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Psychoanalytic Dialogues:
The International Journal of
Relational Perspectives
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To cite this article: Jill Salberg Ph.D. (2008) Jonah's Crisis: Commentary on Paper
by Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, Psychoanalytic Dialogues: The International Journal of
Relational Perspectives, 18:3, 317-328, DOI: 10.1080/10481880802073504
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Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 18:317–328, 2008
Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 1048-1885 print / 1940-9222 online
DOI: 10.1080/10481880802073504
Jonah’s Crisis
Commentary on Paper
by Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg
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In discussing Zornberg’s paper, Jonah’s Flight, the author uses Zornberg’s mul-
tifaceted midrashic analysis as a portal to offer an alternative reading of the
Jonah text. Using Relational and British Object Relations psychoanalytic
theories, the author explores Jonah’s state of mind, focusing on his profound
despair. Most notably she finds that his despair is indicative of traumatic dis-
appointment stemming from the sense of not being recognized by God, expe-
riencing an acute disconnection. Jonah is then seen as being in crisis: incapa-
ble of self-reflection, caught in a dissociated self-state, and unable to inhabit
and struggle with his own feelings. The result is alienation from himself, inca-
pacity to feel concern for others and estrangement from God. Using the spiri-
tual writings of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who believes that God is in
search of man, the author suggests that it is the need for an intersubjective
relationship with God that is at the core of this Biblical story.
I
HAVE LONG ENJOYED THE WORK OF AVIVAH ZORNBERG, WHO BRINGS
her unique brand of scholarship to multiple areas of discipline:
Midrashic and Talmudic commentaries along side of psychoanalytic,
philosophical and literary approaches to the interpretation of Biblical text.
Zornberg’s amalgam produces, like light through a prism, a multifaceted ap-
proach to exegesis that makes the text come to life and refracts the com-
plexity of life while providing illumination.
Jill Salberg, Ph.D., is an Analytic Training Supervisor, New York University Postdoctoral
Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis; Faculty, Stephen Mitchell Center for Rela-
tional Psychoanalysis and the National Institute for the Psychotherapies; she has taught at
the JCC in Manhattan; and she is a supervisor, Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy.
317
318 Jill Salberg
With this in mind I eagerly approached Jonah, a small tight text found in
the lesser Prophets of the Bible, and one for which, despite reading annually
at Yom Kippur, I have not had a strong affinity. We all bring ourselves to
whatever text we read—in Bollas’s (1989) terms through our own personal
idiom. Zornberg’s idiom often starts with the language used in the text (bibli-
cal Hebrew) as she works her way through Midrashic and Talmudic com-
mentaries seeking the text’s emotional truth. Her use of traditional psycho-
analytic concepts has also been woven through her writing as she searches
for a deeper understanding in the text. For me, reading biblical texts and
midrash has been a long-standing interest. My lens is a Relational psycho-
analytic one, which I use both in reading the story of Jonah and in respond-
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ings. She writes, “His flight, his death-wish, his anger—none of these rouse
him to curiosity about his own soul, its deep currents and cross-currents”
(this issue, p. 285). Zornberg is quite perceptive about this lack of interest
in his inner being. Jonah has no insight into his despair and yet God seems
to be the referent for it.
While I agree with Zornberg about Jonah’s lack of curiosity, I would
think about this differently. We need to explain what prevents Jonah from
reflecting on his inner states. I believe that he is currently incapable of such
self-reflection. His inner world is archaic, a split universe of good and evil,
what Klein (1952) and contemporary writers would characterize as a posi-
tion dominated by paranoid-schizoid anxieties. In a Kleinian universe one
must keep the good separate from the bad, preventing the bad object from
destroying the good. Jonah’s inability to integrate his split world and his in-
capacity for reflectivity—a failure in what Fonagy and Target (1998)
termed the process of mentalization—keep him in a persecutory universe.
He simply cannot comprehend a God who wants people to change—a God
of reparation and forgiveness, a God who tolerates and accepts ambiva-
lence. He needs a God who is rigidly consistent and consequently will not
disappoint him. In Jonah’s internal world, not only do good and bad need to
be kept apart, but he also needs God to organize and maintain the external
world in the same way. A reliable God would be a strict judge who consis-
tently punishes evil.
When we meet Jonah, he is still gripped by this persecutory inner world,
a world ruled by strict justice—there is absolute evil and it must be pun-
ished absolutely. Zornberg tells us, “Even before his flight, he [Jonah] al-
ready knew God’s nature, its deplorable compassion. … The God who is
celebrated as ‘renouncing evil,’ has acted true to form; and Jonah is mor-
tally sick because of it” (this issue, p. 275). Jonah is unaware of how his own
internal split world of good and bad is projected outward onto the external
Commentary on Paper by Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg 321
see Bialik & Ravnitzky, 1992) we learn that there had been prior missions
in which Jonah’s prophecy had not come to pass. Jonah is seen as fearful of
being considered a “false prophet.” I am purporting that Jonah’s flight has
less to do with the failure of his prophecy than with his flight from chronic
traumatizing disappointment with God. This kind of disappointment re-
sults from a moment of nonrecognition. Thus, beneath Jonah’s despair lies
a wound filled with anger. The problem of aggression and destructiveness
haunts the depressive position world. Winnicott (1963, 1965) captured this
when he stated, “Here being depressed is an achievement, and implies a
high degree of personal integration, and an acceptance of responsibility for
all the destructiveness that is bound up with living” (p. 176).
Although we are all moving from depressive anxieties into para-
noid-schizoid anxieties and back again, Jonah seems to be not fully able to
inhabit the depressive position. The challenges of this stage are engaging in
a reparative process that allows a dyad to reconnect after a rupture as well
as feeling a sense of loss than can be mourned. To do these, Jonah would
need to develop a sense of true concern and real regret for his own destruc-
tiveness. It is only with this achievement that he can mourn the disappoint-
ments that occur and then, begin to care about other people and their own
vulnerabilities. Jonah would need to relinquish his fearful refusal to inhabit
his own sense of helplessness, his vulnerability. Nineveh would then have
resonance for him, and he could appreciate God’s forgiveness and find em-
pathy for the people of Nineveh.
These achievements, the capacity for concern and the ability to make
reparation also hinge ultimately on the capacity for reflection and mutual
recognition. Benjamin (1990, 1998, 2006) saw recognition as the essential
aspect of intersubjectivity, writing, “Intersubjective theory postulates that
the other must be recognized as another subject in order for the self to fully
experience his or her subjectivity in the other’s presence. This means, first,
322 Jill Salberg
that we have a need for recognition and second, that we have a capacity to
recognize others in return—mutual recognition” (Benjamin, 1990, p. 35).
Benjamin (1998) further argued that this mutual recognition is co-created
between the two subjects, their dialogue forming the intersubjective space
of the third: “More broadly, [this] could be understood in terms of the dia-
logue as creating a third, something like the dance that is distinct from the
dancers yet co-created by them” (p. 28). We see from the actual story that
Jonah’s flight is an escape from dialogue with God. (Commentaries on Jo-
nah have suggested that Jonah flees to Tarshish believing that prophecy, lit-
erally God’s voice, can only be heard in the land of revelation; see Simon,
1999, p. 3, citing Mekhilta of Rabbi Ishmael). With his flight, Jonah attempts
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To die — to sleep —
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to. ’Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die — to sleep.
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that needs to infuse one’s praying. Jonah’s state of mind in the great fish
does not feel like a focused, intended prayer but rather a submissive prayer,
perhaps even a sudden, last ditch effort to remain alive. I want to suggest
that embedded within the idea of kavanah is the possibility of surrender to
prayer. A true heartfelt prayer has a focused intentionality but also a relin-
quishment of willfullness. This surrender involves a true receptivity to the
experience of prayer rather than a willful desire to be in prayer. Although
Jonah is praising God his praise is all in the past tense.
Jonah offers no desperate plaintive plea for help, nor do we feel his grati-
tude for God’s gifts. I believe that Jonah’s prayer is a kind of submission,
with the accompanying deadened affective state. Ghent (1990) distin-
guished between true surrender and a false surrender, what he terms sub-
mission. He wrote, “I imply that there is, however deeply buried or frozen, a
longing for something in the environment to make possible the surrender,
in the sense of yielding, of false self” (p. 214). In Ghent’s point of view, sub-
mission is a perversion of surrender, and this would mean a false attempt at
intimacy. Jonah, in submissive prayer, remains separate from God. True sur-
render would allow him to experience God’s presence.
Zornberg compares Jonah’s prayer to Hannah’s, who in the Bible is con-
sidered true in her piety. She astutely deduces that Jonah is unable to stand
in the liminal space of prayer between death and life. I would add that his
prayer suggests a state of separateness, a kind of anxious attachment, un-
moored and lacking hope. And after all, hope is what Jonah is too fearful to
dare to risk. Mitchell (1993), in writing about hope in the analytic situa-
tion, stated, “Old hopes, as Wordsworth suggests, are born from dread” (p.
221). How will Jonah ever move from dread to hope? Chapter 3 returns Jo-
nah and us to the storyline and the task he has to face. God continues to in-
sist that Jonah go to warn the people of Nineveh to repent their evil ways.
This time Jonah agrees; he delivers the message and Nineveh quickly turns
326 Jill Salberg
back from evil and repents. God sees that Nineveh has repented and de-
cides to show mercy and does not punish them. Had the story ended here
we might not feel uneasy, nor perhaps would we find it memorable.
The heat of the drama lies ahead in chapter 4. While God shows
mercy and does not destroy the city of Nineveh, Jonah’s despair returns
and deepens with rage. He is angry with God for being just the kind of
God Jonah knew God to be, and states, “You are a compassionate and
gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in kindness, renouncing punish-
ment” (Jonah 4:2). He then asks for death for he no longer wants to live.
Perhaps given the Jonah we have read about this shouldn’t perplex us,
but we are left wondering yet again, how could Jonah find God’s compas-
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Aron, L. (1997). A meeting of minds: Mutuality in psychoanalysis. New York: The Analytic
Press.
Aron, L. (2004). God’s influence on my psychoanalytic vision and values. Psychoanalytic Psy-
chology, 21, 442–451.
Benjamin, J. (1988). The bonds of love. New York: Pantheon.
Benjamin, J. (1990). An outline of intersubjectivity: The development of recognition. Psy-
choanalytic Psychology, 7, 33–46.
Benjamin, J. (1998). Shadow of the other: Intersubjectivity and gender in psychoanalysis. New
York: Routledge.
Benjamin, J. (2006). Beyond doer and done-to: An intersubjective view of thirdness. Psycho-
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