, and political blindspots.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
You’ve written that shiva helped you to assimilate the loss of a loved one. What does assimilation entail in psychoanalytic theory, and how does shiva help achieve it?
I assume that any loss is traumatic. It could be that your 95-year-old grandmother died — yes, she was old; yes, her death was expected; but there is still a traumatic element. Psychoanalytically, trauma means something that is impinging from the outside that cannot be encompassed. It leaves one in a state of psychic overwhelm. What shiva does, when it works, is to create a kind of a wide space within which the individual can talk about or cry about the loss, or even laugh about something completely different, surrounded by callers, who — if they know what they’re doing — basically listen and respond empathically without turning the conversation toward themselves.
You have a bunch of things that are happening there, psychoanalytically. There is what used to be called “abreaction” — just getting the effect out is itself relieving. It’s like the old saying, “I had a good cry.” It helps. There’s relief in that. And if the space is a good space, there’s also room for the mourner to deal with the more conflicted aspects of the relationship.
In your work, you mention how shiva forced you to go against some of your instincts in a way that was ultimately beneficial. For example, you couldn’t distract yourself by performing mundane tasks like grocery shopping. In the short term this was difficult, but it actually helped you to sit with and come to terms with your loss. Are there other Jewish rituals that you have found this dynamic with?
There are tons of Jewish rituals that sort of force one to confront experience. An obvious example is yizkor — four times a year, you are expected to remember your lost loved ones and, depending on the shul that you go to, say kaddish or perhaps sing a psalm. You re-evoke a memory even though you may not feel like it at all.
But even think about something like Shabbat. It creates protected space. When it’s Shabbos, I don’t go shopping. I don’t cook. You’re forced into a space that is more self-reflective because the external stimuli — the TV, the computer, the telephone — are off limits. You’re with yourself and those you’re close to. Now, does that mean that Orthodox people are more self-reflective? No, no way. It’s not that simple. But there is a potential there — the possibility of entering into a quieter, reflective space that is hard to find during ordinary working life.
I feel — and this may just be because of the way that my own Jewish journey has gone — that this experience is not locked into the minutiae of observance. It’s the gestalt that creates the space. It’s like what Abraham Joshua Heschel called a sacred space. However you experience that, whether you experience it religiously or not, it’s a space that pulls you inward and toward yourself — and maybe your family. Not toward what distracts from that.
Can nonreligious people cultivate the “holding effect” that shiva provides, or do you think that it is contingent upon religious ritual?
First of all, I don’t think that just because you sit shiva means that you access any of this. After Oct. 7, I went to a nameless shul, not mine, in which the rabbi got up and did a teaching on something. I don’t even remember what it was — the origin of some Midrash or something. And I was sitting there thinking, this is such a waste of everybody’s time. You are closing down space, not opening space. Singing a song or naming the names of those killed would have opened the space, all this intellectual crap did not.
So there’s no binary on that side. You can be Orthodox and unable to access reflective space or secular and quite able to. People create all kinds of mourning spaces for themselves. Some people go to the cemetery and sit by the headstone. There’s no religious ritual, it’s not because it’s yahrzeit [the anniversary of a death] or something, it’s just because they have a pull to do that.
Do you think that there’s some generalized “holding space” that people and communities naturally provide when someone passes away — an intuitive sense that our duty is to listen and make space for the mourner’s emotions — or do you think that this is unique to the ritual of shiva?
Both and neither. People can know halakha and the minhagim around shiva and still respond in a wooden, unempathic way. But I’ve also been to many, many shivas where nobody knew about those rituals, and shiva didn’t help because everybody did some version of: “Oh, and when my mom died … ”
People were not doing it selfishly; they were trying to be helpful. But there just was not an intuitive understanding that it’s not the time or place for that.
On the other side, non-Jewish communities can also provide it. I have an Italian Catholic colleague who grew up in Sicily, and when she read my paper, she said, “We do almost the same thing in Sicily!” I can’t remember all the details, but they cover the mirrors … it sounds pretty similar, and it makes sense that therapeutic mourning ritual is not an exclusively Jewish tradition.
But do nonreligious communities intuitively do it? Sometimes yes and sometimes no. I mean, think about what’s going on in Israel, right? I think the community — the whole Jewish portion of Israeli society — is providing holding.
In the time since you wrote your papers on shiva, have your views on this subject changed at all?
I don’t think my views have changed, but what’s changed is that I’ve gotten older. I think about it more with me as a subject. I’m also surrounded by more people who have experienced loss. When I wrote those papers, I was quite a bit younger, and hardly anybody I knew had experienced a traumatic loss. If anything, aging has brought it home more. And certainly, the experience that I had around Oct. 7 was that every Jewish community in this area that I know of was creating holding spaces, in a multiplicity of ways — often using music. I think that the therapeutic power of music in these contexts cannot be overestimated.
You brought up Oct. 7. To me, it seems incredibly complicated — how to form this collective holding space while conflict and death are ongoing. It’s a dynamic you don’t encounter in the typical shiva. How do you think that affects the grieving process?
I think we don’t know how to handle it. When you’re in mourning — sitting shiva, whatever you’re doing — you are grieving an event that has passed. How do you grieve when you’re in the midst of trauma? I also wrote a paper called “The Absent Witness: Mourning Virtually” that’s about COVID-19, about the horror of trying to grieve death when death is all around. When it’s not historical, it’s not over, how do you do that? How do you create the space for that?
I have Haaretz on my browser, and in between every patient — literally — I check it, and there’s another dead soldier or hostage. On the other side, I work with people who are Muslim identified, and many of them are weeping with the same intensity for the Gazans who have been killed. Nobody seems able to create a mourning space that encompasses both. Why can’t we grieve for both peoples? We seem not to be able to. Will we be able to when this ends, if it ever ends? I don’t know. But I think that it certainly complicates the whole grieving process.
The way you incorporate your personal experience of loss into your work on shiva is powerful, and unusual for academic writing. What was the response like?
When I published those shiva papers in psychoanalytic journals, the number of handwritten letters that I got from analysts saying, one way or another, “Thank you, you’ve brought me back to my roots” was stunning. There is some way in which many of us Jewish psychoanalysts — not all, obviously — have separated ourselves from our roots, and think about psychoanalysis almost as an alternate religion. This shiva stuff goes in deep, and it gets people in their kishkes. Even for people who are not observant in any way, there’s something about shiva that speaks to both sensibilities — the personal and the psychoanalytic.
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