Woody Allen, Psychoanalysis, and Sexual Taboos
The Unhived Mind / Jonas E. Alexis
Woody Allen and young Soon Yi
Woody Allen is an interesting filmmaker. Not only has he had a continuing fascination with psychoanalysis, but he has also had, as the Jewish Rabbi Samuel Dresner notes,
“a ‘persistent fascination’ with incest…He has been in psychoanalysis for over 30 years; his fascination, whether expressed in his writing, or through his seduction of his and Mia Farrow’s adopted daughter is best explained by an analysis of Freud. Freud, too, was obsessed with incest…
“David Bakan…claims Freud was a follower of the false Messiah Shabbetai Zevi whose attack on Moses was an attempt to abolish the law as Zevi did, through ritual impurity.
“Jews who promote sexual revolution are in this tradition: ‘They,’ Dresner says, ‘conjure up painful memories of the infamous seventeenth century false messiah Sabbatai Tzvi or his successor, Jacob Frank.”[1]
Remember what we learned from Sabbatai Tzvi and his followers in the middle of the eighteenth century. They
“engaged in secret antinomian rites: they practiced necromancy, masturbated and then smeared the whole body with the semen, permitted or even encouraged incest, practiced wife swapping and group sex, advocated a complete sexual freedom, and ‘permitted perjury, theft, and adultery.”[2]
Freud’s psychic determinism largely sanitized the Sabbatean cult, and Woody Allen largely sanitized Freud’s sexual theories through his movies—though his audience hardly sees the connections.
But the issue goes even deeper. As Jewish sexologist Ruth Westheimer herself put it, “Judaism is intensely sexual,” and “sex, in and of itself, has never been a sin for Jews, or something not to discuss.”[3]
It is no surprise, then, that Allen would use subtle sexual liberation as a cornerstone in many of his movies. Allen makes it clear that
“Almost all my work is autobiographical and yet so exaggerated and distorted it reads to me like fiction.”[4]
READ MORE:
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2014/06/11/woody-allen-psychoanalysis-and-sexual-taboos/